Chapter 24 Animal House
Animal House
The criminal case against me was dismissed, and the jurors were sent home that very day.
Mr. Barker and my father were both confident—and would prove to be correct—that I would be removed from the civil suit.
They said I might have to testify for the Fosters as a fact witness if the lawsuit ever went to trial, but it never did.
The country club settled, acknowledging that they had placed the net in an unsafe spot, and that someone—Fallows or Bolger—should have checked the structural integrity of the net when they noticed the target was gone.
The manufacturer paid a portion of the settlement, too, because their warning instructions were deemed insufficiently explicit as to the possible hazards of the net.
I never learned what each side paid to the Fosters in total, but both of Kenny’s sisters did go to college.
It was nowhere near three million dollars, but neither was the cost of two college educations.
So, there’s that.
Some police detectives like to believe that there are pretty basic motivations for most crimes. Greed. Jealousy. Vengeance. Entitlement.
But why we do most things that aren’t criminal is grounded in more complex impulses and desires.
And this is not a crime story. This memoir exists partly because I did not want Kenny Foster to be lost to time, but also because it was his death that made me a writer, and it was death that was the most singular event in my life.
I would never even have met my husband had I not been the instrument of that boy’s demise, because I would have gone to Yale instead of spending part of one autumn at Smith.
(I never did return to Northampton. I’d graduate at the age of twenty-five from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, because there, on the other side of America, I had the best chance of anonymity.) My two children, assuming I even had kids with someone other than Ethan Pomerleau, would be dramatically different grown-ups today.
When I finally watched Animal House in its entirety at the age of forty-four, I watched it with my husband.
And it wasn’t traumatic for me. I even laughed on occasion—though not when ROTC fop Doug Neidermeyer is conked on the head with a golf ball.
I finally understood the jokes about Smith and Amherst I’d heard those months I was in school in Northampton.
And, as a novelist, I appreciated the way the screenwriters let us know how all the characters’ lives would progress, such as the idea that Neidermeyer would be killed by his own troops in Vietnam.
Well, then. Here goes.
In November 2010, Olivia Foster came to my appearance at the Miami Book Festival.
Both she and her younger sister and their two families had returned there to live.
I recognized her instantly in the signing line after the panel in which I’d been a participant.
She still felt guilty for having not come forward right away, but I reminded her that she had been a child: it was a big ask, and in the end, she had shared what had happened.
“At first,” she reminded me, “we didn’t even know the fact the target was gone was a factor.
And then when we did, I didn’t want my brother to seem like an idiot.
As a parent, I understand that’s ridiculous.
But when I was thirteen? I didn’t think like that.
All I saw was that my parents were in unbearable pain.
And the idea that my brother was responsible for his own death?
It was just too much for me to deal with—until I saw you in the courtroom. ”
“I get that,” I agreed.
“I was scared,” she added. “I was just too scared to come forward.”
She said that she and Jane were fine, though they had always felt a lot of pressure to be perfect children for their deeply scarred parents and then to give them perfect grandchildren.
Olivia and her wife had two kids, a boy and a girl, and the older child was named Kenneth, after the uncle he’d never meet.
She hated golf and had never set foot on a course after leaving Tallmadge.
Jane, however, had taken another approach to the demons that accompanied the death of their brother: she had begun to play on the public courses around Westchester in high school, and by her late twenties, when she joined her older sister in South Florida, she was a scratch golfer.
“She’s one of the pros at Palm Fronds,” Olivia said, referring to one of the premier courses in Miami. “She doesn’t have a bunch of Mira’s Moppets, but she has a group the club calls Janie’s Juniors. Been around for twenty years now.”
I never saw Dennis Kerrington again, but I did read his novels, some of which were excellent examples of how artists who are monstrously cruel can also be spectacularly talented.
(As a journalist once said to me about artists generally, “I wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with Picasso or even have lunch with the bastard, but I sure am glad his paintings exist.”) Still, our paths almost crossed one time.
The Washington Post asked me to review one of Kerrington’s books, unaware that years earlier he had scoffed at my work and told me to be a banker.
In other words, I could have eviscerated him in public—perhaps suggested in my review that he should have been a banker—and it would have been the perfect literary crime.
A bit of exquisite literary revenge. But I told the assigning editor we’d met, and so I couldn’t review the novel.
I have a taste for many terrible things, but schadenfreude is not among them.
I did, however, see Theo Catton once more.
In 2018, Ethan had a business conference in Fort Myers, Florida, and I tagged along.
Theo had retired years earlier and lived not far from there on Marco Island.
He was in his mid-eighties by then; I was fifty-eight.
I was unsure whether I would visit Theo when I decided to join Ethan—mostly I was after warmth, palm trees, and the joys of hotel sex—but I hadn’t ruled out the idea.
I was curious what I would find and what I would feel.
So, on the next-to-last day of Ethan’s conference, I decided to go see him.
There was but one thing I really wanted to know.
I think a small part of me had expected the monster to be a vampire: that Jack Nicklaus hair might be white now, but it would be as thick and lustrous as ever.
He’d be one of those ageless old men whose shoulders had remained broad, his voice robust. What I found instead was a frail, bald octogenarian who lived alone in a house on the thirteenth fairway of a golf course, but these days only watched the other club members play.
He’d sit beside his in-ground swimming pool, his view obscured by the screens that hid most residential pools in Florida, as the carts and the foursomes passed by.
Based on the photos of grandchildren I saw in the house, he seemed to be still involved with his two kids.
But I was met at the door by a nurse because he recently had endured a colostomy, and his failing eyesight and pride prevented him from capably managing the bag on his own.
His nurse looked to be my age but had a Floridian athlete’s skin, which meant it had aged far worse than mine.
Still, it was a reminder that the ravages of age were yapping at my door, too.
The woman joined us for tea on the terrace beside his pool, and at first I feared she might be there because she thought it was part of her job to protect him from me.
Did she know that once upon a time, more than four decades earlier, I had been the child who was his illicit paramour?
No, she had no idea, I realized soon enough: she believed I was a friend of his daughter.
And Theo greeted me as if I were a long-lost acquaintance, clearly confident that because, so far, I had never gone public with the revelation our affair had begun when I was fifteen, I wasn’t about to out him now as he neared the end of his life.
And I didn’t that afternoon. His nurse wanted to discuss my books and what I was reading.
She wanted to share what she was reading.
Theo and I talked about how we supposed Tallmadge had changed and, yes, we discussed golf.
There are few subjects as good as sports at making an awkward encounter a little less uncomfortable.
He talked about his children and grandkids, and how proud he was of his grandson on the UCLA golf team.
Finally, Theo said, placing his mug down on the glass table beside him, “Mira, it was so nice of you to drop by. I’m glad everything worked out for you.”
This was my cue to leave, and so I stood. He walked me to the door, and his nurse brought the mugs to the kitchen. But before I left, I had to ask the question that had brought me here.
“Before I go, Theo,” I said as we stood alone in the front hallway, “I do have to ask you one thing.”
He spread wide his arms and smiled, but I could see his antennae were up.
“Were there others?” I asked. “After me?”
His eyes were rheumy now, and his glasses were thick.
But when he stared at me, I could tell a part of him wanted to tell the truth.
Of course there were others. There always were others.
Men like Theo always got what they wanted.
But he couldn’t be honest, even now, well into his eighties.
“Oh, Mira, there could only be one you,” he lied. “You have to know that.”
I nodded. Then he noticed for the first time the tattoo on my arm. “Your tattoo? The cursive is beautiful. Really exquisite. What does it say?”
“You took advantage of my disadvantage.”
“Golf?”
“No,” I corrected him. “Pedophilia.”