Chapter 3 American Goldfinch #4
the one she made for me. Despite having seen designers and cutters at work, actually making a coat without a pattern was still
a level of textile achievement far beyond my understanding. It was like choosing to knit a refrigerator from steel wool. With
the trial still distant, I could go back to Chicago later and pick up more clothing and books. But I would never be without
my coat, a confection of white cotton velvet with fringe that Grandma Nell had designed to grow more fashionably faded with
every wash.
I’d been inside the tabernacle at Starbright Ministry just one time. My father contemptuously called the place “Six Flags
Over Jesus.” It was on Valentine’s Day, that same year.
Rev. Wild was loud and showy, beseeching his flock. “Husbands, love and treasure your wives! Wives, love and serve your husbands!
The love we celebrate today with chocolates and flowers is the merest drop in the ocean of the mighty love of the Lord for
each one of you.” Calling Ruth “my bride,” he passed a Valentine card from the back of the huge tabernacle to the choir, where
Ruth stood in the top row, blushing furiously, trying to smile as everyone applauded her.
He was praising her to the skies. And yet, now that I recalled the occasion, it also seemed that he looked down on her.
Plenty of devoted Starbright women might have envied Ruth her marriage, but I didn’t.
Neither did Felicity. She didn’t have to tell me; her face that day was a banner proclaiming hypocrisy.
Several women stood up and pointed out that they knew Jesus personally.
One of them even beseeched Him for help at the supermarket finding a bargain on pot roast, which seemed to me creepy even in that limited context.
I recalled the supposedly joyous songs they sang that instead sounded like a dirge for sailors lost at sea, songs about short and brutal lives, hastening to their close.
I remembered as especially gross the ancient tune “Abide with Me” (“Change and decay in all around I see . . .”).
There was just one beautiful song, an old gospel hymn (“I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free, for His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me”).
When Felicity transferred to the public high school from Starbright Academy the winter morning she turned sixteen, I thought
she just hated the school, which she said managed to work Jesus into everything, including math. Maybe there was more to it.
There was always more to it, I thought.
I thought of how Ruth Wild, as a science teacher, was good and clear-minded. She did not dodge the bits of science that probably
went against her fundamentalist Christian code, or at least her husband’s. Being who I am, I appreciated how she managed to
style her long-sleeved dresses over leggings and jeans so that they looked more urban hippie than conservative pastor’s wife.
Felicity’s younger brothers, Jay and Guy, were cute little blonds who resembled dark-haired Felicity only in that they were
human, since Felicity was the product of Ruth’s fleeting college relationship with an absent beau (whom my dad, ever the comic,
called “the unsub”). Felicity once told me that she had no idea who her biological father was, beyond his being part Italian,
and she didn’t care to know. Poor Ruth.
Winding around and around in my memories, I must have fallen asleep. When Ross finally returned with his snack, it was after midnight, and he had to pound on the door to wake me up. It took me a moment to figure out where I was.
I tried to ignore the dismay on his face when, without asking, I grabbed half his beef sandwich. Munching away, I asked, “Do
you know how I can convince these guys to talk to me?” Ross shrugged and shook his head. “I won’t force anybody to go on the
record. But if the police have already talked to them, the reality is that’s a moot point anyhow. My call should come as no
surprise. I don’t care about them as much as I want to know what they saw in her. Why pay a thousand dollars for an hour with
her? What would make you agree if you were them?”
Ross said slowly, “I guess if I thought you were going to write about me anyway, then the only thing left would be to make
sure you didn’t completely trash me, without giving me a chance to tell my side of it.” Good point, Ross. Apparently, our
long friendship outweighed institutional loyalty . . . or even softball-team loyalty.
“Well, that’s what I intend to tell them. But I’m more concerned about what they thought about her and why they paid for her
attention. If you were me, wouldn’t you wonder? Wouldn’t you want reasons? Wouldn’t you want to try to trace a visible line
that led from here to there? Wouldn’t you think, there but for the grace of . . . ?”
“Not you, Reenie. You would never,” Ross said. “Apparently, there wasn’t a lot of feeling in it on her side. At least, that’s
what the rumor is.”
“You mean she didn’t fake orgasms?” I said. “Or she didn’t seem to care?” Ross blushed and shook his head. “Would you care?”
Yet I found myself grateful that Ross thought that I would never make such a degrading choice.
I was grateful that he said it. I was certain, but is anything truly certain?
I knew how disclaimers made in daylight could get lost in the dark.
I knew Ross had to be on his way. I’d kept him up so late, and yet hated to part with him.
Not only had he given me useful foundational information, virtually being a stand-in for the men I would talk with, but he was also familiar and dear—and very much on my side.
I promised Ross that I would let him sleep and would not, after all, show up at 8:00 a.m. for breakfast. He could leave a
note for the innkeepers to pack up something for him, for the road.
“One last thing,” I said to Ross. “Then I promise I’ll release you. It’s not like I need to know how to do an interview. But
the kind I’m used to these days is ten minutes if you’re lucky, people saying, ‘utterly fabulous,’ or ‘totally trending,’
or ‘passion for fashion,’ or ‘OOAK.’ Like, once you track them down, you just press the button and out comes the spiel. This
is different.”
“People will be reluctant.”
“That, and I want to ask questions that go really deep. How do you do that? You’re the wiz with human communication.”
“The thing to do when you interview someone is to listen to everything, not just what they say but what they don’t say,” Ross
told me. “You’ve heard this before but really think about it. It’s not just what people say, it’s how they say it. Like a
politician who got caught in a scandal. He’s saying, ‘I’m innocent, I’m innocent, this is all a lie,’ but what is he really
saying?”
“You mean body language.”
“I mean that but content too. Right? Is somebody saying way more than he needs to say? Sixty words when ten would do? You
watch for that.” That was how I started to train myself to listen for hesitations and gaps in the answers I heard, and especially
answers that didn’t come, but instead silences, to measure how long those silences lasted and how comfortable the person was
during them.
“But is there a technique for asking questions, one way that’s better than another way?”
“You have to be patient. You ask and then wait. You resist the temptation to jump in and sort of help the person along.”
Ross was entirely correct. I learned just how strong was the impulse to coach people. Waiting is difficult, but silence is
a powerful tool. It’s accommodating and inviting. A direct answer requires the kind of confidence that somebody with something
to hide might lack. I learned to let the froth of their words bubble forth until it ran out. I tried to read the silences.
Sometimes silence is its own story.
We hugged goodbye. Ross was looking forward to getting home early to his Amira.
No one waited for me.
That night, I lay awake wondering why I was alone, why I’d had only about a dozen dates since college graduation. Was it down
to ambition? Fear? An odd repellent odor? Were my eyes spaced too far apart? Was my mouth too big, in both senses of the word?
Was I simply engineered to be lonely?
Or was I alone because I was a bad person, even though no one knew it? Did other human animals instinctively detect something
malign and avoid me?
These were the kind of night thoughts that crept out to scratch at the fabric of your pillow. Once one is loose, in scuttle
more of them: How would I even write this story?
Yes, I’d gone to one of the best journalism schools on earth.
Yes, I’d done straight news . . . but only during summer internships.
And even then, what I covered wasn’t exactly being embedded with the Eighth Marines in Kabul; it was just how nasty and personal the infighting got on the mayor’s office staff, with one man posting photos of his colleague’s ass crack on Instagram.
Now I wrote whipped-cream prose. I could overlay three square feet of silk, muslin, hemp, linen, copper, indigo dye, nylon, mesh, rubber, steel alloy, and brass with magic.
“Sassy but secure, dramatic yet durable, class made comfortable, the Sensational Sandrine sets the standard for satchels and then raises it to the stars.” It wasn’t wrong, and it was what I was paid to do—convert the unruly details into something scintillating (“We give you the secret lowdown on . . .” “We take you behind the golden doors of the most exclusive . . .” “Why you may gasp at the price before you gasp at the gorgeous . . .”).
My painted-on drama allowed readers to leap over the stumbling block of goods made by the hands of children in China.
Would I be tempted to embellish Felicity like a pricey Burberry square? Would I convert the narrative to portray her as much
victim as predator? Of course, she was, but only in the strictest sociological sense. And further, I was a romantic. Even
if I could keep all the questions in the strike zone, could I later steer clear of tricky tropes and melted melodrama? (Okay,
yes, alliteration addiction admitted . . . ) By its very nature, any story is the thing itself but also not the thing itself.
The event or the issue is framed by somebody else’s vision. The descriptions, the quoted speech, the beginning, the conclusion,
those are all someone else’s choices, not the actual participants’ actions. Despite the goal of objectivity, the reporter’s
own history and personality is folded in, like raisins in a batter.
Long after, I would see how I came to believe my own version of events, then doubt it, then believe it again.
I’d jetted from Chicago to Miami to Honolulu to Rome to cover the debut of the newest microclutch or sculptural cross-body from Alberto or Roberto or Kimiko.
But this turned out to be a much longer journey, especially after things combusted between Sam Damiano and me.
As the long fingers of night stretched out to tow in the gold morning ribbons through the window of the bed-and-breakfast inn on Lake Michigan, I had yet even to speak his name.
The first time I did was the next day. Tucked up gratefully under a quilt, as exhausted as if the long hours of the previous
night were villains I’d outrun, I called his office and asked for him, expecting to leave a message or four or six, shocked
when he immediately took the call, his voice a sweet bass, calm and comforting as tea with honey. He offered to meet me that
afternoon, but I wanted to reach out to the families of the victims before I got ever more involved with the defendant. I
also wanted to talk to Felicity’s mother, to the hometown crowd. There was no particular hurry, so we agreed on the following
week, after I returned from my visit to Sheboygan. All day long, and into the next night, I thought of the sound of that voice
greeting me, telling me, “Hello, Reenie! I’ve been expecting you to call.” I told him that I just couldn’t be comfortable
with what he’d said during that first conversation—he’d go into detail about his client’s version of the deaths if he could.
“I would be happy to share her version of those events, if she had ever shared that with me.”
“The more I think about this, the more trouble I have believing you.”
“Believe me or not, I’m telling you that she won’t talk about that at all. I’m not being a crafty lawyer. This is the absolute
truth. But she did talk about you. She said it meant a lot to her that you showed up at the arraignment and came to try to
speak to her at the jail.”
“But she acted like she hates me! She told me to go away!”
“Yes, that’s what she wants.”
“Well, the trial isn’t for a couple of months. Do you think she’ll change her mind? Do you think she really wants me to leave
her alone? Am I supposed to do that? Is that your advice to her?”
He said, “I’m not sure.”