Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“Forgive me, but what’s the big deal? Lots of kids leave up north every year to go to college downstate. I did. And they do fine. And they don’t have rich benefactors paying their tuition for them like Gracie.”

“So your answer is no, you have not given it much thought.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Grace’s benefactor? You mean the man-it could only be a man, or more than one-who promised her an education? She got one, all right.”

She told me about it.

Gracie had enrolled in the freshman program at Wayne State University in the fall of 1980. She had hoped to declare her major as English. One semester of tuition and room and board had indeed been paid for in full. But no money had been provided for her required texts. At the campus bookstore Gracie learned that the bill for those would come to nearly $350. She had saved barely half that from her summer job at Dairy Queen. Her appeals to her mother for the rest met first with promises, then with lectures about saving money, then with unreturned phone calls. Grace started classes without books.

Finally she contacted her anonymous benefactor. The only requirement the donor had was that Gracie write a short letter at the midpoint and the end of each semester reporting on her academic progress. There was a post office box to which she was supposed to mail the letters. Now she wrote explaining her book dilemma. In the letter she apologized for her ignorance and promised to repay any book money provided.

Soon Gracie heard from a man. He didn’t say whether he was her actual donor, but he had a job for her waiting tables. Late one afternoon she showed up for her first six-hour shift. Although it served food and drinks, B.J.’s Office wasn’t a restaurant. B.J.’s was a strip club on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, about a fifteen-minute drive from Gracie’s dormitory. When she drove up to the place, she thought maybe she’d gotten the address wrong.

“I’m aware that Grace was no angel in her youth,” Trixie said. “But even she was, shall we say, taken aback.”

“But she took the job,” I said.

Trixie shrugged. “This wasn’t some smoky pit frequented by guys missing teeth and stuffing dollar bills in G-strings. This was a gentleman’s club. A jacket was required. You had to pay twenty-five dollars just to get in the door. The girls were from everywhere but here.”

“Canada? Poland maybe?”

“How did you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“Hm. Well, on a good night, Grace could make two or three hundred dollars in tips. So she really only had to work one or two nights a week, which left her more time to study.”

“And I’m sure she used it for that,” I said.

“I didn’t know her then, of course, so I can’t say for sure. But she told me she tried, and I’ll take her word.”

“Did she dance at the club?”

“No. She waited tables.” Trixie folded her arms and gazed down at the floor. “But she might have been better off dancing.”

The middle-aged men who sat with their $7.50 Heinekens at the little round tables in the shadows of B.J.’s Office hadn’t made their fortunes by pursuing things that were easily available. The dancers, of course, were easily available; the waitresses were not, or at least not as obviously so. To bed a slinky young woman who peeled off her clothes before men as routinely as she poured herself a morning coffee was one thing. To seduce a waitress-especially that pretty college student named Gracie-now that was something else.

Midway through her second semester at Wayne State, Gracie stopped going to classes. She moved out of her dorm and into an apartment in the Bricktown neighborhood near downtown Detroit. She continued to work at B.J.’s one or two afternoons a week. Her nights were given to other employment that paid her much more. There was a man, a very rich man, many years her elder, who paid her rent and bought her things. After a while there were other men, other apartments, more money and things.

“So she was a hooker,” I said.

“Of a sort,” Trixie said. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t strictly about having sex for money. Grace became very good at satisfying a particularly difficult-to-satisfy customer. And, unfortunately for her, she came to enjoy it. At least for a time, she enjoyed it at least as much as the customers.”

“Jesus. What kind of customer?”

“Please be respectful of the Lord’s name.”

“Sorry.”

“Tell me, Gus. Are you familiar with sexual bondage? Autoerotic sex asphyxiation?”

From the Lord’s name to autoerotic sex. This woman was tough. I studied her face for any sign of weariness. There was none. She looked to be in her sixties. I wondered if she merely looked older than she was because of the past life she had led.

“I’ve heard of it. Can’t say I’m familiar.”

“You’ll see.”

“So,” I said, “this whole anonymous donor thing was bull.”

I pulled out my wallet and showed Trixie the clipping I’d cut from the Pilot of March 18, 1980. She scanned the article quickly, smiled wanly at the picture. “Look at her,” she said. “Just a child. Can I keep this?”

“It’s yours,” I said. “Whoever paid her tuition was really a”-I searched for the word-“a recruiter.”

“Essentially. Small-town girls from troubled homes, out of sorts in the big city. We had two others at the center. Grace brought them to me.”

”Goddamn b-excuse me.”

“That’s all right. All these guys were bastards.”

She pushed open the door to the room on the left and let me step in before her. The room was lit by the flat afternoon light coming in through the window facing the street. The first thing I noticed was the poster on the wall at the head of the single bed. Red Wings star Sergei Fedorov was spraying ice and snow at the camera in a sideways hockey stop. He wore a bright red jersey, number 91, and a wide smile on his boyish face. Beneath the poster a red bedspread was emblazoned with the Red Wings’ white winged-wheel logo. Three foot-high stacks of Red Wings game programs sat on a trunk at the foot of the bed.

A small desk and a chair stood next to the bed. Atop the desk was a red plastic cup filled with pencils and pens, a photograph in a standing frame, and a single piece of construction paper.

I stepped over and picked up the photo frame. Eddie McBride-Gracie’s late father, cousin and drinking buddy of my own father-reclined across the backseat of a boat, shirtless, in a yellow bathing suit that set off his deep tan. On his lap sat a baby girl with reddish curls and a cloth diaper. She was smiling.

There was no picture of Gracie’s mother, Shirley McBride.

I set the photo down and took up the sheet of paper. It held a pencil drawing of a hockey player with his arms and stick raised over his head in celebration of a goal. It was crude enough to have been rendered by a child, but I supposed it could just as easily have been Gracie’s work.

“Whose room is-was this?” I said.

“Grace,” Trixie said. “Grace slept here.”

“When she wasn’t at the center?”

“Here mostly, at least the last couple of years. Until she went back up north.”

I went to the closet on the opposite wall and slid the doors open. The hangers were filled with simple cotton dresses and jumpers and frilly tops. The floor was covered with pairs of shoes piled on one another. There were pumps and flats and mules and slingbacks, sneakers and moccasins, clogs and knee-high boots and flip-flops and slippers. I shoved the door closed and turned back to Trixie.

“Except for that, looks like a boy’s room,” I said.

“Grace loved hockey. Loved the Detroit team, that player especially.”

Fedorov, one of the Wings’ Russians, was a gifted skater who could play as well as anyone in the world at either end of the ice-when he wanted to. Some nights he played as if he didn’t much care. I wondered if his occasional ambivalence appealed to Gracie, whether she saw whatever struggle she was going through mirrored in her hockey hero.