Patricia Cornwell - Red Mist

“There was tremendous opportunity for me. I missed a very real chance to be somebody,” she says. “An actress, a model, a famous poet. I have a damn good singing voice. Maybe I could have composed my own lyrics and been a Kelly Clarkson. Of course, they didn’t have American Idol when I was coming along, and Katy Perry is a closer fit, more what I used to look like if she was blond. I suppose I could still be a famous poet. But success and acclaim are much more reachable if you’re beautiful, and I was. Back in the old days, I’d stop traffic. People would gawk. The way I looked back then, I could have what I wanted.”

Kathleen Lawler is unnaturally pale from years of being shielded from the sun, her body soft and shapeless, not overweight but broken down and doughy from a life that has been chronically inactive and unavoidably sedentary. Her breasts sag, and her upper thighs spread widely in the plastic chair, her former attention-getting figure as formless now as the white prison uniform she and other inmates wear in segregation. It’s as if she’s no longer physically human, as if she’s evolved backward, returned to a primitive stage of existence like a platyhelminthes, a flatworm, she says sardonically with a thickly elastic Georgia drawl that makes me think of taffy.

“I know you’re probably sitting here looking at me and wondering what I’m talking about,” she says, as I recall pictures I’ve seen, including mug shots from her arrest in 1978 after she and Jack were caught having sex.

“But when I met him at that ranch outside of Atlanta?” she says. “Well, I was something. I don’t mind saying it, because it’s true. Long corn-silk hair, big-busted, with an ass like a Georgia peach and legs that wouldn’t quit, and huge golden-brown eyes, what Jack used to call my tiger eyes. It’s funny how some things get passed on, like you’ve been programmed in the womb or maybe at conception and there’s no escaping. The roulette wheel spins and stops and your number comes up and that’s what you are no matter how hard you try or even if you don’t try at all. You are what you are, you are what you’re not, and other events and other people just enhance the angel or devil, the winner or the loser in you. It’s all about the spinning of the wheel, whether it’s hitting the winning home run in the World Series or being raped. Decided for you, and forget undoing it. You’re a scientist. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know about genetics. I’m sure you agree you can’t change nature.”

“What people experience also has significant impact,” I reply.

“You can see it with the dogs,” Kathleen continues, not interested in my opinions unless she tells me what they are. “You get a greyhound that was mistreated, and it’s going to react to certain things a certain way and have its sensitivities. But it’s either a good dog or a bad dog. It was either a winner on the track or wasn’t. It’s either trainable or not. I can bring out what’s already there, encourage it, shape it. But I can’t transform the dog into something it wasn’t born to be.”

She finishes telling me that she and Jack were two peas in the same pod and she did to him exactly what was done to her, and she didn’t recognize it at the time, couldn’t possibly have the insight, even though she was a social worker, a therapist. She was molested by the local Methodist minister when she was ten, she claims.

“He took me out for ice cream, but that’s not what I ended up licking,” she puts it crudely. “I was crazy in love. He made me feel so excited and special, except in retrospect I don’t think special is what I really was feeling.” She goes into graphic detail about her erotic relationship with him. “Shame, fear. I went into hiding. I can see that now. I didn’t associate with other kids my age, spent huge amounts of time by myself.”

Her unrestrained hands are tense in her lap, only her ankles shackled, and the chains clink and scrape against concrete whenever she restlessly shifts her feet.

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say,” she continues, “and what was really going on was I couldn’t tell anyone the truth about my life, about the lying, the sneaking around to motels and pay phones and all sorts of things a little girl shouldn’t know about. I stopped being a little girl. He took that from me. It went on until I was twelve and he got a job with a big church in Arkansas. I didn’t realize when I got involved with Jack, I basically did the same thing to him because I was encouraged and shaped in a certain way to do it, and he was encouraged and shaped in a certain way to accept it, to want it, and oh, yes, he sure did. But I see it now. What they call insight. It’s taken me a lifetime to figure out we don’t go to hell, we build it on a foundation already laid for us. We build hell like a shopping mall.”

So far she has avoided telling me the minister’s name. All she’s said is he was married with seven children, and he had to have his God-given needs met and considered Kathleen his spiritual daughter, his handmaiden, his soul mate. It was right and good that they were joined in a sacred bond, and he would have married her and been open about his devotion but divorce was a sin, Kathleen explains to me in a flat, dead voice. He couldn’t abandon his children. That was against God’s teachings.

“Fucking bullshit,” she says hatefully.

Her tiger-eyed stare is unwavering, her once lovely face peanut-shaped and haggard now, with a spiderweb of fine lines around a mouth that once was pouty and voluptuous. She is missing several teeth.

“Of course, it was unadulterated bullshit, and he probably moved on to some other little girl after I started shaving my parts and hiding from him when it was my period. Being beautiful and talented and smart didn’t land me anywhere good, that’s for damn sure,” she emphasizes, as if it is imperative I understand that the ruin sitting across from me isn’t who she is, much less who she was.

I am supposed to imagine Kathleen Lawler as young and beautiful, wise and free, and well intentioned when she began her sexual relationship with twelve-year-old Jack Fielding at a ranch for troubled youths. But what I see before me is the wreckage caused by one violation that caused another and another, and if her story is true about the minister, then he damaged her the same way she damaged Jack, and the destruction still hasn’t ended and probably never will. It is the way all things begin and continue. One act, one deception. A chronic lie that escalates to critical mass, and lives are disabled, disfigured, and defiled, and hell is built, lights on and welcoming and like that motel Kathleen described in the poem she sent.

“I’ve always wondered if my life would have turned out different if certain other things hadn’t happened,” she ponders depressively, resentfully. “But maybe I’d be sitting right here anyway. Maybe God decided while my mama was pregnant with me, This one’s going to lose everything. Some have to, may as well be her. I’m sure you understand what I mean. You see it enough in the morgue.”

“I’m not a fatalist,” I answer.

“Well, good for you, still believing in hope,” she says snidely.

“I do.” But I don’t believe in you, I think.

I slip the plain white envelope out of my back pocket and slide it across the table to her. She takes it in small hands with translucent white skin that pale blue veins show through, and her unpolished nails are pink and clipped short. When she bows her head to look at the photograph, I notice the gray in the mousy new growth of her dyed short hair.

“I’m guessing this one was taken in Florida,” she says, as if she’s talking about more than one photograph. “That might be a gardenia bush I’m seeing in the background, through the spray of water from the hose he’s using? Well, hold on. Hold on one damn minute.” She squints at the photo. “He’s older in this. It’s more recent, and those little white flowers are meadowsweet. There’s a lot of meadowsweet around here. You can’t walk a city block without seeing meadowsweet, and now I’m thinking Savannah. Not Florida but right here in Savannah.” After a pause, she adds in a strained tone, “You happen to know who took this?”