Robert Stone: Death of the Black-Haired Girl

So the college students found their way into hard drugs. Some of them had contacts in the medical school. More took the walk down toward the river where it crossed the March Street Bridge. Maud knew the drill; it had been demonstrated to her a week or two earlier by one who knew all too well. After dark, customers from the college side of the bridge brought money in a white athletic sock and tied it to the bridge’s handrail. They then proceeded to the far side of the bridge, where stood a small bodega. If they chose, they could buy a Red Bull or a Lifewater. When they recrossed the bridge, they would find a replacement for the original sock which contained what they were trying to buy. This sort of thing had had repercussions, in both college and town, but it seemed still to be thriving.

Maud was not a user but an ambitious journalist, and she had made a previous reconnoitering trip accompanied by a sometime-user girlfriend to witness the procedure. Her intention was to do the heroin story with anonymous interviews when she was finished with right-to-lifing exhibitionists and their gallery of holy innocents. On her last outing she secretly photographed a buy.

Surely there would be someone here who might appreciate a bag or a sale on this night of punishing snow and hail, but there was no action on the bridge. The inboard rail showed its single graffito, a black-and-white puffy cloud — maybe a stylized expressionist sock — and the printed polychrome Day-Glo letters TARD. It was never certain whether tags were left by street kids or art students. Underneath, the cars splashed through toward the suburbs.

At the Gazette office sometime later, she set out to do the first draft of the piece she had in mind. She eyed the computer screen with a small smile, slid into a comfortable slouch in her chair and wrote what she had planned. “Christ Scientist?” it opened. “No offense intended to the friends of Eddy, with their unspeakably humongous empty domes and morgue-like reading rooms. Nor to the denizens of megachurches nor of the Holy Romantic Megachurch itself. However, how about a little offense to the jolly band of folks who treat us to those cute-kid pictures of fetuses fifty times a year?”

In the next two columns she inserted two photographs from a text called Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation. The pictures in it were of live births, newborns delivered into the breathing world. They were Maud’s counter to the heartwarming fetuses. The first was a photograph of a baby born with hydrolethalus syndrome. It seemed about one-third head. In the color photograph it was eyeless, and its mouth consisted of no more than a tragic moue. Science had identified the chromosomal roots of this condition. Children born with the disorder lived for as long as a day.

Beside this baby was a photograph of an infant with Meckel-Gruber syndrome. Babies born with this disorder look preternaturally old. Carriers of the gene that bears it are genetically unrecognizable.

Maud’s text continued:

They say that the Assembly of God, assembled by God (sort of like the Queen’s Own Fusiliers), treats us to the spectacle of eternal punishment in a kind of haunted house acted out by whooped-up teenagers called Hell House. This is a sort of fun-terrifying spectacle, like a life-size diorama out of Dante or Hieronymus Bosch but much dumber, where you follow the host through a squeaky door into scenes of unending torment presented to you by Christ Torturer the Lord of Unending Piss-Off. This personage is watching your every move for an excuse to fry your ass, not just for an hour, not just for a year, but always. Always.

He’s the only Son of his divine dad, God Abortionist. Who’s your daddy?! Yes, friends, twenty percent of pregnancies spontaneously abort. And lots of those that don’t aren’t nearly as lovable as the ones in the signs right-to-lifers carry.

These paragraphs were illuminated by two more listings from Smith’s. In one, it seemed some wag had placed little striped hats on the angular, bony victims of Beals-Hecht syndrome. Across the page from these was a creature brought to term though suffering from early urethral obstruction sequence, or “prune belly.”

“So, folks,” Maud went on, “see how the great Imaginary Paperweight in the Vast Eternal Blue has all his little ones covered, so let’s make sure they join us. There’s life after birth! That’s what jails and lethal injections are for!”

Afterward she walked the late streets. Flakes hurled around her until the night froze them to pellets of stone.

ALMOST THIRTY YEARS earlier, Jo Carr had left the Devotionists and South America, where she had spent five and a half years as a teaching nun. The order had assigned her to a river valley between two remote ranges of the Andes. She quit before taking her final vows, but she had acquired a thorough knowledge of Spanish, which she spoke inelegantly, and a competency in various dialects of Quechua and Aymara. Back in the States, she had finished work on her master’s degree in counseling.

For a while she had lived with a Buddhist graduate student in Austin, where she had a job at a Catholic college outside town. When that ended she went east, borrowed money from her moderately well-off parents and took the additional degrees the state required for a better job. A few years later, the college in Amesbury hired her. Now and then she had the feeling that some people at the college regarded her with caution. It was no secret that she had been a nun. She was resolutely secular in the counseling she dispensed.

In fact, it was impossible to suggest one road over another to kids who became virtually different people over the course of their college years. They might later bitterly regret something they had done or not done, a choice made that they came to believe they had been tricked into by a counselor covertly serving the wrong side.

Jo had been in trouble once. A number of years before, she had gotten to know a wealthy Catholic family whose daughter she had counseled at the college. Their daughter, who had become pregnant, ended by deciding to give her baby up for adoption to a pious Catholic family of means, so things seemed to have turned out well. The difficulty was that the recipient family came to regard Jo as a fellow Catholic who might provide more babies for friends in search of adoptive children. In the event, Jo found another student who wanted neither premature motherhood nor the sin, as she believed then, of abortion.

Jo brought the parties together. The fragile bark of human design being what it was, within a year things fell apart. Voyages of self-discovery found strange destinations; gathering storms broke. After something like a conversion experience — to what was unclear — it seemed the young birth mother wanted some relationship with her baby. Then she changed her mind. Discontents found their way up the college’s chain of command and even Dean Spofford, the smoothest operator ever to package a denial of college liability in a letter of condolence, found the outcomes trying. However, the experience taught Jo to be extra-scrupulous regarding matters sectarian, and she kept her job.

In the course of resolving that incident, Jo had gotten to know some of the people at the Newman Club and a look-in at what had been a subculture within the Catholic Church. Jo Carr, who would long keep her sentimental regard for religion, had found it hard to dislike the Newman people. In the days before the Catholics got so aggressive in their anti-abortion politics, before the sexual abuse scandal among parish priests, the Newman clubbers were quite lovable, with their Masses said by young priests from Kerala or Swaziland. Some Catholic kids went to the Newman Center in their freshman year and soon drifted away. At Whelan Hospital Jo had seen one she remembered, a pious post — parochial schoolgirl named Maud Stack, who had produced the club’s newsletter. Now Maud was a campus star, a Gazette editor whose idea of a club had nothing to do with dead cardinals. According to rumor, Maud had a romance going with one of her professors. Jo was not sure who the man was but suspected Steven Brookman, a witty man she knew slightly.