Steven Millhauser - Edwin Mullhouse - The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954

It was only the beginning. On the playground she taunted him, calling him vile names. In games of dodgeball she aimed at his head. One day, running away with her kitten after having kicked Edwin, she fell down and cut her knee; shrieking and sobbing she limped inside and told a strange teacher that Edwin had pushed her down. Edwin was called into the principal’s office, where I soon joined him as a witness; three other members of the class had seen Rose Dorn fall, and her case collapsed. One morning when Edwin opened his workbook he found that several pages had been scribbled on with black crayon. She told Trudy Cassidy that Edwin loved her; she told Mario Antonio that Edwin said he was a Jew; she told people that Edwin made pee in his pants. Passing his desk on the way to the coatroom, she knocked his books or crayons to the floor. She tortured her kitten in Edwin’s pained presence, holding Gray upside down by the tail while he yowled and spat and clawed the air, or swinging him under her legs with both hands and flinging him up into the air, where he writhed and twisted.

And then, as if inflamed by Edwin’s calm fortitude, or as if Edwin himself were too small to suffer her rage, she began to include others in her attacks. And it was here that her instinct for revenge began to display a certain shrewdness, since it recognized that her real enemy was not Edwin, whom she had never cared for anyway, but something quite different. Trudy Cassidy was her first victim: she came up behind her on the playground and pulled hard on her hair. Later in the day she tripped Marcia Robbins, who fell and began to cry; Rose Dorn was sent to the principal’s office. But nothing could stop her now: she kicked Diana Walsh in the leg, with lowered head she butted Anna Litwinski in the stomach, and standing in front of plump Marcia Robbins she chanted “Fattypants Fattypants Fattypants Fattypants” until Marcia burst into tears. One day she stabbed Barbara DeAngelo in the forearm with a pair of scissors. It is true that the points were blunt, and everyone knew that Barbara DeAngelo was a big crybaby, but no one had ever been attacked with a pair of scissors before. But it was on Donna Riccio that she practiced the first of an outrageous series of attacks that quickly attracted the attention of half the playground.

I recall the incident very well. Donna was standing in the middle of the jumprope line, chanting away lustily with balled fists, and I was watching the game with Edwin at a distance of some ten feet, wondering how on earth they managed to jump into those two rapid ropes. As I tested my notion that the jumping-in took place immediately after either rope smacked the tar, I became aware of Rose Dorn standing almost beside me. She ignored me completely and seemed intent on the game. Donna sprang into the ropes, performed grimly an elaborate series of nimble little jumps, leaped out, and strode to the end of the line, where she balled her fists and began chanting again. At that moment Rose Dorn went up behind her. She paused, as if deciding; and with a sudden motion she reached down, gripped Donna’s coat and dress, and yanked them as high as they would go, revealing for all to see a pair of pale blue underpants. Donna screamed, but some nearby boys were laughing, and Rose Dorn ran away. She did the same thing to Marcia Robbins, whose underpants were yellow, and Susan Thompson, whose underpants were white; Marcia Robbins burst into tears, and all three girls reported to Mrs. Cadwallader. Of course Rose Dorn was sent to the principal’s office. But the attacks continued, and soon she was followed by a band of older boys who watched from a near distance, whistling and cheering.

One day she came to school with a box of wooden matches. Holding an unlit match in one hand and the box in the other, she came up to Jimmy Pluvcik, struck the match, and flung the flaming stick at him, laughing falsely as he ran away.

In the room she became increasingly unmanageable; her attack on Barbara DeAngelo was only the most memorable of a number of physical assaults, for each of which she was sent to the principal’s office. Several girls were distinctly frightened of her by now; Marcia Robbins looked anxiously about whenever Rose Dorn came within ten feet of her, though at a safe distance she whispered spitefully. I myself, for some reason, was less troubled by her violence than by her drawings. For as her behavior degenerated, so did her crayon drawings: the simple figures with red and blue arrows sticking through them were soon going up in flames of black and red and purple. She began to scribble over everything she drew, turning all pictures into holocausts. I recall one picture especially. With a black crayon she drew a round face, a stick coming down as if from a lollipop, a triangle at the bottom of the stick, and two stick legs with balls for feet. With a yellow crayon she drew three long lines coming down from both sides of the head, which remained bald on top. The face was blank. With a red crayon she began to color in the triangle in her usual way, following first the left slope and then the base and then the right slope, leaving a space in the center which she would finish any which way. But as she was following the right slope, suddenly the crayon shot away from the outline and began to swirl and crisscross all over the picture, as if the dress had become unraveled and, with a life of its own, were now winding the neck and face and legs in a loose red net. At this point she pushed the picture across to me; I looked at it, nodded, and pushed it back. But she was not yet finished, for now her red crayon began to rush furiously back and forth over the entire figure until it had formed a solid sheet of bright dark red. When she was through you saw a black outline behind a fiery shield of red, the whole thing surrounded by the white of the paper; and if you looked closely you saw, ever so faintly, the blurred remains of the hair, now no longer yellow but red-orange.

I never liked Rose Dorn; but I do not wish to temper the strict truthfulness of this biography by painting her one stroke blacker than she was. She did not always torment us. I don’t know what else precisely she did do; I suppose she left us alone. We were thankful enough for that, after a while. And there were periods of deep musing, when rapt in revery and trafficking with who knows what monsters of the spirit, she seemed peaceful and even pretty; even sweet; even innocent. Her serenities had once been very important to Edwin: he saw in her then some essential angel that burned away all accidental devils (I myself had always believed that she was communing with pale-eyed fiends). But of course she would always spoil it in the end, just as she spoiled Edwin’s passion in the end, because she had pale eyes and her mother was a witch and she was damned to hell no matter what she did.

It was not until a certain morning that Rose Dorn actually frightened me. It was a cold day, though no colder than usual; to my surprise she entered the playground with the red hood of her coat covering her hair. In the coatroom she dawdled. I watched Mrs. Cadwallader frowning at the empty seat, and at the clock, and at the coatroom door, and she had already risen in anger when a collective gasp sounded and Trudy Cassidy nudged my arm. Her face expressionless, Rose Dorn walked between the tables to her seat. That was all; but as we rose to our feet and began to pray I could barely remember the words. It was not until some time later that I could actually look at her. She was hideous, grotesque. She looked as if she had removed a wig. Her braids were gone, and her short pale hair, parted on the left and combed to the side, barely reached her ears. She looked like a boy. She was utterly changed, and I was reminded of Mrs. Mullhouse at the beach when she covered her hair with a white bathing cap and became a stranger, smiling with a mouth that had only a grotesque resemblance to the mouth of the real Mrs. Mullhouse. But whereas her face, in the white bathing cap, looked smaller and thinner, as if all the features had been pressed together, Rose Dorn’s face looked larger and almost square; and her large pale eyes, staring out at you with no expression that I could recognize, gave you the feeling that they were dangerously exposed, as if her abundant hair had once protected them. Billy Duda said that her mother had cut off her hair. Donna Riccio said that Rose Dorn had cut it off herself.