Baby Doll Games Read online

  Win felt totally mellow, totally focused on the circle of orange within his glass. The Cliffs of the world kept spinning off the walls, wasting so much psychic energy on sex. As if sex were the only thing that mattered. All that humping and bumping and thumping and romping for one quick spurt and then the afterglow. Clow came a lot easier than that. As long as he had his little packets tucked away beneath the oranges and mangoes in the vegetable crisper… he didn’t abuse it. Emmy’d been wrong there. And when you thought about AIDS and herpes and all the rest, his glow was a lot healthier than the way she’d switched partners every ten minutes.

  The liquid circle of orange grew larger and larger as he stared into its depths, remembering an orange sun going down at the end of summer and Emmy’s salty body lying beside him on the beach towel, mellow with sunshine and the champagne she’d brought in an ice bag. “You and Nate,” she’d said softly. “You’re both such effing innocents. Sometimes I wish the three of us could just go away and dance on the moon.”

  “Nate doesn’t dance,” he’d reminded her, loving the way her pointed little ears poked through the edges of her hair.

  “So he can work the moon and you and I will dance.” She’d shaped her body to his in recumbent ballet. "No Rikki, no Eric to hold us down. We’ll fly, float away.”

  “Hey, West, you okay?” asked Jim Lowry.

  The swollen orange sun melted into orange juice again. Win swallowed it down, then turned his mild brown eyes upon the police officer. “I’m okay,” he said. “You okay?”

  David Orland laughed sourly. “Welcome to Doctor Goodthink’s therapy group.”

  * * *

  “It was hard to get any of them to concentrate long enough to answer our questions,” Jim Lowry complained as he and Elaine summed up their findings for Sigrid back at headquarters. “Helen Delgado and Nate Richmond both claim they didn’t see that Mion was abnormally upset about anything. Delgado said she didn't even see Mion after lunch; and Richmond said she ran in for some pictures he'd done of her Monday-afternoon class and seemed okay then. Once they started getting ready for this afternoon s performance, we decided to call it a day.

  “That was a good try on eliminating Orland, though,” Sigrid told Elaine.

  That young woman absently pushed a pencil through her tousled curls and said, “Jim and I were thinking he might be out of it altogether anyhow.”

  “Oh?”

  “On the one hand”-she held out her small square hand and ticked the fingers off with her thumb one by one as she made her points-”Orland doesn’t have an apparent motive to kill. Unless we can prove he had a key, he couldn't count on finding the alley door open. Innes and Judson say they usually left their pumpkin heads by their wing positions but not always so he couldn't be sure they’d be there yesterday; and finally, if we think Emmy Mion was killed because of something that happened shortly before show time, then Orland is out because he can prove he was uptown the whole time.”

  “No one saw him at the theater until the kid on the door let him in,” said Jim, “and someone was with Mion the whole time." The borders of his notepad were doodled over with ringed fingers remarkably like Elaine’s.

  “What about during the first scene?” Sigrid asked. “Wasn’t she alone then?” Well, yes, they admitted But that was only a few minutes. Not enough time to goad someone to kill her; and even if she had, why hadn't he struck her down then? Why complicate things by waiting till she was onstage?

  Why indeed? Sigrid thought gloomily. She returned to Albee’s impression that Ginger Judson was holding back something that happened in the dressing room moments before the curtain.

  “No idea what that could have been?”

  "No, but if Judson was lying about it, Innes backed her up. And don’t forget that Mion came out on the landing when the show was ready to begin and told them to break a leg. That doesn’t sound like she was upset, does it?”

  They tossed it bade and forth with Peters and Eberstadt, who had returned from fruitless gleaning among an audience unable to name the murderous jack-o’-lantern.

  “One thing though,” said Jim Lowry as the conference was breaking up. “That scenarist-Roman Tramegra. I know he’s not our killer. Not with that shape. But Lainey and I caught him in the women’s dressing room today. He said he was rounding up dishes missing from the green room; I think he was snooping.”

  “Ah,” said Sigrid, abruptly at a loss for words. “I- um-He’s a friend of mine. We don’t have to worry about him.”

  “All the same,” said Elaine later that evening, when she and Jim were seated over drinks, “remember that Gill woman who turned up during the Maintenon bombing? She asked the lieutenant if somebody named Oscar was mad because she’d moved in with Roman. How many guys named Roman do you think Lieutenant Harald knows “She’s living with Tramegra?” Grinning broadly, he signaled for another drink. “Talk about your odd couples!”

  Chapter 15

  Personal notes of Dr. Christa Ferrell, re: Corrie Makaroff [Sunday, 1 November-It occurs to me that in addition to clinical notes, I should be keeping a journal of “color” background for the paper I plan to submit next summer to the regional conference of psychotherapists. Touches of human interest will make a livelier presentation.

  Sigrid Harald's name was on one of those police reports It then when she turned up again yesterday at that dreadful death, the coincidence was too good not to take advantage of-a real stroke of luck. Ever since her mother came talked at one of St. Margaret's career days, I've always made it a point to read the credit lines at the edge of photos in magazines & news journals her byline’s there several times a year. If I can get Anne Harald interested in this case-well, they do say a picture's worth a thousand words.

  Measurable difference between S.H. & her mother; Repressed resentment there? S.H. was standoffish & quiet at school, a classic loner, while A.H. seemed friendly, open, easy to talk to. Pretty, too, as I recall. S.H. must take after her father?

  S. such a neatnik at St. M's-never got called down for messy room. Everything picked up or hung up Probably why she went in for police work Fetish for order? Don't remember any signs of wanting power. She never went out for any offices.

  Mustn't get sidetracked with S.H's hang-ups tho This joumal's about the Makaroff children. I'll begin with Martha's broad motherly face which looked troubled when she entered my office at the mental health center in mid-August & asked if she could bother me a minute.] Martha Holt is one of Social Services’ best field workers, a concerned human cog in a bureaucracy so- hamstrung by red tape, budget cuts and overwork that it sometimes forgets it’s supposed to ease problems, not make new ones.

  [NB-For the past year I've been doing psychiatric evaluations for NYC, getting in some solid experience before opening a private practice of my own9 &r I’ve already seen more hard-core misery than I'd ever imagined possible back in the suburban hospital where I interned 6 certainly more than I'd been led to expect during those classes at my comfortably affluent med. school.] The problems caused by grinding poverty are so discouraging that I know I won’t last here much longer, but Martha’s been at it twenty-three years. Often frustrated and occasionally depressed, she somehow goes on doing her bit to make the world a better place for her clients.

  My specialty is pediatric psychotherapy, which is why she brought her anxieties about the Makaroff children to me that morning rather than to one of the generalists on the staff. I’ve untangled some emotional knots before they tied up a child’s psyche and I think I’ve helped avert a few psychoses, but it’s not as simple as working with Calder and his little friends at that dance theater where every child comes from a loving, middle-class home. Working at Social Services is like handing out bandaids when tourniquets and pressure bandages are needed. For every child we save, there are three dozen more locked into a life of poverty, illiteracy, joblessness, and hopelessness. Burnout’s an occupational hazard here, yet Martha can’t seem to stop caring.

  She laid the case fo
lders on my desk: one for Darlene Makaroff and each of her daughters-Tanya, not quite ten, and Corrie, just past four.

  The folders gave the usual facts and Martha’s running comments filled in around the edges. Darlene Makaroff had been one of six children, mother on welfare, father’s whereabouts unknown. Pregnant with Tanya at fourteen, two abortions, then a second full-term pregnancy; fathers of both daughters unknown. The usual Social Services applications, AFDC granted. Job-training programs abruptly ended. Several drunk-and-disorderly convictions, the daughters temporarily removed to foster care three or four times. General neglect, but no evidence of physical abuse.

  “She wasn’t a mean person,” Martha sighed. “Just weak and undirected.”

  I turned to the last page in the folder and saw why Martha used the past tense. Two weeks before, Darlene’s latest boyfriend had smashed her head in during a drunken brawl.

  “According to the police reports, he was using a hammer and screwdriver to loosen a stuck window. Darlene started yelling at him, and the whole situation spun out of control.”

  She was DOA at the hospital.

  The man, Ray Thorpe, had a history of juvenile violence, Martha said, and is still at large.

  [NB-Hard not to compare Darlene Makaroff with Dr. Christa Ferrell. I’m older than she was, but I’ve lived in clean shining places with nutritious meals, pretty clothes, a family who love 6 encourage me. I can reasonably expect marriage or an equally rewarding relationship, perhaps children eventually, certainly a full professional career. My life’s still opening up while Darlene Makaroff's is closed forever.] And what of Darlene’s daughters? Will they follow their mother’s pattern?

  “They have a chance now,” Martha said earnestly. “Let’s help them make it, Christa.”

  The girls were there during the brawl, she told me, and had actually seen their mother killed. In (act, it was nine-year-old Tanya who had dialed 911 and screamed for help.

  As soon as she was notified, Martha had gone to that dreadful welfare building and brought the two children to her own apartment for the night. Tanya had sobbed herself into quivering exhaustion but little Corrie had gone numb.

  “Tanya’s going to be okay, I think," said Martha. “It’s Corrie that has us worried. She’s like a sleepwalker. She moves and eats and sleeps, but she doesn’t play and she doesn’t speak unless you ask her a direct question.”

  “Two weeks isn’t an excessively long grieving period,” I said.

  “Is she really grieving though?” asked Martha. “She doesn’t cry or reach out for comfort. Mrs. Berkowitz says it’s like she’s blocked everything out.”

  “Mrs. Berkowitz?”

  “The girls’ foster mother. Lovely woman. She took them earlier this year when Darlene got six months’ real time for her last d-and-d. The children were crazy about her, especially Tanya. In fact, when Darlene got out of jail and demanded them bade, they cried all the way home. Mrs. Berkowitz wanted to adopt them, but Darlene wouldn’t hear of it.”

  My antennae went straight up on that. If Corrie had resented her mother for taking them away from Mrs. Berkowitz, she might be carrying a crippling burden of guilt. Childish logic could lead her to believe she was somehow responsible for Darlene’s death.

  “What was the relationship before Mrs. Berkowitz entered the picture?”

  “Well, you know how children are,” Martha sighed. “Whatever is seems normal when they’re that young. Darlene was their mother and I doubt if it ever occurred to Tanya or Corrie not to love her. Certainly Darlene was always talking about how much her babies meant to her.”

  “Especially if she were drunk?” I suggested cynically. “She could get sloppy and sentimental,” Martha admitted.

  “And when she was sober?”

  “I told you, Christa: Darlene never actively abused the girls. She might forget to feed them or make Tanya go to school or wash the sheets every time Corrie wet the bed, but that wasn’t because she didn’t love them.”

  A poor sort of maternity, I thought, but I knew it could have been worse.

  Much worse.

  I’ve seen the battered ones. The cigarette bums. The bruised little faces and bloody buttocks.

  “I gather that life with Mrs. Berkowitz was considerably different?”

  “We’re very lucky to have the Berkowitzes in our foster program,” Martha said fervently. “He’s a plumber and she’s a born homemaker. They can’t have children and there are so few Caucasian infants available for adoption these days. They were naturals for us.”

  “Do they still want to adopt the Makaroff girls?” Martha nodded. “Funny how it happens. They’ve had other children longer, but something blossomed with these two last winter. Corrie quit sucking her thumb and wetting the bed and then started getting A’s on her school- work. Darlene’s mother certainly doesn’t want them; so if I, we can get Corrie straightened out. the paperwork ought to sail through the courts.”

  “I suppose it’s possible that Mrs. Berkowitz had so displaced Darlene as a mother figure that the child feels guilty about her death,” I said cautiously.

  Martha beamed. “I knew you’d help.”

  11 i [NB-probably should describe my office in full de tail when I write this up. especially since I've given so much thought to it I? am rather pleased with the results. Except for the city-issued file cabinet, all the furnishings are mine. No clinical formality for me. (0 certainly nothing as sterile as Sigrid Harald’s office. Barely any touch of color there.) Instead. I've created a cheerful family room: bright carpets, chintz chairs 0 couch, 0. under the, window, open shelves with dolls, stuffed animals, other toys.] Two days after my conversation with Martha Holt, Mrs. Berkowitz sat on the couch across from me with a little girl on each side.

  Sheila Berkowitz is thin and pleasant-faced. Late thirties, strawberry blonde hair, no makeup. She wore white. sandals and a blue cotton sundress. No jewelry except for a wedding band, a modest diamond engagement ring, and clip-on earrings of blue plastic. She displayed unconscious, signs of nervousness about being in a psychiatrist’s office, but was trying not to communicate that nervousness to the children.

  School was still closed for the summer, but she proudly confided that Tanya had been conditionally promoted to die fourth grade.

  Considering how much time the child has lost from school because of her mother’s negligence, I decided Tanya must be a good student and I said so.

  “I still have to catch up with arithmetic this summer and pass a test when school starts,” Tanya said shyly.

  She is a wiry child. Pale skin, a freckled nose, changeable blue-green eyes, and light brown hair tied in a ponytail with a blue ribbon that matched her blue plaid shorts. After an initial shyness, her natural friendliness came through and soon she was chattering about school and eyeing my toys.

  Four-year-old Corrie still has some baby fat in her cheeks and legs but she is of similar build and coloring as her sister. Her twin ponytails were secured with perky red bows and she wore a little red playsuit and white sandals. She did not squeeze against Mrs. Berkowitz’s side as Tanya had when they first met me, but neither did she shrink away. She simply sat where put and gazed at me without curiosity or fear.

  Since Tanya responded so well, I asked if she would mind talking with me a few minutes while Mrs. Berkowitz and Corrie waited outside.

  “N-no,” she said, but timidity came back as she watched her sister and foster mother exit.

  It didn't take me long, though, to put Tanya at ease again. At nine, she is still young enough to be beguiled by what I call my baby doll games. Very young children will actually use the dolls as surrogates to act out their rage and hostility; the older ones will let their guard down because the toys give them something to do with their eyes and hands.

  “This is my oldest baby doll,” I told Tanya, pulling a rather shabby Bitsy Betsy from the back shelf. “What was your first doll’s name?”

  By the end of our second session, I had a reasonably clear pictur
e of what life with Darlene Makaroff had been like for her daughters. Whenever children chatter about toys and games and the people who give or withhold presents and love and nurture, they cannot help but reveal their own emotional ambivalences.

  I soon knew that going to the Berkowitzes that first time when Darlene was in jail had been a great revelation for Tanya. It wasn't just that the apartment was bigger, brighter, and cleaner, although it was; nor that the food tasted better and the beds slept warmer, although they did; nor even that she and Corrie had new toys and never-before-worn jackets for the first time, although they had.

  No, it was the intangible security of a known routine that seems to have captured Tanya’s imagination. For the first time in her young life, breakfast, lunch, and bedtime came at the same hours every day. School was no longer a sometime thing. There was structure and order. A Ear cry from the hand-to-mouth life her true mother provided.

  Tanya evidently tried to carry her newfound orderliness home, but “Mommy said I was getting too prissy and anyhow, lots of times she didn’t feel good enough “

  “Too drunk,” I thought to myself. We continued to talk and play and, bit by bit in that second session, we edged closer to Darlene Makaroff s death.

  “I’ll bet Corrie was pretty scared when that man started hurting your mom,” I said.

  “I was, too,” she whispered and her small hands twisted the dress she had taken off a Raggedy Ann doll into a knot. “Ray hit her and hit her and then he ran away and Mommy was all bloody and I called the police and then Mrs. Holt took us to her house and then Aunt Sheila came and got us and said we were going to be her and Uncle Lyle’s little girls from now on.”

  “Do you like that?”

  “Aunt Sheila lets me run the vacuum cleaner,” the child answered obliquely. “And she’s going to show me how to crochet.”