Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull ShortLit) Page 3

  I’ve just finished writing a book report on Mrs. Mike by Nancy and Benedict Freedman and only hope that I can live a life as full of love and happiness as hers was. How lucky I’d be then! How lucky!

  MRS. MIKE: The Heartwarming Classic Story of the Boston Girl

  Who Married a Rugged Canadian Mountie

  She put me on the train in Boston, and for the twentieth time I promised I’d dress warm and keep dry and not go out into the night where there were bears.

  There I was thinking of Mother. And I mustn’t. Otherwise, how could I keep going through this white world of pale sky and frozen earth?

  And when would I see her? I knew Mother hadn’t the money to come on for the wedding-and Mike already had his orders; we would leave immediately for Hudson’s Hope. The pain of a separation that would be for years, and maybe forever, must run between us the length of Saskatchewan.

  (FEBRUARY 21, 1961)

  Tonight I have something to tell you that I don’t quite understand about myself and Barb. I read a theme of Barb’s entitled “A Day to Remember” and if [she] ever finds out that I did I hope or pray I can make her understand the why of it and tell her it’s not that I mean to pry-I only am jealous of the small world she lives in and I wish I could penetrate it.

  I speak of her feelings for Bodie, water-skiing, and the long summer days she has spent with him and my cousin Pat. She is a different person then and all her passion, desires, and affections seem to bubble to the surface and she quite obviously adores him, even though he is 30 yrs. old.

  Anyway in the theme she describes the day, etc., and then mentions that she imagines herself in love with a special someone (Bod, of course) and that he makes it all so perfect!! Why oh why is she the only one to whom such emotions come? Even as confusing and unhappy as she may be at times, she still possesses that. Exactly what occurs on those long summer days one can only guess...I envy her from the bottom of my heart.

  I long for an experience similar; not the same place or circumstance but instead something that could be mine and mine alone-something apart from my everyday friends and acquaintances and my family. I have nothing like that and I have always wanted it. I am always the one that must be nice, sweet, and a family girl. Why can’t I possess the outgo that could secure for me those wonderful worlds that could be all mine.

  Love and its many tributaries have never showed themselves to me. I should probably be always seeking and looking for a world I can share with just one other-just one other male person. Someone I love and someone who loves me. Like I said I shall probably keep looking for the rest of my life for the thrill and excitement of infatuation and passion. An impossible thing for me. I will stop now-how lucky Barbie is. I love her so much!

  UOFM

  There was a saying about girls

  who wanted a serious education:

  If nine out of ten girls are beautiful,

  the tenth will go to Michigan.

  (1966)

  I went for a walk this morning.

  My hair was tied back off my face.

  My attire was a cozy-blue wool sweater, no socks, a tan trench coat

  My cheeks were red and cold to the touch.

  My head cleared and rejoiced.

  I thought of neither past nor future,

  but only of the cold air

  the fast walk, the next curb,

  the top of the hill,

  the rain on my face.

  My lips were singing

  “I Wish I Were a Kid Again.”

  My destination: anywhere in god’s name

  but out-away-

  and make it exciting

  BARB AND JANE, PART II

  After Barb left for college, things between them

  changed. In 1964, Jane was elected to give

  her high school commencement address

  with a guy named Bill Street. They shocked everyone

  with an unexpectedly searing speech

  on civil rights. The weekend J.F.K. was shot

  Jane was visiting Barb

  at Michigan, out on a double date.

  Barb was worried the guy wouldn’t like

  Jane, but he did. He really liked her.

  The next year Jane joined Barb at Michigan, though

  they ran with different crowds. Jane’s friends

  were political, the most serious students around.

  Jane refused to rush a sorority; Barb’s boyfriend

  was in the hottest fraternity. But they met weekly

  for coffee, had each other over for dinner, talked

  about books. It was Jane who first turned my mother on

  to reading Virginia Woolf. One day

  Barb and her boyfriend snuck into the back

  of a campus auditorium to hear Jane debate.

  It was then that Barb realized her little sister

  wasn’t just good up there-

  she was great.

  (1966)

  To Barbara

  Wherever you are next year, or ten years from now

  Let’s still somehow get together for coffee!

  Here’s to the hope that you’ll never stop “growing up”-

  “not only for what you are

  but what I am when I am with you”

  —myself.

  Gratefully,

  your sister,

  Janie

  A NOTE ABOUT THE BOYFRIEND

  Within a few years, he would become

  my mother’s husband.

  A few years later,

  my father.

  Ten years after that, he would die suddenly,

  at forty.

  Shortly after the death of her mother, Virginia Woolf

  lost her beloved half-sister, Stella.

  In her memoir, Woolf wrote: I remember saying to myself after

  [Stella] died:

  “But this is impossible; things aren’t, can’t be like this”—

  the blow, the second blow of death, struck on me;

  tremulous, filmy-eyed as I was, with my wings creased,

  sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis.

  OF HER BLOOD

  By her second year of college, her parents told Jane

  she was no longer welcome in their home.

  That same year Jane wrote

  in her journal:

  Mother, the Christian hypocrite

  and I, of her blood. Under

  her influence-how much am I-

  and I love her—at least

  if I can love at all

  I do.

  (1966)

  Well, he didn’t call. And I, like a fool, waited for him to all evening.

  But 10 o’clock has come and gone-and hopelessness surrounds

  my tired body and sore throat.

  Perhaps Jim Hudek was the best I’ve ever know-

  way too good for me—how horrid.

  The young divorcée-I rather like the sound of that.

  But, in truth, how a divorcee without even a union?

  You’re a good kid, Jane. Good for what?

  A kid-you bet.

  How does the wine taste?

  Daddy...we’re not close enough—

  I’m a chicken. I don’t think I have a backbone—

  I don’t think I really understand very much.

  I’m not really truthful.

  I’ll not make any New Year’s Resolutions—

  I don’t know what I’m going to do next.

  Character-what is it? Tomorrow is Monday, January 3, 1966.

  PHIL

  I know that Jane eventually had a serious boyfriend at Michigan, but I don’t know where to find him. I plug his names into all kinds of directories and get nothing. My mother finally comes up with the name of another university he might have attended in the ’70s, so I contact their alumni office. They have one overseas address for that name.

  It’s hard to know what to say in my letter, so I don’t say much. If it’s him, I figure he’l
l understand.

  FIRST LETTER FROM PHIL

  Dear Maggie,

  I just received your letter and I’m sure I’m the person you’re looking for. At the time of her death over thirty years ago, Jane and I were both very much in love and were planning to get married. I’d be happy to share with you whatever it is you would like to know.

  THE BOX

  A few months later, Phil comes to the States, and we plan to meet for coffee in Brooklyn. Though he has lived in Europe for many years, it turns out he owns an apartment right around the corner from where I live.

  In contrast to the openness of his letter, at first Phil seems quite wary. He wants to know why I’m so passionate about Jane, why I want to write about her. Why I would want to take private things and put them into the world.

  We end up talking for several hours; an outsider might think we were old friends. When we get up to leave, he says he wants to give me the contents of a safety-deposit box he emptied that morning, a box that he kept sealed for thirty years.

  Watching his figure recede as he walks down the street then descends into the subway, I feel inexplicably bereaved.

  I climb my stairs, sit down at my desk, and slowly examine his gifts: an obituary he cut from the Detroit News, now yellow and brittle with age; a few snapshots of Jane; and a copy of a poem someone read at her funeral.

  At the time, Phil had never heard the poem before—he’s not big on poetry, he explains-but this one moved him so much that he found it in a book, went home and typed it up.

  Now I have a piece of his old stationery, a dead Ann Arbor address printed in the upper right; below it, the typewritten words of Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night. l Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  SECOND LETTER FROM PHIL

  I’d like to describe how I met your aunt.

  It was in 1966 (the year she made no New Year’s Resolutions, and did not know what she was going to do next, if memory serves me correctly). I was only twenty-three years old at the time, and a second-year graduate student in economics. I had a teaching fellowship, which meant I had to lead two “discussion” sections of introductory economics per term. Jane was a student in one of the classes in the January term. I believe the course was Principles of Microeconomics.

  Jane impressed me as unconventionally bright-even among a very bright student body. She was not especially extroverted and, in fact, rarely participated in class discussions or asked questions during the hour. But there was an intensity in her presence and a driving desire to master the subject matter which I found magnetic.

  She was always 100% prepared, had always thought about the material, and-as was typical with her-had a basic insecurity that she never quite understood all she needed to understand. The way I got to know her more as a person was through her questions after class and during office hours.

  Jane was straight as an arrow. But that didn’t stop me from being attracted to her intellect, her intense curiosity, her budding sensitivity to social issues, her ambition, and ultimately-much later-her more physical attributes.

  I remember when she told me she was going to do her junior year abroad. That may have been the first time I realized I was seeing her as a potential person in my life rather than merely as a student. I knew that the study abroad experience would be wonderful for her and encouraged her to pursue it. But I strongly sensed I was going to miss her. And, of course, I did.

  I will close now and give my psyche a rest.

  (1966)

  Tomorrow: holds France, perhaps.

  Pittsburgh, of course.

  Loneliness, so what.

  FRANCE

  In the fall of 1966, Jane went to France

  to study for a year at Aix-en-Provence.

  She took a boat over, a crash course

  of French onboard.

  At the end of the year, she

  hitchhiked through Europe.

  My mother has the vague sense

  she went to Yugoslavia, maybe

  even as far as the U.S.S.R.,

  but she can’t say why. Phil

  doubts it; given that

  he was a Marxist, he’s sure

  they would have discussed it.

  No one really seems to know

  very much about her trip.

  At any rate, she came home

  smoking cigarettes.

  LETTER FROM FRANCE, 1967

  My dear sister Barbara,

  Thank you for your lovely letter of March 15th-sorry I haven’t answered sooner...

  You ask about the American exit from France, and the French attitude toward de Gaulle-I can only evaluate subjectively, but I do have a few observations, for what they’re worth-yes, the French are grateful for American aid after the war, but their viewpoint is entirely different from ours...there’s a pretty strong argument that our benevolent generosity after the war only made us richer, and more influential, so the attitude is thanks, but now is the time for you to leave-but there’s the catch, because France still needs us...it’s a vicious cycle...I understand it, cause somewhere in our American foreign policy is the idea of a moral—of imposing our way of life on the rest of the world—

  Glad you saw The Blast, called The Curée over here—I enjoyed it very much-find Vadim an excellent cinema artist-would be extremely curious to know if any of it was censored in the transfer-

  Exams are right around the comer, plus two ten-page French papers, but there are only five weeks left, and the summer sounds like a real adventure-have no idea where I’ll find myself, but am getting real anxious for the freedom and excitement of travel to god knows where-there’s some kind of indescribable joy about climbing on a second-class car in the railway station in Marseilles and taking off for god knows where—I have almost a mystique about it—

  Can’t begin to tell you about my five days in Florence-there was too much that went too deep to relate—maybe someday over a cup of coffee. I’ll tell you all about the pain and horror of those five days-Yes, I still talk to Phil frequently-feel very close to him sometimes—

  My weight is atrocious (ask Mom), but I haven’t had more than 500 calories a day for a week, so the promises for the future are good—I won’t come back this heavy, and yet haven’t minded it too much...

  Let me know of your future plans, and please give me your summer address-should love to have taken a trip out to see you in the lovely city, but as the saying goes, one can’t do everything. Hello to your husband.

  REFRAIN

  “Agreeing that [Jane] was a ‘liberal,’ [a friend] said, ‘She was interested in seeing that the black students got the things they wanted.’”

  -Ann Arbor News, March 22, 1969

  My relatives all say

  Jane wanted to change the world

  Then they add

  None of us can

  (1966)

  I’m still in revolt.

  The fury’s there.

  I suspect it is Egoism with a capital E.

  Pride goeth before and all that—

  People are misdirected

  compromising the finest in them

  for the ugliest of the world—

  me too.

  THE LAW

  By her senior year, Jane was on the pill.