The Believer, page 18
“I obviously didn’t want to go,” she tells me, “because I could’ve gone to my room and that would’ve been it. But I went and sat with Mom and Dad, and I don’t remember much after that.” She had her stomach pumped. No one at the hospital asked how she was going, or mentioned what had happened, though her name and face were in all the newspapers.
“And I admit it, many times in my life I still sometimes want to do that because it never ends.”
When he fails to come home that night, his parents think he’s had an accident, that he fell from the sky.
“But then as the people came along from various newspapers,” Guido explained later to a reporter, .” . . some journalist, I think it was from Channel Nine, he mentioned to me that he’d heard about—it was to do with some strange object surrounding . . . That was the first hint that we have about a UFO. And as they tell us, myself and my wife, we felt much more relieved because we knew that Freddy was always mentioning about UFO[s], that he would like to meet one, and our heart really opened up with a great big hope.”
“When I heard that,” Alberta added, “I was, more or less, put it this way, don’t get me wrong, I was happy, because at least he’s somewhere . . .”
She will make the point that an unidentified flying object doesn’t necessarily have to be from another planet. Guido will say that most people believe we’re not alone in the universe, there’s got to be another civilization somewhere, that a lemon tree doesn’t only have one lemon.
Mount Stromlo Observatory, in Canberra, will advise that the night of October 21st was the peak of a meteor storm.
Six months after Fred disappears, the Australian newspaper reports on a clairvoyant’s claims that he had a conversation with the pilot during a séance at his home, in which Fred told him that sixty seconds of the radio transcript had been suppressed before it was released. “The allegation is in line with highly publicized claims by friends and family after its release,” the article says. “Valentich is supposed to have said he was safe but no longer had a physical body. He is claimed to have said: ‘I am in light. I can move to wherever I need to be.’ Fred reportedly told the clairvoyant, Colin Amery, that extraterrestrials needed his skills.
“Mr Guido Valentich said yesterday he still believed his son was alive but was skeptical about Mr. Amery’s claims. Mr. Valentich said it was just possible Mr. Amery might be trying to publicize his book, New Atlantis, which predicts severe upheavals and great changes to the earth in about a year.”
When asked what he believes happened to his son, Guido tells reporters that he believes Fred must have been struck by some unidentified flying object. That he hopes a UFO is involved; he’d prefer that option over the others. He will attend meetings of the UFO research societies where he will be welcomed, remembered with near-reverence twenty years after his death and with a wince for his pain. Spoken of with total respect for the fact that he insisted on looking up rather than down for the body of his child, and that he never stopped looking.
The investigators find that Fred presented a façade of his ability, achievement and future to his acquaintances, close friends and family. That he was running out of time on that front. They note Rhonda’s statement that “he perspired profusely and his voice changed in any unexpected or out of the ordinary situation.” How this sits uncomfortably with the evidence that “his voice remained ‘matter of fact’ and completely normal” on the transmission. They note that had the vehicle crashed into the sea, wreckage would probably have been sighted. “It therefore is not possible to determine the cause of the disappearance but it seems likely that the aircraft did not crash in the sea . . .”
On May 15, 1983, about four and a half years after Fred disappeared, a piece of an aircraft washed up on the beach on the west coast of Flinders Island in Tasmania, opposite the northern end of the Flinders Island Aerodrome. It was identified as an engine cowl flap from a Cessna 182, used to control airflow over the engine. The aluminum fragment had once been painted white and it bore a steel operating bolt which, while heavily corroded, appeared to have failed on impact or in flight. It is not unknown for a cowl flap to separate from an aircraft in flight, but there had been no recent instances in the area, no aircraft wreckage dumped at sea, no missing Cessna aircraft besides that flown by Fred Valentich. Jim Sandercock wrote to the Royal Australian Navy Research Laboratory for assistance, noting that the serial number of Valentich’s Cessna “falls within the range of serial numbers applicable to the part found.”
He asked about the likelihood of this particular item traveling under the influence of ocean currents, over a period of close to five years, from a spot somewhere between Cape Otway and the northern tip of King Island to the Tasmanian beach where it was found. It would be, he writes, a step towards solving the mystery of the disappearance and its sole occupant.
It happened that unusually large currents had been seen on two occasions earlier in the year. They were of sufficient magnitude to constitute an unusual event, Ian Jones, of the Ocean Sciences Division, explained in his reply. Thus it would seem reasonable to speculate, Jones wrote, “that the storm induced large bottom currents over much of eastern Bass Strait and moved your aircraft parts towards Flinders Island.”
In the photos on file, the three pieces that constitute this scrap of current-carried metal are not so much. They are the color of bleached bones, have the clean lines and jagged irregularities of pottery shards. The single certainty is that they were not built to exist in isolation. A meager and forensic accounting of something broken, somewhere.
30
Halfway Home
Lynn
Lynn has her own room on the fourth floor of the shelter, which is where the only individual rooms are located. The beds there are mostly reserved for women with full-time jobs. Lynn’s room doesn’t have a door, but she has hung a purple curtain, behind which there is a bed and a locker, a window ledge to put things on. It is the most privacy she has had for thirty-five years, and she’s grateful for it though the girls keep her up with their smoking and fighting and, if they happen to have credit, talking at volume on their phones at 3:00 AM. It’s August, stiflingly hot and the air conditioner is broken. It doesn’t bother her. The only problem is the stairs, which she takes slowly on account of her knee. She ascends carefully, sending her purple aluminum cane—a parole present—scouting out ahead. Thud, step, step.
Lynn was raised in a small town in upstate New York in a house so close to her grandparents it was like having two homes. Born with a bad appendix, she couldn’t jump rope or climb trees, but her mother taught her to read early and she could go inside her closet and build a cottage, a castle, a world of her own making. Her family was Episcopalian, Sundays spent in the church her grandfather helped build, where her parents met after her father saw her mother singing in the choir. Lynn added her voice there too, growing taller each year in front of the pews that would turn to ash one freezing January day after the best efforts of her father and the other volunteer fire fighters failed to contain the flames lit by a troubled teenager.
She did well at school. Studied abroad for a year, navigated her way around a Spanish high school, found a place for herself there in a different country, a different language. In 1963, when she was sixteen, she made her own way down from New York to join the March on Washington. Became seasick on the Staten Island ferry before she’d even left the state.
It’s all moving. Anywhere she rests her eyes. The dirty floor. The gray waves of New York Harbor. The gulls veering above. A voice offers her a drink, something fizzy to settle the lurching inside. She looks up and everything disappears.
This was how she met AJ, first when they were on the same boat and decades later when they found themselves in the same prison. Both times it felt like a miracle.
They make the rest of the trip together, ignoring the looks they receive as an interracial couple, Lynn white, AJ Black. Leaning against each other in the crowd, they listen to Dr. King’s speech. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children . . .
They elope using AJ’s fake ID which identifies him as male. Back home, she introduces AJ as her boyfriend. They are together for the next few years as Lynn finishes high school, then college. AJ comes up from the city to spend long nights at her small apartment which contains the world—her books, a Siamese cat, a Murphy bed that folds down from the wall and a Chevy Impala convertible parked outside. Lynn sometimes drives down to Manhattan, and they go out in the Village where they can be among friends. They’re there in the early hours of June 28, 1969, running down Christopher Street, holding hands, the noise flaring out from the Stonewall Inn at their heels.
They broke up eventually because Lynn wanted children.
“If I had stayed with him, I think we both would’ve stayed out of jail,” Lynn says of her first and last love. She thinks she could have persuaded AJ “to stop doing what he was doing.” She is referring to the fact that AJ worked, from a young age, with an uncle as a “paid mercenary”: a hitman. “Righting wrongs and settling scores,” as Lynn describes it wryly. You wouldn’t catch him standing up and sitting down in a church, but AJ was extremely religious, would pray every night on his knees.
Lynn graduates. Takes a job as a substitute teacher. Signs the mortgage on the old corner grocery store, remodeling it on her own line of credit. Opens Bailey’s Deli, which she names for a lover she will one day wish she had stayed with and with whom she will seek respite when things start to get worse with her husband. She’ll wonder later whether it was Bailey who in fact fathered her son.
She meets Ray at that red light in his fast car when he asks her for directions he already knows. Marries this older man who is so proud of her, who shows her off to his friends, I’m dating a girl who speaks three languages! Ray stops selling cars and starts selling strollers, purchases a baby-supplies shop in the next town over. She will have children, she will live near her parents, she will work hard, go to graduate school, and that will be her life. All its ingredients perfectly proportioned like the salads she stands on the wooden floor of her own deli confidently making and handing over, with a smile, to her regulars.
In the beginning is the aberration.
What happened at his work to cause this? This isn’t Ray. Of course she accepts his apologies, his gifts, his compliments. His remorse rights the world. Though his pride in her accomplishments (She’s studying her master’s in clinical psychology!) has long curdled into resentment (You think you’re so smart . . .) she keeps thinking things will return to how they were. When they don’t, she starts to feel a burning shame: her bruises, her black eyes; her judgment in selecting this person as her person. The marriage crumbles, she starts seeing Bailey again in secret, she resolves to leave Ray for good and start over. And then she is pregnant, which stops nothing. His rage and her shame a double helix spiraling out of control.
She doesn’t tell her parents what is happening, though they live on the same street. They could have heard her from their porch had she shouted for help after he pushed her down the front stairs, separating her from her front teeth. Her father—former Canadian special ops—would have charged across the intervening driveways to extract her in a heartbeat. But Lynn remains silent, this small woman who thinks of herself as so self-reliant that hours before she goes into labor she is still lifting bags of potatoes and crates of celery around the deli to fill the orders for Fourth of July parties.
July is raspberry month, as the article above the birth announcement for Lynn and Ray’s son informs readers of the local paper. Ray beats her while she is nursing through the night, running the deli, checking in on her mother, who is getting increasingly ill. He shows no particular attachment to the child. He says, “Now who does he look like?” in a tone that makes her skin crawl.
She stops going to the church she grew up in. Drives a few towns over instead, where she can sit unrecognized, her tongue probing the spot where tooth is now air as she strives to reach some accord with the world as it is.
Eventually she reels it up from the trench of herself like some luminescent deep-sea creature, files for a divorce and changes the locks. When she returns home from work to find he is in the house, she calls the police and reports a break-in. They attend, then leave in annoyance. A nonissue, a domestic. “When I called they would be like, ‘Oh, it’s Lynn again.’ I could hear them. They were pretty tired of being called to the house,” she says, explaining that it would enrage Ray further, that he would return and rape her.
From then on, she comes home to find windows broken, things missing: her silverware, her jewelery, the relief she had felt after she told him it was over. She packs suitcases into her car, straps her son into his car seat, drives towards Canada, planning on finding somewhere to stay when she arrives, has enough savings to support them both while she finds work. She is pulled over before the border, forced back home by a man Ray hired to follow her and threaten her. The police respond by saying only that there is nothing they can do. Nobody saw him do anything. Her word against his.
In the world of legal proof, the expression “word-on-word” refers to the conflicting versions of an event that took place between two people in private. He said/she said. There is a danger in framing contested facts in this way. Too often it falsely gives “the impression of even odds, as though each side is as likely as a coin flip.”
Ray shows up at the deli. Punches Lynn in the face, her jawbone breaking under his fist in front of customers, a man and his daughter standing at the counter. The presence of witnesses results in his first arrest. Though the Family Court will issue an order of protection against him, he is released the same day.
“Remember,” Lynn says, “this was 1980, upstate.” She is referring to the small communities, the conservative attitudes, the endless accumulation of snow over long winters of short days when nothing thawed or melted away.
31
The Kingdom of Heaven
Loisann
I am sitting in the home of Loisann and Anthony Witmar, where I’ve come to learn about their church and their lives and what snapped me like a magnet to the sight of them singing in the subway. In some ways this home would feel the same regardless of whether it was located in Myerstown, Pennsylvania—where they are from—or the South Bronx. Their children, Eliana, three, and Antoine, two, would wake up each morning and eat their cereal, play with their toys. The Bible verses printed across their plastic shower curtain would be the same, the drone of the washing machine, the taste of the molasses-infused shoofly pie Loisann just baked and the smell from the scented candles she lights would all be the same.
However, in Myerstown the Witmars lived in a farmhouse on five pleasingly green acres. On the way to their two-bedroom apartment today, I passed through the most dangerous police precinct in New York City and stepped around a dead dog wrapped in a garbage bag to reach their front door. In Myerstown, they were embowered by family and friends. Here, hardly anyone speaks to them. In Myerstown, the clothes they wore served to deflect attention from their appearance. Here, they have the opposite effect. It is true that both neighborhoods have been quiet, but the quiets have not been the same.
All going well, their children will probably never attend a school; Loisann will start homeschooling in a few years. In the meantime, she settles next to Eliana on their squishy sofa each day, holding Antoine against the great orb of her pregnant belly, her feet not quite reaching the ground as she opens their Bible study book. In a sing-song voice, she keeps her children’s attention as she reads about Joshua and the thief who, against God’s command, looted items from the town after the Battle of Jericho, hiding them for himself before being discovered and stoned to death. At the end of this story, there are a few discussion points which Loisann runs through while Antoine squirms. When Eliana is stumped by a question about the fate of the thief, Loisann gently instructs her that, because the man disobeyed God, he and his family had to die. Then it is coloring time.
Loisann is thirty-one. She has sparkling eyes, brown hair and something in her smile that reminds me of the actress Katie Holmes. The Pennsylvania Dutch inflection of her speech means that her Os and Ls are lilting, slightly elfin creatures: sweet surprises hiding like Easter eggs in the garden of her words. And those words are, sometimes, old words that entrance me with their strangeness: courting, youngsters, seamstress. When she says “the Bronx” her inflection contains the Dutch of the ships whose stone ballast was used to pave the streets on Lenape land they called New Amsterdam. It stops my heart every time.
Loisann speaks firmly and fast. The thoughts that she shares with me come out well formed and in monochrome. I can’t even tell you how lovely is her laugh. She radiates a particular type of strong energy I think of as “high-density” and reminds me of a toy koala I had when I was a child: she is adorable and just below the soft surface she is as hard as rock.
“While Dad called himself a Christian, his life did not show it, at least at home,” Loisann tells me, the last word rhyming with poem. “He could look good at church but at home—some people would use the word dysfunctional. Now compared to general America, we had a very good home. Anthony had more of a typical Mennonite upbringing.”
One of eight children, Loisann grew up on a veal farm in Pennsylvania. There were lots of good memories, she says, in spite of how things were. There was a time there when her father went through a kind of rehabilitation program. He wasn’t an alcoholic, wasn’t on drugs. It was just to help him be more Christ- like, she explains. But his heart wasn’t really in it.
As the children play on the carpet between us, Loisann explains that she loved school. Remembers being sixteen at Myerstown Mennonite School, starting the new school year, thinking sadly, “Okay, that’s tenth grade already.” Her friends were leaving, starting jobs. “We opened our biology books,” she remembers, “and I was like, ‘Ahhh, I love it.’ This was secure. This was my world. This was what I loved. I was like, ‘I just can’t imagine getting out yet. I’m not ready to quit.’”
“And I admit it, many times in my life I still sometimes want to do that because it never ends.”
When he fails to come home that night, his parents think he’s had an accident, that he fell from the sky.
“But then as the people came along from various newspapers,” Guido explained later to a reporter, .” . . some journalist, I think it was from Channel Nine, he mentioned to me that he’d heard about—it was to do with some strange object surrounding . . . That was the first hint that we have about a UFO. And as they tell us, myself and my wife, we felt much more relieved because we knew that Freddy was always mentioning about UFO[s], that he would like to meet one, and our heart really opened up with a great big hope.”
“When I heard that,” Alberta added, “I was, more or less, put it this way, don’t get me wrong, I was happy, because at least he’s somewhere . . .”
She will make the point that an unidentified flying object doesn’t necessarily have to be from another planet. Guido will say that most people believe we’re not alone in the universe, there’s got to be another civilization somewhere, that a lemon tree doesn’t only have one lemon.
Mount Stromlo Observatory, in Canberra, will advise that the night of October 21st was the peak of a meteor storm.
Six months after Fred disappears, the Australian newspaper reports on a clairvoyant’s claims that he had a conversation with the pilot during a séance at his home, in which Fred told him that sixty seconds of the radio transcript had been suppressed before it was released. “The allegation is in line with highly publicized claims by friends and family after its release,” the article says. “Valentich is supposed to have said he was safe but no longer had a physical body. He is claimed to have said: ‘I am in light. I can move to wherever I need to be.’ Fred reportedly told the clairvoyant, Colin Amery, that extraterrestrials needed his skills.
“Mr Guido Valentich said yesterday he still believed his son was alive but was skeptical about Mr. Amery’s claims. Mr. Valentich said it was just possible Mr. Amery might be trying to publicize his book, New Atlantis, which predicts severe upheavals and great changes to the earth in about a year.”
When asked what he believes happened to his son, Guido tells reporters that he believes Fred must have been struck by some unidentified flying object. That he hopes a UFO is involved; he’d prefer that option over the others. He will attend meetings of the UFO research societies where he will be welcomed, remembered with near-reverence twenty years after his death and with a wince for his pain. Spoken of with total respect for the fact that he insisted on looking up rather than down for the body of his child, and that he never stopped looking.
The investigators find that Fred presented a façade of his ability, achievement and future to his acquaintances, close friends and family. That he was running out of time on that front. They note Rhonda’s statement that “he perspired profusely and his voice changed in any unexpected or out of the ordinary situation.” How this sits uncomfortably with the evidence that “his voice remained ‘matter of fact’ and completely normal” on the transmission. They note that had the vehicle crashed into the sea, wreckage would probably have been sighted. “It therefore is not possible to determine the cause of the disappearance but it seems likely that the aircraft did not crash in the sea . . .”
On May 15, 1983, about four and a half years after Fred disappeared, a piece of an aircraft washed up on the beach on the west coast of Flinders Island in Tasmania, opposite the northern end of the Flinders Island Aerodrome. It was identified as an engine cowl flap from a Cessna 182, used to control airflow over the engine. The aluminum fragment had once been painted white and it bore a steel operating bolt which, while heavily corroded, appeared to have failed on impact or in flight. It is not unknown for a cowl flap to separate from an aircraft in flight, but there had been no recent instances in the area, no aircraft wreckage dumped at sea, no missing Cessna aircraft besides that flown by Fred Valentich. Jim Sandercock wrote to the Royal Australian Navy Research Laboratory for assistance, noting that the serial number of Valentich’s Cessna “falls within the range of serial numbers applicable to the part found.”
He asked about the likelihood of this particular item traveling under the influence of ocean currents, over a period of close to five years, from a spot somewhere between Cape Otway and the northern tip of King Island to the Tasmanian beach where it was found. It would be, he writes, a step towards solving the mystery of the disappearance and its sole occupant.
It happened that unusually large currents had been seen on two occasions earlier in the year. They were of sufficient magnitude to constitute an unusual event, Ian Jones, of the Ocean Sciences Division, explained in his reply. Thus it would seem reasonable to speculate, Jones wrote, “that the storm induced large bottom currents over much of eastern Bass Strait and moved your aircraft parts towards Flinders Island.”
In the photos on file, the three pieces that constitute this scrap of current-carried metal are not so much. They are the color of bleached bones, have the clean lines and jagged irregularities of pottery shards. The single certainty is that they were not built to exist in isolation. A meager and forensic accounting of something broken, somewhere.
30
Halfway Home
Lynn
Lynn has her own room on the fourth floor of the shelter, which is where the only individual rooms are located. The beds there are mostly reserved for women with full-time jobs. Lynn’s room doesn’t have a door, but she has hung a purple curtain, behind which there is a bed and a locker, a window ledge to put things on. It is the most privacy she has had for thirty-five years, and she’s grateful for it though the girls keep her up with their smoking and fighting and, if they happen to have credit, talking at volume on their phones at 3:00 AM. It’s August, stiflingly hot and the air conditioner is broken. It doesn’t bother her. The only problem is the stairs, which she takes slowly on account of her knee. She ascends carefully, sending her purple aluminum cane—a parole present—scouting out ahead. Thud, step, step.
Lynn was raised in a small town in upstate New York in a house so close to her grandparents it was like having two homes. Born with a bad appendix, she couldn’t jump rope or climb trees, but her mother taught her to read early and she could go inside her closet and build a cottage, a castle, a world of her own making. Her family was Episcopalian, Sundays spent in the church her grandfather helped build, where her parents met after her father saw her mother singing in the choir. Lynn added her voice there too, growing taller each year in front of the pews that would turn to ash one freezing January day after the best efforts of her father and the other volunteer fire fighters failed to contain the flames lit by a troubled teenager.
She did well at school. Studied abroad for a year, navigated her way around a Spanish high school, found a place for herself there in a different country, a different language. In 1963, when she was sixteen, she made her own way down from New York to join the March on Washington. Became seasick on the Staten Island ferry before she’d even left the state.
It’s all moving. Anywhere she rests her eyes. The dirty floor. The gray waves of New York Harbor. The gulls veering above. A voice offers her a drink, something fizzy to settle the lurching inside. She looks up and everything disappears.
This was how she met AJ, first when they were on the same boat and decades later when they found themselves in the same prison. Both times it felt like a miracle.
They make the rest of the trip together, ignoring the looks they receive as an interracial couple, Lynn white, AJ Black. Leaning against each other in the crowd, they listen to Dr. King’s speech. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children . . .
They elope using AJ’s fake ID which identifies him as male. Back home, she introduces AJ as her boyfriend. They are together for the next few years as Lynn finishes high school, then college. AJ comes up from the city to spend long nights at her small apartment which contains the world—her books, a Siamese cat, a Murphy bed that folds down from the wall and a Chevy Impala convertible parked outside. Lynn sometimes drives down to Manhattan, and they go out in the Village where they can be among friends. They’re there in the early hours of June 28, 1969, running down Christopher Street, holding hands, the noise flaring out from the Stonewall Inn at their heels.
They broke up eventually because Lynn wanted children.
“If I had stayed with him, I think we both would’ve stayed out of jail,” Lynn says of her first and last love. She thinks she could have persuaded AJ “to stop doing what he was doing.” She is referring to the fact that AJ worked, from a young age, with an uncle as a “paid mercenary”: a hitman. “Righting wrongs and settling scores,” as Lynn describes it wryly. You wouldn’t catch him standing up and sitting down in a church, but AJ was extremely religious, would pray every night on his knees.
Lynn graduates. Takes a job as a substitute teacher. Signs the mortgage on the old corner grocery store, remodeling it on her own line of credit. Opens Bailey’s Deli, which she names for a lover she will one day wish she had stayed with and with whom she will seek respite when things start to get worse with her husband. She’ll wonder later whether it was Bailey who in fact fathered her son.
She meets Ray at that red light in his fast car when he asks her for directions he already knows. Marries this older man who is so proud of her, who shows her off to his friends, I’m dating a girl who speaks three languages! Ray stops selling cars and starts selling strollers, purchases a baby-supplies shop in the next town over. She will have children, she will live near her parents, she will work hard, go to graduate school, and that will be her life. All its ingredients perfectly proportioned like the salads she stands on the wooden floor of her own deli confidently making and handing over, with a smile, to her regulars.
In the beginning is the aberration.
What happened at his work to cause this? This isn’t Ray. Of course she accepts his apologies, his gifts, his compliments. His remorse rights the world. Though his pride in her accomplishments (She’s studying her master’s in clinical psychology!) has long curdled into resentment (You think you’re so smart . . .) she keeps thinking things will return to how they were. When they don’t, she starts to feel a burning shame: her bruises, her black eyes; her judgment in selecting this person as her person. The marriage crumbles, she starts seeing Bailey again in secret, she resolves to leave Ray for good and start over. And then she is pregnant, which stops nothing. His rage and her shame a double helix spiraling out of control.
She doesn’t tell her parents what is happening, though they live on the same street. They could have heard her from their porch had she shouted for help after he pushed her down the front stairs, separating her from her front teeth. Her father—former Canadian special ops—would have charged across the intervening driveways to extract her in a heartbeat. But Lynn remains silent, this small woman who thinks of herself as so self-reliant that hours before she goes into labor she is still lifting bags of potatoes and crates of celery around the deli to fill the orders for Fourth of July parties.
July is raspberry month, as the article above the birth announcement for Lynn and Ray’s son informs readers of the local paper. Ray beats her while she is nursing through the night, running the deli, checking in on her mother, who is getting increasingly ill. He shows no particular attachment to the child. He says, “Now who does he look like?” in a tone that makes her skin crawl.
She stops going to the church she grew up in. Drives a few towns over instead, where she can sit unrecognized, her tongue probing the spot where tooth is now air as she strives to reach some accord with the world as it is.
Eventually she reels it up from the trench of herself like some luminescent deep-sea creature, files for a divorce and changes the locks. When she returns home from work to find he is in the house, she calls the police and reports a break-in. They attend, then leave in annoyance. A nonissue, a domestic. “When I called they would be like, ‘Oh, it’s Lynn again.’ I could hear them. They were pretty tired of being called to the house,” she says, explaining that it would enrage Ray further, that he would return and rape her.
From then on, she comes home to find windows broken, things missing: her silverware, her jewelery, the relief she had felt after she told him it was over. She packs suitcases into her car, straps her son into his car seat, drives towards Canada, planning on finding somewhere to stay when she arrives, has enough savings to support them both while she finds work. She is pulled over before the border, forced back home by a man Ray hired to follow her and threaten her. The police respond by saying only that there is nothing they can do. Nobody saw him do anything. Her word against his.
In the world of legal proof, the expression “word-on-word” refers to the conflicting versions of an event that took place between two people in private. He said/she said. There is a danger in framing contested facts in this way. Too often it falsely gives “the impression of even odds, as though each side is as likely as a coin flip.”
Ray shows up at the deli. Punches Lynn in the face, her jawbone breaking under his fist in front of customers, a man and his daughter standing at the counter. The presence of witnesses results in his first arrest. Though the Family Court will issue an order of protection against him, he is released the same day.
“Remember,” Lynn says, “this was 1980, upstate.” She is referring to the small communities, the conservative attitudes, the endless accumulation of snow over long winters of short days when nothing thawed or melted away.
31
The Kingdom of Heaven
Loisann
I am sitting in the home of Loisann and Anthony Witmar, where I’ve come to learn about their church and their lives and what snapped me like a magnet to the sight of them singing in the subway. In some ways this home would feel the same regardless of whether it was located in Myerstown, Pennsylvania—where they are from—or the South Bronx. Their children, Eliana, three, and Antoine, two, would wake up each morning and eat their cereal, play with their toys. The Bible verses printed across their plastic shower curtain would be the same, the drone of the washing machine, the taste of the molasses-infused shoofly pie Loisann just baked and the smell from the scented candles she lights would all be the same.
However, in Myerstown the Witmars lived in a farmhouse on five pleasingly green acres. On the way to their two-bedroom apartment today, I passed through the most dangerous police precinct in New York City and stepped around a dead dog wrapped in a garbage bag to reach their front door. In Myerstown, they were embowered by family and friends. Here, hardly anyone speaks to them. In Myerstown, the clothes they wore served to deflect attention from their appearance. Here, they have the opposite effect. It is true that both neighborhoods have been quiet, but the quiets have not been the same.
All going well, their children will probably never attend a school; Loisann will start homeschooling in a few years. In the meantime, she settles next to Eliana on their squishy sofa each day, holding Antoine against the great orb of her pregnant belly, her feet not quite reaching the ground as she opens their Bible study book. In a sing-song voice, she keeps her children’s attention as she reads about Joshua and the thief who, against God’s command, looted items from the town after the Battle of Jericho, hiding them for himself before being discovered and stoned to death. At the end of this story, there are a few discussion points which Loisann runs through while Antoine squirms. When Eliana is stumped by a question about the fate of the thief, Loisann gently instructs her that, because the man disobeyed God, he and his family had to die. Then it is coloring time.
Loisann is thirty-one. She has sparkling eyes, brown hair and something in her smile that reminds me of the actress Katie Holmes. The Pennsylvania Dutch inflection of her speech means that her Os and Ls are lilting, slightly elfin creatures: sweet surprises hiding like Easter eggs in the garden of her words. And those words are, sometimes, old words that entrance me with their strangeness: courting, youngsters, seamstress. When she says “the Bronx” her inflection contains the Dutch of the ships whose stone ballast was used to pave the streets on Lenape land they called New Amsterdam. It stops my heart every time.
Loisann speaks firmly and fast. The thoughts that she shares with me come out well formed and in monochrome. I can’t even tell you how lovely is her laugh. She radiates a particular type of strong energy I think of as “high-density” and reminds me of a toy koala I had when I was a child: she is adorable and just below the soft surface she is as hard as rock.
“While Dad called himself a Christian, his life did not show it, at least at home,” Loisann tells me, the last word rhyming with poem. “He could look good at church but at home—some people would use the word dysfunctional. Now compared to general America, we had a very good home. Anthony had more of a typical Mennonite upbringing.”
One of eight children, Loisann grew up on a veal farm in Pennsylvania. There were lots of good memories, she says, in spite of how things were. There was a time there when her father went through a kind of rehabilitation program. He wasn’t an alcoholic, wasn’t on drugs. It was just to help him be more Christ- like, she explains. But his heart wasn’t really in it.
As the children play on the carpet between us, Loisann explains that she loved school. Remembers being sixteen at Myerstown Mennonite School, starting the new school year, thinking sadly, “Okay, that’s tenth grade already.” Her friends were leaving, starting jobs. “We opened our biology books,” she remembers, “and I was like, ‘Ahhh, I love it.’ This was secure. This was my world. This was what I loved. I was like, ‘I just can’t imagine getting out yet. I’m not ready to quit.’”
