The Virgin Suicides Read online

  It was hard to tell. As October came, the Lisbon house began to look less cheerful. The blue slate roof, which in certain lights had resembled a pond suspended in the air, visibly darkened. The yellow bricks turned brown. Bats flew out of the chimney in the evening, as they did from the Stamarowski mansion the next block over. We were used to seeing bats wheeling over the Stamarowskis’, zigzagging and diving as girls screamed and covered their long hair. Mr. Stamarowski wore black turtlenecks and stood on his balcony. At sunset he let us roam his big lawn, and once in the flower bed we found a dead bat with its face of a shrunken old man with two prize teeth. We always thought the bats had come with the Stamarowskis from Poland; they made sense swooping over that somber house with its velvet curtains and Old World decay, but not over the practical double chimneys of the Lisbon house. There were other signs of creeping desolation. The illuminated doorbell went out. The bird feeder fell in the backyard and was left on the ground. On the milk box Mrs. Lisbon left a curt note to the milkman: “Stop bringing bad milk!” Recalling that time, Mrs. Higbie insisted that Mr. Lisbon, using a long pole, had closed the outside shutters. When we asked around, everyone agreed. Exhibit #3, however, a photograph taken by Mr. Buell, shows Chase ready to swing his new Louisville Slugger, and in the background the Lisbon house has all its shutters open (we find a magnifying glass helpful). The photo was taken on October 13, Chase’s birthday and the opening of the World Series.

  Other than to school or church the Lisbon girls never went anywhere. Once a week a Kroger’s truck delivered groceries. Little Johnny Buell and Vince Fusilli stopped it one day by holding an imaginary rope across the street, one on each side tugging air like twin Marcel Marceaux. The driver let them climb in, and they looked through his order slips, lying that they wanted to grow up and be deliverymen themselves. The Lisbon order, which Vince Fusilli pocketed, turned out to resemble a requisition of army supplies.

  1 — 5 lb. Krog. flour

  5 — 1 gal Carnat. Dehyd. milk

  18 roll Wh. Cld. t. p.

  24 can Del. pchs. (in syr.)

  24 can Del. g. peas

  10 lbs. Gr. chuck

  3 Won. Br.

  1 Jif p. but.

  3 Kell. C. Flks.

  5 Stkst. Tu.

  1 Krog. mayo.

  1 iceberg

  1 lb. O. May. bacon

  1 L. Lks. but.

  1 Tang o. f.

  1 Hersh. choc.

  We waited to see what would happen with the leaves. For two weeks they had been falling, covering lawns, because in those days we still had trees. Now, in autumn, only a few leaves make swan dives from the tops of remaining elms, and most leaves drop four feet from saplings held up by stakes, runt replacements the city has planted to console us with the vision of what our street will look like in a hundred years. No one is sure what kind of trees these new trees are. The man from the Parks Department said only that they had been selected for their “hardiness against the Dutch elm beetle.”

  “Even the bugs don’t like them, that means,” said Mrs. Scheer.

  In the past, fall began with a collective rattle in the tree-tops; then, in an endless profusion, the leaves snapped off and came floating down, circling and flapping in updrafts, like the world shedding itself. We let them accumulate. We stood by with an excuse to do nothing while every day the branches showed growing patches of sky.

  The first weekend after leaf fall, we began raking in military ranks, heaping piles in the street. Different families used different methods. The Buells employed a three-man formation, with two rakers raking lengthwise and another sweeping in at a right angle, in imitation of a formation Mr. Buell had used over the Hump. The Pitzenbergers toiled with ten people—two parents, seven teenagers, and the two-year-old Catholic mistake following with a toy rake. Mrs. Amberson, fat, used a leaf blower. We all did our part. Afterward, the scrubbed grass, like thoroughly brushed hair, gave us a pleasure we felt all the way to our bowels. Sometimes the pleasure was so keen we raked up the grass itself, leaving patches of dirt. At the end of day we stood at the curbside surveying our lawns where every blade had been flattened, every dirt clod obliterated, and even some of the dormant crocus bulbs violated. In those days before universal pollution we were allowed to burn our leaves, and at night, in one of the last rituals of our disintegrating tribe, every father came down to the street to ignite his family’s pile.

  Usually Mr. Lisbon did their raking alone, singing in his soprano’s voice, but from fifteen Therese had begun to help, stooping and scratching in mannish clothes, knee-high rubber boots and a fishing cap. At night Mr. Lisbon would light his pile like the rest of the fathers, but his anxiety over the fire’s getting out of control would diminish his pleasure. He patrolled his pile, tossing leaves into the center, tidying the conflagration, and when Mr. Wadsworth offered him a sip from his monogrammed flask, as he did every father on his rounds, Mr. Lisbon would say, “Thanks no, thanks no.”

  The year of the suicides the Lisbons’ leaves went un-raked. On the appropriate Saturday Mr. Lisbon didn’t stir from his house. From time to time as we raked, we looked over at the Lisbon house, its walls accumulating autumn’s dampness, its littered and varicolored lawn hemmed in by lawns becoming increasingly exposed and green. The more leaves we swept away, the more seemed heaped over the Lisbons’ yard, smothering bushes and covering the first porch step. When we lit bonfires that night, every house leaped forward, blazing orange. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames. As weeks passed, their leaves remained. When they blew onto other people’s lawns there was grumbling. “These aren’t my leaves,” Mr. Amberson said, stuffing them into a can. It rained twice and the leaves grew soggy and brown, making the Lisbon lawn look like a field of mud.

  It was the growing shabbiness of the house that attracted the first reporters. Mr. Baubee, editor of the local paper, continued to defend his decision against reporting on a personal tragedy such as suicide. Instead, he chose to investigate the controversy over the new guardrails obscuring our lakefront, or the deadlock in negotiations over the cemetery workers’ strike, now in its fifth month (bodies were being shipped out of state in refrigerated trailers). The “Welcome, Neighbor” section continued to feature newcomers attracted by our town’s greenness and quiet, its breathtaking verandas—a cousin of Winston Churchill at his home on Windmill Pointe Boulevard, looking too thin to be related to the Prime Minister; Mrs. Shed Turner, the first white woman ever to penetrate the jungles of Papua New Guinea, holding in her lap what appeared to be a shrunken head, though the caption identified the blur as “her Yorkie, William the Conqueror.”

  Back in summer, the city newspapers had neglected to report on Cecilia’s suicide because of its sheer prosaicness. Owing to extensive layoffs at the automotive plants, hardly a day passed without some despairing soul sinking beneath the tide of the recession, men found in garages with cars running, or twisted in the shower, still wearing work clothes. Only murder-suicides made the papers, and then only on page 3 or 4, stories of fathers shotgunning families before turning the guns on themselves, descriptions of men setting fire to their own houses after securing the doors. Mr. Larkin, publisher of the city’s largest newspaper, lived only a half mile from the Lisbons, and there was no doubt he knew what had transpired. Joe Hill Conley, who fooled around with Missy Larkin every so often (she’d had a yearlong crush on him despite his frequent shaving cuts), testified to us that Missy and her mother had discussed the suicide within Mr. Larkin’s hearing, but that he showed no interest as he lay on his chaise in the sun with a wet cloth over his eyes. Nevertheless, on October 15, over three months later, a letter to the editor was published describing in the sketchiest manner possible the particulars of Cecilia’s suicide, and calling on the schools to address “today’s teenagers’ overwhelming anxiety.” The letter was signed “Mrs. I. Dew Hopewell,” an obvious pseudonym, but certain details pointed to someone on our street. First of all, the rest of the tow
n had forgotten about Cecilia’s suicide by that point, whereas the growing disrepair of the Lisbon house constantly reminded us of the trouble within. Years later, after there were no more daughters to save, Mrs. Denton confessed that she had written the letter, in a fit of righteous indignation under the hair dryer. She did not regret it. “You can’t just stand by and let your neighborhood go down the toilet,” she said. “We’re good people around here.”

  The day after her letter appeared, a blue Pontiac drove up to the Lisbon house and an unfamiliar woman got out. After checking the address against a piece of paper, she walked up to the front porch nobody had climbed in weeks. Shaft Tiggs, the paperboy, now lobbed papers against the door from ten feet away. He’d even stopped collecting on Thursdays (his mother made up the difference from her pocketbook, cautioning him not to tell his father). The Lisbon porch, where we’d first stood to see Cecilia on the fence, had become like a sidewalk crack: stepping on it was bad luck. The AstroTurf welcome mat curled at the edges. Unread papers lay in a waterlogged heap, red ink running from color sports photographs. The metal mailbox released an odor of rust. The young woman moved the newspapers aside with her blue pump and knocked. The door opened a crack and the woman, squinting into the darkness, launched into her spiel. At some point she realized her listener was a foot shorter than where she was looking, and readjusted her gaze. She took a pocket notebook from her jacket, waving it like the faked papers spies wave in war films. It worked. The door opened a few more inches to let her in.

  Linda Perl’s story appeared the next day, though Mr. Larkin would never discuss his reasons for running it. It gave a detailed account of Cecilia’s suicide. From the quotations in the piece (you may read it for yourself if you like; we’ve included it as Exhibit #9), it’s clear Ms. Perl, a staff reporter recently hired from a provincial newspaper in Mackinac, interviewed only Bonnie and Mary before Mrs. Lisbon threw her out. The story proceeds by the logic of the many “human interest” pieces that had begun to proliferate at the time. It paints the picture of the Lisbon house in the broadest terms. Phrases such as “The tony suburb known more for debutante parties than for funerals of debutante-aged girls” and “The bright bouncy girls show little sign of the recent tragedy” give an idea of Ms. Perl’s style. After rendering the most cursory description of Cecilia (“She liked to paint and write in her journal”), the piece solves the mystery of her death by giving way to conclusions such as these: “Psychologists agree that adolescence is much more fraught with pressures and complexities than in years past. Often, in today’s world, the extended childhood American life has bestowed on its young turns out to be a wasteland, where the adolescent feels cut off from both childhood and adulthood. Self-expression can often be frustrated. More and more, doctors say, this frustration can lead to acts of violence whose reality the adolescent cannot separate from the intended drama.”

  Ostensibly, the piece avoids sensationalism by informing the readership of a common social danger. The following day a general article on teenage suicide appeared, also by Ms. Perl, complete with charts and graphs, and mentioning Cecilia only in its first sentence: “The suicide of an East Side teenager last summer has increased public awareness of a national crisis.” From then on it was a free-for-all. Articles came out listing teenage suicides statewide for the past year. Photographs ran, usually school portraits showing troubled youngsters in dress-up clothes, boys with wispy mustaches and necktie knots like goiters, girls with hair sprayed into meringue, their vulnerable necks tagged by gold chains spelling out “Sherri” and “Gloria.” Home photos presented the teenagers smiling in happier times, often over birthday cakes flaming with conclusive candles. Because Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon refused interviews, the papers had to obtain photographs of Cecilia from our school yearbook, Spirit. On the torn-out page (Exhibit #4), Cecilia’s penetrating face peers from between the sweatered shoulders of two cropped-out schoolmates. Television crews came by to film the increasingly dreary exterior of the Lisbon house, first Channel 2, then Channel 4, then finally Channel 7. We watched to see the Lisbon house on TV, but they didn’t use the footage until months later after the rest of the girls killed themselves, and by then the season was all wrong. Meanwhile, a local television show focused on the subject of teenage suicide, inviting two girls and one boy to explain their reasons for attempting it. We listened to them, but it was clear they’d received too much therapy to know the truth. Their answers sounded rehearsed, relying on concepts of self-esteem and other words clumsy on their tongues. One of the girls, Rannie Jilson, had tried to end her life by baking a pie full of rat poison so that she could eat it without attracting suspicion, but had served only to kill her eighty-six-year-old grandmother, a lover of sweets. At this point Rannie broke down weeping, the host consoled her, and we were into a commercial.

  Many people objected to the articles and television shows, coming as they did so long after the fact. Mrs. Eugene said, “Why can’t they let her rest in peace,” while Mrs. Larson lamented that the media attention had come “just when things were getting back to normal.” Nevertheless, the coverage alerted us to danger signals we couldn’t help but look for. Were the Lisbon girls’ pupils dilated? Did they use nose spray excessively? Eye drops? Had they lost interest in school activities, in sports, in hobbies? Had they withdrawn from their peers? Did they suffer crying jags for no reason? Did they complain of insomnia, pains in the chest, constant fatigue? Pamphlets arrived, dark green with white lettering, sent out by our local Chamber of Commerce. “We thought green was cheerful. But not too cheerful,” said Mr. Babson, who was president. “Green was also serious. So we went with it.” The pamphlets made no mention of Cecilia’s death, delving instead into the causes of suicide in general. We learned that there were 80 suicides per day in America, 30,000 per year, that an attempt or completion happened every minute, a completion every 18 minutes, that 3 to 4 times as many males completed suicide but 3 times as many females attempted it, that more whites than nonwhites completed suicide, that the rate of suicide among the young (15–24) had tripled in the last four decades, that suicide was the second leading cause of death among high-school students, that 25 percent of all suicides occurred in the 15–24 age group, but that, contrary to our expectations, the highest rate of suicide was found among white males over 50. Many men said afterward that the board members of the local Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Babson, Mr. Laurie, Mr. Peterson, and Mr. Hocksteder, had shown great prescience in predicting the negative publicity the suicide scare would bring to our town, as well as the subsequent fall in commercial activity. While the suicides lasted, and for some time after, the Chamber of Commerce worried less about the influx of black shoppers and more about the outflux of whites. Brave blacks had been slipping in for years, though they were usually women, who blended in with our maids. The city downtown had deteriorated to such a degree that most blacks had no other place to go. Not by choice did they pass our display windows where trim mannequins modeled green skirts, pink espadrilles, blue handbags clasped by gold frogs kissing. Even though we’d always chosen to play Indians and not cowboys, considered Travis Williams the best kickoff returner ever and Willie Horton the best hitter, nothing shocked us more than the sight of a black person shopping on Kercheval. We couldn’t help but wonder if certain “improvements” in The Village hadn’t been made to scare black people off. The ghost in the window of the costume shop, for instance, had an awfully pointed, hooded head, and the restaurant, without explanation, took fried chicken off its menu. But we were never sure if these developments had been planned, because as soon as the suicides began the Chamber of Commerce turned its attention to a “Campaign for Wellness.” Under the guise of health education, the chamber set up tables in school gymnasia, giving out information on a variety of hazards, from rectal cancer to diabetes. The Hare Krishnas were allowed to chant bald-headed and serve sugary vegetarian food for free. Mixed in with this new approach were the green pamphlets and family therapy sessions at which kids had to stand up and
describe their nightmares. Willie Kuntz, whose mother took him to one, said, “They weren’t going to let me out of there until I cried and told my mom I loved her. So I did. But I faked the crying part. Just rub your eyes until they hurt. That works, sort of.”

  Amid the increasing scrutiny, the girls managed to keep a low profile at school. Various sightings of them at the time merged into a general image of their careful cluster moving down the central hallway. They passed beneath the great school clock, the black finger of the minute hand pointing down at their soft heads. We always expected the clock to fall, but it never did, and soon the girls had skipped past the danger, their skirts growing transparent in the light coming from the hall’s far end, revealing the wishbones of their legs. If we followed, however, the girls would vanish, and, looking into classrooms they might have entered, we would see every other face but theirs, or would overshoot their trail and end up in the Lower School amid a meaningless swirl of finger paintings. The smell of egg tempera still brings back those useless pursuits. The halls, cleaned by lonely janitors at night, were silent, and we would follow a pencil arrow some kid had drawn on the wall for fifty feet, telling ourselves that this would be the time we spoke to the Lisbon girls and asked them what was troubling them. Sometimes we caught sight of tattered kneesocks rounding a corner, or came upon them doubled over, shoving books into a cubbyhole, flicking the hair out of their eyes. But it was always the same: their white faces drifting in slow motion past us, while we pretended we hadn’t been looking for them at all, that we didn’t know they existed.