The Professor and the Prostitute (21 page)

This was the case with Irene Schwartz. Her father said to me, “No one knew what she was planning. Not just the outsiders. Even we, her family. I spent the Saturday before her death with her and the children. She was laughing. The children were laughing. Yes, she was in treatment. But no one suspected anything like this at the time.”

In her final hours, Irene Schwartz must have missed her mother and longed to be reunited with her, for she left a note saying that she wanted to be with her mother. She also wrote that she was afraid that unless she joined her mother now, she too might have to spend her days in hospitals. And then she picked up the shotgun.

That Irene Schwartz should have wanted to kill herself, given her history of severe depression, seems comprehensible. Suicide among depressed people is twenty-five times greater than among the population at large. But the children? What makes a loving mother, however depressed, murder her offspring?

I asked several authorities on female depression to explain this phenomenon. “There are several components,” Dr. Helen Kaplan, clinical professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical Center, told me. “One of them is rage. When you talk about an infanticide, as opposed to a suicide, it isn't really enough to talk merely about depression. Think of Medea. There's no better way to do your husband in than to kill not just yourself but your children. It's better than suicide, because if
you
die, your husband will eventually forget about you. No matter how much he loved you, he'll eventually marry again, and he won't even have to pay alimony. But if you obliterate the children, you can be sure he'll remember you to the end of his days.”

Dr. Alexandra Symonds, a psychiatrist who has worked at New York's Bellevue Hospital with women who killed their children and then tried to kill themselves but survived, concurred with Dr. Kaplan but stressed that her patients had usually not been aware of the rage component. “It wasn't just that they denied it,” she said. “They actually
believed
they were saving their children from, say, the devil, or that they had to kill them because there was no one around who would look after them once they themselves were gone. They were delusional.”

Maggie Scarf, author of
Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in the Lives of Women
, suggested to me that in the case of Irene Schwartz “there may have been a blurring of the boundaries between herself and her children.” Some psychic blurring goes on during pregnancy, when a child is in its mother's womb, and during early infancy. At those times it's normal, perhaps even essential, for the well-being of the child. “But later on,” she said, “a woman
has
to recognize that there are boundaries, has to know that when her child feels bad it doesn't mean she has to feel bad, or that when she feels bad, her child needn't. If a mother can't separate herself from her children, it's pathological.”

Clearly Irene Schwartz, who had devoted her life to her children, had blurred the boundaries between herself and them and had come to believe that there was no one to look after them once she died. That this was a delusion that didn't even approach reality is what makes her story so painful, for consider this: at her funeral services, held jointly with those for the children, the chapel was thronged with relatives and friends. Many of them, had Irene only been well enough to communicate her fears, might willingly have volunteered to raise and coddle Judy and Joshua. There was Irene's father, her in-laws, and a host of aunts, uncles, and cousins. And, of course, her husband.

He rose before the assembled mourners and spoke out in a heartrending but steady voice. “My daughter, Judy, was precious in every way,” he began. Then, with a father's awareness of a child's most intimate affections and habits, he told the group that Judy had had a favorite song, one she listened to on her phonograph each night before she went to sleep. The song was “Tomorrow,” from
Annie
, with its exuberant melody and buoyant lyrics. He'd found the record there on her child-size phonograph the morning he'd been summoned precipitately home from Europe. “I love ya, tomorrow.… Just thinking about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and sorrow till there's none.”

As for his son, “Josh was a dynamo,” Robert Schwartz said. “For the rest of my life, Josh, I'll be a better man because of you, little buddy.”

The desolation in the stunned man's voice was almost unendurable. Those mourners who had not cried earlier began weeping inconsolably until at last a rabbi, the very one who had married Irene and Robert, tried to stem the sobbing by seeking to explain how so loving a mother could have performed so desperate an act. “It was not Irene who did what was done,” said the rabbi. “It was the illness which overwhelmed her and her life.… Who can comprehend the power of the disease?”

I left the funeral that afternoon thinking obsessively about my teenage daughter and how, when she'd been little and mischievous, I'd frequently snapped, “Do that again and I'll kill you!” How often had it happened? How often, when she and her friends had played their favorite games—Tent, which involved burying masses of clothes and toys and even food and drink under a canopy created by a bedspread on the floor; Swimming Pool, which involved filling pots and pans with water and spreading the vessels out on the carpet for Barbie dolls to swim in and little girls to knock over—how often in those days had I said to my husband when he came home, “I came within an inch of killing the kids this afternoon.”

But that inch was really a mile. There is an enormous divide that separates the normal mother from the infanticide. It can be an alarming, lonely space, a daunting desert that makes a mother say of her children, “I just can't understand them. They're nothing like me.” But it is what keeps our children safe.

THE TRANSSEXUAL, THE BARTENDER, AND THE SUBURBAN PRINCESS

Rockland County, New York

1981

T
HE HUDSON RIVER WASHES
up a hundred or so bodies a year. It is New York's Ganges, the watery resting place of numerous dead, many the victims of stabbings and shootings. The identities of these victims and of their assailants frequently remain unknown. But when, on October 28, 1981, a woman's body, dressed in a lavender spaghetti-strap camisole and lavender pants, wrapped in a yellowish water-sodden blanket, and riddled with four bullet holes in the skull, was fished from the river at West Twenty-eighth Street, the body was quickly identified, largely because there was something most unusual about it.

Examining the lavender-garbed corpse, doctors at the city's medical examiner's office discovered that it belonged to no ordinary female. The vagina was abnormally large, there were no ovaries or uterus, and there was a telltale bit of prostate gland. They informed Manhattan detectives of these anomalies, and the detectives, who had already begun checking on missing persons in and around New York, began to suspect that the body belonged to a twenty-four-year-old named Diane Delia, who had disappeared from her home in Yonkers. Diane, they had learned, had been a woman for only a short while. Indeed, until a year before she had been John Delia, a man.

So began one of the most bizarre criminal cases of our era. It resulted, after a three-month investigation, in the indictment of two people: a well-to-do, twenty-six-year-old doctor's daughter named Robyn Arnold, who had purportedly been engaged to marry Delia when he was still a man, and a twenty-two-year-old, down-at-the-heels bartender named Robert Ferrara, who had actually married Delia once he became a woman. It led to a tension-filled murder trial and a dramatic verdict. But what proved most intriguing of all about this odd case was the door it opened on a style of life in a corner of suburbia few people knew existed.

Philip Roth once observed that the American writer in the mid-twentieth century has his hands full trying to comprehend and then make believable much of American reality. “The actuality,” he wrote, “is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” I thought of Roth's words constantly as I began my immersion in the case of John/Diane Delia and his/her best beloveds.

I started my research by visiting a disco called Zipperz, in New Rochelle, New York, on a Saturday night about a year after Delia's body had been hauled from the river. I'd heard that John/Diane Delia had been well known at Zipperz, where, long before he altered his body to make it female, he used to do female impersonations. His impersonation of Diana Ross was famous in his crowd, and indeed, after the disco learned he had been murdered, it sponsored a kind of memorial service for him—a John/Diane Delia night during which a pride of female impersonators mimicked Delia mimicking Ross.

Zipperz was a gay disco, catering to both sexes, and the clientele for the most part was young, unsophisticated, and employed at unskilled, low-paying jobs. The night I was there, I met an abundance of sales clerks, waiters and waitresses, hair stylists and manicurists. “Most of the people here are just coming out,” one muscular hair stylist explained. “Some of them are still in high school, and some of them are just starting their careers, just beginning to look for jobs.”

The place was jammed that Saturday, the dance floor teeming, the lines at the bar three deep. Behind the barroom itself was another area, a large, dark room with low-slung couches set into little cubicles. On the couches, couples or threesomes were sprawled in complicated embraces. “It's not polite to look,” the hair stylist chided as he showed me through the room.

I'd never been in a place like Zipperz before, and at first I felt uneasy, sure that none of its patrons would want to talk to me, an outsider. But, to my surprise, I found that as soon as I explained that I was there because I wanted to write about the Delia case, I was deluged with communicants. Delia had apparently been everyone's favorite transsexual—although this, said a lesbian who claimed to have been a good friend of the deceased, “is a distinction not unlike being everyone's favorite concentration camp guard. Transsexuals as a bunch are not a very nice bunch.”

It was this woman who told me that Delia had been an extraordinarily talented impersonator. She'd seen him do Diana Ross not just here, at Zipperz, but in a Manhattan club called the Ice Palace. “He was beautiful,” she said. “Tall, olive-skinned, with long dark hair streaked with red highlights. And then he'd put on this Diana Ross wig, a really expensive wig, and he would just
become
Diana Ross. It was magical. I've seen lots of female impersonators, but he was far and away the best.”

Another woman disagreed about Delia's abilities, pointing out that he never actually sang during his shows but lip-synched to a recording. “He was only so-so,” she muttered. “Nothing special.”

“She's just jealous,” said a man in a curly blond wig. “Ask them over at the Playroom about Diane Delia. Or at the Talk of the Town. Or even down in the city, at Studio Fifty-four. Diane Delia was a
star!
”

I did ask around about Delia that night, visiting a number of the suburban gay bars and discos where he/she had been a regular. I was denied entry to the Talk of the Town on the edge of Scarsdale, a fancy establishment whose parking lot was overflowing with Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. “No women,” the man at the door informed me. “I don't care what you've heard about us. We just don't let women in, no matter who they once were.” But I spent some time at the Playroom in Yonkers, a dingy bar on a side street where I noticed that several of the female customers were wearing what was apparently the latest in S-M jewelry, lightweight metal chains looped together like strands of pearls. And it was that night that I first realized how provincial I, a. New Yorker, was. All the clubs I toured were doing a land office business, yet I had assumed that the kinds of night spots in which transsexuals hung out were a big-city phenomenon, that in the suburbs life was still just a matter of tricycles and skating ponds, commuter schedules and gray flannel suits.

Delia had been born in Riverdale, New York, the second son of Joan and Bruno Delia, a builder. He had been an Rh-negative baby, and within hours of his birth he had had to be transfused—an event that he embued with great significance. Years later he told his girlfriend Robyn Arnold that his blood type may have determined his entire future, for his mother, perhaps because of the slim thread upon which his existence had momentarily hung, forever after pampered him, made him her darling. Certainly, he never had quite the same childhood as his older brother, a macho youth who used to hang around Bruno Delia's construction sites. Joan Delia kept John at home with her. There, according to Robyn, she played with him when he was a preschooler as if he were a little girl, dressing him in her clothes, styling his hair, dabbing makeup on his cheeks. Later, she taught him to clean the house, shop for groceries, cook.

Was his subsequent interest in cross dressing and, ultimately, in switching his sex the result of these early environmental experiences? Or was there something about him, some ineffable and subtle difference from other boys, that inspired his mother to treat him more like a female than a male? The answer is unknowable. Nor do psychiatrists, psychologists, and medical researchers agree about whether sexual confusion emanates from nurture or nature. All that is certain in this case is that by the time John Delia entered high school, he felt himself emphatically different from other adolescent males. In his closet, he had a collection of women's frivolous dresses.

He attended Manhattan's High School of Art & Design, showing talent in art and music. But eventually music took over. “Our whole family is very musical,” Joan Delia explained. “My oldest son plays five instruments. I myself used to sing light opera. But Diane”—she called her youngest Diane, whereas his father consistently referred to him as John—“was the best of the lot of us. She had a beautiful voice. Teeth like Liberace! Eyes like black olives! A personality, a charisma, that stole the show.”