Vintage Didion (11 page)

And yet it happened. In the end, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana were nailed by a woman.

Elizabeth Lederer stood in the courtroom and watched Saturday night as the three were hauled off to jail…. At times during the trial, she looked about half the height of the long and lanky Salaam, who sneered at her from the witness stand. Salaam was apparently to dumb to realize that Lederer—this petite, soft-spoken, curly-haired prosecutor—was the jogger’s avenger….

You could tell that her thoughts were elsewhere, that she was thinking about the jogger.

You could tell that she was thinking: I did it.

I did it for you.

Do this in remembrance of me:
the solution, then, or so such pervasive fantasies suggested, was to partake of the symbolic body and blood of The Jogger, whose idealization was by this point complete, and was rendered, significantly, in details stressing her “difference,” or superior class. The Jogger was someone who wore, according to
Newsday
, “a light gold chain around her slender neck” as well as, according to the
News
, a “modest” gold ring and “a thin sheen” of lipstick. The Jogger was someone who would not, according to the
Post
, “even dignify her alleged attackers with a glance.” The Jogger was someone who spoke, according to the
News
, in accents “suited to boardrooms,” accents that might therefore seem “foreign to many native New Yorkers.” In her first appearance on the witness stand she had been subjected, the
Times
noted, “to questions that most people do not have to answer publicly during their lifetimes,” principally about her use of a diaphragm on the Sunday preceding the attack, and had answered these questions, according to an editorial in the
News
, with an “indomitable dignity” that had taught the city a lesson “about courage and class.”

This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and to flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up virgin who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of “real life.” The defendants, by contrast, were seen as incapable of appreciating these marginal distinctions, ignorant of both the norms and accoutrements of middle-class life. “Did you have jogging clothes on?” Elizabeth Lederer asked Yusef Salaam, by way of trying to discredit his statement that he had gone into the park that night only to “walk around.” Did he have “jogging clothes,” did he have “sports equipment,” did he have “a bicycle.” A pernicious nostalgia had come to permeate the case, a longing for the New York that had seemed for a while to be about “sports equipment,” about getting and spending rather than about having and not having: the reason that this victim must not be named was so that she could go unrecognized, it was astonishingly said, by Jerry Nachman, the editor of the
New York Post
, and then by others who seemed to find in this a particular resonance, to Bloomingdale’s.

Some New York stories involving young middle-class white women do not make it to the editorial pages, or even necessarily to the front pages. In April 1990, a young middle-class white woman named Laurie Sue Rosenthal, raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and at age twenty-nine still living with her parents in Jamaica, Queens, happened to die, according to the coroner’s report, from the accidental toxicity of Darvocet in combination with alcohol, in an apartment at 36 East 68th Street in Manhattan. The apartment belonged to the man she had been, according to her parents, seeing for about a year, a minor city assistant commissioner named Peter Franconeri. Peter Franconeri, who was at the time in charge of elevator and boiler inspections for the Building Department and married to someone else, wrapped Laurie Sue Rosenthal’s body in a blanket; placed it, along with her handbag and ID, outside the building with the trash; and went to his office at 60 Hudson Street. At some point an anonymous call was made to 911. Franconeri was identified only after Laurie Sue Rosenthal’s parents gave the police his beeper number, which they found in her address book. According to
Newsday
, which covered the story more extensively than the
News
, the
Post
, or the
Times
,

Initial police reports indicated that there were no visible wounds on Rosenthal’s body. But Rosenthal’s mother, Ceil, said yesterday that the family was told the autopsy revealed two “unexplained bruises” on her daughter’s body.

Larry and Ceil Rosenthal said those findings seemed to support their suspicions that their daughter was upset because they received a call from their daughter at 3
A.M.
Thursday “saying that he had beaten her up.” The family reported the conversation to police.

“I told her to get into a cab and get home,” Larry Rosenthal said yesterday. “The next I heard was two detectives telling me terrible things.”

“The ME [medical examiner] said the bruises did not constitute a beating but they were going to examine them further,” Ceil Rosenthal said.

“There were some minor bruises,” a spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner told
Newsday
a few days later, but the bruises “did not in any way contribute to her death.” This is worth rerunning: A young woman calls her parents at three in the morning, “distraught.” She says that she has been beaten up. A few hours later, on East 68th Street between Madison and Park avenues, a few steps from Porthault and Pratesi and Armani and Saint Laurent and the Westbury Hotel, at a time of day in this part of New York 10021 when Jim Buck’s dog trainers are assembling their morning packs and Henry Kravis’s Bentley is idling outside his Park Avenue apartment and the construction crews are clocking in over near the Frick at the multimillion-dollar houses under reconstruction for Bill Cosby and for the owner of The Limited, this young middle-class white woman’s body, showing bruises, gets put out with the trash.

“Everybody got upside down because of who he was,” an unidentified police officer later told Jim Dwyer of
Newsday
, referring to the man who put the young woman out with the trash. “If it had happened to anyone else, nothing would have come of it. A summons would have been issued and that would have been the end of it.” In fact nothing did come of the death of Laurie Sue Rosenthal, which might have seemed a natural tabloid story but failed, on several levels, to catch the local imagination. For one thing she could not be trimmed into the role of the preferred tabloid victim, who is conventionally presented as fate’s random choice (Laurie Sue Rosenthal had, for whatever reason, taken the Darvocet instead of a taxi home, her parents reported treatment for a previous Valium dependency, she could be presumed to have known over the course of a year that Franconeri was married and yet continued to see him); for another, she seemed not to have attended an expensive school or to have been employed in a glamour industry (no Ivy Grad, no Wall Street Exec), which made it hard to cast her as part of “what makes this city so vibrant and so great.”

In August 1990, Peter Franconeri pled guilty to a misdemeanor, the unlawful removal of a body, and was sentenced by Criminal Court Judge Peter Benitez to seventy-five hours of community service. This was neither surprising nor much of a story (only twenty-three lines even in
Newsday
, on page twenty-nine of the city edition), and the case’s lenient resolution was for many people a kind of relief. The district attorney’s office had asked for “some incarceration,” the amount usually described as a “touch,” but no one wanted, it was said, to crucify the guy: Peter Franconeri was somebody who knew a lot of people, understood how to live in the city, who had for example not only the apartment on East 68th Street between Madison and Park but a house in Southampton and who also understood that putting a body outside with the trash was nothing to get upside down about, if it was handled right. Such understandings may in fact have been the city’s true “ultimate shriek of alarm,” but it was not a shriek the city wanted to recognize.

2

Perhaps the most arresting collateral news to surface, during the first few days after the attack on the Central Park jogger, was that a significant number of New Yorkers apparently believed the city sufficiently well-ordered to incorporate Central Park into their evening fitness schedules. “Prudence” was defined, even after the attack, as “staying south of 90th Street,” or having “an awareness that you need to think about planning your routes,” or, in the case of one woman interviewed by the
Times
, deciding to quit her daytime job (she was a lawyer) because she was “tired of being stuck out there, running later and later at night.” “I don’t think there’s a runner who couldn’t describe the silky, gliding feeling you get running at night,” an editor of
Runner’s World
told the
Times
. “You see less of what’s around you and you become centered on your running.”

The notion that Central Park at night might be a good place to “see less of what’s around you” was recent. There were two reasons why Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, when they devised their winning entry in the 1858 competition for a Central Park design, decided to sink the transverse roads below grade level. One reason, the most often cited, was aesthetic, a recognition on the part of the designers that the four crossings specified by the terms of the competition, at 65th, 79th, 85th, and 97th streets, would intersect the sweep of the landscape, be “at variance with those agreeable sentiments which we should wish the park to inspire.” The other reason, which appears to have been equally compelling, had to do with security. The problem with grade-level crossings, Olmsted and Vaux wrote in their “Greensward” plan, would be this:

The transverse roads will… have to be kept open, while the park proper will be useless for any good purpose after dusk; for experience has shown that even in London, with its admirable police arrangements, the public cannot be assured safe transit through large open spaces of ground after nightfall.

These public throughfares will then require to be well-lighted at the sides, and, to restrain marauders pursued by the police from escaping into the obscurity of the park, strong fences or walls, six or eight feet high, will be necessary.

The park, in other words, was seen from its conception as intrinsically dangerous after dark, a place of “obscurity,” “useless for any good purpose,” a refuge only for “marauders.” The parks of Europe closed at nightfall, Olmsted noted in his 1882 pamphlet
The Spoils of the Park: With a Few Leaves from the Deep-laden Note-books of “A Wholly Unpractical Man,”
“but one surface road is kept open across Hyde Park, and the superintendent of the Metropolitan Police told me that a man’s chances of being garrotted or robbed were, because of the facilities for concealment to be found in the Park, greater in passing at night along this road than anywhere else in London.”

In the high pitch of the initial “jogger” coverage, suggesting as it did a city overtaken by animals, this pragmatic approach to urban living gave way to a more ideal construct, one in which New York either had once been or should be “safe,” and now, as in Governor Cuomo’s “none of us is safe,” was not. It was time, accordingly, to “take it back,” time to “say no”; time, as David Dinkins would put it during his campaign for the mayoralty in the summer of 1989, to “draw the line.” What the line was to be drawn against was “crime,” an abstract, a free-floating specter that could be dispelled by certain acts of personal affirmation, by the kind of moral rearmament that later figured in Mayor Dinkins’s plan to revitalize the city by initiating weekly “Tuesday Night Out Against Crime” rallies.

By going into the park at night, Tom Wicker wrote in the
Times
, the victim in this case had “affirmed the primacy of freedom over fear.” A week after the assault, Susan Chace suggested on the op-ed page of the
Times
that readers walk into the park at night and join hands. “A woman can’t run in the park at an offbeat time,” she wrote. “Accept it, you say. I can’t. It shouldn’t be like this in New York City, in 1989, in spring.” Ronnie Eldridge also suggested that readers walk into the park at night, but to light candles. “Who are we that we allow ourselves to be chased out of the most magnificent part of our city?” she asked, and also: “If we give up the park, what are we supposed to do: fall back to Columbus Avenue and plant grass?” This was interesting, suggesting as it did that the city’s not inconsiderable problems could be solved by the willingness of its citizens to hold or draw some line, to “say no”; in other words that a reliance on certain magical gestures could affect the city’s fate.

The insistent sentimentalization of experience, which is to say the encouragement of such reliance, is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character and the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city; eight million stories and all the same story each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.