After my own parents divorced, as I embarked on the sixth grade, my mom actually began writing letters to inmates on death row with the Cook County Department of Corrections. Their return letters arrived, cockeyed print engraved on the envelopes like braille. One of the men, named Johnny, sent his photograph, which my mom kept tucked inside her wide oak credenza, such that dangerous men seemed the obvious byproduct of the dissolution of marriage. I felt torn. I wanted the death penalty abolished, but I also wanted these men to die, putting an end to their efforts at wooing my now-single mother.
Unfortunately, the dangerous men Annie attracted were not behind bars. In the second of her rebound matrimonies, Annie became not just a victim of abuse but also a victim of poor health, exacerbated by stress and hardship. Annie’s doctor diagnosed breast cancer. Weak, depressed, and depleted as she underwent treatment, Annie was not strong enough to parent Wes on a daily basis, and therefore she placed Wes in the care of another troubled family whose matriarch, though mentally ill, was physically well.
When Clayton, a ten-year-old boy in Wes’s surrogate family, invited him into his closet, the purpose was none other than to molest Wes and further to suggest that the abuse remain a secret. Only seven years old, Wes followed the older boy’s instructions—to enter his dark bedroom vault, to remove his pants, and to show Clayton, in the privacy of the closet, his private parts. What began as show-and-tell quickly evolved into Clayton’s suggestion—request, demand—that Wes open his mouth and inhale Clayton’s manhood, biting him there, gently, playfully. Having watched three of my own boys in bathtubs, plucking their penises, little ornaments of dough dangling between their legs, how can I not be tempted to soften this story by referring to Clayton’s penis as his “boyhood”? All small boys are amazed, and rightfully so, by these delicate appendages. They tug and twist, marveling at their elasticity, as we mothers, perched on toilets and the sides of bathtubs, behold the innocence of their self-discovery.
Despite Annie’s illness and the ubiquity of abuse, Wes chose against returning to Wisconsin to live with his father, Zane, when presented with the option, worried for his mother’s welfare, sure that murder or suicide would snuff her in the end. One day, Wes watched Annie’s husband strangle her; perhaps he intervened, coming to her rescue, though reports remain unclear. In any event, the next day, when he came upon his mother’s body, half-conscious in the bathtub after a suicide attempt, he wondered which kind of loss would truly be worse.
Although we conceive of mothers as absolute, immortal, even godlike, I’d long known motherhood to be a precarious station in life. My own mom met my dad, her psychiatrist, after a suicide attempt, and mothers, at least in my life, were either martyrs or sacrificial lambs. I was an elementary-school girl when my soon-to-be best friend’s mom, Laura Chapman, suffered doom at the hands of her baby’s father. Laura had arrived at his parents’ home, the Franz residence, to pick up baby Travis after a long day at a new job. As she unzipped her coat, having entered through the side door, a voice called out from the depths of the basement, “Laura, down here.” Her eyes adjusted, and she discerned Harold Franz’s shape, hunkered against the bottom step, something like a bayonet protruding from his armpit. Before she could turn toward the kitchen, she felt something hot and deep like a cigarette stubbed out on her heart. He’d fatally shot her.
As Mandy’s soul sister, when she showed up in my classroom the year of the murder, I too treaded the dark waters of bafflement and grief, grappling to make sense of how and why fathers killed mothers. Could anybody have prevented the irrevocable course of events? According to testimony Ryan collected, Aloysius Jungwirth was actually believed to have prevented his own mother’s death, child as bodyguard, even if she failed to protect him. Several family members and friends, eager to paint a saintly picture of Wes when he faced sexual assault charges, would testify that Wes saved his mother by remaining in Seaside until she was strong enough physically and emotionally to return home. Eventually Annie used the legal system to file restraining orders against her third husband, and finally, in the end, to divorce him before being beaten to death.
Aloysius Jungwirth’s long backstory was important to all of us, the only defense strategy at Ryan’s disposal. When this boy, the youngest of adults, was detained by police and asked questions about touching Sabrina without consent, he confessed to far more than his mother or I imagined possible. Annie maintained some hope that he could enlist in the US Army, perhaps leave town, as vanishing was her go-to solution for heartache and trouble. If he were able to pursue his life in the army, perhaps Wes might later return home, truly a man, labeled a kind of hero. In her heart, he deserved all kinds of medals, but as she imagined Wes in camouflage, what she did not yet know, or perhaps what she could not yet admit, was that Sabrina was not Wes’s first and only victim. His first two victims were actually those girls squatting beneath the descending fog of the green blanket, waiting for the depleted “ozone layer” to murder them
