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CHAPTER 1
IT WAS IN THE SPRING OF 1999, during the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it buildup to the millennium, when time and its significant markers were much on the collective mind, that I started thinking about writing a short piece about Howie and Margo. Armed with a quiver full of justice and indignation, I was going to reveal long-buried truths about their deaths, and with them, the underground streams of institutionalized racism and police malfeasance that once seeped through Stamford like a broken sewer. My essay was going to expose Howie and Margo's story to the cleansing light of the written word. It was going to be cut and dried, black and white, and it was going to have nothing whatsoever to do with me. That was my mission.
Well, we all know what happens to missionaries.
The story nearly ate me alive.
I opened up a Word document and titled it "Stamford." Then, just as I was about to start writing about Howie's death at the hands of the police, I realized, with some surprise, that I didn't know who killed Margo. And I couldn't write about Howie's violent end without first addressing hers. I presumed that her bizarre murder, certainly by some random maniac, had been solved, and I had somehow forgotten the outcome or had never been told. So I picked up the phone and called my cousin Denise.
The decade of our coming of age — our teens and early twenties — not the one of our birth, makes for a generation, so that placed me and Denise squarely in the 70s. We'd rather have been members of the 60s, but we were just kids then, watching our older cousins and their friends live out the psychedelic dream in our aunt's basement. We'd hide at the bottom of the stairs in a trance, listening to our cousin Michael's band render Donovan's "Season of the Witch" unrecognizable, as we gazed wistfully up an imaginary road. The air smelled of pot, tobacco, and incense. The clothes were soft and loose, the feet bare. We closed our eyes and divined the future, a utopian world of pleasure and possibility. Even though Aunt Ginny had just the one child, who died in 1981 in a motorcycle accident, there was always a bedraggled soul or two on her sofa. Sometimes these were other cousins seeking a respite from their own families, but usually they were local teens who had run away from home, often just blocks away, looking to divest themselves of a middle-class existence in search of life's truths.
Yes, I thought, yes. There was more to the world than what I could see in the suburban culture around me, which seemed materially bland and spiritually bereft. I was particularly fascinated with the longhaired boys who espoused a litany of freedom, justice, and rebellion. It never sunk into my tie-dyed brain that they might only be playing at being rebels, or that there was something particularly privileged about the renunciation of privilege. Most never got farther than Aunt Ginny's sofa.
During the time I was with Joe, Denise had been my steady — and at times only — connection to my family. She'd take the train up from the Bronx, where she lived, to visit me and Joe in Stamford, then later in Westport. I told her everything, so I thought finding out about Margo would be as simple as a telephone call, as if I were retrieving information I had put into storage. Even then, even with decades of stability padding my bones, with marriage, three children, and a home hundreds of miles away from Stamford, I was uneasy.
Funny, I thought to myself. It was as if I didn't really want to know what happened.
It was no coincidence that I decided to find out about Margo just as my two girls and a boy were creeping closer to the age I was when I met Joe. When my oldest daughter started acting out in the predictable ways of adolescence, I flashed back to Margo's piteous end. Danger, danger, the alarms rang in my head, but what was there in their pampered lives for me to fear? They'd been shielded from every imaginable threat since birth, bound in car seats, topped with bicycle helmets, and slathered in 35 SPF sunscreen to protect their fair skin, and yet I knew, deep down, I was helpless to protect them from the unimaginable dangers, the ones where young women ended up as body dumps by the side of the road. The zeal I had devoted to grinding organic carrots for baby food had only been a talismanic rite to keep that other world at bay. As my girls began to maneuver the adolescent tightwire of freedom and responsibility, I saw myself in their struggle to come to terms with what it means to be female in a world that, even after decades of feminism, can feel as if we're peddling backward. If I could not figure out how Margo ended up in the potter's field, how would I know what the path looked like so I could place a Jersey barrier across it for my children? That seems like an absurd leap to make, but anyone who has raised a fourteen-year-old girl has experienced the kind of stress that can make a mother daft with paranoia.
A small lump settled in my chest as I dialed Denise, and every ring on the other end of the line made me want to bail. I had to force myself to keep the receiver to my ear. What was I so afraid of? At the sound of her voice, I shot out the question, as if it had been under pressure.
"Who killed Margo?"
"Are you shitting me?" she said, without missing a beat, not in the least bit surprised to hear Margo's name mentioned for the first time in decades, as if she'd been sitting by the phone all that time waiting for me to call. "Howie killed her. Of all people you should know that. He told you at a card game that if he was going to kill anyone it would be with a bow and arrow."
* * *
GAMBLING DENS. I don't know what else to call them. What word is there to describe a residential basement or garage with a card table set up for a few handles of booze and a single round table for playing cards? Joe and I went to these places once in a while, mostly just to watch good poker while we sipped cheap scotch. Joe's mother, Georgia, had taught me to drink scotch after hearing me order a sloe gin fizz at a bar. "You've got to have a grown-up drink, sugar," and changed my order to a Dewar's with a splash and a twist, "just like at the Peppermint Lounge," where she once sang backup for Ray Charles.
This particular garage in Stamford was no Peppermint Lounge. The clientele was all black men with the occasional white girlfriend, like me. I could not have imagined that what I saw was only the tip of a much bigger iceberg of gambling in Stamford, black or white. It was truly an equal opportunity enterprise. Sometimes I played. They called me the White House and let me win a hand so I'd bet more and lose it all. Joe knew the game. He smiled at my first hand when I'd looked at him so proudly, then laughed at my second. I've never seen a man who loved to lose as much as he did. Howie was on my left (Where was Margo? He never seemed to go anywhere with Margo), sitting on a stool, looking down at his cards and saying that if he was going to kill someone — God knows how table talk had turned to that — it would be with a bow and arrow. It was my turn to laugh. There was so much male bravado around me, there was no taking any of it seriously.
* * *
IF I WERE READING a murder mystery, and the protagonist heard the words, "If I were going to kill someone it would be with a bow and arrow," from this Howie character, then wondered out loud a few pages later who might have killed his girlfriend with a bow and arrow, I'd close the book. No reasonable person could refuse to put such obvious pieces together. But what does reason have to do with fear? Think of obliviousness as the bubble pack of life. It kept me from breaking in transit. With no self-awareness whatsoever, I had stored Margo's arrow-pierced body where I couldn't get at her. It's not that I didn't remember Howie's telling me about his murder weapon of choice, once Denise reminded me what I already knew, it was that, unlike Denise, my younger self had failed to connect that information to the fact of Margo's death. Or if I had made the connection, I promptly severed the line. There was something about her death that went beyond reason, refusing to find a settled place in the past.
To fully grasp how disturbing my own memories were to my conscious mind, consider this. The first time I made a stab at putting words on paper about Margo and Howie, I wrote a few pages, condensing their story into the basic elements of what I knew. I could feel my heart beating in my fingertips the whole time I was typing, perhaps an hour, and I was relieved when it was done. A first draft. When I read it through, I thought I had done a good job of capturing the essence of what had happened. Then, on the second reading, I realized I had left out that Margo had been killed too, not just Howie. I smiled to myself, shook my head, and put it aside.
What else didn't I remember or just outright block out? I didn't know Margo that well to begin with, and it was clear from the card game episode that I had a fairly warped memory of anything in her orbit. If I was going to write about her, I couldn't rely on what was in my head. If I wanted to find out how she died, I'd have to ask the questions I had failed to ask back then. And even though I began this project determined to keep myself out of it, I kept turning to my younger self and asking, "Well, what did you think?" But I couldn't hear her. I could barely even see her, the thin girl with straight brown hair, the serious gray eyes that would not return my gaze. Leaving behind the memory of Margo had meant forgetting parts of myself, and I needed that eighteen-year-old by my side as I faced the challenge of getting three children through their teenage years. I wanted to gain some wisdom from that girl, who was both brave and reckless to a fault, and to do that, I had to open the box marked Fragile. In that box, nestled along with all my stored emotion, was a three-pronged mission: (1) figure out what had happened to Margo, (2) remember what had been going on with me, and (3) try to understand why her death made me so wary, for so long.
Finding Margo seemed, at least at first, to be fairly straightforward. I relied on the archives of the Stamford Advocate, which, aside from shedding a light on the world I lived in, had the newspaper accounts of her death as well as Howie's. Through Joe, I knew Howie well enough, Margo, much less so. I didn't even know who Margo's friends were. I tried to find as many people as Joe and I knew back then, but I never knew the last names of many of them to begin with. It was an enormous help to discover that Joe had written a novel using everyone's real names, more or less. Another book, Rogue Town by Vito Colucci, a nonfiction account of the 1970s Stamford Police Department, was useful as well. The internet was fairly primitive when I started this project, but even as it matured, many people have remained elusive. Some have died. Others, like Margo's family, did not want to talk. Howie's family did not want to talk.
I am no investigative reporter, so I cop to the plea of not really knowing what I was doing most of the time. For instance, I did not know that regular people could employ the Freedom of Information Act to obtain criminal files and relied instead on a reporter who was able to access Margo's murder file at the police station. Each step forward in Margo's death took time. Each step triggered an overhaul of the story, which often made me put the project aside until I could wrap my head around any ill-fitting revelations.
Finding me required less research but more soul searching. I had to read between the lines, looking hard at what I had suppressed and why. I listened to the things I did not say, watched what I did not do. I looked at how I neatly packed up Margo's death and stored it away. I compared historical fact to my memory of events. At times I questioned history, other times my self. I had to reexamine my attitudes about race and white privilege, then and now. I had entered my relationship with Joe with expectations I didn't know I carried. On some unarticulated level, I was drawn to the idea of me and Joe as some manifestation of equality, both gender and racial. There we were after all, black and white, man and woman, side by side. The racial seems self-evident — but gender? Logic has never been idealism's strong suit. Every time I'd pointed out some inequity in our relationship to Joe, something as basic as who had first dibs on the car, he said, "What are you going to do? Call NOW?" as he drove away, laughing. He thought the National Organization of Women was a joke, and feminism itself hysterically funny.
It wasn't funny. It was nothing less than self-determination. It's what, in the end, we were all after. Me, Margo, Howie, Joe. We wanted equality. We wanted justice. We wanted to not be controlled by the world as it was.
CHAPTER 2
IN THE FRAMEWORK of this narrative, Stamford serves as both the landscape and the backstory. It supplies the plot and the atmosphere. It does everything but fondle the murder weapon. Such a major player needs its own introduction. Not as it is now. What it is now is so different from what it was in the mid-70s, it is as if it had gone into the witness protection program and come out with a fake passport and a nylon wig. HUD, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, was responsible in the 60s and 70s for what was called urban renewal but really meant urban removal. By the time I arrived, Stamford's rubble had already been bulldozed, loaded into trucks, and hauled away to be dumped as fill.
The city was starting fresh, just like me. It was, as a whole, an unpromising time in which to start a life, not just in Connecticut but anywhere in the country. States and municipalities were failing left and right. Garbage was piling up all over the country because cities couldn't afford to have it picked up. The post office wanted to cut mail delivery to three days a week. When I was growing up in Bronx and then Westchester, New York was like the sun, supplying light, heat, and gravity to all the bodies in its orbit, but by the 70s, this sun was eclipsed by blight and decay. White flight had taken so much of New York's tax base that in October 1975 Mayor Abe Beame had to ask for a bailout from President Ford.
Ford to City: Drop Dead.
Ford, who had just survived two assassination attempts — one woman hoping to gain the approval of mass murderer Charles Manson, the other woman just trying to effect change — would blame losing the general election to Carter in November 1976 on that headline. He had only narrowly edged out Ronald Reagan at the Republican Convention, but Reagan would be back before the 70s were over. Ford didn't even say "Drop Dead." He swears. It was the Daily News manipulating his words and manipulating the story. Because in the end, Ford did bail out the city.
Thank you, Mr. President, but even with the bailout, it was too little, too late. New York City corporations scattered like cockroaches. Families like mine had left the Bronx and settled in quaint suburban villages, but corporations needed somewhat more infrastructure than a septic tank and a municipal pool. They're not corporations for nothing. They wanted things. Land for one — lots of it — not to mention transportation, schools, housing, and labor.
Stamford frantically waved its hand. The city council wanted those taxes. The developers, realtors, and merchants needed those corporations because they weren't feeling too well themselves. Everyone had some skin in the game. Please. We are the perfect city. We have already razed the unsightly downtown (read: black community) using HUD money. Gone! A white slate! Do us. Here is Interstate-95 slicing through the midsection, making it highly commutable from just about everywhere. A straight shot. The city also had the Merritt Parkway in North Stamford, a curvaceous road that rubbed thighs with Greenwich, ideal for executives already living there. If they moved their businesses to Stamford, their commutes would be a roll out of bed. If only I-95 had easy exits for the workers to hop on and off. The city fathers wrung their hands.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Stamford '76"
by .
Copyright © 2019 JoeAnn Hart.
Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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