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Novels by Mary Marcus
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Memorial Day
One Memorial Day years ago, my very young son and I were standing on a street corner on the Upper West Side. It was cool for the end of May. I think I was wearing a sweater. Broadway was closed and men in uniform carrying flags were marching down the street. One of those uniformed men was a friend of ours from the neighborhood. He called out to my son, and just like that, carried him off on his shoulders with a band of brothers who were Green Berets in Viet Nam. One minute he was standing next to me, the next he was waving his little downy six year old arm in the air, brandishing an American flag. Later when I collected him at the War Memorial on Riverside Drive, I asked him about the experience. He told me about an old geezer who kept warning him, “Don’t let the flag touch the ground, son.” The flag was heavy and my son was worried he would drop it. I think I might have explained to him what it means when a flag touches the ground. My son had that flag for a long time. First it was crammed into one of the slats of his headboard, his proudest possession. Then it hung from the wall. Then, it was in his closet. It was still somewhere around when I cleaned out his room after he left home and we moved house. Last summer, I thought about the flag and those vets marching down the street when my son had an American flag pinned on his lapel. I wondered in a fanciful way if those vets had done a number on his malleable mind way back then? When...Plus Ca Change…
When I was eleven, we lived in a great big un-paid for house with a mansard roof, and several empty rooms because there was no money for furniture. Our house was in the new part of Shreveport that was to us, countrified, coming as we did from a track house with an ornamental screen door and two young pine trees in front. Our new backyard was full of old trees and new trees and was nearly an acre. At night in the winter, we could hear foxes. At the end of the block was a branch of Bayou Pierre, and it was there, one morning in the summer, I went looking for dewberries so we could have cobbler that evening. Aline had been with us by then for more than a year, and though my mother cried all the time, she wasn’t my father, and we laughed at the dinner table. We were broke, of course, and told not to answer the front door in case it was the bill collector, but I was no longer afraid. My father was dead. My mother was at his store trying to make a living. It was my sister, my brother and I under the gentle reign of Aline, who could handle us. Two previous housekeepers, Henrietta notably, had run away screaming waving her hands in the air. Land around the bayou was dense and the dewberry vines had prickles on them. I had discovered a big clump of them; enough to fill a huge tin can full, and was sedulously picking and eating and biting out prickles from my fingers, when I heard a noise in the bushes. I was afraid of snakes....Gender Inequality And The Pederast
Although girls are more often molested than boys, boys do worse after being molested than girls do. Not that girls are unaffected, not that molestation doesn’t deform a girl’s view of the world. But for boys, the damage appears more severe. And the long term is ugly: As many of us saw in the Academy Award Winning Movie, Spotlight, boys who grow up without coming to terms with their childhood abuse often struggle as men with addictions, anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide as well as the inability to develop or maintain relationships. Does that mean women are able to take such goings on in our stride? No I don’t think so. But women are taught to submit from an early age, almost from the get-go. Molestation– the most extreme form of submission– is in a horrible way, just a lot more of the same old, same old. But for boys, who have been taught to be tough, to admit such goings on is utter shame and degradation. Real guys don’t get molested. Or something like that. And that’s why I take my hat off to Judge Thomas Durkin who yesterday sentenced former House Speaker, Dennis Hastert, once one of the most powerful men in congress, to a mandatory jail sentence in connection with his financial misconduct. The statue of limitations had run out for sexual misconduct (a terrible thing in my opinion, sex crimes are like war crimes). However, good Judge Durkin, despite the protestations from the likes of Tom Delay (another sterling character) socked it to him for the financial misdeeds. And while we are on the subject, how did a humble Congressman from Illinois manage to come up with the 3.5 million (the sum of the payout and...
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