When I learned about the murder I was busy researching a book that would soon take me out of the country. I planned to write about the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century immigration of Italians to America, a story that would include the personal experiences of my grandparents and parents as well as my own boyhood recollections of growing up on the Jersey Shore during World War II, while my father’s two younger brothers were in the Italian army trying to resist the Allied invasion.
In 1982, having finished interviewing my parents and other relatives who had settled in the United States, I took an apartment in Rome, and later in southern Italy, to learn about the lives of my kinsmen who had remained in their homeland. In the winter of 1985, I rented a house for five months in Taormina, Sicily, to begin writing the book that would be published years later as Unto the Sons. Joining me in Taormina was my wife, Nan, an editor at Houghton Mifflin who remained active with her firm in Boston while doing her reading and editing in Sicily; and among our occasional houseguests were our twenty-one-year-old daughter, Pamela, then an intern with the Paris Tribune, and our eighteen-year-old daughter Catherine, a sophomore at Bard College.
But throughout these years, from the 1980s through the 1990s, whether I was in New York or overseas, the mail continued to bring me personal greetings and attic-observed information from Gerald Foos in Aurora, Colorado. He reported that the police had so far failed to track down the man who had killed the woman in Room 10, but that the police had been summoned to his Manor House Motel for other matters.
He mentioned that one male guest had committed suicide, shooting himself with a pistol. He noted that a 400-pound guest had suffered a fatal heart attack and that his body, bloated overnight, could not fit through the doorway and therefore the room’s main window had to be removed in order for the body to be carried out to the coroner’s vehicle. One guest, a married father of two, died confronting a burglar. The fight woke up his family, who heard the gunshot that killed him. Gerald Foos also reported that another guest had died while masturbating, collapsing with his fingers so rigidly clinging to his penis that the ambulance crew was obliged to carry him away in that condition.
In addition to these happenings, Gerald Foos complained of being privy to many other unappealing or appalling examples of human behavior, including robbery, incest, bestiality, and rape—and, even among so-called consenting couples, instances of sexual exploitation. Gerald Foos believed that the legalization of the birth control pill in the early 1960s, which he favored despite being a practicing Roman Catholic, encouraged many men to expect sex on demand. “Yes, the pill allowed women to control their fertility,” he conceded, “but she also assumed most of the responsibility, and the blame, if she accidentally became pregnant. The man in her life would ask, ‘Have you taken your pill, darling?’ and then assume that the issue was settled: for him it was a green light for sex, a quick orgasm, and deep sleep. Women had won the legal right to choose but had lost the right to choose the right moment.”
In the years when his parents were a courting couple, as well as when he himself was dating Barbara White in high school, Gerald Foos singled out the fear of pregnancy and the illegality of abortions as big factors in minimizing premarital intercourse. If unmarried couples became pregnant, in most cases it was considered morally obligatory, if not mandatory under a statute, to authenticate the relationship with a marriage.
Gerald Foos said that as a seventeen-year-old farm girl, his mother, Natalie, had been practicing the rhythm method with her boyfriend, Jake, but had “made a mistake”—and thus she was five months pregnant with Gerald on her wedding day in 1934. Gerald went on to say that while the availability of the pill and the redefinition of moral standards in the 1960s helped to phase out “shotgun” marriages in America, he was not sure that the Sexual Revolution had produced anything that refuted his negative recounting of what he saw from his attic and reported in The Voyeur’s Journal.
Between the 1970s and 1980s, our country went to war with one another. They had battles with words and images, through law and politics, over what made men and women full citizens of the nation. Across two generations, they argued and fought over everything from women’s role in the job market, to their attempt to control reproduction, because of the pill, and from men’s role as breadwinner to whether they could love each other and marry, and other things and issues like gender, sex, and family.
During many nights’ observations of subjects below the vents, the Voyeur could confirm again and again these on-going quarrels between women and men, which were characterized by unhappy sexual relations and interactions, while at the same time little seemed to be going right as they referred to their responsibilities and jobs in the outside world. When in bed together they lay there for hours watching TV. When men were alone they watched TV and masturbated. Women when alone masturbated too, although not as much. But I think both sexes are now masturbating more than ever. The only couples who seem to enjoy pleasing one another in bed, and to have the patience and desire to give one another orgasms, are lesbians.
TWENTY-SEVEN