There were five, six, seven immolations and then...
There were five, six, seven immolations and then there were no more, and shortly thereafter Merry did become herself again, thinking again about things immediate to her daily life and more appropriate to her years
When this South Vietnamese president, Diem, the man against whom the martyred Buddhist monks had been directing their protest--when some months later he was assassinated (according to a CBS Sunday morning show, assassinated by the USA, by the CIA, who had propped him up in power in the first place), the news seemed to pass Merry by, and the Swede didn't convey it to herBy then this place called Vietnam no longer even existed for Merry, if it ever had except as an alien, unimaginable backdrop for a ghastly TV spectacle that had embedded itself in her impressionable mind when she was eleven years old
She never spoke again of the martyrdom of the Buddhist monks, even after she became so committed to her own political protestThe fate of those monks back in 1963 appeared to have nothing whatsoever to do with what galvanized into expression, in 1968, a newly hatched vehemence against capitalist America's imperialist involvement in a peasant war of national liberationand yet her father spent days and nights trying to convince himself that no other explanation existed, that nothing else sufficiently awful had ever happened to her, nothing causal even remotely large enough or c c purse shocking enough to explain how his daughter could be the bomberAngela Davis, a black philosophy professor of about Rita Cohen's age--born in Alabama in 1944, eight years before the birth in New Jersey of the Rimrock Bomber--a Communist professor at UCLA who is against the war, is tried in San Francisco for kidnapping, murder, and conspiracyShe is charged with supplying guns used in an armed attempt to free three black San Quentin convicts during their trialA shotgun that killed the trial judge is said to have been purchased by her only days before the courthouse battleFor two months she lived underground, dodging the FBI, until she was apprehended in New York and extradited to CaliforniaAll around the world, as far away as France and Algeria and the Soviet Union, her supporters claim that she is the victim of a political frame-upEverywhere she is transported by the police as a prisoner, blacks and whites are waiting in the nearby streets, holding up placards for the TV cameras and shouting, "Free Angela! End political repression! End racism! End the war!"
Her hair reminds the Swede of Rita CohenEvery time he sees that bush encircling her head he is reminded of what he should have done that afternoon in the hotelHe should not have let her get away from him, no matter what
Now he watches the news to see Angela DavisHe reads everything he can about herHe knows that Angela Davis gucci silver bag can get him to his daughterHe remembers how, when Merry was still at home, he went into her room one Saturday when she was off in New York, opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and, seated at her desk, read through everything in there, all that political stuff, the pamphlets, the paperbacks, the mimeographed booklets with the satiric cartoonsThere was a copy of The Communist ManifestoWhere did she get that? Not in Old RimrockWho was supplying her with all this literature? Bill and MelissaThese weren't just diatribes against the war--they were written by people wanting to overthrow capitalism and the Ugovernment, people screaming for violence and revolutionIt was awful for him to come upon passages that, being the good student she was, she had neatly underlined, but he could not stop readingand now he believes he can remember something in that drawer written by Angela DavisThere was no way of his knowing for sure because the FBI had confiscated it all, put all those publications into evidence bags, sealed them, and removed them from the houseThey had dusted her room, looking for a solid set of fingerprints that they could use to match up with anything incriminatingThey collected the household phone bills to trace Merry's callsThey searched her room for hiding places: pried up floorboards from beneath her rug, removed wainscoting from the walls, took the globe off the ceiling chanel handbags collection light--they went through the clothes in her closet, looking for things hidden in the sleevesAfter the bombing, the state police stopped all traffic on Arcady Hill Road, closed off the area, and twelve FBI agents spent sixteen hours combing the house from the attic to the basement; when finally, in the kitchen, they searched the dustbag of the vacuum cleaner for "papers," Dawn had let out a screamAnd all because of Merry's reading Karl Marx and Angela Davis! Yes, now he remembers clearly sitting at Merry's desk trying to read Angela Davis himself, working at it, wondering how his child did it, thinking, Reading this stuff is like deep-sea divingIt's like being in an Aqua-Lung with the window right up against your face and the air in your mouth and no place to go, no place to move, no place to put a crowbar and escapeIt's like reading those tiny pamphlets and illustrated holy cards about the saints that the old lady Dwyer used to give her in ElizabethLuckily the child outgrew them, but for a while, whenever she misplaced her fountain pen, she'd pray to StAnthony, and whenever she thought she hadn't studied enough for a test, she prayed to StJude, and whenever her mother made her spend a Saturday morning cleaning up her messy room, she prayed to StJoseph, the patron saint of laborersOnce when she was nine and some diehards down at Cape May reported that the Virgin Mary appeared to balenciaga designer their children in their barbecue and people flocked in from miles around and kept vigil in their yard, Merry was fascinated, perhaps less by the mystery of the Virgin's appearance in New Jersey than by a child's having been singled out to see her"I wish I could see that," she told her father, and she told him about how apparitions of the Virgin Mary had appeared to three shepherd children in Fatima, in Portugal, and he nodded and held his tongue, though when her grandfather got wind of the Cape May vision from his granddaughter, he said to her, "I guess next they'll see her at the Dairy Queen," a remark Merry repeated down in ElizabethGrandma Dwyer then prayed to StAnne to help Merry stay Catholic despite her upbringing, but in a couple of years saints and prayer had disappeared from Merry's life; she stopped wearing the Miraculous Medal, with the impression on it of the Blessed Virgin, which she had sworn to Grandma Dwyer to wear "perpetually" without even taking it off to batheShe outgrew the saints just as she would have outgrown the CommunismAnd she would have outgrown it--Merry outgrew everythingIt was merely a matter of monthsMaybe weeks and the stuff in that drawer would have been completely forgottenAll she had to do was waitIf only she could have waitedThat was Merry's story in a nutshellShe was always impatientMaybe it was the stuttering that made her impatient, I don't miu miu black bag kno