There was a disturbance in the force; I shot up in bed at 3 a.m.
I saw them before I heard them, a flash of motion in the street, maybe 70 yards beyond our window. Two figures beneath a streetlight, one beseeching, the other arms folded stoically. An argument.
Immediately you could tell they were a couple, and that it was a kind of lovers' quarrel, but what with the dark and the distance it took me a moment to discern it was a man and a woman, probably in their 30s, homeless judging by the pair of bikes and pile of bags they'd dropped in the median. He was lean, and moved with athletic fluidity as he circled and vented, his arms waving in a pantomine of entitled male grievance. She was small and stood quiet and immovable.
The choreography was familiar; he'd lurch toward her then retreat, and I thought it might get physical. I held my phone in my hand and thought about the baseball bat in the corner of our bedroom. He was bigger than her, maybe bigger than me. I closed the dog door in case any of our sleeping dogs woke up and decided to investigate. I didn't want them barking at this distraught man; I wasn't sure the neighborhood needed to be alerted.
On the other hand, I was prepared to intervene. I have intervened before.
When I was a kid there was a story about a woman who was murdered while her neighbors watched and refused to get involved. The death of Kitty Genovese, a 29-year-old bar manager who was stalked and stabbed outside her apartment building in 1964 has become part of our national mythology, a fable about public apathy and the bystander effect--the psychological theory that people are less likely to help a victim when other people are present.
"For more than half an hour," Martin Gansberg wrote in The New York Times, "38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman to death in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens."
Gansberg went on to note that not one of those respectable people called the police. This was how callous and indifferent to the suffering of others we had become.
That made a good story anyway. From the beginning there were questions about the Times' reporting, and in 2016, an editor's note was appended to the archived version of the story: "Later reporting by The Times and others has called into question significant elements of this account."
There was no evidence 38 people watched Genovese's rape and murder; apparently no one saw the attacks--there were two, not three--in their entirety. At least two people called the police. One woman, Sophia Farrar, raced from her apartment to try to rescue Genovese while her killer was still in the vicinity. She held her and tried to comfort her while they waited for an ambulance.
A lot of people who did hear or see something thought they were watching a lovers' quarrel or drunks arguing. Some associated it with the routine closing-time kerfuffling of a corner bar. But Farrar, a close friend of Genovese's, said the whole neighborhood must have heard the same "blood-curdling" scream she and her husband heard around 3 a.m.
On the other hand, when Farrar and her husband looked out the window and saw nothing, they went back to bed. It was about 35 minutes later, when another neighbor phoned her to tell her Genovese was being attacked, that she ran down the stairs, around the corner and across the alley to find her friend.
That initial scream was most likely from the first attack. Winston Moseley, a 29-year-old married father with no criminal record, stabbed Genovese in the back because, he later said, he was looking for a woman to kill.
His knife punctured her lung, which might have made it difficult for her to scream with any volume afterwards. Moseley retreated when a man in a 10th-floor apartment shouted for him to "leave that woman alone." He ran to his car and drove off while she staggered around the corner out of sight.
He came back a little later, wearing a Tyrolean hat to disguise himself. He searched for Genovese for long moments before finding her collapsed in the vestibule rear entry of her building. She fought with him there; there were defensive cuts on her hands and arms. He raped her and took $49. An upstairs neighbor called the police and Farrar.
So, like almost everything, the Genovese case was more complicated than initially reported. (Initially, it was hardly reported at all; one of 686 murders in New York City in 1964, it got a couple of paragraphs. Gansberg didn't get on it until after The Times' Abe Rosenthal--then the metropolitan editor--decided the story deserved a full investigation.)
Gansberg, who worked for the Times for 43 years, died in 1995. He had a long and distinguished career. He won prizes, including a big one for his story on Genovese's killing.
The longer I watched the couple arguing in the street, the less certain I was doing the right thing. I know some people would have called the police right away, others might have opened a window and shouted at the couple to pipe down and move along. Others would have gone back to bed.
He hadn't touched her and she didn't seem frightened, and one of Crow T. Robot's lines from an old "Mystery Science Theater 3000" episode kept running through my mind: "People have the right to use the street, old man."
And people who are out on the street with bags and bicycles at 3 a.m. likely have nowhere else to go.
Then he crossed the street, so he was probably standing outside our garage. I snapped on the driveway light as I left our bedroom--to remind him that there were people around--and walked upstairs, from where I had a view up and down the street. I cracked the window in order to hear a little better.
I saw him stomp off down the sidewalk, heading north, and thought it might be over. Then he reversed and ran to her again. Standing two feet away from her, he bent his knees and pumped his arms down like a downhill skier exiting the gate. And I clearly heard him scream.
"But I love you!"
I am cynical enough to hear that declaration as a threat, and to imagine it is the last thing many people have heard before a bullet or a blade or a fist arrived. But he just stood there with his head hanging. After a long moment she moved to wheel his bike to him and he took it. Then he shouldered on his backpack and she shouldered on hers, and they rode off together toward whatever peace or chaos awaited them outside my jurisdiction.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].