Jul 30 2009
∞
“ [Gloria Stewart] trembled. She cried. She looked at Daddy Beckett. She sobbed and coughed and stumbled over her words. Her testimony said, There is no closure. Her hatred filled the room. She saw Robbie [Beckett]’s trial. She saw him convicted. It was just a passing moment in her hatred. This was one more moment. It was nothing compared to the aggregate force of the hate she sustained every day. She left the witness stand. She veered by the defense table and looked at Daddy Beckett close up. She trembled. She walked to her bench and sat down. Her husband put an arm around her.
I never felt her kind of hatred. I never had a flesh-and-blood target.
I never felt her kind of hatred. I never had a flesh-and-blood target.
— James Ellroy, My Dark Places. The book is about his mother’s unsolved murder, the way he ran from her death through booze and drugs and terrible living, and his eventual return to the case to try to solve it. This quotation, on page 309 of the hardcover, had a peculiar force in context that it doesn’t necessarily have when sectioned out. That line, “Her testimony said, There is no closure,” made me suck in my breath when I read it.
