Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps
the grasp of her madam mother—especially now, since loan sharks and their goons were stopping by the apartment making threats. Life was a matter of survival, waiting and wondering what would happen next.
“For the most part, I left school because I was embarrassed to go. That was okay with Mom because she was home [most of] the day. So, she could keep me pretty much under her thumb and make sure I didn’t do or say anything I wasn’t supposed to.”
Dianne said her father generally stayed away after they moved to Kew Gardens, but would visit occasionally. One of the times he did show up, she said, she happened to be home alone.
“He wasn’t drunk, so he didn’t bother to do anything to me. But he was really quite nasty to me about why my mother wasn’t there. So I said to him, ‘I don’t know where she went….’ I then asked him if he wanted coffee. He said no and left.”
As the chilly air rolled into New York during the fall of 1970, Mabel made a decision to move after being mugged in front of the apartment. It was the latest in a string of robberies she had endured since moving to Kew Gardens. The final incident happened at a bus stop up the street from the apartment. Mabel had gotten out of work at 4:00, which would generally put her in the apartment by about 5:00 A.M. On this morning, someone who had been apparently waiting for her at the bus stop sneaked up from behind as she walked home and pistol-whipped her in the back of the head. With blood running down her forehead, she had to go back and get stitches at the same hospital she had just come from. When she finally made it home later that morning, she told Dianne they were moving.
“My life,” Mabel said, “is worth more than a lousy paycheck.”
And my life is worth more than turning tricks for you! Dianne thought, but she didn’t say anything.
With no way physically to move—neither Mabel nor Dianne had a driver’s license or car—Mabel said she’d pay for Dianne to get a driver’s license and ask her father to buy her a car, an El Camino, so they could pack up everything when they were ready and go.
“But don’t you tell him we’re moving,” Mabel warned.
Mabel had a location picked out upstate. It was on a lake in the Catskill Mountains. Comfortable. Relaxing. No big-city problems. No pollution. No muggings. Just fresh air and the pungent smell of pine needles, dry leaves, and fresh water.
John Molina agreed to buy the car, but once word got back to him they were going to use it to move, he laughed and told them to forget it.
“He ended up showing up on our doorstep one day,” Dianne recalled, “and he was almost three sheets to the wind at the time. Right about then, I went into my own protective mode. My mother was there and they started getting into it.”
As they argued, Dianne stepped away, trying to remain, she said, “invisible.” But her father, at one point during the argument, said, “Dianne, I want you to come down to the house with me.”
Dianne knew what that meant.
“Whenever he was angry, he would never take his anger out on the person he was angry with. It was always me.”
“No, no, no,” Dianne said. “I have to do something else. I can’t go.”
I can’t go…. I can’t go…. I can’t go. This was what Dianne thought as she stared at her father. I know you’re going to rape me again.
Mabel stepped up and said, “No! She’s got something to do for me. She has to go somewhere for me.” While talking, Mabel took out her address book and pointed to an address. “You have to go here, Dianne,” she said.
John looked at the both of them—What the hell is going on?—and asked, “Where is she going? What’s this about, Mabel?” He seemed confused.
“She has to go to Flushing and take care of an errand for me.”
With that, John left.
“You get your ass upstairs,” Mabel told Dianne after John left, “get dressed in those clothes I bought you and go now.”
Since Dianne had started turning tricks, Mabel had purchased her an entire new wardrobe of provocative clothing, which went along with the job. But Dianne had a hard time wearing any of it.
“Let’s put it this way,” she said later, “even if I had Marilyn Monroe’s body, I would not have been caught dead in those clothes!”
The obvious questions one might ask looking back on all this would be: Why didn’t Dianne go to her father—or anyone else, for that matter—and explain what was happening? Why keep it all secret? Why not tell her brother? The police? Anyone who could possibly put an end to it.
“I tried always to be invisible…,” Dianne said. “You have to look at it from my point of view: there were other situations that occurred in the house…my father would not have believed me if I told him what my mother was doing.”
Experts claim this type of severe emotional and sexual abuse would have prevented most people in Dianne’s situation from believing she could report the abuse without suffering repercussions. Psychologists claim some of the main reasons why kids don’t report such savage sexual abuse are that they “may have been threatened by the offender regarding telling,” or “may not know it is wrong.” Some may even “assume responsibility.”
In Dianne’s case, she later said, she felt a bit of each. She felt, for example, if she ever went to someone and explained what was happening, she wouldn’t be believed.
One story Dianne later told that led her to believe her father, especially, would have written off her allegations against her mom as preposterous involved her dog. When she lived in Jamaica, her father used to make Dianne keep the hallway area of the house free from any dog hair. Dianne would sweep it often, but the dog would shed throughout the day. By the time her dad got home, the hallway was generally full of hair. If he found as much as one hair in the hallway, she claimed, he would beat her, accusing her of not having swept the hallway at all. How, she asked, could she have gone to that same man and reported what her mother was making her do? On top of that, she said her father was raping her. Would he want to get the authorities involved at the expense of perhaps exposing his own behavior?
“He used to bash my head up against the wall whenever he saw hair in that hallway. He’d grab me by the back of my hair—which was down to my knees then—and bash me against the wall, calling me all kinds of names: ‘slut, whore, bitch.’ I wasn’t going to talk to him about anything, even if I was dying.”
If all of what Dianne said was true, it was a situation where there was no end and no beginning for her. She was caught in the middle, just trying to survive as best she could. The move upstate, at least at first, seemed like a new beginning. Dianne was getting older. In a year or two, she could think about leaving home. The move up north would be the start of something different. Maybe things would change. Dianne didn’t see Mabel sending her 100 miles south to turn tricks with johns in the city. At the least, the prostitution would end.
Mabel had a friend, Marie Hess, a woman who had lived near them in Jamaica, but she had moved up north many years ago. When Mabel found herself without a vehicle and no one to help her move, she called Hess and asked for help.
“Mrs. Hess,” Dianne recalled later, “sent her husband down to Kew Gardens in his truck to help us.”
The move didn’t happen as quickly as Dianne might have hoped. In fact, it would be a few years before Dianne and Mabel relocated. Dianne was almost eighteen years old, she said, when they finally moved.
It was the summer of 1972. Tucked deep in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, Kauneonga Lake, Sullivan County, New York, seemed like a tranquil, quiet place for Dianne and Mabel to begin a new chapter. Arriving there, it was everything Dianne had pictured it would be: peaceful, serene, colorful, secluded. Dad couldn’t just pop over anymore and give her any problems; he would have to drive for hours. Mom couldn’t pull an address out of her smock and say, “Go here, Dianne, and do what he says.” In a way, her life of emotional