Over almost 25 years, crime and mystery grand master Robert B. Parker wrote about April and her interaction with his hero, private investigator Spenser, three times. We first met her as a high school dropout turning tricks in Boston's Combat Zone in 1982's Ceremony. Spenser's girlfriend, high school counselor Susan Silverman, is worried about the girl and asks Spenser to find her and bring her out if necessary. Four years later, a now high-class call girl April makes a bad decision that again puts her in need of Spenser's help in Taming a Sea-Horse. And finally, in 2006's Hundred-Dollar Baby, an adult April owns her own call-girl operation and is facing pressure from some thugs who want a piece of the action. Fortunately, she knows a thug who works for folks who are being bullied and she hires Spenser to teach the miscreants the error of their ways.
In one sense, April is a female counterpart of Paul Giacomin, the aimless young boy Spenser meets in Early Autumn. Paul's plight as a weapon in his parents' battles touches Spenser, who decides to get leverage on the parents in order to get Paul out on his own and give him a chance at a decent life. He becomes more of a parent to Paul than anyone else has been, and Paul becomes in many ways Spenser's son.
Spenser's initial encounter with April parallels his meeting with Paul. Sullen, withdrawn and uncommunicative, she is not a young person with a promising future. Her mother is weak and dominated by her father, who is a class-A jerk that Spenser wants to punch shortly after meeting him. Although her mother seems to genuinely care about her daughter, she will not be able to be any kind of parent or worthwhile guide for April as long as her husband is in the picture.
Like Paul, April is a young person who needs to escape her home in order to have any chance at a good life or to flourish as a person. Spenser blackmails Paul's parents into letting him attend a prep school and then a college to study dance, which he has discovered he loves. He gets April on with a high-class madam in New York City, allowing the 16-year-old girl who has spent the last several months as a hooker to remain one. Even though she will have a higher-class clientele and gather social skills and graces she now lacks, she'll still be a teenager being paid to have sex with men, most of whom will probably be quite a bit older than she.
Over the course of a couple of months spent with Spenser, Paul learns some basic carpentry, how to box and work out, jog and cook. These are the things he knows, Spenser says, so these are the things he will teach Paul. By adding them to his previous skill set -- TV-watching and shrugging -- Paul will be able to make his own way and if he happens across something else he wants to learn how to do, he will be able to take care of himself while he does. Spenser invests time and self in the boy and it's his realization that he has come to care what happens to Paul that prompts him to develop his blackmail plan. Despite both Parker and Spenser's oft-stated belief in sexual equality, the idea of offering the same sort of skill set to April doesn't come up. Apparently the only thing she can learn how to use is her body, and that only as a tool to please and satisfy men.
Spenser may very well not have as much invested in April as he did in Paul. She doesn't grow nearly as much and isn't any more likeable by the end of the story as she is at the beginning -- and that wasn't much to start with. He may not be willing to spend the time and energy on another child. Parker may not be able to figure out how to write Spenser as the surrogate father of a daughter as he was for a son. He'll take a shot at it later in his career as his female detective, Sunny Randall, tries to work with a 15-year-old runaway in 2000's Family Honor, with mixed results.
Spenser says he doesn't know any good social workers or other people in helping professions who he figures will be able to reach and help April. Given that finding her uncovered a massive child prostitution ring run by the chief of high-school counseling in the state of Massachusetts, he has no confidence any state system will be able to help either. He fears that any attempt to try will wind up with April a runaway again and back out on the street as a low-level prostitute, as she has no other skills -- and he, apparently, doesn't care enough to give her any, as he did with Paul. There could be any number of reasons for this. Spenser might not feel comfortable trying to "parent" a teenage girl. He might not believe he could successfully convince April's parents to back away as he did with Paul's parents. He recognizes the effort he put into Paul and might not believe he could muster the same thing for April. He might not like April enough to try. April might not have the spark in her for something that Paul had for dancing. I've read some suggestions that April doesn't have the self-discipline Paul had to try to make something of himself. Perhaps, but that's reading Paul after several weeks with Spenser -- the first adult in a long time to pay any attention to him. When he first shows up, there's no more indication of a diamond in the coal as there will be with April, and there's no initial effort to create it.
Or it could be that Parker, having given his hero one surrogate child, didn't want to write him another. Whatever the reason, what we have are Spenser and his girlfriend, high-school guidance counselor Susan Silverman, arranging for 16-year-old April to meet a New York City madam who Spenser knows from another case, so she can find a way to continue as a prostitute in a safer environment.
Susan has no illusions about April's home life, since she's the one whose initial worries about April brought Spenser into the case to start with. She makes some noises about saying that some serious therapy for the young girl and her family would be the best solution and about some uncertainty in enabling a 16-year-old girl to continue as a prostitute. And as a high school guidance counselor, she knows the wreck the state system will be with its chief director exposed as running a child prostitution/pornography ring. But she knows nobody who could find a way to help a 16-year-old kid not hook for a living? She has no contacts that might get her in touch with folks who may have some experience with that? Yes, this is 1982 and very much prior to large-scale efforts to make people aware of human trafficking and helping the many children involved in it, but what we're left with are the only two adults concerned with April's welfare enabling her to continue to see her body as her only value and sell it.
Ceremony has us see this decision as the best outcome right now for April, and Spenser says that if after meeting his friend the madam she doesn't want to go that way, they will try to think of something else. But since the only two adults who've cared about April for April's sake don't seem to want to put up much of a roadblock, it's hard to see her choosing a path where she's something other than a commodity, even if she will now be a much better cared for commodity -- a valuable toy instead of a cheap one.
Parker seemed to realize in some way his solution to April's problem was inadequate. When he wrote the screenplay for the Spenser: Ceremony TV movie in 1993, he had Susan and Spenser get April connected to a group that worked with young girls leaving prostitution. Whether he believed his original ending wouldn't have worked with a TV audience or he understood it to be an error, he did change it. And that makes the TV movie the only time Parker gave this character an even break.
Taming
Four years later, the madam who took April in calls Spenser. April left her employ and connected with another, less exclusive escort service and the madam, Patricia Utley, believes she will eventually wind up back on the street because the man who runs the service has done the same to other girls before.
Spenser calls April to meet with her and warn her about the danger she is in. But the pimp who runs her service has convinced her they are in love and she has what may be a fairly typical 20-year-old's reaction to adult authority's disapproval of her choice of partner: She storms out. Later it becomes apparent she has disappeared and Spenser has to trail her through a web of connections involving the mob, money-laundering and Parker's stand-in for Hugh Hefner and the Playboy magazine empire. When he finds out what happened to her, he learns that she has been taken from the pimp by an organized crime group who supplies women to a banker who launders money for them. Since, in the words of one of the mobsters, the banker likes "things that women don't," April has been held in captivity for several weeks. Spenser convinces the mobsters that it would be better business to return April to him. They do, and this time he offers her a connection on a personal level that he did not before.
Her reaction suggests that some kind of different life is ahead for April, and that Spenser has some awareness of responsibility towards her, which he is now willing to exercise. Although of the three books in which April appears she is onstage less in Taming than in any other, it is easily the most hopeful appearance for her.
Baby
But, we will learn 20 years later in Hundred-Dollar Baby, that hope was false. Spenser sits in his office one afternoon when a stunning young woman walks in. At first he doesn't recognize her, but then realizes it's a grown-up April Kyle. After Spenser rescued her, she went back to work with the New York madam, who now has April set up in a kind of satellite operation in Boston's Back Bay. It's the same kind of high-end call girl work that April did herself, but it's run into problems. Some local criminal elements seem to want a piece of the action, and in this case the double meaning would actually be the better outcome. They want protection money from April, who doesn't want to pay it.
As Spenser works to try to uncover who's muscling into April's work -- and discourage them as only he knows how -- he learns that the situation is not as straightforward as April has said. In fact, April has provoked some of the confrontation in an attempt to get control of the business from her former employer and she makes a pass at Spenser as a part of whatever's going wrong with the wiring inside her head. When he finally confronts her with the knowledge of the crimes she's committed (that is, in addition to the whole prostitution ring), April loses it. First she threatens to shoot Spenser, then turns the gun on herself and pulls the trigger.
While Spenser packs his bullet-proof vest away in his car -- he expected April to shoot at either herself or him -- he and Hawk discuss why she went around the bend. Through this conversation, Parker retrofits April with a damaging history of abuse that scarred her so badly she really had no chance of leaving the path that led her to take her own life. So whatever hope we might have had that Spenser might finally take on some responsibility as an adult in April's life was apparently unfounded -- it's been long enough since he's had any contact with her that he doesn't even recognize her when she shows up in his office.
Of course, it's possible that after Taming a Sea-Horse, April shut down again once she was safe, and she distanced herself from Spenser. It's equally possible, and a lot more likely, that Parker is once again using April as a prop. Previously, she's been a MacGuffin he has to find but has had next to no role in her own story. In Baby, she offers Spenser a chance to have a monumental failure. He had the chance to call police at different times once he learned of April's involvement but refused, believing that since his decisions helped create this problem, he had to be the one to try to resolve it. Because of that decision and the confrontation he engineered, April wound up facing Spenser over a gun. Three choices followed: Drop the gun and be taken in, shoot at the bullet-proof-vest-wearing Spenser and get shot by him, or shoot herself. Spenser's pushed this confrontation, and he comes in second place in the "People responsible for April Kyle's death" race behind only April herself.
April's death represents a nearly complete failure for Spenser, on a par with his loss of Candy Sloan in A Savage Place. Then, Spenser's serving as a bodyguard for a Los Angeles TV reporter who is being threatened for her coverage of Hollywood corruption. He fails at a crucial juncture, and Candy is killed. Her death, as well as Spenser's decision to sleep with her, sets up personal conflicts that will echo through the next three books and culminate with Susan's decision to move to California and fall in love with another man.
Not here. Spenser fails April, she shoots herself and we never see another tremor of a mention about what her death or his role in it might cause for him. At almost every turn, he has made decisions that brought April to see her worth in terms of her body and little else, but once the covers of Hundred-Dollar Baby close, April and the failure she represents vanish as though they never existed. Parker can ret-con all the damaging abuse he wants into April's story, but all that does is sharpen the indictment against the two real adults in her life -- Spenser and Susan -- for not insuring she found someone who could help her heal.
Of course, this discussion treats April, Spenser and Susan as though they were actual people with their own volition. They're really only characters written by Robert B. Parker, and they don't do or say anything that Parker doesn't write. So rather than Spenser failing April, it's more accurate to say Parker fails. He fails to treat her as anything other than a prop; first as a MacGuffin that Spenser has to find and then as a handy means to give Spenser a Dramatic Failure. She joins Allie French in Parker's Westerns and Jennifer Stone, Jesse Stone's ex-wife, as women that Parker uses primarily as tools to create conflict for the lead character. To be fair, Parker uses Sunny Randall's ex-husband Richie in the same way. But he doesn't kill any of them off. So whether or not April represents Spenser's greatest failure (I vote no; I still think Candy Sloan holds that title), she very likely represents Parker's. Unless you want to count All Our Yesterdays.
Punchline
Little kids may not understand a lot about society, but when they see the way families are shown in entertainment and when they watch the majority of their peers' families, they develop a picture of the way things are supposed to be. The unwritten story is that whatever else goes on in the world, "home" is a safe place and Mom and Dad take care of you, protect you from harm and love you. One of the tragedies of child abuse is its betrayal of that worldview and hope. Considering what April's parents were like, she may have felt that betrayal early on, even if she suffered no actual abuse. We don't see anything in her father that would lend itself to picturing a nurturing parent, and his domination of the household means her mother is no help against him. When Spenser and Susan discuss some of the psychology or even pathology of prostitution, they consider the idea that many prostitutes may find some kind of meaning in it. Even if they are valued only as a commodity, they are valued, and that may have been lacking for them, as it apparently was for April.
Spenser will have similar discussions with Patricia Utley, the New York City madam with whom he first connects April. As he tries to understand why April left Utley for another organization, she explains the same idea; that like many other prostitutes April is trying to find value or even love and someone who knows that may be able to manipulate her into circumstances she rationally knows could be harmful.
The adults April meets could try to help her understand her value comes from somewhere else. Her parents should have, Spenser and Susan could have, but nobody does. A person in my line of work holds that we are valuable because we are God's creations, but even the agnostic world Spenser inhabits permits the idea that April has value just because she's a human being. In fact, that idea is a bedrock part of Spenser's code. It may or may not have been his responsibility to teach April that she had a meaning beyond what other people wanted to use her for, just like it wasn't necessarily his responsibility to teach Paul Giacomin that he had a value beyond being a pawn in his parents' divorce and battles. He chose to do the one, but not the other and so became another part of the joke played on the girl he rode in to rescue but never saved.
No comments:
Post a Comment