MRS. PETERSON: Yes. And never sorry for it. He was a fine boy. A dear boy. Very bright too. At school they said he was a genius. He won all of those scholarships and went up to Harvard. You’d think he’d come to see me, wouldn’t you? After all I did for him? But no. He never comes. He never comes around. And now the social workers won’t let me have any more children. Not since my second husband died. They say there have to be two parents in a foster home. And besides they say that I’m too old. Well, that’s craziness. I love children, and that’s all that should count. I love each and every one of them. Haven’t I dedicated my life to foster children? I’m not too old for them. And when I think of all the suffering children, I could just cry.
The last half of that report was a transcription of a long and rambling conversation with the man to whom Mrs. Peterson had been married at the time that she took the eleven-year-old Ogden Salsbury into her home.
This interview was conducted with Mr. Allen J. Barger (now eighty-three years old) in the Evins-Maebry Nursing Home in Huntington, Long Island, on the afternoon of Friday, January 24, 1975. The subject is supported at the home by the three children from his second marriage. The subject, who suffers from senility, was alternately lucid and incoherent. The subject was not aware that he was being recorded.
Dawson leafed ahead to the passage he bad marked.
AGENT: Do you remember any of the foster children that you took in while you were married to Carrie?
MR. BARGER: She took them in. Not me.
AGENT: Do you remember any of them?
MR. BARGER: Oh, Christ.
AGENT: What’s the matter?
MR. BARGER: I try not to remember them.
AGENT: You didn’t enjoy them like she did?
MR. BARGER: All those dirty little faces when I came home from work. She tried to say we needed the extra money, the few dollars the government gave us for keeping the kids. It was the Depression. But she drank up the money.
AGENT: She was an alcoholic?
MR. BARGER: Not when I married her. But she was sure on her way to being one.
AGENT: Do you remember a child named-
Mr. BARGER: My trouble was I didn’t many her for her mind.
AGENT: Excuse me?
MR. BARGER: I married my second wife for her mind, and that worked out swell. But when I got hitched to Carrie . . . Well, I was forty years old and still single and sick to death of going to whores. Carrie came along, twenty-six and fresh as a peach, so much younger than me but interested in me, and I let my balls do my thinking for me. Married her for her body with no thought as to what was in her head. That was a big mistake.
AGENT: I’m sure it was. ‘Well . . . Now, could you tell me if you can remember a child named- MR. BARGER: She had magnificent jugs.
AGENT: I beg your pardon?
MR. BARGER: Jugs. Boobs. Carrie had a magnificent set.
AGENT: Oh. Yes. Uh…
MR. BARGER: She was pretty good in bed too. When you could get her away from those goddamned kids. Those kids! I don’t know why I ever agreed to take the first one in. After that we never had less than four and usually six or seven. She had always wanted a big family. But she wasn’t able to have children of her own. I guess maybe that made her want them even more. But she didn’t really want to be a mother. It was just a dream, a sort of sentimental thing with her.
AGENT: What do you mean?
MR. BARGER: Oh, she liked the idea, of having children more than she liked really having them.
AGENT: I see.
MR. BARGER: She couldn’t discipline them worth a damn. They walked right over her. And I wasn’t about to take over that chore. No, sir! I worked hard, long hours in those days. When I came home I didn’t want to do anything but relax. I didn’t spend my time chasing after a pack of brats. So long as they left me alone, they could do what they wanted. They knew that, and they never bothered me. Hell, they weren’t my kids.