On the burial of random limbs:
Three gravediggers have come forward to say that, on orders from supervisors, they customarily took miscarried fetuses and amputated limbs from the local Catholic hospital and buried them, not in a discrete spot, but in the freshly dug graves of people who bore no relation either to the fetus or the limb.
Sometimes, the gravediggers said, they would wait until mourners had left and place a limb or bottled embryo on top of the coffin, then cover it with earth. At other' times, they would bury the limb before a funeral.
A second former gravedigger, Theodore Kozloswki, offered one possible motive. “They’re not getting anything for these limbs, so they don’t want to waste a piece of land,” he said.
Like many Catholic hospitals St. Francis has historically disposed of limbs and embryos through burial rather than cremation, continuing to do so even after the Vatican permitted cremation in the mid-1960’s. But according to Victoria Odescalchi, a hospital spokesman, the hospital’s president, Sister M. Anne Elizabeth, assumed that the limbs and embryos were “buried in an appropriate section of the cemetery" and was “very shocked and upset" to learn what the gravediggers said had happened. Ms. Odescalchi said. St. Peter's Cemetery ended the $442 monthly pension from the arena diocese. “I said you ought to have location by itself and keep Tecf’rds where the limbs are. They said, Just take them and throw them in a hole the gravediggers said. They were afraid they would be dismlssed and they objected strenuously. Mr. Spencer said he quit anyway in disgust.
“I quit because I couldn’t stand when I was doing it,” he said. “I told them there wasn’t enough money for me. I got a conscience.”
Local church officials remain sensitive about discussing the allegations. “The most I’m able to tell you is I’m distressed over it and we are looking into it,” said the Rev. Leo Prince, St. Peter’s pastor
The first indication of St. Peter’s casual burial practices came on Oct. 25. A terrier named Honey, taken for a walk on the Hyde Park property of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, began digging feverishly and exposed a foot. The Hyde Park police, believing they had stumbled across a homicide, called in a famed pathologist who concluded that the limb had been surgically removed.
The police soon learned that the earth had been carted in as landfill from an area at St. Peter’s used for dumping flower arrangements.
“It’s ghoulish and a little macabre," said Michael C. Clinch, Hyde Park’s police chief, “but it's more displeasing than it is illegal.”
and on Djuna Barnes:
Barnes fled home at the age of 17 in 1909 to live for two months with a middle-aged suitor. At 21 she arrived in Greenwich Village.
“Nightwood” led many of Barnes’s admirers to suppose she was an evangelist for lesbianism. Given that the novel was devoted to an obsessive love affair between two women, Lady Ottoline Morrell could hardly be blamed for writing to praise Barnes’s courage in defending same-sex love. Barnes was furious. She had never regarded herself as a lesbian. Her first great love affair was with Ernst Hanfstaengl, the grandson of a Yankee general in the Civil War, to whom she was engaged from 1914 to 1916. His rejection of Barnes as an unfitting mother for his German child was painfully recorded in a section deleted from Nightwood.
Barnes took to drink for solace and did not shake the habit until she was almost 60. By then, Thelma had been exorcised in “Nightwood,” and Barnes was ready to embark on her most autobiographical work, “The Antiphon.” Dag Hammarskjold thought enough of this curious play to arrange a Swedish premiere; Eliot, who published it, contributed a blurb (later withdrawn), noting that “never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.” Barnes, who acknowledged only the genius, was understandably displeased.
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