We walked along a fence like the kind around the schoolyard, except that along the top of it were three parallel strands of barbed wire.
I heard a whirring sound and turned to see a man shooting me with a multi-turreted movie camera. Another man appeared who ran backward in front of us, popping flashbulbs at our feet. We held up our hands. I can’t describe this. I am tired of describing things. We are clients of a new law firm, Voltani, Ampere, and Ohm. If you’ve seen one prison you’ve seen them all. We had to give up our packages, over Ascher’s protest. We were in this office and the man was dressed like a policeman. Ascher grabbed my book ends and tore off the paper. “Gifts from children to their parents!”
“Can’t take ’em,” the man said.
“The things of children!”
“Sorry, Counselor.”
Ascher argued vehemently, and then suddenly stopped and pretended to us that it meant nothing. “It’s all right,” he confided to us, “I’ll speak to someone.”
We went to the Death House, a place that lacked the hum of the rest of the prison city. Elsewhere you could hear voices, or the rumble of machinery under your feet. Here, it was absolutely still. We were in a room bare of everything except a wooden table and some chairs. The bottom half of the walls were painted brown. The top half of the walls were painted yellow. No one was in the room. Everything was quiet.
“They have to bring them now,” Ascher said in a lowered voice. “First your mother, then afterwards your father,”
We waited and no one came. We stood in our coats and waited. I went to the window and looked out between the bars. We were high up. I could see the Hudson River. Ascher sat down at the end of the table, pushed his homburg back on his head, put his hands on his knees, and sighed. I heard the door open. I turned but it was a guard. He stepped inside the door, closed it softly, and stood against the wall with his arms folded. I went over to him and raised my hands.
“What are you doing, Daniel?”
“He has to frisk me,” I explained without lowering my hands.
“’At’s all right, kid,” the guard said. He cleared his throat. He had terrible acne, great red eruptions all over his face.
“No, go ahead, search me, I might have a gun.”
The guard looked at Ascher. He cleared his throat again.
“’At’s OK, kid, I’m satisfied you don’t have a gun,” he said.
“How do you know if you don’t search me.”
“Me too,” Susan said.
“All right, children,” Ascher said. “They haven’t seen their parents in over a year,” he explained to the guard.
“Yeah, well they’re here,” the guard said.
“Search me,” Daniel insisted, his voice louder now.
“OK, kid, I said it was OK,” the guard said. He acted as if he was afraid I’d wake someone.
“SEARCH ME!” I screamed. I could feel my face turning red.
The guard looked at Ascher, who had stood and walked up behind me. Ascher must have nodded, because he quickly leaned over and patted the pockets of my mackinaw.
“Now her.”
He lightly touched the hem of Susan’s coat, and then stood up straight against the wall and folded his arms and ignored us.
Still nobody came. Susan began to walk around the edges of the room, measuring each wall with her footsteps. When she came to the guard she merely went around him as if he were part of the wall. I took up my vigil at the window. I wondered why they built this prison within sight of the river, since it would only want to make people escape. If I had long enough time here I’d find a way to get or make a rope long enough and to saw the bars so that no one would know, and to climb the fence. I’d learn all these things with enough time. I would let myself down the wall and climb the barbed-wire fence and run down to the river. Once I reached the river they’d never catch me. I could hear my own breathing as I ran. I could feel the cold water rising around me as I waded into the river, and then warming as I set out downriver with powerful strokes made more powerful by the current. The chill of late afternoon was touching the hills. The sky was growing imperceptibly darker. I would swim to New York. The river had turned black. The scene through this barred window was absolutely still. Nothing moved. It was frozen in the absolute stillness of the dirt-crusted window.
For some time I had been observed by my mother who had quietly come into the room. She had been as noiseless as the Death House stones. She did not speak but watched Susan in her walk and me in my revery. I have the letters between them—how for a week they wrote back and forth in anticipation of the visit and constructed the proper way of presenting themselves. They would be calm, composed, cheerful, matter-of-fact. They would answer our questions honestly and with no alarm. They would teach us, by example, how one lived in the Death House.
What happened was that Susan ran over to me and took my hand. Then I saw her too. We stood near the window and looked at our mother.
She was smaller. She had on a grey sack dress and house slippers. Her hair looked shorter. She was thin, and she was very pale, almost waxen. She stared at us with an expression on her face either of joy or terrible pain, I don’t know which, but of such intensity that I couldn’t meet her gaze. My eyes squeezed shut and when I could open them again I saw that she had pressed her fingers to her temples and applied such pressure that the corners of her eyes had slanted.
Susan was crushing my fingers.
“Look at you two,” my mother said. “You’re so big I don’t recognize you.”
“We sent you pictures,” I said.
“I know, I know. And I love those pictures. I have them taped to the wall where I can see them all the time, even when I’m going to sleep.”
“In your cell?”
“Yes.”
“Can we go there?”
She glanced at the guard who stood there as if he saw and heard nothing. She smiled. “I’m afraid they wouldn’t allow it,” she said. But the feeling I had was that she ruled this place, and that the guards were like servants who took care of her.
“Aren’t you going to give me a hug?” my mother said.
Susan and I looked at each other, and shuffling across the room, we suffered ourselves to stand before her as she kneeled and hugged each of us in turn. We were as stiff as boards. She did not feel in a hug the way my mother used to feel. She didn’t smell the same.
“You’re so big. You’re beautiful. You’re my beautiful children.” She had red lipstick on that made her face horribly pale. Her eyes were sunken, burning very brightly from pits deep in her face.
“When are they going to kill you?” Susan said.
“Oh, they’re not going to do that. It’s just their way of talking. I’m sure Uncle Jake told you about appeals, about other judges who have to reexamine the evidence. It all takes time, you see. We’re in no danger of that right now.”
“But what if they kill you anyway?” Susan said. “How will they do it?”
“Well, darling, what they do is called electrocution, and it’s very painless. It’s very fast and it doesn’t hurt. But let’s not talk about that. Aren’t you warm? Take your coats off, let me look at you. You’re very nicely dressed. How lovely you look. Here, I have something for you.”
From her pockets she took two bars of candy, a Milky Way for each of us.
We sat at the table and ate the Milky Ways while she sat on a chair between us, touching our heads, our legs, our shoulders. “Look how broad-shouldered you’re getting,” she said to me. She seemed quite happy now.
I tried to think of things to tell her, things to make her feel good. I said I liked school. I said I enjoyed math. I said I had lots of friends. These were the lies of my letters, and to my disappointment she seemed to believe all of them. It is the same way you lie to very sick or old people to make them feel good, and let them believe that their pain has at least brought some order to the world. But it is a measure of the unreclaimable distance from you that they believe what
you say.
“Where is my daddy,” Susan wants to know.
“Well, he’ll be here soon. First I get a visit with you, then he gets a visit with you.”
“Why not together?”
“I don’t know. It’s one of ther rules.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, my sweet girl. Look how long your hair has gotten. It’s so pretty.”
“Where is he?”
“Not far from here. In another cellblock. It’s not far.”.
“Do you see him?”
“Oh yes. We get to talk once a week through a screen.”
“We went home,” Susan said.
“Yes, I remember that.”
“But it was gone,” Susan said.
It seemed to me vital to dissociate myself from my sister’s remarks. I told my mother that I was planning to become a lawyer so that I could get her free.
“So?” Ascher said from the other end of the table. “This I haven’t heard before.”
“You’ll make a good lawyer. Won’t he, Jake?”
“Of course.”
“I won’t let them kill you,” I swore. “I’ll kill them first.”
“Oh now,” she chided. “Where did you get that expression?”
My mother took a kleenex from her pocket and wiped the chocolate from the corners of Susan’s mouth. Susan hadn’t finished her Milky Way, but stood up now, restlessly, and began to walk around the table with her arm outstretched and her fingers lightly brushing whatever they touched—a chair, my back, Ascher’s back, my mother. I had a terrible sense of illness, of my mother’s illness. It was as if she were a patient in this place rather than a prisoner. It was as if she was already dead. She was so unlike herself that I became discouraged about the possibility of communicating with her.
I found her looking at me with a sad half-smile. “It is a little hard to make up for all the lost time. A strange feeling, isn’t it.”
“Yes.” I blurted out what was on my guilty mind: “We’re going to live with a family in Westchester.”
“I know.”
“It’s in New Rochelle. It’s not far. It’s closer to here than the Shelter.”
“I know. I’ve exchanged letters with them. They’re fine people, the Fischers. Don’t worry, I know all about it.”
“The Judge made us. When the term is over.”
“Danny, you don’t understand. It’s with our consent. We want that for you. We chose them from all the people. It will be some time, and that’s too long to live in the Shelter.”
Susan was now back to her race along the walls of the room. My mother turned to watch her. She couldn’t keep her eyes off Susan and I was embarrassed to see the expression on her face. I realized she was no longer pretty to me.
A few minutes later I saw the guard look at his watch; and almost at the same moment a matron in the same blue guard’s uniform opened the door and told my mother her time was up.
We said goodbye. She hugged us again. “You’ll come back soon, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I love you, my sweetest angels. I love your letters. I love your faces. Soon this will all be over and we’ll have peace. It’s a terrible thing to do to people, isn’t it? But don’t worry. We’ll get out of here. We will have fun again. All right?”
“Yes.”
We stand leaning backwards into her hands which hold us in the small of our backs, as she kneels in front of us as if she wants to bury her face in our children’s loins.
“In all of this I never forget you for one moment. I’m so proud of you. Do you know that?”
“Yes.”
She kissed us and stood up and left without taking us with her.
What is most monstrous is sequence. When we are there why do we withdraw only in order to return? Is there nothing good enough to transfix us? If she is truly worth fucking why do I have to fuck her again? If the flower is beautiful why does my baby son not look at it forever? Paul plucks the flower and runs on, the flower dangling from his shoelace. Paul begins to hold, holds, ends hold of the flower against the sky, against his eye to the sky. I engorge with my mushroom head the mouth of the womb of Paul’s mother. When we come why do we not come forever? The monstrous reader who goes on from one word to the next. The monstrous writer who places one word after another. The monstrous magician.
When my father came in he was wound up in a parody of good cheer. He shouted a greeting, he was effusive. They had given him different glasses, with colorless plastic frames. His hair was very short. His ears were prominent. He wore grey pants and a grey shirt that was too big for him. Slippers and no belt. He looked very young. Smaller than I remembered him. Red of face. Insane.
It caused me terrible anguish, when I thought about it later, that they had to wear those grey uniforms. Why did they consent to being dressed that way?
“How are the two best children in the world! How are my favorite children in the whole world. Look at them, Jake. A million dollars. A million dollars. I bet they don’t know what I’ve been doing while I’ve been in prison. Do you? Do you know what I have in this box?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m going to show you. Watch carefully.”
He took from under his arm a cigar box held together with a rubber band, the paper hinge having torn in the way of cigar boxes. With a great flourish, like a magician on a stage, he placed the box on the table and removed the rubber band and slowly lifted the lid.
“See this? It’s my collection.”
In the box were dead moths, roaches, spiders, beetles, flies and at the bottom, under everything else, an enormous brown water bug with its legs curled up. “The insect world is truly amazing. If you just look at it you discover marvelous things.”
“How do you catch them,” I said.
“With a paper cup, that’s all the equipment I need. I hold it over them till they suffocate. That way they’re not damaged, although I can’t keep them from drying up. I can’t mount them properly,” he said. “They won’t let me have pins or cotton or the killing fluid. But I’ve petitioned, I’ve petitioned. Some of these moths are beautiful, look at this one.”
He held one brown and black moth up on a piece of paper. His hand was trembling and it seemed as if the dead moth were shaking, trying to take off.
“I hate it,” Susan said. “I hate dead things.”
“Now these are my roaches—I can usually find all the specimens I need.” He laughed. “But they’re very hard to catch. You have to trick them, you have to trap them. Sometimes it takes hours.”
He was alarmed at Susan’s reaction. He closed the box in the middle of a sentence. He stood up and walked around. He was flustered. He suddenly didn’t know what to say to us. He sat down and held his head in his hands and looked at the floor.
When he looked up he had composed himself. “You know, your mother and I figured it out—as the crow flies we’re not more than twenty feet from each other. I’m one floor below and one block over. And of course there’s a lot of stone and steel between us, but we’re that close. Poor Mommy. There’s no one up there with her, you know. She is the only lady. I at least have murderers to talk to.” He laughed.
He seemed to look at us for the first time. “You’re getting to look like me,” he said to his son.
“Am I?” Susan wanted to know.
“Ahh—you’re luckier,” he said with a smile. He held his arms out and pulled her toward him. “You’re the image of your mother. You’re beautiful like your mother. Jake!” he called over his shoulder. “Is that not an ideal situation? What could a father ask for but that his son take after him and his daughter after his wife. Is that not ideal?”
“Absolutely,” Ascher said.
“We are an ideal family,” my father cried.
He took some Baby Ruths out of his pockets and pressed them on us. “We just had candy,” I said.
“Save them for later, then. Save them for the ride.”
I as
ked him if he was ever allowed out of his cell.
“Oh yes, oh yes. Fifteen minutes a day I have exercise in the yard. I play catch with the guards. Or I run around. I find specimens there. I find my best moths there. You want to know all about it, don’t you?” He laughed and mussed my hair. It was the first time he touched me.
“Also I play chess with some of the other inmates. We make our own boards and paper men marked with the pieces they are. And we shout out our moves. You remember how I taught you to notate on the chessboard?”
“Yes.”
“I always thought chess was a waste of time. It is! It’s a terrible waste of time. I look forward to the baseball season. They’ve already broadcast some of the exhibition games of the Dodgers and the Giants. Over the loudspeaker. Are you still a baseball fan?”
I shrugged. It was a taste I felt guilty for having. He thought all sports a means of keeping people subjected. He felt loyalty to a baseball team was the worst kind of working class gullibility.
“Well, they’ll make one of me yet!” he said with a laugh. I was looking directly into his face, at his eyes made large and rude by his eyeglasses. He sighed, pushed us away, and got up to pace the room. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and jerked his hand upward so that a cigarette came out of the pack. He put the cigarette between his lips and lit a match to it and replaced matches and pack in his shirt pocket. He did all this with a practiced economy of motion. Yet I had never known him to smoke a cigarette.
“Time,” he said. “There’s so much reading you can do. So many exercises. You have to find ways to make it go past. To fill it. You know what I mean? Time which is so valuable—in jail you’ve got to kill it. But I’m writing a book. I’m making notes for it now. Lenin wrote when he was in jail. All of them. They knew how to make the best use of it. As in everything, model yourself on the masters.”
He sat down and grabbed me by the shoulders. He held his cigarette between his fingers and the smoke curled up past my eye. I noticed the ash was about to fall—if it did it would fall on my shoulder.