“You don’t mess around, do you?”
“Know what they call me behind my back?” I said.
“What?”
“Little Warden.”
She stopped at the top step. “So is that—what—good?”
I laughed. “Oh yeah. It’s sort of…an honor. They like me.”
In the apartment, where hints of scrapple smell still hovered, she wet a fingertip and traced over my eyebrows. “Well, I think somebody else likes you, too.”
“Huh?” I said, swatting her hand away.
“That boy on the bike? He kept looking at you.”
“Big deal,” I said, and hoped the heat rising to my face wasn’t showing. “He was talking to me. Where’s he s’posed to look?”
“At me,” she sniffed. “But he never once did.”
8
Carl brought me a pie every Monday, before Eloda served supper. Carl was the prison baker. He had once been a master sergeant baker in the army. He was in jail for breaking and entering, but I saw him as my personal pie maker. He named his masterpieces. Peachy Geachy. Very Cherry. Lemon Boommeringue. Chocolate Cream Dream. I was never disappointed.
I set to my Monday pre-supper ritual. I lovingly sliced my pie—it was Blueberry Crumbbum—into seven identical slices. I put six in the refrigerator and one by my dinner plate. God help anyone who touched them. Thankfully, my father was a cake man.
Dinner this day was Swiss steak, mashed potatoes and peas. I spoon-pressed a hollow into the mashed potatoes and made a little brown pond with Swiss-steak gravy. I had been thinking of something for days, and now I just blurted it out: “I want the key to the exercise yard.”
My father stared at me, blinking. I loved catching him off guard. “Really? Why would you want that?”
“Dad, you’re always saying they’re not dangerous. Or you wouldn’t let me in the backyard with just the fence between us.”
He nodded. “True. But that doesn’t mean I want you in there. It’s their yard.”
“Dad—” I jumped up, ran to my room and returned with the latest copy of Corrections, a monthly journal for prison administrators. I opened it. I slapped it down in front of him. “Look.”
It was a two-page spread showing pictures of prisoners with dogs. The headline read:
PETS: KEEPING THE PEACE
My father looked it over.
“They help keep inmates calm. Less stress. Less problems for you. You’re always talking about that.”
He closed the magazine. “You want me to bring in puppies.”
I thumped my chest. (I could be dramatic.) “I want you to bring in me.”
He smiled, made a sniffy noise and went back to his Swiss steak. “I don’t think so.”
I hovered over him. “Da-ad. If dogs can help keep prisoners happy—”
“Peaceful.”
“Right, peaceful. If dogs can do it, imagine what a person could do. Especially the right person.”
“You’re a kid.”
Ha—he had just blundered into my trap. “Exactly! I’m a kid. Inmates think kids are cute, little, harmless—like pets.”
“You want to be the prison puppy. My daughter Fido.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. I hated when he did that. He was always turning my serious arguments into jokes.
I corked my giggles. “No! I just want to help.”
He looked up at me. “I know,” he said. And I could see it in his eyes—he did know. More than I was willing to admit.
“They like me,” I told him. “I’d be a good influence. Something to look forward to each day. And it’s summer. Heat means stress. Problems.”
“Stop looming over me,” he said. “Go sit and eat.”
I sat.
He put down his fork, looked at me. “Why do you think I added an hour to yard time? Why do I feed them so well? Or create a Quiet Room?”
The Quiet Room. My father considered it his masterpiece. It had a glass ceiling, like a greenhouse. There were plants and even small trees. The highlight was a mini-waterfall that fell three feet from a tin wheelbarrow into a plant-circled pool. It was supposed be a sanctuary for the inmates. A healing place.
Even I would not have said the following if I hadn’t already known that he knew: “Dad—nobody goes there.”
He didn’t argue. “Give it time.”
“No,” I said, “give me time.”
He pointed his fork at me. “Eat your dinner.”
I pointed my fork at his fork. “You haven’t heard the last of this.”
His eyes grinned. “Eat your dinner.”
In those days, at dinner with the warden, I had two modes of operation: verbal combat and sullen silence. On this occasion I was too charged up to be silent. So I changed the subject. “Okay, then,” I snipped, “what did she do?”
Predictably, he pretended he didn’t know what I was talking about. “Who? What?”
“Stop it, Dad,” I sneered. “Your acting stinks. You know what and you know who.”
He did know. Perfectly. The who was Eloda Pupko. The what was: What did she do to get herself in prison? I had been asking my father forever.
He said, “Her record is none of your business.”
“Dad—I know everybody else’s business. Boo Boo is a shoplifter. Carl’s a burglar. Tessa’s a drunk.”
He picked at his teeth. “They were. They’re recovering.”
I laughed. “Dad—Boo Boo? Recovering? From a cold, maybe.”
He almost grinned. “Okay, maybe not Boo Boo.”
“So—see? I know about them all.”
“Because they blab.”
“They blab to me. They tell me everything through the fence.”
“Fine.” He nodded. “So ask her yourself.”
“I did. She won’t say.”
He shrugged. “Then neither will I.”
I warned him. “I’m gonna pester you every day for the rest of my life. Is that what you want?”
He seemed barely interested. “Suit yourself.”
Exercise-yard key? Strike one.
Eloda’s crime? Strike two.
I went for the strikeout. With my father it was all or nothing.
“I want scrapple,” I said.
“Pig snouts,” he said.
“Scrapple.”
“Pig snouts.”
It was all he needed to say. A hundred times during the past few years I had demanded more scrapple. A hundred times he had told me that scrapple was made of pig snouts (it was—still is—but there’s lots of other stuff in it, too) and that no daughter of his was going to start out the day with pig snouts in her stomach instead of cereal.
“I’m not saying seven days a week,” I said reasonably. “Only three.”
“Pig snouts,” he said.
“It’s torture!” I whined. “Smelling it every day.”
“Put a clothespin on your nose.”
“I can go to the Blue Jay and get it there with my own money. They have breakfast all day. I can do that. Any time I want.”
“Go for it,” he said.
“I will,” I said. In fact, I already had. But it used up a lot of my allowance.
And then he did something unforgivable: he made me laugh. He said, “At least I’ll know it wasn’t my fault when you start growing a snout.”
I gave one of those sudden laughs that blow a booger bubble from a nostril. I quick used my napkin. I turned away so he wouldn’t see my face. Didn’t he know that making me laugh was the worst thing he could do? Not to mention: Strike three!
I slammed down my fork. “I’m leaving.” I got up and walked off. I got as far as the old RCA Victor floor-model radio.
“Camille.”
I stopped.
“Finish your dinner.”
I came back. I finished my dinner in less than two minutes. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t speak.
He pretended not to notice. He drank his coffee and flipped through the pages of Corrections. He wasn
’t fooling me. He hated the silent treatment.
And that wasn’t my only weapon.
I cleaned my plate. And I mean cleaned. I held it up to my face and licked every speck off it. He pretended not to notice. I got up and walked off for the second time. He called, as I knew he would: “You forgot your pie.”
I would not give him the satisfaction. “You eat it,” I snapped over my shoulder.
I stormed out the big door and up the stairs of the Tower of Death.
9
Some kids had tree houses. Some kids had hideouts. I had the Tower of Death.
I had been calling it that since I was little. How lucky was I! I lived in a hundred-year-old house—the prison had been built in 1851—that resembled a Norman fortress. The tower was the best part of it. Dark. Gloomy. A single lightbulb threw frightful shadows.
When I was younger, I climbed the creaking stairs with delicious apprehension into the Middle Ages. The room at the top was circular. From the battlement slots that served as windows, I pretended to zing flaming arrows into the hearts of attacking enemies. They screamed magnificently as I poured cauldrons of boiling tar upon their heads.
It was easy to imagine that the smoky, meat-house smell in my nose was that of battlefield slaughter. Above my head, hanging from the ceiling, were dozens of imported salamis. They were hard and black and long and evilly twisted and they made me think of lopped-off toes of hellish monsters. They came from Italy. The owner of DiRenzo’s Market paid the county an annual fee to store them here, in what I came to call the Salami Room.
As I got older, the tower became a different kind of place. The hangman’s noose, flopped in the corner, had become more than merely fascinating. Questions rose like dust from its moldy fibers. Was it ever used? If so, whose neck did the honors? Was death fast? Slow? Was his family there to see? His child?
Over the decades many other relics had washed on an upward tide into this jailers’ attic: wooden cabinets with a century’s worth of prison files, gas-lamp sconces, an old porcelain sink, a sign that said NO SPITTING, a zinc-clad washtub full of prisoner-made rag dolls, all with hair of yarn, the same yarn from which the inmates made rugs and stringballs.
—
I looked out the south-facing slot window. The invading hordes had vanished with my little-kidhood. Now it was the dusky rooftops of Two Mills that I saw, sloping down to the shopper’s feast of Main Street. And below that the long, red-tiled roof of the train station, where a Pennsy electric of matching red was pulling out for Philadelphia. Beyond came the river and, spanning it, the bridge and P&W trolley trestle: twin stitches sewing my town to Bridgeport across the water.
The slot window to my right faced west and the setting sun. As always, I was drawn to it. For from this vantage I could see The Corner. Well, more sense than see, really: gaps in the checkerboard of rooftops meant streets. Oak Street. Cherry Street. Oak and Cherry.
The Corner.
Where my mother had gently nudged my carriage—baby me throned like a potentate (or so I’ve always pictured it)—off the curb and into the street…
Where my mother stepped off the curb after me at approximately ten-fifteen on the morning of Monday, February 3, 1947…
Where the Supplee milk truck turned the corner…
Where the truck hit and instantly killed my mother, but not before she sent my carriage racing across the street so fast that when it hit the curb I popped out and went flying to a landing on the sidewalk in front of 203 West Oak Street—without a scratch, so abundantly bundled was I…
Where milk from broken bottles spilled across sidewalks and over curbstones and down the guttered hill: a thin white stream to meet the waters of Stony Creek.
Though I stood at the westward window, I resisted the temptation to look out. I could never do so without crying, and on this night I did not want to cry. I wanted to fume. At my father. At the world.
So I stalked about the Salami Room. I grabbed the hangman’s noose and pulled it over my head and mock-hanged myself, just to show him.
I punched hanging salamis. I grabbed stupid rag dolls by their yarny hair and hurled them against the wall.
I heard music. Little Richard screaming “Long Tall Sally.”
I returned to the south-side slot. The windows were sealed to protect the hanging salamis, but sounds from Airy Street came through easily. A long red convertible was cruising below. It looked like half a high school class was packed into it. Having a great old time. Not a care in the world. Radio full blast. When it came to the best line, everybody screamed along with Little Richard and threw their hands in the air, including the driver: “…he duck back in the alley!”
Over the red convertible, over the town and the river and Bridgeport and all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, I sent back a wordless scream of my own.
And then, even though I wasn’t at the westward window, I cried, kicking the wall because, once again, sad had displaced mad, and I had tried so hard to stay mad.
I retreated to the wooden file cabinets.
While other kids read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, I lost myself in the jailhouse histories of felons. The oldest file was for an inmate named Ebert Haverstack. It was dated September 1853. According to his record, Ebert Haverstack was in the pokey for “chronic and habitual theft of cow’s milk,” the cow being Ethel, owned by farmer A. Bechtold.
But on this day I wasn’t interested in Ebert Haverstack or any of the others, except one: Thomas Browne. I pulled his file. I sat on the floor, my back against the wall. The Salami Room, like me, was free of cosmetics. The circular wall was nothing but the inner surfaces of the stones one saw from the outside. Even in summer it was cool in the Salami Room.
Thomas Browne’s record dated from 1870. His crime was listed as “uncomplicated mayhem.” It was those two words that had first caught my attention. I had looked up “mayhem.” Basically it seemed to mean going bananas. I pictured Thomas Browne marauding down Main Street, his boots—no, bare feet, and he’s in long johns—careening through wagon ruts in the dust. Maybe he was waving a bottle of whiskey and insulting ladies with parasols. Or slashing the reins of hitched horses and sending them off to Philadelphia with mad whoops and slaps on the rump.
But it was the word “uncomplicated” that most beguiled me. My father had no idea what it had meant as a legal term in 1870. To me it came to suggest mayhem in its purest, rarest form. Perhaps only one such perpetrator per generation came along. Somehow I found that admirable—noble, even.
And all the more so when I read The Letter.
10
It was the last thing in the folder. The paper was yellow and thin and crazed like shed snakeskin. Thomas Browne had beautiful handwriting. He would have gotten an A in my Palmer Method class.
The Letter began: To My Dearest Loved One. That was it. No name. Was he writing to his wife? Sweetheart? Mother? I’ll never know.
The Letter went on: Many of my fellows here crowd the common windows by day, conversing through the bars with passers-by on the street. I find no need to occupy myself thus. I am content to mind my cell or stroll the yard with none but my memories for company. And what wonderful memories! I can not more strongly advise you—the bad time is over. Do not allow your future to be plundered by the past—neither the bad nor even the good of it. Leave the memories to me. I shall keep them warm for the both of us. As to your own dear self, you must
That was it.
As I sat cross-legged on the floor of the Salami Room, I asked for the hundredth time: Thomas Browne, why does your letter end so abruptly? Did the hangman come for you? (For mayhem so rare?) Did you get word just then that you were pardoned, and so tossed the letter aside for the embrace that awaited you outside the bars?
I lowered myself into the familiar words as into a warm bath. They rose about my shoulders, steeping me in a love so uncomplicated that it demanded nothing. Leave the memories to me.
I returned The Letter to the folder, the folder to its drawer. I pulled
open another drawer, the bottom one. I pulled it all the way, so I could reach into the space behind the files. I took out the shoe.
It was my mother’s. A light brown, low-heeled oxford. A plain and simple shoe. The kind of shoe a mother might have worn when taking a baby out for a stroll. It was on her foot when it happened. No one had ever told me so. No one had to. I simply knew it when I found it a couple of years before. I was snooping in my father’s bedroom closet and there it was, wrapped in a towel in the corner. I transferred it at once to the Salami Room. In the following years I never felt a moment’s guilt, only a dim surprise that my father never mentioned it.
I went to the westward window. In the dying light my eyes found the intersection of rooftop gaps that marked The Corner. Again I heard the rattle of the milk truck. I held the shoe to my heart and I whispered her name—“Anne O’Reilly…Anne O’Reilly”—and I cried.
Night had fallen by the time I came down from the Tower of Death. I went straight to the fridge. There it was, the same slice of Blueberry Crumbbum, on the same plate, covered in wax paper. I had known all along that he would not eat it. I didn’t bother with a fork.
11
We were in Charming. Where else? It was the only place Reggie shopped for clothes.
She was flipping through tops. Each one provoked a sneering remark:
“Groaty.”
“Nowheresville.”
“Barf.”
“Ugh.”
She wore her usual short shorts, white this time. White sandals. Black, collared shirt, tail out and knotted in front at the waist.
The rest of her was pink.
“Did you notice,” I inquired as I watched her flip through tops, “you’re pink?”
She glared at me and went back to flipping. “Not for long, Hopalong.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
Reggie Weinstein was cursed with the worst affliction (according to her) that a person could have. She was white. I mean milk white. Snow white. This was okay—barely—in December. In June, unforgivable.
She had never even noticed her whiteness until she turned twelve. That’s when she discovered tan.