21
The door was still open from Reggie’s departure. I climbed the Tower of Death to the Salami Room. I peered out the narrow window. Reggie was passing the courthouse. Her hand was going back and forth to her mouth. It was hard to tell for sure at that distance, but I thought: She’s smoking a cigarette! She turned left on Swede Street and was out of sight, heading for Main, downtown.
I went back down the tower stairway to the door I was not allowed to open. It was a curiously little door, no higher than my nose. It led to the battlement, a notched, narrow walkway around the base of the tower. The battlement was off-limits to me. I didn’t care. I opened the door, ducked my head and stepped out.
The outer wall came up to my waist. I walked back and forth. Or at least my feet did. The rest of me was in my head, the morning’s debris sloshing around like so much laundry in Eloda’s washing machine: glass on the laundry room floor…I’m going to Bandstand!…Marvin Edward Baker…mob on Airy Street…she’s in jail…Tommy D…bad is bad…she loves me…she doesn’t…sometimes I pretend…so, girl, you better…hell on wheels…firebug…she doesn’t…shut your mouth…she doesn’t…she doesn’t…
Was Reggie right? Was that all I was to Eloda—a way out of the cellblock? A nice, cushy job?
And of course, compared to an inmate’s usual routine, it was a cushy job. Or, as Boo Boo would say, “the high life.” So why didn’t Eloda try harder to stay on my good side? Didn’t she know the warden’s daughter had some clout around here?
And why, of all people, had I confided to Reggie Weinstein in the first place? Yes, she was beautiful. She was fun. She was cool. But did she wear the crown of Miss Sensitivity? Hardly.
How long had I been fitfully pacing the battlement? Suddenly a face was poking through the little doorway. It was Tony, the day guard from Reception, the first person people saw when they entered the prison. He always had a big smile for me. Not this time. “Miss Cammie, you need to come in off there. Right now.”
I didn’t argue. Tony explained that people were calling the prison switchboard. They saw someone moving outside the tower. They thought an inmate was escaping. Now I knew why I wasn’t allowed on the battlement.
I returned to the Salami Room. The brewery whistle flung its lunchtime bulletin over the town. I wasn’t hungry. Even if I had been, I would not have gone down. I needed to be alone in the one place in the world I could call my own. My attic. Where my feelings and memories and questions were stored. Where I could safely take them from their drawers and trunks and blow the dust off them and turn them over in my hands. Where I could grope for and occasionally touch the feathery outermost fringes of peace.
Why Eloda Pupko?
What is there about her?
What if one day she shocks me and says, Okay, call me Mom?
What then?
Will I be happy?
Me?
Happy?
Reggie…Eloda…my father…Is there anyone I get along with?
Ah—Boo Boo.
I sat on the flagstone floor, my back against the curving wall. I held my mother’s shoe in my lap. I read and read again the thin, yellowed letter of Thomas Browne to his Dearest Loved One. I closed my eyes and recited it to myself like a memorized poem. I fondled the phrases. Leave the memories to me….Do not allow your future to be plundered…the bad time is over….you must…
You must…
Why did it have to end there, leaving me alone with what was missing? What if Thomas Browne had finished the sentence? What would it have said? I could not banish the notion that it would have said something to me, something that would have left me standing gloriously clear and free atop a hill, all the burrs and prickles finally fallen from my skin.
Dust drifted lazily in shafts of sunlight. Through the sealed windows, from below, came the eternal din of traffic, the occasional human shout. Beyond…to the west…always there…The Corner…The Corner.
I lay down on the stones, a rainbow-haired rag doll for a pillow. I must have slept, for I know I dreamed, of a quiet room where milk fell silently from a wheelbarrow.
22
Next day everything seemed back to normal.
I awoke to the smell of scrapple.
I ate my usual breakfast. In the summer of 1959 that meant Cocoa Puffs.
When I finished my cereal, Eloda, as usual, was there to do my pigstub. We chatted as if the laundry-room mess had never happened. I even made her chuckle when I asked, “Is it ready for a ribbon yet?” If she had heard Reggie and me the day before, she didn’t let on.
I went down to the yard. I plunged into the mob. All the fuss, the touching, the lips and eyes of excitement—I let it wash over me, wash away the discord of the previous day. I was their tranquility pet. And the rope in a tug-of-war: Boo Boo wanted me for herself, and so did the others. This time they won. They had me till the brewery whistle sent them back inside.
After lunch I went to the movies. Attack of the Giant Leeches was playing at the Grand. That sounded pretty good.
It was. Monster leeches were dragging unsuspecting people down into their cave in the Everglades, where they slowly sucked the blood out of them. I was revolted and spellbound at the same time. Movies didn’t get much better than that.
—
Then came Sunday.
23
Except for the occasional Phillies game, I hated Sundays.
In my house Sunday did not mean church. My father had forsaken church after my mother’s death, so I never went to Sunday school. I first heard the name “God” in curses on the sidewalks and alleys where I played in my preschool days. I dimly recall once asking a playmate, Regina Shaffer, who this God guy was. I don’t recall her answer.
In the years that followed, from streets and school I gleaned impressions of God. He seemed at first to be a man, a really important big-shot man, kind of like a president but even bigger. God was like a coach, directing everything that happened on earth. Whenever I came across God’s name in print, the pronouns “He” and “His” came with a capital H. Not even George Washington could say that.
Another Sunday thing was angels. Angels seemed to be part human (they looked like us) and part bird (big white wings). They lived with God in the sky beyond the clouds, in a place called Heaven. They wore white nightshirts and no shoes or socks. That was about all I knew of angels until one day in third grade, when I was nine.
If you stood facing the front of Hancock County Prison, to the right you would see city hall, to the left St. John’s Church. Running alongside the block-long length of the prison’s west wall was the church cemetery.
On my way home from school I always took a shortcut through the graveyard. Sometimes I ran, weaving and dodging among the tombstones, pretending they were defenders in a football game. On this particular day in late spring, I came to a sudden stop on my way to a touchdown. A new gravestone had caught my eye. Unlike all the other worn gray monuments, this one was a smart, rounded tablet of pure white marble, like some front steps in town. I wandered over. I read the name on the stone:
MARGARET BIRD
I read the epitaph. When I came to the last two words—
OUR ANGEL
—the breath went out of me. Death? Angels? Heaven? Answers to questions I didn’t know I’d had were snapping into place.
Angels are dead people.
Who don’t stay dead.
Light from the radiant headstone blinded me, bathed me in a staggering thought: Maybe my mother did not come to an end at The Corner.
Maybe.
Oh, what a wonderful word!
I ran.
I raced from the cemetery, burst into Reception, blurted at Tony: “Where’s my dad?”
“Cellblock,” he said.
“I have to see him!” I was gasping.
“He’ll be out soon,” he said, much too calmly.
“Tony,” I screeched, “I have to see him! Now!”
He knew he shouldn’t do it, but I was the warden’s d
aughter. He picked up the intra-prison phone. A minute later another guard was opening the door. I dashed past him, through the anterooms (which he should have locked behind himself) and into the cellblock.
“Daddy! Daddy!” I flew past barred, gaping faces to my father at the other end. “Daddy, guess what—” I gushed, and stopped when his finger pressed my lips. He pulled me into an empty cell. He sat me on the lower bunk. He was not happy with me. We both knew I was violating the rule about not interrupting him at work. “Keep your voice down,” he said. “Now where’s the fire?”
“Huh?” I said. “What fire?”
“What can’t wait?”
I told him. It all came pouring out. Death. Angels. Heaven. Margaret Bird and the dazzling tombstone. The annoyance on his face changed to a flatness I could not read. But his eyes never left me. I had his attention. I took my best swing. “So maybe,” I said, “she’s in Heaven now. She’s still alive up there. You think?”
For a moment there was no reaction. The guard, as I was gushing, had backed off into the cellblock gloom. Then my father smiled at me. I had not known a smile could be so sad. He touched me. “Sure, Cammie,” he said. Just that. Then he waved for the guard to take me out.
Sure, Cammie.
The words followed me as the guard led me out of the cellblock.
Sure, Cammie.
I had never heard my name said so sadly. He was a terrible actor. He was lying. With those two words he knocked my barely hatched belief out of the nest. Angels were no match for my father. His “Sure” easily canceled my “Maybe.” If my father didn’t believe in angels, neither, at age nine, could I. I would not be meeting my mother in Heaven after all.
24
And so on this Sunday three years later, while other kids went to church and got in touch with angels and Heaven, I grabbed my bike and went for a ride. I think I did it to escape the mads. It seemed I spent half my life being mad at somebody. My father. Mothered-up little kids. Boys. Friends. Reggie. Eloda. The milk-truck driver. Even my mother. Had I spent all those Sundays in church, no doubt I’d have aimed my mads at the whole host of Heaven. An unhatched egg of knowledge deep inside me understood that mad is a monster that chews itself. But at age twelve, all I knew was that I needed to get out of town, put some distance between me and Sunday.
Despite Eloda’s forgiving demeanor and the adoration in the women’s yard and the movie’s giant leeches, I still felt rotten about Friday’s carnage. In the space of an hour I had attacked both Eloda and Reggie. Count the daily infliction of my sour temper on my father, and I’d abused the three most important people in my life.
I rode west through the traffic of town…Airy Street into Jeffersonville…the endless asphalt of Egypt Road…Trooper Road…onto the Singing Bridge, the river visible below the steel grating…on into the hills and history of Valley Forge.
I rode without stopping. I pedaled to the top of Valley Forge Mountain, circled the observation tower at the peak and coasted back down. I lost myself among the hills and endless meadows, riding roads whose names I did not know. In the distance I faintly heard the brewery’s lunch whistle, which never took Sunday off.
I rode and rode. Something in me wanted to keep going all the way to California. But I could not. I could never travel more than a bike ride from the nexus of my life, the seed from which I sprang: The Corner—the place that I could neither seem to leave nor visit. If I had any destination that day, it was oblivion. For in fact it was much more than the events of the past few days that had left me hanging from the hooks of guilt.
—
Accident investigation in 1947 was not very fancy. All that was known of the event came from the milk-truck driver himself, a man named Kirby, and a pedestrian half a block away. Their accounts were identical. Both told police that as the truck was upon her, my mother shoved the carriage across the street. Both agreed that the truck seemed to strike my mother at the same moment that my carriage struck the opposite curb. There the carriage stopped, but I went flying, presumably indicating the force of my mother’s push. I lay on the brick sidewalk, utterly unharmed, saved by my mother in every way—the push, the pink snowsuit that had protected me against winter cold and sidewalk landings, and most of all the unimaginable love that had hurled me clear of her last moment on earth.
When I became old enough to be told about the accident and to think about it, the question of blame crept into view. Such a tragedy had to be the fault of someone, something.
Was the driver to blame?
Until then the driver, Kirby, had had a spotless record with Supplee Dairy. There was no suggestion that he was speeding or careless. He wasn’t drunk. He was driving south on Cherry and turning west onto Oak. In those days not every intersection was a four-way stop. The stop signs were on Oak, not Cherry. So no, it wasn’t his fault. He did nothing wrong. Which apparently was no comfort to him. Before the day was over, he quit his job.
The truck was not to blame. The brakes were checked and were found to be working perfectly.
My mother? Was she to blame? Of course not. Like the brakes, my mother was perfect.
How about God? It seemed possible, until I pleaded my case to my father in the cellblock that day. When he dismissed the whole God/Heaven/angels thing with a shrug and the “Sure” he didn’t really mean, he deprived me of both relief and scapegoat. I could not blame Him.
That left me.
Was it my fault? Was I acting up, crying and fussing and distracting my mother’s attention from the oncoming milk truck? Or was it a more positive sort of distraction? Was I doing something adorable, tempting my mother to take her eyes from the street and to lean into the carriage and nuzzle me as the truck barreled onward? I did not know. I still don’t know. I never will.
—
Milk trucks rested in parking lots that Sunday as I pedaled to exhaustion over the hills of Valley Forge. In time I found myself, stunned and heaving, leaning from my bike seat on one foot. I was off the road, in the middle of a meadow, the bike wheels sunk in wild rye. I looked up. Hawks were circling lazily above me like winged kites, like black angels. In my Sunday state, I imagined for a moment that they had followed me from The Corner. I bolted from the meadow.
The hills were spilling shadows as I coasted down and out of Valley Forge, through Bridgeport, over the Hector Street bridge and back into town. As I held for a red light at Main Street, I heard something to my right: the sharp snap of a cap pistol, accompanied by “Pow! Pow! Pow!” A little boy, skin the color of a Milky Way, was terrorizing storefronts with a toy silver gun. He was alone, heading east. “Pow! Pow! Pow!”
The light turned green. I forgot about heading home. I followed the boy instead.
25
Why?
I didn’t know then. Don’t know now.
I footed my bike along, staying well behind. I didn’t want to spook him. Except for us, Main Street was empty. In those days stores were closed on Sunday.
He was tiny, maybe five. He wore a white belt and a holster that came down to his knee. Red bullets hung in loops along the belt. The red ribbon of the spent caps stuttered up out of the silver chamber and fell over his little fingers.
I found myself afraid that he might turn around, spot me, shoot me. But he didn’t. He was furiously intent on wiping out East Main Street. Philly Tobacco. Zummo’s Hardware. Linfante’s Zeps. The ramshackle sprawl of Chatlin’s Department Store. “Pow! Pow! Pow!”
He turned right on Mill. He was heading into Mogins Dip.
Mogins Dip was the black-only section of town. It sloped down from East Main to the railroad tracks, which in turn paralleled the river.
When I reached the corner, he was halfway down the block, firing along the row-house canyon of two- and three-story brick fronts. He pulled up before a house with a sky-blue door. For a full ten seconds he fired at the blue door. Satisfied at last, he holstered the silver gun and swaggered up the steps. And suddenly turned, spotting me five houses up. His eyes boggled. He
went for the gun, aimed between my eyes. “Pow! Pow! Pow!” He waited. It took me a moment to catch my cue. I produced an unconvincing groan. I flopped—shoulders, hands, head—in my bike seat. Dead. I even closed my eyes. I heard the blue door open and close. When I peeked, he was gone.
26
The next couple of days were routine. At ten each morning I visited the women’s yard.
Now that I had the key and could go inside with them, I took my self-appointed role as tranquility pet even more seriously. In my most deluded moments I imagined that the only thing standing between my father the warden and an epic prison uprising was little ol’ me.
Ha! Tranquility was nowhere in sight when I opened the gate each morning. I was mobbed. It was my first taste of mass popularity. They peppered me with questions: “Are saddle shoes still cool?” “What happened on Perry Mason this week?” “Tell us about Marvin Edward Baker!”
One day on a whim I took my hula hoop with me. They went wild. Someone different was hooping with it every minute. At the end of the two-hour yard time I didn’t have the heart to take it back with me. I left it there, a yellow toy on the packed gray earth.
I tried to give attention to everyone. I strolled about the yard, my retinue in tow. I said hi to the shy and the sullen. I stopped by Deena, sunning on her shower towel, and chatted for a moment at her black plastic eye cups, careful not to block her rays. I took a turn at badminton swats with Helen and Tessa. I was doing everything the Quiet Room did not.
I must have returned home each day reeking of cigarettes. There was no danger of smoking myself. Boo Boo had proclaimed to all: “Don’t let me catch nobody off’rin’ this here girl no cig’rette.” Nobody ever did.