My urgency came from another source as well. When I’d seen the full load of love that Andrew got from his mother, I had not been jealous at all. Quite the opposite. What the experience had done was give me an up-close, eyewitness taste of what I was missing. I wanted it now more than ever.
But I’d been trying all summer. I’d tried being needy, to trick her into motherhood. I’d tried being adorable, lovable, grateful. I’d given her a diary. Called her Mother. If that didn’t break her, what would? What else could I do?
Nothing, as it turned out. For life, not I, was writing my story. When you’re inside your own story, you don’t see things like a reader. You don’t see your life in tidy paragraphs and chapters. What you see is a mishmash—no, scratch that. You don’t even see. You simply feel. And even then, it’s mostly a low-grade feeling, the flat doldrums of the routine, the everyday. And then, sooner or later, feeling spikes. The boring pool has become a raging torrent. Life is writing you in italics.
As I look back, that’s what I see in the final weeks of that summer of ’59: myself tumbling helplessly in a torrent. I cannot steer. I cannot control. I cannot resist.
But now, more than half a century later, it is I who holds the pen. I must decide where to begin the story’s final pages—the climax, if you will. It could be any of a dozen days, for events did not always follow neatly or sensibly. It was, even in hindsight, a mishmash. So…let’s say it began sometime after the day Boo Boo told me about “Spootnik” and called back to me in the Quiet Room, “You tell him!” Let’s say it began the day I heard pounding on the front door and found a suddenly rejuvenated Reggie beaming and shoving a big, glossy black-and-white photograph in my face.
43
It was Marvin Edward Baker. From the shirt collar up, occupying all eight by ten inches. Unsmiling. Needing a shave. Not trying to look good. Just happening to be in the same room with a camera. His black hair more plastered than combed, as if it had been troweled onto the top of his head.
“Where’d you get it?” I said.
“Times-Herald,” she said. “They make copies you can buy. I paid half a dollar. My father did it for a picture of me once.”
I glared at her. “A murderer. You paid fifty cents for a picture of a murderer.”
The look she was giving the picture was creepy-close to affection. “Not just any murderer.”
“You’re sick,” I told her.
“I’m going to frame it!” she chirped, ignoring me.
I pictured her bedroom walls, with framed pictures, mostly cut out from magazines, of Bandstand regulars and Broadway and movie stars.
“I’m gonna say it again,” I said. “Real slow. He’s…a…murderer.”
She smiled at me with great patience, as if I were a child. “Famous is famous,” she breezed.
I suppose on some level I dimly understood what was happening. The focus of her dream had never really been Bandstand or Broadway or the movies. It was fame. Fame its own raw self. If fame would not attach itself to her, then she would attach herself to it. In this my friend Reggie was apparently not unique. I dared not tell her what my father had recently revealed to me: Hancock County’s most famous criminal had begun to get fan mail of his own.
She was holding out the photo.
“Don’t give it to me,” I told her.
“I want it autographed,” she said.
“Huh? Why do you want my—” And then it hit me. “Oh no.” I swatted her hand away.
“Cam-mee…,” she squealed. “Just give it to him. Tell him to put ‘To Reggie Weinstein, with best wishes.’ That’s all. Well, and his name, of course.”
I started laughing, shaking my head. I couldn’t think of a word. “What’s worse than sick?”
She thought for a moment. “Grotesque?” she said helpfully.
“You’re grotesque.”
She flopped onto the sofa. She glanced about. She popped back up. She ran to the kitchen, returned with a saucer. From the waistband beneath her shirt, she pulled out a green pack of cigarettes. Kools. She produced a pack of matches and lit up right there in my living room. She dropped the spent match onto the saucer.
“I knew it,” I said.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m sick. And grotesque.” She jabbed the picture at me. “Just get his autograph? One little teeny-weeny favor for your bestest-ever best friend?”
In truth, I was not shocked by her request. Because I lived inside the prison walls, people often assumed I had greater access to the inmates than I really did. People seemed to think I roamed everywhere at will and played cards with them in their cells.
“Reggie,” I told her, “he’s in the hole.”
“What’s the hole?”
“Solitary confinement. Even other inmates can’t see him.”
She took a drag on her Kool. Her cheeks puffed. She swished the smoke about like a grown-up tasting wine. Apparently she had not yet learned to inhale. When she opened her mouth with a faint “puhh,” the smoke, with no push from its smoker, seemed to wander out reluctantly and loiter about her face. She steepled her hands in prayer. “Pleease.”
That’s when I noticed she was also carrying a ballpoint pen. But not her ever-present pink transistor. “Where’s your radio?” I said, trying to change the subject.
It took a moment for my question to register. “Home,” she said distractedly. Which proved how obsessed she was over the picture. “But you know people. Your father’s the warden.” She was whining.
I was fumbling for my next defense when Eloda came into the living room, pillowcase in hand. She had been changing my bed. She planted herself in front of the sofa. She ignored me. She glared at Reggie. “Put that out.”
Reggie blew a cloud. She gave a snooty sniff. “I’m a big girl. I can smoke if I want to.”
“Not in my house.”
No doubt Reggie was as shocked as I was to hear a prison trustee refer to my apartment as her house. I was delighted. Reggie’s point of view, predictably, was different.
Reggie casually tapped ashes onto the saucer. She stared pointedly at the pillowcase. “Well, I got news for you. It’s not your house.”
I saw Eloda’s jaw clench. Her fist tightened on the pillowcase. I’ll never know what might have happened next because I snatched the burning cigarette from Reggie and dashed it out on the saucer. “Yes it is,” I said.
What exactly did I mean by that? Even I wasn’t sure. But the words were out, in the room, as real as the ribbon of smoke curling up from the saucer.
And then Eloda was turning abruptly and heading back to my room. I grabbed the saucer and took it into the kitchen. I cleaned the saucer and dried it and put it in the cupboard.
I should have gone right back to the living room then. But I didn’t. That was my mistake. I went to my room. Why, I’m not sure. To put off returning to Reggie? To receive Eloda’s gratitude for defending her? If that was my reason, I was disappointed. Eloda was her usual workaday self, all business. She ignored me. I grabbed the other side of the sheet she was fitting over the mattress, intending to help her. She stopped. She sent me a huff of displeasure. Her hand went to her hip. “Miss Cammie—now who’s the housekeeper around here.” It wasn’t a question.
When I got back to the living room, Reggie was gone. I assumed she’d taken off. I was relieved. I hoped I’d heard the last of her Marvin Edward Baker infatuation. By now it was well after noon. I realized I was hungry. Even to this day I cringe to think what might have happened had I not walked into the kitchen.
44
Blame Gonzalez.
In 1909 a man named Gonzalez, an inmate at Folsom State Prison in California, was sent to the hole. After a week he couldn’t take it anymore. No human contact. No sunlight. But plenty of rats. It was driving him crazy. So he went on a hunger strike. Fifteen days later the prison agreed to his demands. Gonzalez was returned to his cell. By then he was famous.
Newspapers had spread the story about the Folsom hole dweller whose leg
s were covered in rat bites and who never heard another human voice. CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT crowed the headlines.
When my father became warden, he discovered his jail had a hole, an eight-by-eight-foot pocket dungeon of despair. It was unfit for rats. No one could recall an inmate ever staying there. No one could find a key to the door.
My father changed all that. The hole was scrubbed, fumigated, painted. A square of wall was bashed in and barred: sunlight! A new bed. New potty. New key.
Baker became the new hole’s first resident. A copy of the Times-Herald was slipped under the door every day. The guards who brought his meals were instructed to speak to him.
Though my father believed in humane treatment for all prisoners, this was not what drove his actions. He put Baker in solitary simply to keep him alive and healthy. (It’s now called protective custody.) So unspeakable was Baker’s crime that my father feared the window installer/murderer would never survive a day or two on the cellblock. The solitary, the homey “comforts”—all was done in order to deliver to the courthouse a defendant fit for trial by a jury of his peers. The warden wanted no hunger strikes on his watch.
So Baker had a good life for an inmate—as long as he was inside. But how to get him some fresh air? (“I need some fresh air!” Gonzalez had squawked.) My father sought the answer. Unbeknown to me, he found it shortly before the day Reggie showed up with her picture and ballpoint pen….
—
As I reached into the kitchen cupboard for the peanut butter, I happened to glance out the back window. If my eyes had had a throat, I would have choked. Reggie was down below, at the chain-link fence. Two guards with rifles stood in the exercise yard. At the far end of the yard, at the Marshall Street wall, a man in denim walked slowly back and forth. I didn’t have to be told it was Marvin Edward Baker. This, as I would soon learn, was Baker’s one hour per day in the fresh air. High on the wall, Jim was out of the guardhouse, on alert.
I stood at the back-door window, not believing what I saw: a sexy, high school–looking girl in short shorts handing a picture to an armed guard through the space between the gate and fence post…the girl with animated shoulders saying things to the guard I could not hear…the prisoner at the far wall stopping…looking…moving toward the fence…the second guard stepping forward…Jim on the wall raising his rifle…
I burst through the door and down the outer steps. I yanked Reggie from the fence. I yelled at the startled guard: “Gimme!” He gave me the picture. I shoved Reggie up the steps, into the kitchen, slammed the door.
“What in the name of God do you think you’re doing?”
She gave me her wide-eyed what’s the big deal look. “Getting an autograph on a picture.” She reached for it.
“Not anymore you’re not.” I tore the picture into a hundred pieces and flung them across the kitchen.
She stared at the floor, blinking those big, beautiful eyes. I thought she might cry, but she surprised me. She smiled. She gave a casual shrug. She wagged the ballpoint pen in front of me and said blithely, “Another half dollar, another picture.” She walked out of the kitchen and out of the apartment.
Five minutes later, I had just cleaned up the picture pieces when I heard the stomping of many feet on the stairway, many fists pounding on the door. I knew it was the Jailbirds. When I opened the door, they shouted in unison: “Snowball fight!”
45
On the other side of the creek, up on West Elm Street, was the icehouse. A wooden, green-painted shanty from another time, it had begun selling ice to owners of pre-refrigerator iceboxes and now supplied blocks and cubes for restaurants, caterers and backyard parties—and the hokey-pokey man. Mostly ignored by kids in the winter, the icehouse became fascinating in the summer months because on the back side of the shanty could always be found, even in August, a mound of discarded crushed ice, as if January had left a little bit of itself behind.
Within seconds we were girl-mobbing up Airy Street. Reggie was with us. After she left my place, she had bumped into the gang. She gave no sign that anything unpleasant had passed between us.
At one point the girls veered right. It was the natural way to head for Elm Street. It would also lead us to Oak and Cherry. The Corner. I felt suddenly sour, mushy. I couldn’t move. I called, “Hey, no, this way—I wanna go over the bridge.” Nobody argued. It was always fun to spit on cars below from the Airy Street bridge. Of course, they knew my mother had been killed by a milk truck when we were all babies. But they didn’t know exactly where it had happened. They didn’t know about The Corner or my lifelong dread of going near it.
When we reached the icehouse, we were thrilled to discover that the snow pile was undisturbed; we were the first kids to use it that day. We went straight to war: screaming, throwing, ducking, chasing. Mostly screaming. Our hands were soon bright red. We sucked our cold, wet fingers to rewarm them. The icehouse workers ignored us.
The small back lot of the icehouse ended abruptly at a bluff some twenty feet above the train tracks. There was no fence. We stayed well back from the edge.
We were about halfway through the snowball pile when we first heard the rumbling. It was faint, coming from the east. Five years earlier we would have instantly recognized the sound of a steam locomotive. Now it took a second or two to realize that it was the new kind of train engine, a diesel, that was heading our way. Instantly we forgot each other. Frantically we mashed and molded snowballs. We carried armloads to the bluff’s edge, just in time to see the flat iron muzzle poke around the curve at Elm and Astor. The earth trembled beneath our feet.
The train was endless. Coal cars. Boxcars. We had to keep returning to the pile to replenish our arsenal. We were merciless. No car went clacking on toward the park without a white splat. The caboose never had a chance.
There’s something special about the silence left in the wake of a long train. It seems at once an ending and a beginning—or, more specifically, a waiting, a question. As if the train is calling back: That was me. Now how about you?
Maybe that’s why I said it. I hadn’t planned to. I really hadn’t given the whole thing much thought. I hadn’t been counting the days. Unlike a lot of kids, I could wait to grow up. But there they were, words coming out of my mouth: “Hey, everybody—wanna come to my birthday party?”
Cheers rang from the bluff.
And again I surprised myself: “And a sleepover!”
As they shrieked and pelted me with the last of the snowballs, it came to me that I’d never made people so happy.
46
On the long walk home that day, I tried to figure myself out. I had never had a birthday party. Never really wanted one. My father usually took me to a Phillies game. Now I was having not only a party but a sleepover, too. (It never occurred to me that my father might not allow it.) Sure, I understood why the Jailbirds liked the idea of sleeping overnight in a prison. The thrill of it. The cool factor of being friends with the warden’s daughter. But now, quite unexpectedly, I was tempted to think it wasn’t only the warden’s daughter that they liked. I was beginning to think it was also me.
My own self.
Cammie O’Reilly.
As I approached the prison, Baker demonstrators were once again walking their signs back and forth. I noticed a new one: NEXT STOP—ROCKVIEW. I remembered what Marvin Edward Baker had been overheard to say, as reported by Reggie: “I ain’t never goin’ to Rockview.”
I was halfway through Reception when I was stopped by the voice of Mrs. Butterfield, my father’s secretary: “Miss Cammie?” She was holding something. It appeared to be paper, folded many times down to the size of a cigarette lighter. She did not offer it to me. She merely displayed it. I was puzzled. She said, “It’s from Evelyn Dunbar.” Mrs. Butterfield always used inmates’ proper names. Evelyn Dunbar was Boo Boo. “She gave it to Willard”—a cellblock guard—“to give to me. To give”—she smiled; she reached across her desk—“to you.”
I took it and headed up the stairs to
the apartment. She called after me: “Nobody read it.”
This was a reference to the usual practice of reading and censoring all inmate mail that came into and went out of the prison.
The paper I unfolded turned out to be two items: a note and a small envelope. The note was for me. It was penciled in big, blocky letters:
DEER MISS CAMMY
PLEESE PUT THIS ON THE BENCH FOR DELANSY
The envelope was sealed. I could tell there was a note inside. I wondered what it said. Was it something about the place by the water that Delancy was looking for? Or about the wedding? Or just some moony lovey-dovey stuff? I wondered why all the complicated plotting. Couldn’t she just say it to him when he came to visit on the weekend? I was too young to understand that leaving a note on a bench was far more romantic than speaking it in the visitors’ area of a county prison.
I didn’t go to the yard the next day. I assumed the bench in question was the legendary one in the courthouse park. I assumed Delancy still came out and ate his lunch there. I arrived at the bench at eleven-thirty. I taped the note to the seat. I sat there guarding it like a mother hen.
Arching over Main Street in those days was a bridge that carried the P&W high-speed trolley northward out of Two Mills. In the center of the bridge was a huge, ornate clock with Roman numerals—the town’s timepiece. I left when the clock said 11:50.
I climbed the marble steps to the courthouse terrace that overlooked the park. I leaned on the balustrade. Below, I could see the trash can, the bench, the white note. I could see the first of the lunchtimers emerging from the building. The brewery whistle blew over the town. More people were coming out…and that’s when I abruptly turned and walked away. My desire to catch a glimpse of Boo Boo’s boyfriend had been canceled by a sense that I was intruding. I had done my job and now I should just get out of there and leave the field to the gods of love.