The Warden's Daughter

  Her hands fell to her lap. “I’m sorry.”

  Which struck me as a ridiculous thing to say. “Sorry for what?” I said.

  That stumped her. She turned more of herself from the typewriter. “Are you all right?” she said.

  I stared at her. I wanted to reach through the window and punch that nose. “Screw you,” I said, and walked away, but not before reaping immense satisfaction at the sight of her shocked-wide eyes and kidney-bean nostrils.

  I went from sign to sign, window to window. Public Defender…Roads and Bridges…Voter Registration…first floor…second floor…

  No Delancy Worthington anywhere.

  Still, the Hancock County courthouse was a big place, with hundreds of people….

  Next day at lunchtime I parked myself on the bench in the courthouse park. All trace of the note was gone. Someone came and sat at the other end of the bench, but it was an old lady. I stayed until the P&W clock said two. That’s when, finally, I cried.

  —

  She had done it with carpet yarn. The same stuff they made stringballs from. She did it from a water fixture in the women’s shower room. She must have done it very quickly and very well, they said, perhaps even practiced, because she was alone and unnoticed in the shower room for only a matter of minutes. Equally astonishing was the realization of how much yarn it must have taken to do the job for someone her size. Some speculators said ten balls’ worth. Some said fifty.

  I have little memory of the faces of others during those days. Dinners with my father were wordless. Same with Eloda and pigtail time. In fact, I found myself resenting Eloda’s hands on my hair. I wanted them to be Boo Boo’s. Death changes the angles. Suddenly I beheld a new truth: Boo Boo would have been the perfect mother for me after all.

  All the more horrifying, then, to realize that I myself might have driven her to do it. I could not erase from my memory the look of surprise and disappointment on her face when I told her that, no, I had not looked for “the Spootnik” in the sky.

  51

  I staggered through a fog in the days that followed. I did not aim to do things, go places, say words. There were simply random moments when the fog lifted and I found myself in the middle of a doing, a place, a sentence.

  Her funeral was at a church called Heaven Help Us in North Philadelphia, where a surviving sister lived. I didn’t even know I was going until I found myself pedaling in what I knew to be the general direction of the city.

  How did I ever get there? The distance must have been at least twenty miles. I knew neither the time nor the exact location of the event. How often did I stop for help? I recall only one face: a grizzled old man, skin so black it was almost blue, missing front teeth, a crusty fingernail pointing. And, as I rode off, his voice croaking: “You be careful!”

  As I drew closer, I began to construct a picture of the funeral and my place in it. I was nagged by a singular problem: How would I see over the crowd of mourners surrounding the grave site? I was a kid from Two Mills, white, not related, not a neighbor. I had no standing, no reason to worm my way to the front ranks or to be welcomed at all. And then a brilliant solution: a tree! The graveyard would have a tree. A climbable tree. Possibly mulberry. Near the open grave. I would look down from there. Best seat in the house!

  Spurred by my plan, I pedaled harder. I found the church. A lady in an office said the burial was “across the street, but—”

  I raced out the door, across the street. Gravestones poked above the ground, but nothing else conformed to my picture. No trees. No crowd. Unlike the St. John’s cemetery next to the prison, there was no grass, as if death were the only crop that would grow. The sky was gray.

  Five figures stood in a far corner. As I approached, walking my bike, one of them left the others and came past me: black suit, black skin, white collar, a nod, a smile. The minister. A couple of tire turns closer, I saw that two of the remaining figures stood back from the dark rectangle in the earth, casually postured, shovels to the ground like third legs: the gravediggers. The other two were women, in black, like the minister. One no doubt was the sister. They stood perilously close to the hole.

  Warily I walked my bike forward. Obviously I was late. The graveside service had just ended. No one had come to mourn but the two women in black. They did not speak. They did not move. Curiously, to me, they were looking outward, into the city, not down into the dark hole. The soft tick of my bicycle wheels sounded like a clock in an empty house. I stopped. All my chummy hours with Boo Boo in the Quiet Room suddenly seemed to count for nothing. I was intruding. I heard a quick scratch: a gravedigger had struck a match, lit a cigarette.

  A sudden breeze on my face. The day was getting darker. A trick of the wind, no doubt, but I thought I caught a whiff of strawberries. As quietly as I could, I turned my bike around and walked back out through the tombstones. I never got close enough to the hole to see the casket.

  —

  I pedaled home through a slurry of haunting images: a careening milk truck…four cherries half buried in whipped cream…Andrew on my bike between my arms…Boo Boo’s laughter…Annamarie Pinto’s mother checking out groceries at Fiore’s Market…my mother’s shoe…Boo Boo’s flashing red fingernails. I must have pedaled forty miles to cover the twenty. By the time I lugged my bike into Reception, Mrs. Butterfield was gone for the day. Al the night guard sat at her desk. Three other guards stood in a group. They all glanced at me, surprised, then toward the apartment. My father stood halfway up the stairs. “Where were you?” he snapped.

  I parked my bike behind the brass spittoon. “Boo Boo’s funeral,” I said.

  My father’s face softened. I could almost hear his undelivered lecture whistle from the room.

  “It’s dark,” he said as I approached him on the stairs. He took off my baseball cap. He touched my hair, my shoulder. “You’re soaked.”

  This was news to me. Apparently I had pedaled home in rain.

  It must have been a Monday, as Carl’s weekly pie sat whole and unsliced on the kitchen table. My pie knife and a plate lay beside it.

  Eloda was at the gas oven, turning a dial. I wondered what she was doing there. She was usually back in her cell by seven o’clock.

  “I’m not hungry,” I told her.

  She turned and gave me a look. “You’re soaked,” she said.

  “No kidding,” I said.

  Next thing I knew she was yanking my clothes off in the kitchen, muttering about kids this and kids that. I was an almost-thirteen-year-old girl, but I didn’t mind. I was numb to everything. She dried me off with dish towels and swaddled me in my father’s chocolate-brown terry-cloth bathrobe.

  That’s the last thing I remember of what one would normally call that day. The partitions of my world had already collapsed. If I had been in a prison of my own before, I was in solitary now. There are no days of the week in solitary, no neat squares on a calendar. There is no dawn. No weather. No window. There is no that, no then. Only this. Only now. Only light and dark. And even the light is dark.

  I must have gone to bed. I suppose I slept. But all I recall is the terry cloth heaping so cozy about my ears—so unspeakably unlike the brown robe of earth enfolding Boo Boo—and now I am sitting on the high counter stool and Eloda is behind me with comb and rubber band, so it must be another day. I’ve just polished off a cup of coffee. Nobody, not even my own personal warden, will deny me any request at this time. And now, incited by the caffeine, no doubt, I’m gabbing away, a regular Chatty Cathy.

  I’m telling Eloda about the funeral. I’m telling her about my hours with Boo Boo. About Boo Boo’s youth in the southern swamplands and her dream of a house by bright water and a life with Delancy and a bunch of kids. About her love of Scooper Dooper banana splits and my appointment as proxy and our sweet-potato-pie deal. And Eloda behind me is combing and listening, and now she is saying, “There’s no Delancy.”

  “Huh?” I say. I’m already floundering, so my bewilderment is merely more of the sam
e.

  She repeats: “There’s no Delancy, Miss Cammie. I’m sorry. There never was.”

  I turn so quickly that her hand accidentally yanks my pigstub. “She met him at the park at the courthouse,” I tell her. “On the bench by the cannon. He had a sandwich. She said, ‘Liverwurst.’ And ‘onion.’ He said, ‘What a nose!’ He works at Recorder of Deeds but the ugly lady won’t admit it.” I am strident. I am adamant. I know a thing or two about evidence.

  I see the sad, disappointed smile, the smile grown-ups use when they have to tell a happy kid or a know-it-all kid, Sorry, but you’re wrong. “She made it all up,” she says. I gape at her, at the sad smile. I want to punch it.

  “You’re lying!” I scream, and run from the house.

  52

  Eloda was right, of course.

  As information splashed over me, I was forced to acknowledge that most of what Boo Boo had told me was untrue. There had been no childhood in southern swamplands. No dancer. No roller derby. No circus handler. Contrary to her reports to me, she was not due to get out soon. She had at least ten more years behind bars. Whatever her crime was, it was more than shoplifting.

  Delancy was the last to go. I fought for him. I returned again and again to the courthouse. I pestered ugly women at office windows. I questioned county employees leaving work. I sat on the bench by the cannon, waiting, half expecting any moment to catch a whiff of liverwurst and onion, half expecting to turn and see him. The last time I walked away from the bench, I went to the courthouse terrace overlooking the park. From above I watched that bench, as keenly as any hawk ever eyed a field mouse. He never came. I walked away.

  Lies? Dreams? Delusions?

  I settled for dreams. I picked them off the floor and wiped them clean with my shirttail and tucked them into the pocket of my jeans. I made a pilgrimage—I walked, not rode—to Scooper Dooper and replayed the proxy, built the love bridge one last time. The last of the four cherries snagged on a sob in my throat at the table by the window. And I knew—I knew with a certainty that made no sense at all—that in some dimension, some universe that mattered only to Boo Boo and me, Delancy was real.

  53

  Solitary.

  There is no time. There are no stories. It is where moments go to die. I am flying over the street as the milk truck slams into my mother….The cordite from spent fireworks sweetens the air as I walk the night tracks with Danny Lapella….Stringballs soar over the wall at the end of the world….Snowballs splatter on a caboose….A gravedigger strikes a match….Helen and Tessa squabble at the badminton net….The brewery siren wails both forever and never, for it is both always and never noontime….

  Marvin Edward Baker understands. Ask him.

  I ride my bike farther and farther from town, keeping an eye peeled for houses by bright water.

  I wander the length of Stony Creek, from its feed into the Schuylkill all the way upstream to the State Hospital grounds.

  I prowl the alleyways of Mogins Dip, in particular the one behind the blue-doored house on Mill Street. Though Eloda banished Andrew from the prison, she never forbade me from seeing him elsewhere. But I have not. Why? Do I believe that over-obeying her will earn me some Eloda reward? Have I been afraid of tainting the perfect memory of our bike ride and that day with a new encounter? I don’t know. I only know that here I am, parked behind a telephone pole, spying on his mother in her backyard. I see only her head and shoulders behind a white fence. She wears the lemon-yellow wrap. She ducks and disappears for minutes at a time. Maybe she’s tending a garden.

  There’s a yelp—“Mommy!”—and Andrew comes bounding down from the back porch. He’s shorter than the fence, so I can only hear him. Excited squeals and jibber-jabber fly until he charges back into the house and the alleyway is quiet once again. I wait some more but he does not return. I pedal off.

  I watch the guys play baseball from the park boulevard beyond left field.

  I order a foot-long at Ned’s. Eat half and throw the rest away.

  I gorge on candy. Snickers. Mars bars. Milky Ways. Butterfingers. No Turkish Taffys or Sugar Daddys. They take too long. Candy cigarettes—I don’t smoke them; I crush them to powder in my teeth. Signs are beginning to appear on the streets; the planet-conscious sixties are coming: DON’T BE A LITTERBUG! I toss my candy wrappers all over town.

  I turn a corner. Danny Lapella is coming. I quick about-face and go the other way.

  Red fingernails gash my dreams.

  Scrapple scents the air.

  Milk bottles rattle.

  Children sass.

  Did you see the Spootnik?

  No.

  Did you see the Spootnik?

  Yes.

  What I’m bringin’?

  Carpet yarn to hang you from, my dear.

  The Corner…The Corner…

  I reach back. The pigstub…is different. My fingers are counting…one knot…two knots…When did it become…two knots?

  I do.

  I do not.

  I do not visit the yard. I do not look out the kitchen window. I do not climb the Tower of Death to the Salami Room. I do not ride past the house at 428 Swede Street. Light. Dark. Dark. Light. My ankle…I have just walked from the kitchen into the living room. I have cut the corner around the kitchen bar too short, brushing my ankle. I’m in bare feet and pedal pushers, forced on me in another life by Reggie. I look down. It’s gone: the scab. The scab from my bike spill on Oak Street. It was my last piece of Boo Boo, a reminder of my proxy at Scooper Dooper, our last day. I get down on my hands and knees. I search the carpet. There’s pounding at the door. I panic. The scab! Where is it? Pounding. There! I find it. I put it in my pocket. I go to the door. My name is screaming. I gather myself. I push the ponderous iron bar. It grumbles as it exits the iron cuff that binds it to the massive door. Bedlam on the other side. I mash down the iron latch. I’m about to open the door but they beat me to it. They shove the door with such force that I’m knocked to the floor. The Jailbirds scream down at me: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

  54

  They didn’t even wait for me to get up from the floor. They stampeded over me into the living room. Reggie poured 45s from her Bandstand tote while the others ran to my room for the record player. They plunked it onto the coffee table, plugged it in and started rocking to “The Twist.” Reggie yanked me to my feet and made me mimic her hip-wiggle moves:

  Come on, baby, let’s do the twist!

  I guess I knew it was my birthday when I woke up that morning. I mean, I must have known, right? I was thirteen! I must have known they were coming that night at seven. I must have known they were sleeping over. (I had invited them, hadn’t I, in that other life before Mrs. Butterfield said, “It was Boo Boo”?) Why else would they have come with bedrolls? Why else would the dining room table be so festively set, with our good silverware and at each place a little gold box with gold string tied in a bow? And a cake in the middle with my name blue-written in the strawberry icing: CAMMIE?

  Why else the big red shiny cardboard letters proclaiming YOU’RE A TEENAGER! strung across the dining room wall?

  Why else the piñata—piñata?—hanging from the living room ceiling?

  The evidence was clear, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: a birthday was happening.

  I guess Eloda had set the table and put up the sign. I guess Carl had made the cake. I guess I opened presents.

  No doubt I (the alleged birthday girl) was first whacker at the piñata. No doubt it gushed candy. No doubt we cheered.

  It must have been a night of laughing and dancing and scream-singing and cake and ice cream and thirteen candles and “happy birthday to you!” and cherry cordials (from the little gold boxes) and nonstop nonsense and mirth and on with the pajamas before it was dark and bare-feet fights and pillow fights, and I guess I had fun; I guess I was there.

  Or some proxy of me.

  The me that I was in touch with—the solitaire—the misbegotten misfit deep in her own black hole—that me—lo
oked up from her bottomless here and now and saw in the unreachable distance the merriment of a birthday party swirling around the funnel top of her funk. And who knows how long it would have gone on that way if the phone had not rung.

  55

  Reggie grabbed it. “O’Reilly’s Saloon!” She listened for a moment, then held out the phone to Glenda. “For you.”

  There wasn’t a peep as we all stared at Glenda Schmoyer and she stared back at us, her eyes listening. Early on in the conversation there were a couple of nos and a slump-shouldered “I’m sorry.” Then there was a lot of listening, an “I will,” an “I won’t,” a string of okays accompanied by so much nodding it appeared her neck was stuck at ON, then in solemn procession: “I will….I won’t….I promise.” And finally: “Good night, Mom.”

  Glenda was dazed. She couldn’t seem to find the cradle for the receiver, so she handed it back to Reggie.

  “What happened?” asked a breathless Donna Holloway.

  “Is everything okay?” asked Gussie Kornichek.

  Glenda sagged. She sighed deeply. For a moment I thought she might cry. “It’s my toothbrush,” she said.

  “What about it?” said Reggie.

  “I forgot it,” said Glenda.

  “That’s all?” I said.

  Another deep sigh. “My mother always packs my stuff when we go away. I asked her to let me do it this time. I”—she swallowed a sob—“I packed everything in my bedroll. I remembered”—she squeaked—“everything. Except my toothbrush.”

  “No big deal,” said Reggie. “You can use mine.”

  “Oh no!” Alarm flared in Glenda’s eyes. “I can’t use anybody else’s. None except my own.”

  “But your own is in your bathroom at home,” Reggie pointed out reasonably.

  Glenda sagged even lower. “I know. I guess I just won’t brush tonight.”

  Gussie said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. I ain’t sleeping in the same room as somebody with dirty teeth.”