“You never told me about the swimming pool,” she said.
“What?”
“He was drowning and you saved him, and in the family pool. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What difference does it make to the case?”
“Simon, it puts you in her home watching over him. You must have . . . you had to have had permission to be there. What other possible reason could you have for being there? Best of all, it’s admissible for relevance, and it also goes to your character. It makes you a hero.”
“Hardly a hero, Gina.”
“Either a hero or psychotic,” she said, smiling.
“You can be both, in fact.”
“Simon, this is serious. When we get another jury I want to call him.”
“Who?”
“Sam.”
“No. He’s a little boy.”
“Simon, I really think—”
“Gina, no. Anyway, it was a long time ago. He won’t remember.”
“Simon, he’ll remember nearly drowning. Alex says he’ll remember.”
“No, I don’t want you calling him. I don’t want him involved.”
“It’s a bit late to think of that, isn’t it?”
“What exactly are you saying?”
“Simon, don’t be stupid. If Anna won’t get you out of this, her son can.”
Could I ever prove to Anna that my feelings for her are not, as Alex insists, elements of a delusional condition, a madness? The burden of proof is almost impossible to meet. Almost. Alex, my friend, you’re going to have to give her one last message. Tell her they wanted to call him. Tell her my lawyers wanted to call Sam. He would only have to tell the truth to be believed. This is a gift we adults don’t have. All he has to do is tell the court the truth, what he remembers, and then, according to Gina, the nightmare is over. But tell Anna I wouldn’t let them put him through it. Tell her that.
They drive me and several others back to prison. Five of us rattle around in the back. Three are talking, two of us are lost somewhere in the world outside the van. The walls have been cleaned but not properly. You don’t dare breathe deeply. A sudden stop or a pothole in the road and we are right back in it, maybe head first. How can I let Gina call Sam?
The smell of disinfectant punches you in the face as soon as you return. We are back later than normal. A jury took its time finding someone guilty and our transport was delayed. After being searched, I am taken, as always, back to my cell. The disinfectant smells stronger than ever. It tears at my skull. It will keep me from sleeping despite my exhaustion. The door is slammed shut, heavy, I close my eyes at the sound. No, Christ, no, not now. The Turk has found his way in. This has to stop.
“Nazim,” I whisper, but he doesn’t answer. He lies on the cot.
“Get out!” I plead. Why did he have to come here, for what? For company, for comfort, for sex, or did he come to be talked out of it? He came with a gift, the disinfectant. He brought a bottle of it with him, a gift both in the bottle and the lesson in self-sufficiency. You don’t need anyone else if you can swallow whatever life brings you. The Turk could. And now he won’t move. Say good-bye to me, you Fuck. No more afraid. Show you how. All good boys now, Mr. Greer. All good boys now. All good boys.
part
six
1. “Would you like to go first?”
I had to go first. It looked at the time like diabolically bad luck, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Sometimes they come in disguises. More often the disguises come first, alone, far too early and we have no choice but to inhabit them, grow older in them, get photographed in them for the glory of mantels and dressing tables, and then wait. We wait for the blessings to arrive and make themselves known to the disguises. I had to go first.
I stood up hoping that no one could notice the slight tremor that went from my hands to my notes. The tutor said I didn’t have to stand if I didn’t want to, whatever was most comfortable for me. I sat down again, cleared my throat, and began to read.
“When I was a little girl, my mother tried to make me believe there was something special about me by constantly pointing out that my birthday, the first of November, was also All Saints’ Day. For those not brought up Catholic, the Catholic Church celebrates a different saint every day of the year. Not only are there these three hundred and sixty-five saints, the ones mentioned in the official Canon, but there are several hundred more, many, if not most, of whom are almost forgotten. In addition, there are hundreds of would-be saints, or as my girlfriends at school called them, Saint Wannabes, waiting to be added to the list. I wasn’t very old when it occurred to me that All Saints’ Day was really a kind of catch-all day designed to celebrate all of them and particularly all the ones we would otherwise feel guilty about forgetting. I took this to mean that being born on All Saints’ Day did not at all, of itself, despite my mother’s protestations, make me very special.
“When I put this to my mother, she quickly came up with a new line of reasoning. There was indeed something inherently special about me, she assured me, because I shared my name with one of the most important women in the history of the world. My name, Anna, she said, was Italian for the name by which we know the mother of Mary. This new information did the trick, at least until my girlfriends and I started researching the whole matter of patron saints, particularly those who shared our names. Research at that time in our lives meant asking the nuns. Again for the uninitiated, patron saints are those saints who protect or have a particular interest in people in certain occupations, activities, or countries, or in people with specific ailments.
“It didn’t take long for Hilary and Clare, my two best friends at school, to eagerly get back to me with what they breathlessly described as their big news about Saint Anne. I should have inferred from their glee that they hadn’t discovered that Saint Anne was the patron saint of movie stars, supermodels, or pop singers. But being as yet unacquainted with schadenfreude, the feeling, let alone the word, I was totally unprepared when Hilary told me that Saint Anne was in fact the patron saint of housewives.
“Part of me didn’t believe it and part of me believed it enough to cry facedown in my pillow when I got home from school. I knew very little of the world, but I knew that the world did not revere housewives. My mother was one. I did not want to be a housewife. Further research confirmed that Saint Anne was indeed the patron saint of housewives and of Christian mothers, of childless women, and of women in labor. She was also the patron saint of miners and, interestingly, of Canada. My mother heard me sobbing in my bedroom and came to see what was wrong. That’s when she told me for the first time about an Anna slightly closer to me than the mother of Mary.
“On the day that my mother was taken to hospital by a neighbor to give birth to me, my father received a telegram from his family in Italy informing him in the stop-start language of telegrams that his beautiful sister, his favorite sister, had died. They named me, Anna, after her. My mother once showed me a picture of my father as a little boy with his whole family, back in the small town in Italy he came from. She pointed out the little girl that was his sister, Anna, who was beautiful even as a child, and promised to get me my own copy of the photograph. I somehow suddenly felt quite a lot better. True to her word, she had a copy made for me. I often look at it still.
“But my appetite for learning had been whetted. A few days later, I was delighted to discover that of the sainted namesakes of my two best friends, Saint Hilary was the patron saint of snakebite victims and Saint Clare of Assisi was the patron saint of television, the story being that one Christmas when Clare of Assisi was too ill to leave her bed, she nonetheless managed to both see and hear Christmas Mass despite its taking place several miles away.
“Perhaps it was because of this early delight with learning that I am now at university continuing my education. A housewife can never know too much. Thank you.”
I sat down, too afraid to look at anyone. I started shuffling my papers, relaxing only when the tuto
r said, “Thank you, Anna. Very interesting. Okay. Who’s next?” At least it was over.
Next came a string bean of a boy in threadbare corduroy pants with stubble on his face who treated us to an exegesis on his love of the movies A Clockwork Orange and Taxi Driver. The blessing came next, after the stubbled corduroy string bean. A young man, clean-looking, dark hair, unostentatious in his dress, whom I hadn’t remembered from the first tutorial the previous week, stood up and started talking, partly reading, partly performing, all without pretension, without ego. I had never seen anything like this before, not merely from someone my own age, but from anyone. I was mesmerized. The blessing was that I had gone first. I would not have been able to say anything aloud in public had I had to follow this young man. He was about to captivate the room.
His name was Simon. He stood up and began, “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.”
Then he paused, and nobody knew where to look. It was as though he had expected this because he let us sweat it out, saying nothing, waiting a seemingly predetermined number of beats before continuing, before letting the rest of us off the hook. Then he continued.
“This is surely one of the great openings of the last hundred years. It’s right up there with Kafka’s ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without him having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.’ But the subject of this professed autobiography was not a writer at all but a singer. In all likelihood, she didn’t write the opening lines herself and, anyway, even if she did, it was not true. Her mother was eighteen, her father sixteen, and they never married.
“Her father, himself a musician, abandoned most of the usual rites of fatherhood almost upon her conception. The singer was born Eleanora Harris. Her mother’s parents had never married, and Harris was her mother’s father’s surname. Her mother, said to have run a brothel, often sent Eleanora to live with relatives. At ten she was sent to live at the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls. Back home at eleven, she was raped by a neighbor before being sent back to the nuns. At twelve, a large full-bodied girl, she was herself working at a waterfront brothel where she distinguished herself from the other girls through her singing, sometimes to records, at other times a capella.
“Somewhere between twelve and fifteen she went to New York. This was in the late 1920s. Willful, intelligent, and high-spirited, she was never going to last long in domestic service—and with her mother’s tacit approval, she again ended up in a brothel. She earned her first dollar as a singer in New York singing Fats Waller’s ‘My Fate Is in Your Hands.’ She was then aged between fifteen and seventeen. It was around this time that she took her father’s surname, becoming known in jazz clubs, and subsequently in the world, as Billie Holiday.
“Because of the marginal position of jazz in our society, she is now probably better known, certainly to people born after 1970, more as an almost archetypal figure of show biz tragedy than as an artist. It didn’t help that her repertoire comprised what were then largely pop songs which, like most pop songs of all eras, were often churned out and never meant to have much of a life beyond a few weeks’ eager rotations on a jukebox or its successor. And to compound this still further, she was not in a position, at least in the early days of her career, to command even the best of these songs.
“Yet a few months before her inevitable premature death at forty-four, Frank Sinatra was moved to describe her as unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing of the previous twenty years. What was it about her singing that made him say that?
“Like Louis Armstrong, her idol and musical role model, she often took liberties with written-down melodies, modifying them in subtle ways, rendering them more emotionally effective and more her own. To some extent, she was making the best of a limited vocal range which, even at her most supple and robust, was probably never much wider than fifteen notes. Also like Louis Armstrong, she seemed to have an impeccable sense of ‘swing,’ frequently illustrated in her trademark style of lagging slightly behind the beat. Her chosen inflections became the standard way of singing most of her repertoire, much of which became the standard repertoire for all jazz singers because of her.
“But her musicianship was greater than the sum of its parts as these might be identified by a musicologist. What lifts her at her best above almost everybody else in her field is the presence in her singing of genuine emotion without artifice. There are musically purer, smoother, silkier, more perfect voices, but they don’t have the capacity to make you feel the singer’s emotional intention within the song as easily as hers did. And she did this with bright, up-tempo, happy, or sexy songs in the first half of her career just as much as she did with the now far better known melancholy songs she chose in the second half of her career as accompaniment to the alcohol, drug addiction, and the brutality of too many men.
“There are many senses in which I shouldn’t even know about her. I wasn’t born when she was alive, and am even too young to have been touched by the periodic resurgence of interest in her. Like most of you, I belong to a generation that, to the extent that one can generalize about these things, takes pride in knowing almost nothing about what came before it while so far offering very little of substance to the world from within its own ranks. Personally, I am suspicious of the schmaltz that so often lurks within nostalgia and—with apologies to the young woman who spoke earlier—suspicious of hagiography. So why am I talking to you about Billie Holiday?
“We were set the task of presenting a piece of our own writing on any topic at all as long as it illustrated something of ourselves. I think you can tell a lot about people from what is important to them. Do they like art? What kind of art? How much do they like it, and why? Where did the liking come from? Provide the answers to these questions and you will have gone a long way toward revealing much of yourself. Ultimately, for all the expert criticism in the world, the test of something as subjective as music or literature or even a relationship is, as E. M. Forster put it, our affection for it. And conversely, the test of us is that for which we have affection. That is why you are apt to get upset when somebody you care about does not share your taste in music or movies or literature.
“I have to admit to having seen photos of the young, cheeky, sassy Billie Holiday that make me wish I could have known her, spent time with her, warned her against all that was coming and protected her from it. Many of her songs that I like most are not the ones the critics praise. They were recorded too close to her death, and when I hear these songs I imagine taking her far away from the scene that was killing her and then feeding her, nursing her back to health.
“How much of my affection for her music can I really say is earned by the work and how much by the horror I feel at the circumstances of her life? To be absolutely, scrupulously honest, it is difficult to answer that accurately. Except to say that for a long time I knew and liked her music without knowing much at all about her life. The truth is, I started listening to Billie Holiday as a small boy because my mother liked her. It wasn’t that my mother told me to like her but that as I was growing up I saw the importance of this woman’s music to my mother. She has an illness that periodically leaves her bedridden. Listening to Billie Holiday makes her feel better; it always did. The first records I ever put on the family turntable were the Billie Holiday ones that I played for my mother. It was the only thing I could do for her.
“Unquestionably that adds to my affection for her music, but what about my mother’s affection for it? She knew very little of Billie Holiday’s life. When my mother listened to ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’ from her bed after I’d moved one of the speakers into the hall so that she could hear the record player, she had no way of knowing the shocking details of the singer’s life not long after the recording was made. Seventeen months after the song was recorded, the singer, emaciated and desperate for heroin, lay dying on a hospital bed. My mother would not have known a
bout this. My mother might have known about the violent men in her life but probably not about the occasional affairs with women. I doubt she knew about the prostitution. But I can’t be sure. You see, we didn’t ever talk about Billie Holiday in my parents’ house. Thank you.”
And with that he sat down. The girl sitting beside him must have wondered what she had ever done to deserve having to present her work immediately after him. I was sure that everyone else in the room was as impressed as I was, even if we didn’t all quite know why.
He had chosen Billie Holiday—a long-dead female African-American jazz singer, neither chicly obscure nor enjoying a return to anyone’s notion of the prevailing fashion, musical or otherwise. It occurred to me that the choice might have been dictated by his desire to impress the women in the tutorial rather than by his real interest in her. As against this, there was a genuineness about him that was manifest in his revealing references to his mother and, implicitly, his father and their relationship with each other.
I was impressed. I was intrigued. I wanted to listen to Billie Holiday. I wanted to hear what he heard. More than this, the way he had spoken suggested untried worlds way beyond my father’s ever-expanding bakery in which he baked biscotti, worlds away from my mother’s saints, worlds beyond even all the floors of the Sir Robert Menzies School of Humanities, the “Ming Wing” that housed us. This young man, Simon someone-or-other, was their ambassador. It was exciting to think of meeting people like this. But, of course, there were not people like this. There was only him. I didn’t know that then. But had I known, I would not have done anything differently. For all the calm certainty, the maturity in his language and delivery, his intelligence, and the unmistakable good looks they enhanced, there was a vulnerability and an honesty about him that I just assumed every woman in the room found irresistible. I knew I did even before he sat down.