In the Slammer With Carol Smith (21 page)

It’s possible I will leave a note for Martyn, giving him leave to print whatever survives. Because it is the history of my own survival, and I want somebody to know. And because the only way to thank the helper is to let the load be shared. As I have shared, if so weightlessly, the burden of his house.

All of that. And because I am saying goodbye.

So will end the case record? Except for the brief summary always demanded—
pro forma
is the phrase—of any ‘Worker’ going off case.

For that, Dr. Camacho’s U.S. mail cards will be ideal. Some faithfully written upon over the years but never sent; some still blank. Long out-of-date as to postage, but an extra stamp will rectify. Perhaps the obvious interval between the old rate and the present one will give pause to some. Yet though the public reports on me have long been accessible, my guess is that any who might collate those with my private story are few.

Once I might have wished for that. But the daily round no matter how minimal—does it shrink the ‘manifesto impulse?’ Or merely put it in scale?

Yet in the pile of newspaper, all in order by date, is one that came some days ago. When I leave will I set it on top? I don’t always read the paper through, but this account was front page.…

I
HAD COOKED
a meal for myself that night, excusing the formality, even laughing at myself, on the grounds that I would soon be back to scratch.

Once—there were tramps. They were considered part of the rolling stock of the nation. In those days they carried no ethical burden in their bundles-on-sticks. Riding the rails, they foraged and scavenged; in towns they were said to mark secretly certain backdoors as being easy handouts. Rollickers all, they were seen either as men who could not cope with the civil life, or chose not to. In turn, no one marked how it was with them when their time came to sicken and die. That was not in the legend.

My aunts’ cookbook had a recipe for Hobo Stew, a simple one-pot mess sometimes resorted to. My stew, cooked in Martyn’s one pot, was even simpler: canned beans, hotted up. But buying an onion to add is a domestic act. I had rarely cooked here, beyond coffee and tea. As in the pad, I have been reluctant to broach my usual outside diet—cold, raw, tinned, with take-outs in the dead of winter, and in summer a treat from a stall.

There’s no course of hardening for streetlife. It’s just that ease is too easy to get used to. If it’s not meant to last. Yet should sticking to principle bar enjoyment? I found myself cautioning: Carol, cozy up. In a minute I’ll reach for the folded paper brought in earlier that day, along with the tampons that are a luxury resumed. I enter drugstores easily now.

In the hospital they had issued us sanitary pads only, and afterwards I had continued to use those, out of the very habit of passive obedience the hospital both exploited and said they were trying to rid us of. In any event, under the pills, one’s period can vanish, or be scant. But I have apparently normalized in this area as well. So, like the man I glimpse now and then on my nights in the park, who has a cellular phone he beds down with—I join with modern equipment as I can. ‘Guy just handed me it,’ he’d told me. ‘Outside a Third Avenue bar I hang out near. Wanted it out of his sight; he can’t pay the rent on it. Neither can I. Maybe it was on a drug-gang hotline? So far, nothing on it. But the cops see me talking on it, I don’t get chased.’

Tonight I won’t be chased. Soon, at month’s end, I plan to be gone. Deserting those very seductions that have helped put me right. Back to those streets that most will see as what I can’t be cured of. But tonight—I’m thinking—I am cozy. Not doll-cozy, like a child. Adult cozy, in the housed style of those who are in control. The meal, however modest, is achieved, and full in the belly. In the small of my back is the ache-y release that comes from the menstrual flow. When the body, without theory, once more relinquishes motherhood. Surely I’m not brooding on that. Merely savoring the feel of that pseudo-child’s fingers in my own. Maybe no one has a true concept of what children are until you have one—and even then. What you need, Carol, is the larger view. So reach for it, your freebie newsheet. I do.

And there, on the front page, is our story.
Radical Fugitive Turns Herself In.

Which one?

Minna, the labor unionist. Who has plea-bargained, turned state’s evidence, or done whatever is professional.

A ‘bulldog’ detective is quoted. ‘“Never gave up on it. She was the mastermind. Others were just amateurs.”’ There hadn’t been much of a case to be pursued; why had he?

According to him, the owners of the damaged house—parents of Laura’s boyfriend, had refused to pursue, and had since died. Nor would the son-and-heir to the building cooperate. He and Laura had obviously never needed to go underground, having married instead. Interviews refused.

Another named suspect, our Doris, mother of two, was now in treatment for breast cancer, diagnosis poor. But it was Minna’s culpability that had kept him at it. ‘“Because of how she had snuck under, hey? Teaching our American children, pretty-please as all get out.”’ In an L.A. high school. ‘“Advisor to the seniors. Chaperoned them at the prom, no less. Top salary with all benefits.”’

But Carey, where is she?

She is there. Second Section.

Minna, that gray space of a human, is not, maybe by photographer’s choice. But Carey is. Full-length, in front of the hotel she was once hired to manage, and now owns.
Not In Bermuda
is the logo on the hotel’s tee-shirt she wears. ‘“We do that so as not to embarrass them,” Madame Fleurisse, as she prefers to be known, said mischievously. There have been rumors that she functions as a madam, but she denies the story as nonsense, alleging that for her customer-friends, some of them royal, there is no need. “They have each other.” The island where the hotel is located is underdeveloped, “And will so remain.”’

The language of her interview is as queenly as her foot-high up-do coif. ‘“If you’re said to be in that trade, might at least follow suit.”’

But the legs in the white shorts look the same. The two darkish children lean against her whites. A boy and a girl. ‘“I had a third, but it died.” Recently? “No—the first.”’

Their father? “An American. From Boston, out of the Bahamas.”’

I see her sobbing on my shoulder. Did she follow him? Or he her?

For there is money; the island is a fief. ‘“My inheritance.”’

From her father, the well-known diplomat? ‘“Good Lord, no.”’ From her mother, who has stood by her.

Dead?

‘“Indeed not. The children call her Nanna Dowager. The whole island does. My mother has come into her own.”’

Madame’s ‘husband’—or the father of her children merely?—had pleaded with her to bear his son and daughter on American soil. ‘“But of course I could not.”’ Or would not? Her reply: ‘“We are British subjects, all of us.”’ The children bear her name. Her real one. But of course, if there should ever be a need for her to testify in behalf of a certain party, she would come.

For Minna?

‘“You bats?” Madame replied.’

Then for whom?

According to the detective, there was a fifth young woman at first thought to be an accessory. ‘Kind of an innocent hanger-on. When the house went, we found out later she wasn’t even there. Did some months in jail though, had a breakdown later—we weren’t proud of that.’ Where was she now?

All parties had lost track of her. ‘“She traveled under several names later,”’ the detective said. ‘“Like she wanted to hide. Until there was a case, no need to keep tabs. So we let ourselves lose track. Do it all the time.”’

‘“We five were all innocents,” Madame Fleurisse said. “Minna wanted real targets. But we others just wanted to sign on. Maybe do a bit of damage. But not to hurt. And thanks to that accident—we didn’t. Yes, it was indeed an accident,” she said. “We barely got out of there. I’d been afraid that Minna and the others were centering more on target that day than we’d agreed. Central Park Fountain, actually. At midday. So I—well, in the scuffle it did go off. Lolly lost a finger, I understand—we fled our separate ways. But it must have been worth it to her. The parents wouldn’t go back to the place. She and her boyfriend rebuilt.”’

I can see them at it. The boy wanted us all out. We never even called him by name. He was just Laura’s. She would rebuild him as well.

‘“The one you call the hanger-on,” Madame Fleurisse said. “We kind of did it for her, really. Even Laura, who is a bit of a louse. Even poor Dora who’s not much of a—just a nice sweet love. And Emmy, when her mind was hers. Maybe even Minna, the party hack, though she meant to do it in that style she always socked us with—
Realpolitik.
We were all using that girl, in our minds. She was the only real cause we’d ever come that close to. So we used her. And lost her. She was the real bomb.”’

Had Madame Fleurisse any message for her co-conspirators?

‘“That is the message,” Madame Fleurisse said.’ But when asked the real name of the fifth woman, she would not reveal.

I am standing up. Reading that last, I stare into the photo’s eyes as if I can force it to say. As if those cool eyes could hear me call: ‘Okay, Carey, it’s safe to. Or if you’re just holding it in your heart to leave me be, wherever I am now. Don’t. Go ahead.’

Or if she can’t recall anything but the ‘Smith’? Not that hard to believe. Brought up by a string of short-term nannies who departed before they even got a suntan, she had their loose habits of endearment, calling me ‘Dickeybird,’ ‘Hop-to-it,’ ‘Peachblossom,’ ‘Thomasina Thumb,’ after all the books they must have read to her, hoping to stop her ears against the brute business in the room above.

‘It’s okay, if you don’t remember it. I’m remembering for both of us.’ But the photo does not reply.

I am still standing up. I don’t cry. Blood is running down my leg. That seems as it should be. When a message pierces like the arrow always waited for.

I am the bomb.

‘What is Lust?’

When the minister my aunts favored because he was more than a preacher declared that text from the Sunday pulpit the congregation was not alarmed. Taking it for merely part of his What is the Way? sermons, that had included What is Church? Charity? Family? Episcopal?—the answer to each being Love. However, the aunts, whose donations at times could be only stuffs from our attic that the minister’s wife did over for her blouses and his ties, had noticed at once that although he was wearing his robe, his tie was one of the loud ones from the local haberdashery. And in the vestry, in a meeting called for after the service, he did indeed reveal that he was leaving for a foreign mission, along with another woman, since his wife did not believe that either lust or Botswana was Love.

At the time, my eighteen-year-old body would have settled for any reasonable solution. I would discover, like many, that college was almost as good as a migration. There I learned that sex, even when restricted to two persons, could be engaged in almost as a communal activity. What else was group-biking to campsites just too far to return from that night, where after woodfire and song, boys and girls slipped away to become men and women. It was autumn, when at dusk the sun and the moon might both be in the sky, and for better or worse that would later be an image retained.

In prison, sex would come with a knife. In hospital, sex was forbidden, or frowned upon. In the halfway house, that boy and I had mostly swapped our woes. Later there would be a few dirty tricks in garages, with those who saw I was too beat to say no. In time, the medication, pushing me one stage past vulnerable, took care of me in its impersonal way. One is neutered. What is Lust, or indeed Love?

Whatever rages behind the tiny nipples of the queenly little creature who had been here—and who had given every hint that she expected to be full-size in the marriage bed and in child-bed also—has never happened to me. I have never been avid for one person. Yet I have hoped to hear from passion.

The virtue of the street is that you do not expect. I never looked that in the face before. And the political, even my young stance on it—can it so shrink the personal that you no longer dare?

Now another life is lapping at me, as if I loll in a nest of little animal tongues. And someone is avid for me.

Not strange that I believe this. Everything here is a bulletin board for him. His walls embrace me. The newspapers pile, like lazy or neglected conversation. Some talk we have already had, some we might. The paleface drums wait on call. While, in the bathroom, watched by those stiff half-ancestors of his, who whether they were the turbaned masters or their barelegged servants, were light-years apart from the mutton-chopped men and busked women who were half mine—I become the girl I might have been, wrapped lover-waiting, in her warm towel.

It’s there that lust overtakes me, cupping my hand to breasts ripe and comely, spreading my legs to empty air. My fingernails, sharpened to ladylike ovals, scrape the tile. I filed the nails to go with the bangle on my wrist, recalling how the giver had saddened at the sight of their blunt squares. In my ears the blood thumps, ready. I suck water from the spigot, smooth my hot cheeks with his hands, stand up, beating my head with my fists, and run from Martyn and myself, out into the hall.

That same night I begin sleeping in the bags hung there, one to a night, and night after night. For this I must give up my divided routine. I don’t find what I’m looking for. His smell.

When long after dark, some nights later, a letter is slipped into the commercial mail slot that all tenant doors here retain, I hoist myself up from the floor, where I have been lying face down, and walk on all fours monkey-style to pick it up; it seems to me that I am truly animal now. If one that yearns to speak. But I have not been idle here. Someone from the stationer’s, noting that I haven’t been by, will have brought the letter; I can guess who. When I complete the task that has kept me inside here, I’ll read it, as a proper end to that labor. The earliest clippings and the dustiest are at the top, far above those I’d read. That must have been the reason for the ladder hung in the hall’s dark corner, a homemade set of wooden rungs, but from its dust not since disturbed. I find these simple household actions touching; perhaps he would think the same of what is in my pack.