In This Rain (6 page)

“I feel a press conference coming on.”

Ford nodded. “Edgar zeroed right in on the NY1 van. Kept him from buzzing around Sarah, though, so it’s not all bad. Sarah, she’s just staring out the window. Polite, thanks folks for their sympathy, then just sits there staring.”

“Sounds like she’s in shock.”

“She tried so hard, Ray.”

“We all do.”

“Is it worth it?”

Ray’s eyebrows rose. “Say what?”

“Trying so hard. Is it worth it?”

“Ford, son, I know I didn’t just hear you ask that.”

“The nights, the weekends, the meetings. Begging for money, begging for space. New programs, new ideas, new beginnings, new chances. And kids still go flying off roofs.”

“You can’t be the one to save all of them, Ford. That’s vanity, son.”

“But what’s the point, Ray? What’s the damn point? We’ve been bailing for years and the boat’s still sinking.”

“What are you going to do?” Ray asked evenly. “Just sit back and let it go down?”

“Of course not. I just— sometimes it’s hard to see how it’s worth the cost.”

“Cost?”

Ray waited. Ford didn’t answer.

“The Lord gave you work to do here, son,” Ray said. “You took it on and now you got to keep doing it until the Lord tells you to stop. Yes, all right, you lost T. D. Tilden. He wasn’t a child you could reach. But you’ve got kids here, now, today.”

Ray spoke quietly but he was a preacher: his words filled every corner of the room. As their echo faded, the out-of-tune sound of the chorus swelled from downstairs, children singing a joyous, unintelligible song.

Ford shook his head. “How did you do that?”

Ray grinned the grin that was as sunny as his white hair and the scar on his cheek was fierce. “That, son, was the Lord moving in a mysterious way. Now come on, we got work to do. We need to talk about this meeting tomorrow. You want me to be your moral mouthpiece, I got to have some idea what’s going on.”

Heart’s Content

Regularly, Ann had come to the prison to see him. She didn’t give a damn about the COs’ smirks, the lewd stares of the prisoners. Only when she heard them needling Joe— “Hey, Cole, too bad you don’t get conjugals. Must be hard, just sitting there with all that. Yeah, must be hard.” High-fiving each other for their wit— did her face blaze, and that was anger.

“I’m sorry,” she’d said to Joe, neither of them sure what she was apologizing for or what to do about it. And they’d done nothing, changed nothing. Until the morning, six months into his sentence, when he walked into the visiting room with his eye blackened, his cheek bandaged.

When she asked, “What happened?” he didn’t answer; when, sitting straighter, she said, “It was about me, wasn’t it?” he felt himself smile.

“It always is,” he said, and he’d bought them each a cup of poisonous coffee and they’d gone on to other things. But that day she’d left early. The next time she came she wore flat shoes, no makeup; her hair was braided and pinned.

But she’d kept coming. He’d told her she should stop. It had to look bad, he said; and she said she didn’t care how it looked or who was looking. “Everyone already knows whose side I’m on.” With a twist of her hand she dismissed the visiting room’s glazed tile walls and the bored guards in each corner, the convicts on molded plastic chairs knee-to-knee with desperately upbeat wives and girlfriends. “You think if I stopped now, they’d think I finally realized what a louse you are? Bull. They’d think I’m the type who turns my back on my friends.”

“You think they’re watching that closely?”

“If they’re not, why should I stop coming?”

He grinned. “Well, hell. You win. As usual.”

She hadn’t stopped coming. But her visits got rarer. (Among the population and COs this was noted and wisecracked on.) It was a mixed blessing, seeing Ann less often. That was because it had been a mixed blessing from the beginning, seeing her at all.

Any day, in policy, was visiting day; New York State would not be accused of keeping its prisoners from the civilizing effects of friends and family. But because the prison population was largely drawn from the city’s streets, and the prison was three hours north, most men had visitors only on weekends. And for most men, only one day counted: the second Saturday of the month, when their women (sometimes their parents, sometimes their friends, but it was the women who mattered, and it was the kids) scuffed off the bus the Department of Corrections ran up from the city. The women headed first to the washroom in the double-wide outside the gates. They changed diapers and scrubbed kids’ faces and repaired their own makeup, trying to hide the puffiness and dark circles that would betray them: how hard it was at the end of the workweek to wake before dawn to get the six a.m. bus, how hard it was to keep the four-year-old occupied and the baby quiet the whole trip. How hard it was to talk the sullen twelve-year-old into coming one more time to see the father he’d been dragged up here to visit half his life. How hard it was.

Joe, because he worked the grounds, often saw the women’s arrival. On the second Saturday he’d try to arrange his duties to be near the lot when the bus pulled in. One by one the women would step down, blinking. They’d peer around, getting their bearings. At first he’d thought it was the sunlight disorienting them, but soon he realized it was far more. Clasping the children’s hands, the women would head for the trailer with, it seemed to Joe, more determination than desire; but they’d emerge softer, in a different rhythm. Lips reddened, hair brushed and braided, they’d chat with each other. Old hands took first-timers under their wings: a lot of kindness there. They shuffled inside, to the lines where, though he couldn’t see it, Joe knew they were searched (clothing, mouth, and handbag, even the babies’ diapers) and then to the gates that opened and slammed over and over, as each woman with her children stepped from the other world into the men’s.

The men inside waited for the second Saturday; they called it family day. Aloud, no man expressed anything but indifference or a resigned indulgence. As though it were for the women and the kids; as though, inconvenient though it was, the men would let it go on. To admit to more would have been to show a weakness no one could afford. But you could tell: men who shaved only irregularly choosing that morning to demand a new razor; a shoving match in the breakfast line; envious eyes in the dayroom lifting from the droning TV to follow those men the COs came to fetch.

Things were tough for a day or two after the second Saturday; the COs hated those shifts. It wasn’t just the loneliness that crashed down after the gates slammed and the bus drove away. It wasn’t only the uselessness that some men felt, to see the changes in their kids just once a month, or once every three, or only in photographs because the kids had stopped coming. It wasn’t the awakened and unsatisfied lust that hung in the air like a storm waiting to break. Family day cracked the illusion they lived by. They were their world, all actors on the same stage performing for no audience. Family day parted a curtain they’d agreed to call a wall. It showed them the other world, the one they’d once been part of, and then closed again, leaving them to try to believe their own lies instead of remember.

Ann, of course, didn’t come on the bus. She’d drive up Friday night after work and stay at a bed-and-breakfast with a view of the river. She’d have a good dinner and sleep under down comforters and wheel the Boxster into the gravel lot on the stroke of eight. By her third visit the guards at the gate all knew who was coming and whom she was coming to see.

At first, Joe, like the other men, looked forward to these days. Except for his lawyer, he had few visitors. He discouraged everyone who offered, the way his mother had refused to see anyone at the hospital when she was dying.

He would have permitted Ellie, even after she divorced him, but Ellie wouldn’t come.

She did only once, early on. Out of what? Guilt, worry, some understanding that when roots are so entangled a true separation is never clean, is always painful, could be impossible? Whatever her reasons, he’d been eager to see her. He was still new, then, still trying to live as though prison were just another place in the world. Ellie’s brave face that day, her determined smile, the half-second pause before she spoke each time— each time!— were the tools that smashed to rubble the delicate structure of lies he’d built.

She hadn’t come back. There was no question of bringing Janet; Ellie said, “I’m sure you understand.” He wondered, if it had been Ellie where he was, he on the outside, would he have kept her daughter from her? But he did understand.

Janet sent him letters sometimes, and cards on his birthday, and she wrote that she missed him and in the beginning she probably did. Because she was so young her letters were short, and because she was living somewhere new they were soon filled with people and places he didn’t know. His throat would tighten at the way she wrote about friends and teachers without explanation, sure as only a child can be that, though he was away, he was nevertheless familiar with everything important in her world.

Ellie asked him to call not more often than once a month, to permit her to “build a new life” and “put this behind me.” Conscientiously she sent him photos: Janet in a party dress, or playing peewee soccer, or smiling with thirty other children in her class picture (in the back row, a boy looking the wrong way, his attention caught by something more compelling than the photographer; in his own class photos, that boy had been Joe). Ellie never sent pictures of herself and never spoke about anything in their phone calls except Janet, or some rational, resolvable issue related to the sale of the house, the division of the savings account; she presented these emotionlessly, and he was careful to respond in kind.

Though when, in November, Ellie told him she’d found a buyer for the house, he lost the thread of her words in thoughts of the plum tree he’d planted too near the door. Every winter, as its branches scraped the roof, Ellie was after him to take it down; he always agreed, but it blossomed so early that by the time the weather was good enough for cutting, the tree was too beautiful, and he let it stay. Would anyone tell the new owners not to decide about that tree until after they’d seen it flower?

So on family day he watched the other prisoners’ women arrive, bringing their children, and as the last of them passed through the gate he turned back to his work, stabbing his shovel hard into the rocky ground.

He’d tried to discourage Ann, too. He could have refused to see her. But she’d have stayed all day in the waiting room, talking with the women, giggling with the children, drinking coffee from the clunking machine. She’d wait him out, and if he didn’t break down she’d come back the next week, and the one after. She’d play chicken; he’d seen her do it. She’d make a fool of herself, challenging him to rescue her.

So he gave in. And though, like the other men, he wouldn’t have admitted it, at first he was like the other men, counting the days. But three things happened.

Ann’s visits began to loom like jagged rocks in the sluggish stream of his days. They interrupted the hypnotic flow, created eddies and undertow to disturb his dark slow progress. The unchanging boredom of prison days, often called a curse, was to him— to many— a secret salvation. Lose yourself in its seductive drone, stop tugging and straining to make the minutes move, and time passed more easily. It was the struggle that wore men out.

And though (or because?) his days didn’t change, he was changing. Or not changing: early on, one of the iron men told him that men in prison never change, they just grow more like themselves. That might be true; either way, it meant some things mattered more to him, and some less, some things were getting easier, and some harder.

The third problem with Ann’s visits was this: over the months the visits themselves seemed to fade, the way flowers soften and pale after they’re cut.

As the first year grew old, Ann would arrive, fresh and smiling, and then sometimes after “How’ve you been?” neither of them seemed able to think of much to say. Ann would tell him about places she’d traveled, things she’d seen. “The only white person besides me and Jen, in all of Matsumoto, was a sushi chef.” When she’d bought the new apartment she’d told him about that— “Unbelievable view. Small, but who cares?”— and he’d had to smile: her last place, where she’d lived barely three years, had no view. “But it’s huge, so who cares?” she’d said then.

“I give it three years,” he said, and she smiled with him.

But then what? What could they talk about? Office gossip? Everyone at DOI was keeping so clean you could probably eat off them. And a lot of Ann’s colleagues were people Joe didn’t know anyway: after his conviction, many people had retired at the new Commissioner’s strong suggestion, or left for the private world, where Hizzoner didn’t expect them to be better than the rest of us. Could he and Ann discuss films? He’d seen only what came to the prison, none of it less than a decade old. News? News stories came to Joe like moral-free fables from a mythical land. At first he tried, following national stories: hurricanes, blizzards; the Mideast war, surreal in itself; and local ones: the West Side stadium; the mayoral election; the Harlem 9/11 memorial, thwarted by schoolkids with “Save Our Park” signs. Ann got a great kick out of that one, a developer she hated, stopped in his tracks. “He couldn’t get in at Ground Zero where the big boys are playing,” she reported with glee. “So he wants to plant this thing in the middle of Morningside Park and Harlem’s supposed to fall on its knees in gratitude. Pompous bastard!” Joe wasn’t nearly as interested in the story as in the way it made Ann’s eyes glow and her cheeks redden.

Nor could they discuss cases. Scooping lo mein out of take-out containers, they used to argue, brainstorm, and decide: whom to talk to, whose books and files to examine, how to handle what delicate political situation. Like any branch of city government, the Department of Investigation was a small craft driven by political winds. Not that they were ever steered away from a truth they’d gotten close to, he couldn’t say that. But which truths were important to look for, and which questions didn’t need answers, was decided from above.