Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (22 page)

I heard many of these names on a daily basis. It got to the point where I was given an incorrect full name, Arvin, and then an incorrect nickname for that name, Arvi. After some annoyance at the constant mangling of my name I’d begun to embrace the situation. It was like having fifteen aliases. My mysterious, protean name gave me a cloak of anonymity in the prison. I couldn’t be easily named nor easily placed. While it hadn’t been wise to give inmates my name for a shout-out, it was after all my
Avery
persona who saved the day. I knew that at some point, perhaps, I’d have to choose sides. In the meantime, though, my name concealed more than it revealed. In prison, this comes in handy.

And there were other cloaks one could wear in prison. There were, for example, ways to diplomatically use an inmate’s name without quite calling him by it. Buddha—whose actual name I’ve since forgotten—comes to mind. He and I hadn’t gotten off on the right foot. In fact, we disliked each other immensely. One day, during a lull, I leaned over to Buddha in the library and said to him, “So why’d they call you ‘Buddha’? Is it because you’re a man of peace?”

Buddha, clearly approving of this riff on his pot-inspired name, smiled widely.

“Arlo, man, you’re okay,” he said. “You’re an undercover
playa—
I like that.”

Jessica’s Portrait

It was in this undercover playa persona that I arranged Jessica’s portrait. I didn’t have to look far for an artist. Turned out Brutish’s filthy hands were also quite nimble with the sketching pencil. The portrait session was set for a Wednesday night in the library. I brought in some supplies: cheap and expensive coarse grain paper, colored pencils, charcoal, one of those cool, triangular erasers that is in strict compliance with the standards set forth by the International Ergonomics Association. While we waited for Jessica, Brutish told me that her drawing experience consisted mostly of sketches for tattoos. She specialized in skulls, she said, and was eager to “draw one with skin on it.” Everything was set.

There was only one problem: Jessica didn’t show up. I began to wonder if she’d changed her mind. A few minutes into the period, I noticed the officer on duty motion to someone outside of the library. Jessica had been loitering in the hall, hiding, too nervous to enter.

When Jessica walked in, the inmates hanging around the counter, the usuals, gawked at her.

“Whadaya lookin’ at?” she said, as she installed herself into a little niche at the end of the counter, between the wall and a shelf.

It was pretty obvious what they were looking at. If Jessica wasn’t quite made over, which would be a rather difficult enterprise in prison, she was dramatically touched up—and in a delightful array of improvised contraband cosmetics. Her hair, which usually fell in sorry knots just past her shoulders, was freshly shampooed, combed up into a cheerfully messy little nest, tied in place by a torn ribbon that looked suspiciously like the material of a prison uniform. Her lips and cheeks were rouged, too heavily, with some blood (which I prayed was her own). The eyebrows were plucked. The eyes outlined and lids shadowed jet black with an unidentified substance, and to Evil Handmaiden proportions. A flower—which, on closer inspection was construction paper and shiny gum wrappers carefully folded, origami-style, into six wide petals, symmetrical as a dahlia—was tucked into her hair. She looked pretty, and a touch loony.

The pièce de résistance was her aroma. She was generously doused in some designer perfume clipped from a magazine. These were known around prison as “smellgoods,” and prized by both male and female inmates for use during prison visits. Perhaps she hoped that some of that scent would come through in the drawing itself. She needed only a well-placed ostrich feather or two, and a crimson-dappled white rose, and she might have posed for Madame Vigée Le Brun in Versailles.

She didn’t feel elegant, though.

“Quit starin’,” she said.

Trying to keep things low key, I led her to a quiet spot in the book stacks—where I’d set out two facing seats—and produced the drawing materials for Brutish, who was thrilled to experiment with the new implements. There was a quick debate about the pose. The artist herself demonstrated one approach: chin down, eyes up, lids half-drawn, mouth slightly ajar. An alluring magazine cover shot.

“No fuckin’ way,” said Jessica.

She sat down and adjusted her makeup.

“I look okay, right?”

“You look beautiful, baby,” Brutish replied.

“This is a pretty big deal, isn’t it?” Jessica said to me.

“Definitely,” I replied.

I suggested she turn to profile, as though gazing out of a window. This was dismissed as artsy. No, she insisted on staring forward and smiling. I told her that looking happy was invented for snap photography. But she insisted. After righting her posture, adjusting her makeup yet again, and folding her hands on her lap, she produced a wide Christmas-card smile. Ten minutes into the session, however, her lips were quivering, the tendons in her neck had begun to strain, and her smile turned ghoulish. But Brutish carried on with surprising deliberation.

Jessica said she hoped her son would keep the portrait. Maybe he’d hang it in his cell. Or, one day, in his home. Maybe he’d make a tattoo out of it. Brutish told her to stop talking.

A Letter from Torchin

It took two more sessions to complete Jessica’s portrait. Then Brutish took it back to her cell and, with the use of a contraband sketching charcoal, touched it up. The next night she brought it to the library.

“Shit looks good, right?” she said, sliding it to me across the library counter.

I had to agree. The blend of features that made it unmistakably Jessica had been executed perfectly, and a tad favorably. The proud, firm tilt of chin; the premature jowls; the adult exhaustion under child eyes; the faint and not so faint scars; the subtle mischief implied in the eyebrows; the failed attempt to straighten the curl of sarcasm from the lips. The embellishments of makeup and hairdo.

She handed the portrait to Jessica, who winced at it, but said, “Looks great, hon, thanks,” and gave Brutish a big hug.

“I guess I can’t give you a hug,” she said to me. She extended her hand with a smile.

Jessica wanted to hold on to the portrait while she finished writing her letter. The letter, she told me, was to include stories about her family. About her upbringing. Mostly the good stuff, she said. When she was done with that, she’d give the letter and portrait to me, to give to him.

I wondered how her son would receive these documents. What would he read in the haggard, prettified face gazing back earnestly at him? How would the voice in the letter sound to his ears? His mother, a complete stranger—a prison inmate, like him. It was impossible for me to understand.

My closest approximation was to imagine how a child of Chris’s, Jessica’s grandchild, might eventually look at this portrait. With the remove of a generation, the experience would inevitably be colored as much by detached curiosity as raw emotion. In a small way, I knew something about that. As my mother had flown to California to be with my dying grandmother I had made a small discovery.

From the back of a bookshelf in my parents’ house, I found a one-hundred-page typed, bound volume titled Family History. For some reason this document had been collecting dust for decades without anyone bothering to read it. The document was a faithful transcript of interviews with the entire Eastern European generation of my mother’s family, my grandmother and her generation. It had been compiled by an older cousin back in the 1970s. I opened it up and was immediately engrossed.

I learned of the great feud between the rabbi and the mohel (the guy who does circumcisions) in Torchin, Poland, in the 1920s. For undisclosed reasons, these men hated each other. Their rivalry boiled over one day when the mohel, who also happened to be the town’s butcher, was called in to circumcise the rabbi’s grandson. He “accidentally” botched the procedure, setting off a small-scale civil war in the shtetl.

A generation earlier, my grandmother’s grandfather—my great-great-grandfather, Srachiel—had decided to travel to a new town and become a Hasid in the court of the Great Rabbi of Karlin. Srachiel had conveniently embarked on this spiritual journey after he already was married with two young daughters. When it became clear that Srachiel had no intention of ever returning to his family, his young wife did something scandalous for a woman: she traveled, unaccompanied, to the town where her husband was laying low as a saint-in-training. She marched directly to the Karliner Rabbi’s House of Study, a buzzing hive of busy Hasidim hunched over large volumes of the Talmud arguing with each other, and probably also occasionally playing footsie. This was not a place for a woman. The men stared as she pounded on the door. They told her to beat it. She pounded harder. They told her more forcefully to beat it. But she hadn’t made this epic journey to be turned away at the door.

She did what any half-crazed, goal-oriented person might do in that situation. She ran around the building, smashing every single window of the House of Study. This apparently got the attention of the rabbi himself. He invited her in and let her plead her case. The rabbi turned to Srachiel, the young mysterious Hasid, and asked him if it was true that he’d abandoned his wife and children. He confessed. The rabbi commanded him to return home and gave him a blessing that he’d succeed in business. Srachiel became a horse trader, the old world equivalent of a used-car salesman. Srachiel’s descendants still credit the holy man’s blessing for the triumph of their furniture store years later in St. Louis.

T
he stories in this little book were marvelous, full of adventure and details of home life, comedy and tragedy, narrated in a resonant immigrant English. My relatives spoke of their parents and grandparents, painting a vivid picture of family life stretching back into the nineteeth century. “He had big eyebrows and used to make bets with the grave-digger,” went one description. And another: “She was a big woman with a big coat and a lot of pockets. During the World War I, she would go around the front selling things from her pockets to both sides.” Everyone had a nickname. There was Yossel Angel of Death. Aharon Watch Out, who had a blind horse. When he rode the horse through town he’d yell, “Watch out, watch out!”

But most of all, this book gave me the singular opportunity to hear my grandmother talk openly. She spoke of her excitement and anxiety as a provincial girl going to the big city for market days. And of her love of weddings. She described in detail her sister’s wedding: the weeklong cooking preparation, the singing, the comedian telling dirty jokes—which annoyed her sister—the local children throwing snowballs in front of the old wooden synagogue. She could still taste the delicious fluden, which had turned out better than the strudel that day. She could still hear the rabbi singing, she said. My grandmother was not given to sentiment, and certainly not shtetl sentimentality. I’d never heard anything close to this from her. I was in shock.

She still didn’t talk directly about her experience of loss, about the photos in her drawer, or the family and close friends she’d lost in the war. But it was by far the most extensive version of her story that I’d ever heard—and in her own voice. For whatever reason, she had been more candid with a relative who was not linked to her children. Although my grandmother remained a mystery to me, I now had something tangible. This was the inheritance I’d wanted.

Now, after my mother had spent so much energy to forgive this complicated woman, and as she tried to let her go, my grandmother had given us something more. As she was dying, and her absence became literal—her silence absolute—her presence emerged, just a tiny bit more, in these few typed words.

Perhaps for Chris and his future children, Jessica’s letter would be something like that: rare and valuable words from a silent person.

A Picture of a Mailman

The cynical officer at orientation had said: “The inmates don’t go there to read
Moby-Dick.”
In a way, he was right. Jessica certainly didn’t visit the library to read
Moby-Dick
. But she also wasn’t there to cause trouble, as the officer had been suggesting. So why was she now a regular?

Jessica had told me she “wasn’t much of a reader.” But I could tell by the way she handled books this wasn’t quite true. Perhaps she had been a reader once and quit. Or had lost the ability to focus. She claimed to have read the back cover of almost every book in the library, but rarely checked anything out. And never, so she said, actually enjoyed the occasional book she did end up reading. She didn’t come to the library to find a book, but to search for one. She was an infinite browser.

Sometimes I’d join her in the search. Nothing that she came across, or that I could pull off the shelf, was quite right. I was drawn to inmates like Jessica because they were a challenge. I would try to find books for her everywhere I went, at bookstores, yard sales, on Amazon. I wanted to solve the puzzle. Where on earth was this unnamed book she was looking for?

Some books were close calls, but the one she sought remained elusive. Sometimes I wondered if maybe this book hadn’t yet been written. I suggested to her that she write it—some people wrote, I said, because the book they’d most love to read, that they
need
to read, simply hadn’t yet been written.

She just shot me a sidelong glance and said, “Yeah, right.”

And so the search continued. A few minutes later she told me that any book she’d write would be “too fuckin’ depressing for anyone to read.”

“That’s the American way,” I replied. “You tell people your horribly depressing story, and you feel better about it—”

“And they feel worse,” she said.

During one of these searches, I pulled a Sylvia Plath volume off the shelf. It was a book of Plath’s letters. Jessica told me she’d read it. Twice. Coming from an infinite browser, who was “not much of reader,” this was, of course, a significant comment. Plath was the only writer who held any interest for her. Apparently, Jessica, who trusted or distrusted authors based on their photos, had been willing to forgive Plath her 1950s Smith College cuteness. Perhaps this was because she wasn’t interested in Plath, the writer, but in Plath, the person. She was more interested in the private writings, those not intended for publication. The journals, the letters.