The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

  * * *

  • • •

  “Cecilia is studying to be a doctor,” my mother told the Mortons as we waited for the ferry to depart. It wasn’t true: I had a master’s in public health, which my mother liked to think of as a stepping-stone to medical school rather than the beginning of a career in social work. When I told my father what I planned to do with my life, he told me not to blame him for the fact that I’d inherited my mother’s enthusiasm for impractical causes, but he sent me the money for the plane ticket.

  “A doctor,” said Nancy. “That’s impressive. Perhaps some of your drive will rub off on Sarah. She has it in her head to go traipsing around the desert for a year.”

  I looked at Sarah with real interest for the first time. She was rolling her eyes and twisting a strand of hair around her finger so tightly that her fingertips were turning red. We were built similarly, tits so that anything you wore that wasn’t a giant burlap sack bordered on obscene, but the resemblance ended there. She’d made a pillow out of her Vanderbilt sweatshirt and was resting against it, dangling one arm over the back edge of her seat.

  “Cecilia has always been good with science,” my mother said. “She gets that from her father’s side. I’d wanted to look you up for years, but it was Cecilia and her tech smarts that found you. I never had much of a head for science.”

  My mother was basing my scientific excellence on a ribbon I won for growing hydroponic tomatoes in the seventh grade, though I’d subsequently nearly failed biochemistry and dropped physics altogether. My father was a food critic who had recently been berated by a molecular gastronomist for identifying liquid nitrogen as “smoke” in his review. My tech smarts consisted of having entered Nancy Morton’s older brother’s name into Google. In fairness to my mother, we had, both of us, grown up without the ability to type someone’s name into the ether and receive an immediate report on their current whereabouts. I’d always known about her cousins, but only that year had it occurred to me that one of the great unanswerable questions of her life was now in fact answerable, and instantly at that. The internet did still feel like a kind of mysterious magic then, a new power we had all only recently been granted and were still learning to use. When I finally left the Bay fifteen years later—the nonprofit I worked for was shutting down and I was already barely able to keep up with my rent increases—I took a long walk through the hills and looked across the water at the city that tech rebuilt and tried to remember when I’d first seen it coming, when I’d remembered that all magic, all progress, has a price.

  Even at the time, the magic I used to get us answers had a trace of the ominous: it turned out that Nancy’s brother had been killed in a car crash three years earlier. Nancy and her family had been mentioned in the obituary. I’d offered my belated condolences and invited them down to meet us on one of the Alcatraz ferries. They lived farther north, in Sonoma, and after a brief hesitation she had agreed to drive down for the day.

  “Well it was different then,” Nancy said. “With girls and science. They didn’t encourage us much, did they, Anne?”

  “No,” said my mother. “No, they didn’t. Lots of things were different then.”

  An unsaid thing hung in the air for a moment. Ken Morton cleared his throat.

  “So,” he asked, “why Alcatraz? Lovely day for it, but kind of an odd choice.”

  “I was going to ask the same thing. Interesting place for a reunion. We’ve never been—just moved out here a few years ago and never got around to half the tours. I hear it’s beautiful though.”

  My mother looked like she might cry. Without thinking, I moved closer to her. It hadn’t occurred to me to tell them why I had invited them here specifically. I had assumed that they would know.

  “Didn’t you know?” my mother asked. “That Papa was at Alcatraz? That that’s why he—that’s why things happened the way they did?”

  A moment of surprise passed over Nancy’s face, and then she collected herself.

  “I had heard,” she said slowly, “that he had done some time in prison, and was never really—never really right after that. I didn’t know that it was Alcatraz. You know, I didn’t get to know him that well. Not like you did.”

  “I guess you didn’t,” said my mother. “Nobody else did.”

  My mother sat on one of the benches on deck and hugged her arms to her chest. I sat down beside her. I could tell she was trying not to cry. I put an arm around her and patted her shoulder gently. The Mortons looked embarrassed to be there, and then turned away to watch San Francisco disappear from view.

  * * *

  • • •

  Here is what you have to understand about my mother’s childhood: it wasn’t one. Her mother was the younger of Charlie and Louise’s two children, both raised on the seesaw of his impractical excesses and her Yankee frugality. At sixteen, my grandmother ran off to join a theater; two years later she came back with a Black baby. She stayed home long enough to leave my mother in her parents’ care and to meet a traveling salesman whom she ran off with a few months later. They never heard from her again. Some years later, the salesman sent a note with a copy of her obituary attached. When my mother was small, she and Papa would sit and make up stories about all the places her mother might be. Infinityland: somewhere north of Kansas, a place where you kept going and going but could never leave because it was always getting bigger. Elfworld: somewhere in West Florida, where they kept shrinking you and shrinking you and you didn’t realize you were an elf too until it was too late to do anything about it.

  For years they lived together in the imaginary places, a world you could only be kept from by enchantment, but as soon as she was old enough, my mother left and kept going too, left that house and let the business of loving the man who raised her be confined to telephone calls from faraway places. It was a decision that probably saved her life, and one for which she never forgave herself. I didn’t—and still don’t—dare compare the terms of my life to my mother’s, the stakes of my choices to hers, but I understand more now about how it feels to love the excess in people, about how knowing someone else’s love will consume you doesn’t make it any less real or any less reciprocated, about how you can leave a person behind just to save the thing they value most—yourself. Or maybe I understood it even then but couldn’t have told you how.

  * * *

  • • •

  Here is what you have to understand about Charlie Sullivan: his life at home as a child was bad enough that joining the army at the tail end of World War I seemed like a safer and more cheerful alternative. At fifteen he falsified his birth certificate and enlisted. A captain decided he was too scrawny to be sent overseas. Instead, he was stationed as a border guard, where he spent his days looking backward toward California because his orders were to shoot anyone coming from Mexico, and he figured he couldn’t shoot anyone if he didn’t see them. They’d given him a gun that didn’t work right anyway; it stuck sometimes when he tried to fire, which at first struck him as fortuitous. When it occurred to him that it might also be dangerous, he complained to a commanding officer, who told him if he wanted a real gun, he’d have to be a real soldier.

  Stop complaining, they said, and so he did, until the night he was cleaning his gun and it fired accidentally, putting the same bullet through his best friend and an officer who’d been standing in the doorway. It had happened that quickly, the blast of the gun catching his friend in midlaugh, then silencing the commanding officer’s scream. The first men to arrive at the scene had found Charlie sobbing over the body of his best friend, a nineteen-year-old kid from Jersey who wanted to be an architect. It wasn’t until the base commander showed up that anyone even suggested he’d done it on purpose, but as soon as he did, Charlie was led off in handcuffs, and the previous reports of his gun malfunctioning vanished. They sent him to Alcatraz where he was convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad. They dragged him out of the basement for his
execution twice, only to find it had been stalled. His appointed lawyer, an old army man who thought he’d seen enough evil to know what it wasn’t, wouldn’t retire until he got Charlie Sullivan out of prison. He managed to get sworn statements about my great-grandfather’s faulty gun, his temperament and friendship with the deceased, the medical report that concluded one bullet had killed both men. It was enough to get him pardoned, though he was still dishonorably discharged. The army would admit only to procedural error.

  When my mother left, he was alone with his ghosts. He didn’t have my mother’s patience for strategic approaches, didn’t go through all the proper channels. He called and wrote letters to the Pentagon, trying to get his dishonorable discharge changed to an honorable one, trying to get the veterans’ benefits he’d been demanding for forty years, trying to get a person instead of letterhead to answer him. He wrote to whom it may concern, but it concerned no one. When at last he got a personal response, a We are very sorry but no, from a Maj. Johnson somewhere, he dressed himself in a uniform he’d bought from an army surplus store, stood in the living room, and shot himself in the head.

  My mother was a junior in college then, already engaged to my father. She spent money they had saved for her wedding to have him buried properly. It was nothing glitzy, no velvet and mahogany, but there was a coffin and a church service. My mother and a sprinkling of neighbors came to pay their last respects. Nancy’s father was shamed into his Sunday best. He brought his children, including Nancy, but not his wife. They sat on the opposite side of a half-empty church. They didn’t speak.

  * * *

  • • •

  When I am angry at my mother sometimes, I tell myself this story. If you really want to know what the six of us were doing on a boat to Alcatraz, here is what you need to understand about me: at eighteen I’d joined a college literary club, whereupon we came up with the brilliant idea of tattooing ourselves with quotations from our favorite authors. Mine says The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. Growing up I watched my mother’s every strategic move with some mixture of awe and resentment. I watched her stand up to lawyers who were better dressed and better paid, to imposing men in uniform, to friends who begged her to let the whole thing go already. I wondered sometimes where she got the strength for battle after battle, but more often than not she answered my question for me. After setbacks it was my comfort she sought, my hand she held, and for every word of encouragement I gave her I found myself swallowing the bitter declaration that I had never signed up for any of this—not the paperwork, not the support, not the faith in the ultimate benevolence of the universe that she seemed to take for granted that I shared with her. And yet, faith like that is contagious: I greeted her plans to spend the money she thought was coming to us by donating a bench in her grandfather’s name to the city park with the wary reminder that we had no money coming to us yet; still I pictured him smiling down at us as we sat on it, the first generation in the family to achieve some semblance of peace. I rolled my eyes at my mother’s occasional fantasy of being sought out by her missing cousins, but I memorized their names in case I ever ran into them, regularly looked over my shoulder and peered into the faces of strangers to see if I could map out any family resemblance.

  Looking at them on the boat I’d summoned them to, I realized I never would have known them by sight; they looked like any other strangers. After my mother’s revelation, the gulf between our families seemed even bigger than it had been when we’d met at the pier. The Mortons didn’t talk much the whole rest of the boat ride, not even to each other. I sat by my mother and kept rubbing her shoulder.

  “This could still work out,” I said, even though I didn’t know anymore what was supposed to be working.

  * * *

  • • •

  Alcatraz loomed over us all, stony and angular with patches of green. My mother made halting conversation with Nancy. A woman in front of us pointed enthusiastically at the military barracks ahead. I looked up—rows and rows of matching windows, peeling paint that might have been white once. An old U.S. penitentiary sign had been affixed to the building over the welcome indians graffiti that no one had painted over. All that history, bleeding into itself in the wrong order. Sarah was standing beside me, focused on the same sign. She fished through her shoulder bag and emerged with a tin of mints; I took one when she offered it and chewed, feeling the little bits of blue crystal grind against my teeth.

  “Would you mind telling me what the hell is going on here?” she asked.

  “At this point your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

  “I thought this was going to be a joke or something,” Sarah continued. “I mean, who has long-lost relatives anymore?”

  “Didn’t you know about us?” I asked. I had known about them for as long as I could remember.

  “Not really. My mom was never that close to her parents. We saw them like every other Thanksgiving. Less than that once my uncle died. And then they died too. We don’t really even talk about them that much. Mom’s been weird lately. I think she was happy to get the call. Dad thinks this whole thing is a bad idea. FYI, he thinks you’re going to ask for money or something.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well we’re not.”

  “Didn’t think so.” She stopped to examine a purple flower on a bush, then snapped it off and twisted it between her fingers, staining them lavender. “My mom said something about a lawsuit.”

  “It’s over. And anyway, it was never about the money. It was about the fact that he never should have been here.”

  I told her the story my mother had told me, the faulty gun, the death of his friends, the rats, his suicide.

  “Fuck,” she said, and we were quiet the rest of the way up.

  * * *

  • • •

  When we caught up with our parents, I found my mother still listing slightly exaggerated versions of my accomplishments. It was the kind of subtle inflation of the truth you’d find in a family’s annual holiday newsletter, but it made me angry. It wasn’t that I doubted she was proud of me—her faith in me, I knew, was boundless. It was their faith in me she didn’t trust, and I didn’t like it, the way a group of strangers had the power to shake my mother’s confidence. I had orchestrated the visit confident that my mother’s cousin would be grateful for the chance to make amends, that she and her family would be eager to prove themselves better than the people who raised her. It had honestly not occurred to me that my mother and I would have to make a case for ourselves, that conditions could possibly be such that we were the ones who were supposed to impress them.

  “You don’t have to treat them like they’re visiting royalty,” I muttered to my mother as we approached the entrance of the main prison building. “They’re just people.”

  “I’m treating them like they’re people. They aren’t props, Cecilia. You can’t just order them to show up and expect the rest to take care of itself. But don’t worry, keep up the attitude and no amount of convincing will make them like you. Be exactly what they were expecting, if that makes you happy.”

  I sulked behind my mother as we collected our headphones and prepared for the tour. The main prison building was dim, dingy, with anachronistically fresh green and gray paint. We walked into a room of mock visiting windows, glass with holes cut out for human contact. A small girl in pink overalls sat at one of the windows, tapping the glass and frowning at the dead black telephone she held against her ear, seeming genuinely confused by the absence of a voice on the other end. My mother took a breath and walked through the entryway. Rows and rows of prison bars greeted us. A family in front of us stretched out their souvenir map and tried to locate Al Capone’s cell. I put one side of my headset over my ear and let the other headphone rest just behind the other ear, in case I needed to hear something more interesting. What I heard was Kelli.

  “Eewwwwww,” she said to the exposed cell toilet, littered with tourist trash: cigaret
te butts and crumpled pieces of paper.

  “Shut up and stop being an idiot, Kelli,” said Sarah, which I appreciated until it was silent because no one could think of anything to say that wasn’t idiotic. I put both headphones over my ears. You are entitled to food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention. Everything else is a privilege. I examined a scuff mark on the floor, noted how many people must have walked over this same ground, paid for the luxury of being reminded what privileges were. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live underneath it. Turn left to see the gun gallery, my audio guide informed me, then provided me with the sound of a smattering of rifle fire rat-a-tat-tat, in case, I suppose, I didn’t know what a gun was.

  I did know, and I knew my mother did too, knew she’d replayed Papa’s last minutes over and over again in her head. I had sat with her when she woke up screaming from nightmares about it, or from the old nightmare, the one she inherited from him, the bullet flying from his gun, ripping through his bunkmate, going straight through whoever else appeared in the dream and tried to stop it. She kept the gun he shot himself with. It was locked in a case in our basement somewhere, unloaded. I had my own nightmares sometimes. I slept quietly, but not well. Lately I’d been dreaming I got a phone call like my mother had. I’d been having her nightmare, only this time it was her with the gun to her head, and I never woke up in time to save her.

  Nothing was working out the way I’d wanted it to. Ken Morton was still walking around with his hands in his pockets, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. Nancy Morton and my mother were still making tentative small talk about Sarah and Kelli and me and the weather. Kelli had surreptitiously placed her iPod earbuds under the audio tour headphones and was humming a pop song and making eyes at a spiky-haired boy who was taking the tour with his family. Sarah had pulled out a notebook. I tried to peer over her shoulder to read it, but her handwriting was illegible. No one was taking this seriously enough. Even the site itself seemed like a cheap approximation of the sacred ground I’d been expecting. It was more national park than anything else, dozens of people with sunglasses in their pockets clutching souvenir photos of themselves in the mock gallows and checking their watches to make sure they had left enough time for a picnic lunch. Loud talking, shouting, whistling, singing, or other unnecessary noises are prohibited, said the automated tour guide. I took my headphones off altogether. Kids ran by, giggling, their parents calling after them. A group of women in matching purple sun visors kept loudly asking questions of one another although it was clear none of them knew the answers.