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.
The 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.
She wasn’t the only one. I had created a Plath shelf in the poetry section at the behest of Plath’s ardent fans—mostly among the women inmates—and reluctantly on my part, given the suicidal tendencies of Plath’s martyrdom-obsessed cultists, particularly those in prison.
I asked Jessica what she liked about the Plath letters and journals. She brightened up at the question.
“So much,” she said. “Everything.”
She began flipping through the book and for a full twenty minutes, read me favorite passages. She seemed particularly interested in Plath’s mysticism. She was drawn to a comment in a letter to Plath’s mother, dated June 10, 1958, that read, “had my fortune told by a subway gypsy whose card, ironically enough, showed a picture of a mailman and said I’d get a wonderful letter soon that would change my life for the better.” Fifteen days letter, Jessica said, flipping a few pages ahead, Plath writes ecstatically of wonderful news that she got through the mail. She sold two poems to the New Yorker for a total of $350. This, as Plath herself noted, was surely the fulfillment of the subway gypsy’s vision. As a Bostonian, Jessica was especially charmed by Plath’s comment that the $350 would be enough for “three full months of Boston rent!”
Jessica was also interested by how often, and how thoroughly, Plath wrote to her mother with good news. Every last cent she or her husband, poet Ted Hughes, earned from their writing was touted with an exclamation point, every good tiding recounted with dramatic embellishment. And yet, as amateur Plath scholar Jessica noted, her journal entries from the same period—sometimes overlapping the very same days as letters to her mother—told a more nuanced story.
“That’s always the way it is, right?” Jessica said.
One episode in Plath’s life made a particular impression on her. Plath and Hughes had found a dying baby bird. They tried desperately to save the badly injured creature. Plath became enamored of the “plucky little thing.” But in the end, they had decided to put the chick out of its misery. They gassed it in a box. The bird “went to sleep very quietly,” wrote Plath, “but it was a shattering experience.” Jessica shook her head when reading this.
“You know,” she told me, “that’s how Sylvia went, right? Gas.”
I told her I did know—comments like these from Plath fans were the worrying kind. But she was right, it was an interesting connection.
Jessica also told me that Plath had worked in a mental hospital, which I hadn’t known. “She was obsessed with this one patient,” Jessica told me, “who was afraid she was gonna give birth to an animal—like an actual furry little rabbit! Sylvia was into some pretty messed up shit, right? But that’s why I love her.”
Jessica had clearly given these books a serious read. But she was done with them. Back to square one, she told me. Searching endlessly for a book.
We continued browsing quietly for a minute or two. I pulled out some candidates. She unequivocally rejected them. And the process continued.
“I remember the time I laughed the hardest,” she said, for no particular reason, clearly absorbed in some private reverie. “Do you remember yours?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’d have to think hard about it.”
“I remember,” she said. “It was when my friend Billy’s casket was lowered into the ground.”
She gave me another sidelong glance.
“Pretty fuckin’ funny, right?” She said.
Billy, a friend from childhood, owed a lot of money to the mob. It wasn’t like in other neighborhoods, she told me, where they’d shoot you and leave you to rot like roadkill. In Whitey Bulger’s Irish mob, they’d kidnap you and that was it. You’d never be seen again. In the case of Billy, his mother was told to pay a ransom for his body. This was an attempt to extort money from his rich uncle. The uncle had refused to pay the ransom and so the body was never returned. The uncle, however, paid for the casket, which was buried empty.
“It was a bad day,” she recalled.
On that bad day, Jessica had started drinking again. She had been clean for almost two years, having weathered various storms of her recovery, including a friend’s suicide and her sister’s murder. But the pain was cumulative. At the wake, she got trashed on Jamesons and Long Island Iced Teas, and screwed a near stranger upstairs. Soon after that, she was using again.
Why did she laugh during the funeral?
First of all, she said, she was drunk off her ass. But it wasn’t just that. “It’s not that it was funny,” she said. But something about it, something in the absurdity of watching everyone crying as a big empty box was put into the ground. She couldn’t identify what it was, but something made her laugh.
“I dunno,” she said, “I was thinking, fuckin’ Billy probably’ll show up in back and say ‘fuck is everyone crying about?’ That’s something he’d totally do. We didn’t even know if he was really dead. It was crazy.”
As she was telling me this, and as we continued looking in vain for a book that probably didn’t exist, I couldn’t help but think of the absences in Jessica’s life. Those, like Billy, who were not there, but there. And her son, in the same facility, visible, but impossibly far away�
��there, but not there.
A Ribbon to a Stranger
Jessica’s portrait and letter. I was moved by this use of the library. So much of my job involved intercepting letters—a practice I hated—disrupting communications, trashing people’s written words. But here was a chance to do the opposite. To create a conduit of words, to connect people through a letter. Who knew what it would mean to Chris and Jessica? Maybe it would begin a new chapter. If not, perhaps one day Chris’s children would find the letter hidden in a drawer—as my mother had found her mother’s photos—or collecting dust on a shelf, as I had found my grandmother’s interviews on my parents’ bookshelf. In this way, they’d gain a tiny view, for better or worse, of where they came from.
A week passed. Then another. She wanted the portrait touched up more, she said. She needed to rewrite the letter. She apologized. I told her not to; she wasn’t doing this for me, she was doing it for herself.
Then she was gone, transferred to a different prison. She’d departed without saying goodbye, without leaving the letter or portrait. My first thought was of Chris. I’d told him—through a messenger; he never came himself—that I’d be giving him the gift from his mother. At first, his messenger had curtly informed me that Chris didn’t want a fucking thing from her and seemed justifiably skeptical of me. But a week later the messenger had come in asking for the letter and portrait. I’d told him it was on the way. He had visited almost every day for a week. I’d see him waiting patiently behind a crowd of inmates who had stormed the library counter with their requests. He had come for this reason alone. And every time, I told him the same thing: It’s on the way. It’s in the mail. After a while, the messenger had stopped asking me about it. He stopped coming to the library altogether. But still, I had remained hopeful.
Running the Books Page 17