We were back at the Irving Place bar. Billie Holiday was singing in the background again.
“Still, you’ll be back,” he said, and sipped his drink smugly, though he looked a little unsure, a little battered. Sam Glass had been on a rough ride too. He was used to an easier time of it with women, I thought.
“Not if I can help it,” I said.
A sad pause descended and I looked fondly at him, slumped a little, across the table. I swallowed some of my martini and coughed.
“But I have to admit, Sam. I have learned a lot from you.”
He perked up.
“About editing,” I added, too late.
He laughed. “I am an amazing teacher,” he said. “Utterly amazing. I’m good at what I do—if I’d chosen any other field I’d be the top executive, no question. You know, head of IBM or something. As it is, I have to be content with being the best literary editor ever.”
He lifted his glass and toasted himself, his Artful Dodger grin on his face. Looking at him, I thought: I will always remember Sam Glass this way.
I went back to our apartment to collect my mail. There was a letter from Kyrilikov, who’d gone to Venice for a quick vacation. In the letter, he wrote (in near-perfect English—the clarity of his writing exceeded that of his speech at this point) how the work of the best poets seemed to be written by beings who were no longer people. Later in the letter he wrote that a writer is himself “a superb metaphor of the human condition.” I put down the page and thought about how a writer could be herself a metaphor. Kyrilikov’s final thought was that because a writer was a metaphor for other humans beings, what he had to say about prison “should be of great interest to those who fancy themselves free.”
I was still in our apartment, sitting at my desk, when K.B. called. I picked up the phone and I knew he was there, on the line, though he was silent. Then he cleared his throat. I could hear him trying to decide how to tell me, what words to use. I felt the planet, the star, shift. “They have made this star unsafe.” This is the silence, I thought, on the slaughterhouse floor, this is the silence after the bloodbath.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Please, just say it. Jesus Christ, Kenny. Say it.”
“I was there, I was right there, Holly. Five minutes earlier and I might have been able to save her. I stopped to check on one inmate at C-76 and then I went right over to the Women’s House. I got inside and there was a lot of commotion. Everyone shouting that there’d been a hang-up.
“Holly, she took the classic out—she tore up her bedsheets and tied them to a ventilator grate. I talked my way in—I was her physician, I’d treated her previously. When I entered her cell they were just cutting her down. Her neck had just snapped. We tried mouth-to-mouth. She was gone. They’re holding the body in the hospital morgue now. There’s apparently no one to claim it, so I asked, as her physician, to be involved in any decision about the disposition of her remains.”
There was a very long silence.
“I knew,” I said. “I knew what you were going to say.”
Then, as I knelt down on the floor, still holding the phone to my ear, I slid against the table. As I fell, I dislodged the papers on top, a stack of poems. I let poems fall all around me: poems by my Columbia students, poems by the Rikers Island students, my own poem, a copy of Auden’s poem “First Things First,” and Kyrilikov’s letter—every written paper I carried around in my schoolbag. I heard myself crying out, but then I stopped the sound, stopped myself.
“Jesus Christ,” K.B. said, and his voice was raw. It sounded as if he’d been crying too. “The truth is, there are so many goddam suicides out there, they can’t keep up. The shrinks and the social workers are incompetent and so they institute what they call Inmate Watch, but one inmate can have up to thirty or forty others to watch. Holly. This is not the way it was supposed to turn out.”
I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t find a way to words. Where was language, where were we on this unsafe star? I held my breath, sobbed again, willed myself to stop crying.
“Holly?”
“Kenny?”
“Her face was young, but her hair was so white.”
“I know. Her hair was white.”
“Can you tell me what she was in for?”
It took me a long time to get my breath, but I finally found a way to speak. Her wounds came from the same source as her power.
“She was in for channeling Mark Twain,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that was her only crime.”
Poem of Navigation
North Brother lies due southwest of Hunt’s Point
As the crow flies. Small craft from Rikers Island:
Turn the wheel starboard as the current will
Pull you port. Mark you the tide rips, they hit you
Aft, but there are seven whirlpools that seem
Constant on the path. Stay steady in neutral as you
Come up to the old pier wall. Go under port side and down-
shift into a cove. Bow in middle of hidden cove and tie up
starboard.
Climb the south facing rock wall and head Up Island.
At the north end the plain field, the meadow will shine.
Below is a diagram of the field. Beware marshes on
East side. Clear landing space, three hundred yards.
Don’t forget the weeping willow. You can waltz across
That landing space like a ballroom floor. Look below
For the arrow’s path. Look for markings of tide rips and
Side-winding currents. Look for names of who’ve come before.
Destroy this when you have found your way. Destroy the map
And all signs of writing about the body of North Brother.
Do not bother the birds. If you are quiet, they will show you
All you need to know.
fourteen
The day after Polly died, on a hunch, I’d stood outside Bognal’s closed office door waiting to talk to him. He was on the phone and I could hear occasional flickers of his conversation.
It hardly seemed possible, but it sounded as if he was having phone sex. I stood there outside his door, crying a little. I was not ready to let Polly go and I was deeply defensive about anything said about her in the prison—yet it seemed to me, oddly, perversely, that Polly wouldn’t have minded what I was hearing from old Bognal on the horn. Polly approved of any sad passionate thing—even a furious self-pitying shrink holding a phone receiver, longing to re-create something resembling intimacy for himself. His hoarse, altered voice, baying for love, a kind of diminished love, into a plastic receiver.
“You want it? You want my rock-hard…down your throat? You want it [inaudible] your wet pussy…just like before, you were wearing some [inaudible]—Baby: beg me! Say it, baby! Tell me!”
I knocked loudly and there was a sort of muffled, choked cry, then silence. After a bit, I knocked again.
When he finally opened the door, he looked dazed. I brushed back my tears and nodded to him.
“I wanted to ask you about Polly Lyle Clement again,” I said. He frowned at me.
“Who?”
“The inmate who…killed herself. Two Main.”
“The hang-up?”
“Right. The hang-up. Am I interrupting something important?”
He looked startled.
“Conference call. I just got off.”
I insisted that he find Polly’s file and that he let me read it, standing there in front of him as he dazedly rearranged his desktop. And there, sure enough, was what I was looking for. There were a few, a very few, scrawled notes—reports on Polly’s health and state of mind. Polly had mentioned, after she’d been given a lot of tranquilizers, in an intake interview, something no one had picked up on. She’d referred vaguely to the “State place” just once, in passing—but I immediately knew what she’d meant and what to do next. Manhattan State Hospital was on Wards Island, right under the Triborough Bridge.
The following day I sat befor
e a member of the nursing staff at Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island. Wards Island is at the northern end of the East River and is sometimes considered to be part of Manhattan. I’d taken a bus from 125th Street, reading a bit about the island as I traveled there. Its history, like that of the other islands, was shadowed. At first it had been a potter’s field. Then a site for a hospital for destitute immigrants. Then asylums for the insane were built. City Asylum became Manhattan State Hospital. The Triborough Bridge shot right over it, and landfill connected it to Randalls Island—people walked over a footbridge to get there. It was covered with chain-link fences. The windows on the buildings were barred and shuttered. An exit off the FDR Drive that might have been called the Island of the Mad.
Still, my hunch had paid off. The nurse’s name was Brenda Michiko, and I had found her by asking questions over the phone about specialties at the hospital. As a psychiatric nurse, her subspecialty was epilepsy. She wore harlequin glasses and a very starched crackly-white uniform, and she immediately remembered Polly. Her hands rested on a thickish file with Polly’s name on the lip. We sat in her tiny windowless office, its walls covered with Peanuts comic strips—and she ignored her phone, which rang every so often. Just as in the Women’s House, I could hear shouts in the halls somewhere in the hospital’s interior.
Why, I asked, hadn’t anyone tried to locate Polly Lyle at the Women’s House and bring her back?
“City services don’t seem to talk among themselves,” she said. “We sent out bulletins about a missing patient—but they were probably never picked up and read. We don’t pool information. Lots of confusion and bureaucratic miscommunication, I guess you’d say.”
She smiled at me, a little dazedly. She had very bright, very sad eyes behind the wing-shaped lenses.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “we assumed that Polly had drowned.”
“So you knew she was out on the water? Was there a search for her?”
She looked down, then up again at me.
“There wasn’t a very big search,” she said. “The City doesn’t allocate much in the way of rescue budgets.”
“But how,” I asked, “did she manage to get away from here, to get out on the water—how did she travel?”
“You see,” said Brenda Michiko, “Polly built a raft.”
She opened Polly’s file and turned some pages.
“She was a member of a reading group,” Brenda said, and glanced up at me. “They read the Great Books, classics—you know, there are some very intelligent patients here. They read all the time and they want to talk about what they read.”
She looked down and then up at me again and smiled.
“They read Mark Twain.”
I smiled back at her.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “You know that Polly believed that she was related to Twain?”
“Yes,” I said, “I knew that.”
The phone rang again and Brenda glanced at it, then turned back to me.
“She talked the other patients in the reading group and the nursing staff into mounting a play. A play about Mark Twain—all of his writings. Polly wrote the script. The play centered on Huck Finn and Jim and their travels down the Mississippi on a raft. Polly was set on building a real raft for the play. Something that would look really authentic onstage. We could not provide the actors with much splash-water or fake waves or smoke or much in the way of lighting—but Polly Clement found a way to build a raft down in the basement here with a former employee who was the janitor. His name was Jericho Daston and he loved listening to Polly recite lines from Twain. She memorized everything, all of Twain—I truly believe the girl had a photographic memory! It might interest you to know that she ended up here because she had been wandering the streets, homeless, talking to herself. When she first arrived here—you know, filthy, disheveled—you would never have suspected the intellect on that girl!
“Anyway, Jericho handled the garbage detail down in our underground plant here. Part of his regular job was to load the plastic bags and bins onto a small barge that is picked up by a tug from our ‘port’ and sent to Hunt’s Point sewage plant. So, the staff believed that she was building a prop. Something for the actors to stand on, onstage. It seemed therapeutic as well as an artistic effort. Well, it was that and something more, if you know what I mean.
“The play took place in the auditorium here, and it was a big success with staff and patients—Polly stood on that raft and was a ringer for Huck Finn!—and then, after the standing ovations and the reception here, all the props, including the raft, were taken downstairs for storage. At that point, Jericho and Polly made a plan. We think he agreed to open the garbage float doors for her and put her out on the Hunt’s Point barge on her raft, and she must have cast off from there—and got herself all the way from here to Rikers Island. You know, the staff all thought that raft was made of cardboard and twine—but Jericho had helped her build a seaworthy kind of float, made of material to withstand wind and current.”
“And she knew about the currents, too,” I said.
“Yes.” She glanced at the file in front of her again. “Her history was, well…tied up with that.”
“With…?”
“The sea.” She flipped through some more pages, then looked straight at me.
“Polly Lyle came to trust me. She told me the truth about her life. She did not trust the psychologists, but she put faith in me. Perhaps because I have daughters and I felt so badly for her—what she’d been through. And I do not believe in heavy medication. So she told me: her mother was Mulatto and her father was”—she opened the file and flipped a page—“yes, German. He was a member of the merchant marine and the family lived in New Orleans. The mother was a prostitute and died when the girls were small. The mother came from a family who owned a brothel in New Orleans—they’d been there a long time. There was a family legend about Mark Twain and how he used to visit the brothel way back before the Civil War.”
I started to ask a question, but she went on without hearing me, as if she’d been waiting to tell Polly’s story for a very long time.
“Polly was a twin. The sisters were very high-strung and the father talked often of them being psychic. Polly was epileptic, as was her sister, and he believed that the condition gave them special powers, you know. But he was an unscrupulous man. He actually sold his daughters into prostitution.”
There were more shouts in the hallways and the telephone rang again.
“She was abused physically—she and her sister were beaten and sexually assaulted. When the father drank, he became violent. His father or grandfather, I can’t remember, was a survivor of a terrible ferryboat accident here on the river on one of the islands—and he apparently spoke of it and terrorized the girls with the idea of fire.”
“The General Slocum,” I said.
“I think that was it.”
“Polly got to the island where the General Slocum crashed,” I said, “all alone on that raft—and she stayed there for quite a while before she landed at Rikers.”
It was Brenda Michiko’s turn to smile.
“I believe she could have done that. Polly was a very resourceful person. And she said her daddy taught her one sure thing: how to sail.”
I spent two hours with Brenda Michiko and I left with Polly’s story in my head. Or most of it. I’d asked how I could find Jericho, the janitor who had helped her build the raft, but she shook her head. The administration had fired him after Polly disappeared. They’d discovered his role in her escape and they’d let him go, after threatening to charge him with a criminal act.
“I have no idea where he could be,” Brenda Michiko said. “He left no trace of himself here. It’s the bureaucracy—it allows people to vanish, nobody bothers to check on anything.”
We looked at each other and I thought if I began to cry, she might begin to cry as well—a situation it seemed wise to avoid.
“Polly told me how she lost her sister,�
�� said Brenda Michiko. “Are you sure you want to hear?”
I nodded.
“The father was a merchant marine, as I mentioned. He took his daughters on board one of the vessels he worked on. It was night, there was a party—and he ended up offering his daughters to the other seamen. There was a fire on the boat that night. No one ever knew how it was started, but Polly’s sister and father died in that fire and Polly’s face was burned. It’s possible that Polly was responsible, she said strange things about the fire, but I don’t know. She also hinted that her sister knocked over a torch or a lantern and set a fire on purpose—to get back at the father. But there are no definite answers to that one.”
She looked at her watch.
“I have to go now,” she said. “We have back-to-back meetings all afternoon.”
I was about to ask her for a copy of Polly’s file, but then she opened a drawer in her desk and took out a battered leather-bound book with a broken gilt-stamped binding and placed it on the desktop between us.
“I thought you might want this,” she said. “I cannot locate any of her kin, here or in New Orleans, who might be entitled to it. Maybe you could keep it as a memento of her. She always told such big stories.”
She smiled at my confused look.
“It’s just an old Bible,” she said. “Polly always carried it with her and talked about it being handed down to her from her mother’s family. She said they kept it on a stand in the brothel and the women wrote in it. I haven’t bothered to open it up. I don’t put much stock in the Bible myself.”
I waited until I was back in the lobby to open it. I walked through one of the long winding dark tunnels that connected the various hospitals and the reception area and I sat down in a plastic chair and held it gingerly in my lap. Gilt powder fell from the page edges as I turned them, noting the scrawled handwriting in the margins, the “Blessed are…” s and the jokes. And then I flipped back to the fly-leaf and there was the ladder of names, most of them in the same spidery hand. But there, at the top, the swooping straightforward cursive, readily identifiable: SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS.
Channeling Mark Twain Page 24