fifteen
It was a clear morning on the river. I wrote these words in my notebook, then stowed the tiny notebook away in my jeans pocket and pulled my leather jacket more tightly around me. The river was moving too fast, and the day was too bright, to look away.
K.B., Benny, and I, and in a broader sense Polly Lyle Clement, were on a small hired craft, a boat piloted by a shortish man named Bob Torginruud, who looked a great deal like a fireplug in a watchman’s cap. We were in Hell Gate, on the East River. We stood on the wooden deck, the wind blowing so hard that it was impossible to talk to one another. So we stayed in our separate places, looking out at the brightness—those successive flashes like gunfire off the bridges and pylons and high-story windows. The fast-moving air smelled of garbage and jet fuel, just as it did on Rikers Island. It was a winter day, but it was sunny and not too cold at all.
There were a few black-and-red tugboats around us, some hauling long lines of construction barges—but we kept to the middle of the river, holding our own. The boat’s radio beeped and spoke periodically in snarls of static. Bob T. was busy in the pilothouse and appeared to have no interest in anything beyond the river, which I found reassuring. The world on either shore was urban, jam-packed with buildings—or, in a very few places, green as gems, as emeralds coming toward us, parklike.
K.B. pointed out whirlpools to me, just off the bow, but Bob-at-the-wheel steered impressively through them. We were bouncing around pretty hard now, hitting the wakes of other boats, the tugs, and a large smelly garbage scow. We swung in one direction and then the other, making quick turns in the fearsome currents. I held on to the rail and shot a thumbs-up to Benny, who was sitting down on a coiled pile of old rope, smiling weakly. None of us had gotten seasick so far. Traffic was not bad now—the currents were sweeping us past Randalls Island and then past the Triborough Bridge, under the thundering of a thousand cars—I gazed above the bridge to the grim sentinel figures of the Wards Island mental hospitals as K.B. pointed them out, rising high above the bridge-way. Planes hung overhead awaiting landing instructions, then they bore down over the streams of cars.
Bob T. had told us before we shoved off that Hell Gate Passage ended not much beyond the Triborough Bridge—then, he said, there were the “tide rips” and strong currents guarding the Bronx and Queens shores. The wind filled with the smell of the Hunt’s Point sewage treatment plant, on an ugly stretch of the Bronx shore, where the sludge barges were loaded up. Benny held her nose and waved to me. I held my nose and waved back—then pointed ahead. We were heading straight downriver from the arch of the Hell Gate railroad bridge toward North and South Brother islands. We’d passed the Sunken Meadows section of Randalls Island (Bob T. pointed it out) and the industrial sections, Stony Point.
Now we could see Rikers Island coming up on the other side of the river. I could make out the razor-wire fences and the gray blocks of the prison buildings, the sun glinting off the vehicles on the bridge heading onto the Island. I squinted into the dazzling light off the water—I was trying to see if there were any pimps gathered on the far side of the bridge so early in the day, but I couldn’t make out any big hats. Planes circled down, then over the Island—on their way to the La Guardia runways.
There were gulls everywhere, shrieking and following the boats. I thought of Polly and the birds on North Brother and I glanced over at K.B. He smiled back at me. All the poetry in my head, I thought, and I can’t think of a word for this moment. Nor a word for K.B., except friends, we would be friends always. Then I thought, Maybe we won’t stay apart, maybe we’ll come back to each other. Maybe the path will be clear. (The night before, I had finished my poem called “Twin Cities.” The last lines were “City and City and/river and river of this, my Ever-Dividing Reflection.”) My reflection divided again and I thought about Sam Glass, how we were bound to make more trouble for each other, then maybe also end up as friends. I would not understand passion or love—what either meant to me—not for a very long time. I was going to have to suffer some more, enter despair, come close to giving up on my life, close to the end-of-the-line despair Polly Lyle Clement had felt: then out the other side. Then I looked away from my own visions—I thought about Polly again and what we were about to do in her name. “Truth is, I’m a seer,” she had said, and I felt her gaze upon us now.
Then I remembered the immortal lines of poetry: “But you don’t understand how to think about the dead./…There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor Earth.”
She had been a gift, she had been given to us by some strange profoundly articulated power. She had persuaded me that these gifts, distributed among us, made sense, made joy. I remembered the end of Kyrilikov’s letter from Venice: “Poetry is not an art or a branch of an art, it is something, we think, more. If what sets us apart from other species is speech, then poetry—the supreme linguistic accomplishment—is our anthropological, even our genetic, goal.” I remembered that I’d said something like that to K.B. once, over dinner at the French bistro (I glanced over at him again), but I’d gotten the observation wrong. The woman had needed a shawl, not linguistic light. If Polly’s great gift had come from a wound, it was also a power, an astonishment, a coincidence of love and language and terror—deserving of great honor.
Far beyond us floated buoys that marked the channels into Flushing Bay and the Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges. We were coming up now on North Brother Island—Bob T. had told us that there were the ruins of a pier and a ferry dock on the Bronx side of, as he put it, “abandoned North Brother Island.” I could see it now, the crumbling, half-attached pier—Polly Lyle’s pier; the gulls flew all around it, their wings glinting in the sun, their cries fierce—alternating between falsetto and bass. Their raucous male-and-female shouts reminded me of Gene/Jean. How her voice changed register midsentence. Then I paid close attention as Bob T. maneuvered the boat, turning expertly back and forth, closer to the shores of North Brother.
It wasn’t as hard as I thought to get permission to bring more teachers in. Superintendent Ross signed off on our program, which at first was called Free Space, then Writing Without Walls. Writers took turns coming out to teach, and the Columbia students assisted as interns. There was a workshop in fiction and another poetry workshop and a playwriting class. But there was never again a workshop like that first one. Aliganth agreed with me—and she knew, because she kept requesting guard duty for the poetry workshops, complaining all the while.
It happened slowly, but first Billie Dee was sent upstate to a psychiatric facility. Then Never got hard time, about seven years, for being a drug runner and was sent to federal prison. Gene/Jean served less than a year in the Women’s House and completed her sex change when she got out. S/ he sent me a photo of her/ himself in an Elvis getup: gold and white lamé with a huge rhinestone-studded belt and codpiece. Baby Ain’t got back on the calendar and her pros charge was dropped for time already served. Roxanne Lattner was convicted of cocaine possession and sale; she was sent to a medium-security jail somewhat upstate—she never turned state’s evidence. Darlene’s charge was softened to a Class E felony—closer to manslaughter than murder—and she got off with a year’s served time. I don’t know if she ever got her children back. Akilah Malik took up permanent residence in Cuba, where she wrote her autobiography. The family of the New Jersey state trooper who was shot, and others, posted a reward of a million dollars for her return to the United States to stand trial. Sallie Keller disappeared not long after Polly Lyle Clement killed herself. I never heard what happened to Sallie and her unforgettable ruined face.
But now the future was in the future. Now we bumped hard against the pilings of the tumbledown pier, and birds, what seemed like thousands—gulls, cormorants, egrets, and storklike winged creatures—descended upon us from the air, shouting out their fevered petitions and complaints.
We walked down the broken cobbled streets under the wild growth of trees near the vine-covered redbrick contagious hospital—and there was the ol
d clock stopped dead on a Tuesday in the fifties and the buildings left with their doors gaping as if the inhabitants had just gone out to lunch. The birds followed us, some flapping overhead, some waddling along, insultingly imitating our manner of walking and talking.
I told Benny and K.B. that I wanted to go back to the shore, to the lighthouse ruin we’d passed climbing up out of the broken boards and pilings. I’d noticed it as I stood teetering on the dock. So we rounded back and climbed down the rocks to the lighthouse itself. The huge octagonal light, as Polly had said, was long gone from its turret, but the old lightkeeper’s house still stood fair and sturdy.
We ducked under a fallen beam and were inside: a terrible musty smell and mud-crusted walls everywhere, but a shelter with a kind of cove in the kitchen, broken furniture, and ripped wallpaper—roses and teapots—still peeling away. I walked out onto a little deck that had slowly lowered itself onto the rocks and I shrugged out of my backpack.
Her ashes were in a small earthenware jug, stenciled to make it look like an Athenian black-and-red-figured funerary urn. K.B. and Benny joined me and we climbed down the rocks and opened the urn, and I put handfuls of Polly’s remains into each of their hands. Then we stood on our separate stones and committed her to the river. As I reached out and opened my hand, I called out, not caring if I sounded ridiculous, to Polly: “Light out for the territory, Polly Lyle Clement, light out!” The ashes flew out of our hands and up into the wind, then straight out over the water, sparkling in the bright moving air. Like falling stars in a wilderness of stars.
It took me a long time to find the weeping willow tree, but I did. It was shrunken, overgrown, sunk into the rocks a few yards up the beach from the lighthouse. Perhaps it was dying—but its gnarled roots looked so set into the earth, its branches drooping so timelessly into the water, that it could also have been simply easing into its immortality. It was winter and there were no leaves on its branches, but I could suddenly see it in full leaf: that breathtaking light light green color—the color of a seer’s eyes.
Then I saw the names: one of the inmates’ signatures was almost obliterated by overgrown bark, but the other, LEWIS B. JAMES, stood out in relief, still. Below those names, in hastily cut but clean letters: AKILAH MALIK. I took my pocketknife and I added Polly’s name. I carved it deep, in order that it would last: POLLY LYLE CLEMENT, and just below that:
BELOVED DESCENDANT OF SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, A.K.A. MARK TWAIN
It took me a long time and I cut myself a little but I felt no pain—I kept working till her epitaph was in place.
Then I gently took out the Whorehouse Bible and began to follow the instructions that Polly Lyle had given to me about her personal effects the last time I saw her alive. She had told me that she “saw” that the Bible would come to me and she had asked that I set it afloat on a small raft in the East River and let the Holy Word travel where it would. It was what she’d wanted, her last request—and I knew I had to honor it.
I’d made a small float out of sticks and rubber bands, and now I pulled it out of my pack and I kissed the Whorehouse Bible and fastened it to the stick-float with a rubber band and knelt on the rocks, then pushed it out into the water. It dipped a little, then began to bob away.
I immediately had second thoughts about what I’d done: about the delicate pages filled with the whores’ variations on scripture and the signature of Mark Twain himself on the first gilt-edged leaf—floating away on the river, destined to end up as fish food—and I couldn’t bear it. So I lay down on the rocks and stretched my arm out and pulled the Bible-raft back just as the current was about to sweep it away. I fetched it up, a little damp but whole and entire for posterity.
Or, Reader, I did not. I put out my hand but then let it go, as Polly had instructed.
I won’t say which choice I made. So all right, then, I’ll go to hell for not telling. But Polly and the old man would want me to keep the secret, I know.
K.B. and Benny stood on the rocky incline above and called to me.
“Time to go, Holly, it’s late!”
And the birds flying over echoed their call, “Late, late.” Not as if they were registering a complaint, but as if they’d been waiting patiently there on North Brother—waiting for me, waiting for Polly Lyle Clement, for a very long time.
Twin Cities
I come from Twin Cities, where
the river between, surging, stands.
I believed once that what I called desire
flowed in that confluence between twins,
capitol and columned future. I come from
twin cities: Dark and Light. But the river
was dammed, managed for miles above the locks:
even at the source where the god’s mouth opened
and what we call belief thundered down in
every synonym. Two mirrored cities:
their symmetry invented as my own present,
twinned to a past to which it is now forever
subordinate. Twinned to a future, stunned
in its white eclipse. They killed the white
foxes, brought their pelts to market in the one
named for the Saint pierced by lightning.
The richer Sister prospered on the threshed tons
near the shared slaughterhouse. If the snow grew
steeped in blood, they raised a Court. But no one
out-thinks the two-in-one. The river was dammed, the moon
afloat, an animal face, in the crossed ambivalent tales
of my people and those of the suffering ancients.
Our gold domes on earth imitating the gold clouds
of the Ojibway, their vision-figures who doubled and
doubled but remained apart. Like this single mind, forever
unable to refuse its over-statement: blood on snow,
the gnawed bars of the trap, crack after crack in the
courthouse floor. And one irrefutable truth after another—
obliterated by the irrefutable dual: City and
City and river and river of this, my Ever-Dividing Reflection.
—HOLLY MATTOX, POET
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The list of people to whom I owe thanks is long. First, to my inspired, steadfast, and supportive Random House editors, Laura Ford and Daniel Menaker, and to my agent, Molly Friedrich—there’s no way I could have written this book without you! And all my gratitude to the amazing Jynne Martin and Laura Goldin.
There are also friends and family to whom I quite literally owe my survival during a year of moving and enormous change and upheaval—Laura Baudo Sillerman; my sister, Michele Mueller; April Gornik and Eric Fischl; Elizabeth Bassine; Michelle Latiolais; my daughter, Annie; Luis Caicedo; Grace Schulman; Amy Schroeder; Bill Handley; Jim and Kathy Muske; Erik Jackson; Jason Shinder and Sophie Cabot Black; Bruce Lagnese; Mary Karr; and the Minnesota Muske family (thanks especially, Mike and Chris!). I will never forget what you’ve done for me.
And special thanks to Mark Doty, Billy Collins, Clare Rossini, Jonathan Galassi, Nanci Lee, Sylvie Rabineau, Sara Davidson, Jody Donahue, Susan Halpern, Marion Ettlinger, Debbie Gimelson, Cleopatra Mathis, Lisa Russ Spaar, Sheryl Bellman, Pam Macintosh, Megan Fishmann, Quincy and Margaret Porter Troupe, Mark Strand—and Mae Jackson.
I am also grateful to the University of Southern California, my L.A. “home.”
To my mother—thank you for “growing me up” within poetry. And to my father—thank you for my stubborn mind.
As always, in memory of David. And in memory, too, of Fletcher Marie.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAROL MUSKE-DUKES is the founder and former director of the Ph.D. program in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her last collection of poetry, Sparrow, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and she has been the recipient of many other awards, among them an Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowship
s. She has published seven books of poetry, three novels, and two collections of essays, including Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood. A former columnist for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, a regular contributor to The New York Times, as well as founder of the Free Space/Art Without Walls prison arts program, Muske-Dukes lives in New York City, East Hampton, and Los Angeles, and sometimes in Boulder, Colorado.
ALSO BY CAROL MUSKE-DUKES
FICTION
Life After Death
Saving St. Germ
Dear Digby
POETRY
Sparrow
An Octave Above Thunder
Red Trousseau
Applause
Wyndmere
Skylight
Camouflage
ESSAYS
Married to the Icepick Killer:
A Poet in Hollywood
Women and Poetry:
Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self
The standard disclaimer familiar to most readers of fiction, to the effect that characters, places, and incidents depicted in a novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, is appropriate to Channeling Mark Twain but not entirely accurate in identifying all of the inspiration for this book. Channeling Mark Twain is indeed a work of fiction, yet some of the locales, characters, and events have been suggested by events of my own life and by people I have known. From about 1972 through 1983, for example, I taught poetry at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island, and I directed a prison arts program I’d earlier founded called Free Space/Art Without Walls; I also worked for a rehabilitative program called AfterCare. To some degree, this teaching experience and other actual events and relationships in my life provided the catalyst for this novel’s narrative. Some of what appears in these pages is indirectly autobiographical, yet every event and every character portrait is highly fictionalized—and most of what happens here is invented. To my mind the novelist’s rendering of the world is essentially no different from the poet’s: I believe that the nature of the imagination is transformational—everything in these pages has been transformed in portraying fictionalized “truth.”
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