The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  He opened the door and I slid under the wheel. “Thanks,” I said, fumbling in my purse for my key. I found it, and put it in the ignition.

  “Remember,” Detective Andrews said, “if you hear anything from anyone in that group, let me know at once.” He handed me his card. “I’ve written my home phone number on the back. I don’t usually give it out, but I want to be sure I’m available any time you need me.”

  “I really appreciate this,” I said, putting the card in my wallet, where I would keep it for years.

  “Glad to do it. You’ve had enough trouble. You don’t need any more.” He gave the roof of my car a friendly pat and raised his hand in a farewell gesture before turning to walk back to the courthouse.

  It was a great relief to finally have police protection. Still, there were phone calls in the middle of the night: “Just calling to see if you’re still alive. I hear you are. Fucking shame.” Click. There had been the time one of the Turcotte group stood up and yelled at me during a public poetry reading I gave at the Jones Library in Amherst. And another telling the police I was supervising John Elder and Mary in building a bomb to blow up the Turcotte house.

  But now a Belchertown police car was circling my apartment building several times a day. I felt safer until a Belchertown policeman banged on my door in the middle of the night, intent on taking me to Northampton State Hospital at Dr. Turcotte’s request. I persuaded him to call Detective Andrews, who told him the Belchertown police were there to protect me, not to incarcerate me.

  Now that the investigation of Dr. Turcotte had begun, the police could protect me as a potential witness in a possible insurance-fraud case. Yet he and his followers had not severed their relationships with me. All too often when I drove to the post office to get my mail I had something from one of his followers. I got a postcard from Helen accusing me of being a liar. One day I got a postcard from Dr. Turcotte. I sat in my car in front of the post office and read it. The picture was a pencil reproduction of A Section of the Magnificent Mohegan Bluffs, and the description on the back of the card stated, “With treacherous shoals and rocks below, where many sailing ships have met their doom.” Above this description Dr. Turcotte had written: “Good Morning America!” Under the description he’d written: “8:00 A.M.” Beneath this was a quote from scripture: “I am the vine; you are a branch.” The period at the end of the sentence was a large red circle.

  I laid the card on the car seat beside me. My heart pounded. Every time I got one of the cards or letters condemning me and using scriptures to back their claims, I succumbed to a feeling of guilt at least briefly, and had to fight my way up to a feeling of self-confidence. Had I been wrong in going to the police? Had I listened to Suzanne and her therapist friend’s advice and not my own mind and heart? I agonized. Then I again thought of Newport.

  It was years before I could talk about that experience without intense emotion building in my body until I was shaking inside and out. No matter how many times I told the story of Newport, the pressure built inside me to tell it once more. Had it been necessary for him to penetrate my body for him to be guilty of raping me? Wasn’t it enough that he had plundered and tormented me? Even if he had penetrated me and I’d remembered, in court it would have been my word against his, the word of the patient against that of the doctor.

  “It would be better if you didn’t have to appear in court,” Detective Andrews had said. I agreed that it would be better to avoid a sideshow with the doctor. I still regretted that my getting police protection resulted in the insurance-fraud charge when my own complaint toward him was his sexual assault. But more than regret, I felt the excitement of anticipation as I looked forward to beginning my life anew.

  VIII

  1983

  Looking back, I realize that my new life as a teacher of children had to begin in Holyoke. I’d been drawn to that city for months after hearing of the icons in a Greek Orthodox church there. One Sunday I went to a service there and sat alone in a pew, quietly taking in the many icons of saints along with those of Jesus and Mary. The smell of incense filled the air.

  The stylized figures created by a master icon painter surrounded me on all sides with their rich colors, the thick lines of their features, and their long fingers, full robes, and shining halos. Hearing nothing of what was said, I took in line after line, shape after shape, color after color, filling a hunger deep inside me.

  Then the service was over.

  Walking back to my car, I stooped to pick up a perfect white bird feather at my feet.

  I went back to Holyoke one day the next week, this time to browse in some of the secondhand shops I’d noticed. The first two shops offered no treasures to attract my attention. In the third shop, an old woman, her wild gray hair barely restrained by the few hairpins poked into it, sat behind a counter, crocheting a doily. I asked if she had any rosaries or religious medals for sale. She said she thought she did, then disappeared, shuffling along in her house slippers.

  I heard her rummaging through one drawer and then another while I looked with amazement at the chairs piled to the ceiling against the far wall, and the incredible clutter that filled every inch of the little store.

  When she finally returned, she was clutching a cigar box to her breast. She set it on the counter and opened the lid. Inside were medals of Saint Jude, Bernadette of Lourdes, and the Virgin Mary; a child’s rosary; several crosses and crucifixes; and a small photograph of a little girl smiling out from the oval shape she’d been cut into in order to fit a frame no longer there. Something about the eyes of that child smiling at me from the nineteenth century attracted me, and I placed the photograph on the counter along with several other pictures of children from the nineteenth century. I also picked out several of the medals as well as the child’s delicate rosary and several crosses and crucifixes. “How much would these cost?” I asked.

  Whatever price she quoted was so low that I added a few more medals to my collection. Then I paid her.

  “Thank you,” I said taking the small, crumpled brown bag that she held out to me. “Thank you very much.”

  “Bless you,” she responded. Sitting down on her stool, she picked up her crochet hook and began to crochet as I turned to leave.

  Driving home I thought of possible ways to use my new treasures. I wanted to create three-dimensional collages in wooden cigar boxes I’d collected.

  Home, I sat down in my reading chair and gently slid my new treasures out of the bag and onto the table beside me. Then I began to examine each with care. I was especially drawn to an old crucifix. The cross still held its shape, but the Jesus hanging on it was so worn down that only the vague shape of the body was discernable. All detail must have been rubbed away by the thumb of someone who had caressed it for many years while praying. In my heart I felt the presence of an old woman. Had she prayed for her sick husband as he lay dying? Had she prayed for her children? Had she prayed for enough food to feed them? Had she prayed for herself, that she would have the strength and wisdom to raise them?

  I laid the crucifix back on the table. I wouldn’t be using it in a collage. I wouldn’t be using any of the things I’d bought that day in a collage. They all felt special in a way I was unable to understand.

  I looked into the eyes of the little girl smiling out from the oval shape, and of the other children from the nineteenth century. They were children from Holyoke’s past, and yet I was as moved as if they were living, our eyes connecting, and my heart moved beyond words. I had no idea that within weeks I would begin to work with children in Holyoke, opening their hearts and minds to writing poetry as they opened my heart to them.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I

  1983

  TWO DAYS BEFORE I BEGAN THE JOB OF LEADING POETRY WORKSHOPS FOR the two hundred children in the Donahue Elementary School, my friend Nancy Bullard and I climbed a hill that rose beyond the old apple orchard on her farm. Brilliant sunlight illuminating the August green of the trees illuminated my spir
it as well.

  I turned to Nancy. “I need a part-time job, and I need it to be outside the academic community,” I said with the clarity that had come to me as we’d walked.

  When I got home from Nancy’s, Suzanne called and told me that an elementary school in Holyoke was looking for a playwright to replace the one who’d resigned from an arts project at the last minute. Would I be interested in applying? Though no playwright, I felt that the position was exactly what I needed. Ideas of things to do with the children flooded my mind.

  The next morning I met with the principal and several of the teachers. The school had never had any sort of arts program before, and the teachers had a lot of questions. I answered with the confidence of someone who had a long history of working with children, though I’d only led writing workshops for adults.

  The following day I was in the school as the first poet-in-residence.

  In the hall, I met my first two students: Luis and Ramon.

  “Are you a teacher?” Luis asked as I raised my head from the spout of the water fountain.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’m here to teach you something about poetry.”

  “Po-what?” Ramon asked, puzzled.

  “Poetry,” I repeated slowly, searching for a way to make a concrete, understandable thing of the word. Then I remembered seeing a poster-sized copy of Langston Hughes’s poem “Dreams” tacked up in the library.

  I walked with the boys to the library, where I pointed to the hand-lettered poem. “This is a poem,” I said, and asked Luis to read the first verse aloud:

  Hold fast to dreams

  For if dreams die

  Life is a broken-winged bird

  That cannot fly.

  “Do you have a dream?” I asked.

  “I want to be a policeman,” Luis replied.

  I asked Ramon to read the verse aloud.

  “Have you ever felt like a broken-winged bird?”

  “No. But once I had a broken collarbone,” Ramon responded.

  “We’re talking about simile, about one thing being like another,” I explained. “A broken collarbone is a little like a broken wing.”

  I turned back to Luis. “Have you ever felt like a broken-winged bird?”

  “No. But I felt very sad when my father died.”

  The three of us sat down on the carpet while Luis talked about his father’s death. “I talked to him the day before he died. I loved him very much. I talked to him that day, and then he was dead.”

  “You might want to write about your father and how much you loved him.”

  “And how he died,” Luis added.

  “Yes,” I agreed softly. “And how he died.”

  As we sat talking, a teacher walked by, glancing our way.

  “That’s our teacher,” Ramon told me.

  Luis smiled at me. “She thinks you’re teaching us.”

  Ramon smiled.

  I smiled, too. “I am,” I said. “These are some of the things poetry is about.”

  II

  I felt fortunate to work with a group of children who had few if any strong preconceptions about poetry. If they knew little about poetry, I knew little about them and their city. I did know something about writing. One of the most important things I’d discovered was that my strongest images came when I opened myself to the world around and within me through my senses. Once a fragrance coming through an open window was enough to evoke my book-length poem Red Creek. Often simply describing a visual image has become a poem in itself.

  I began teaching in the Donahue School by guiding each class in writing a group poem that required the children to use their senses. I instructed them to lay their heads on their desks, close their eyes, and imagine that they could move around anyplace in Holyoke in an instant. Then I called the children’s attention to their senses. What did they see? What did they hear or smell, touch or taste? Soon another hand went up, then another. When no more hands were raised, and I felt the poem had come to a natural ending, I asked the children to open their eyes while I read the poem aloud.

  They were excited to hear their group poems that served as my introduction to the children and their city, and their introduction to poetry and to me. I learned that one boy’s little sister’s hair stood straight up before she brushed it down in the morning; that someone else’s sister was pregnant; that one boy’s uncle worked in a paper mill, while his father worked making guns. I learned the names of some of the streets, and that Saint Vincent Nursing Home was in Holyoke. I learned that the children were aware of food stamps, robberies, house fires, welfare, SSI.

  By the end of my first week in Holyoke, I had led all two hundred students in the school of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders in writing their first poems. A couple of teachers commented that they had never seen the children so quiet and involved. I was more surprised at myself than at the children. I’d always found relating in groups difficult. Even small groups had intimidated me, but over the years I’d learned to lead workshops for adults, though there were usually no more than twelve in a group. Now I was leading workshops for twenty to twenty-five children, and I felt more relaxed than ever. I felt confidently at home.

  “What’s poetry?” I asked the children. “Something that rhymes” was the most frequent answer I got at first. The truest answer came from Greg Thompson, a boy who, raising his arm for my attention, said: “Poetry is something that comes from the bottom of your heart.”

  The children surprised me with their enthusiasm for writing poetry. Everyone was writing. Poems were tacked up on bulletin boards, published in the Holyoke and Springfield newspapers. The principal had to order more composition books. “Would you like to hear a poem?” a child would ask a complete stranger visiting the school. One newspaper reporter asked a boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. “A fireman and a poet,” the boy replied without hesitation. Poetry belonged everywhere, to everyone. The excitement was contagious.

  To have their personal feelings and experiences valued and put into a form to be shared was life-giving to the children. It was also life-giving to me. I opened my heart to the girls and boys of the Donahue School, and in that opening I opened to my strength and power as a teacher. I was learning more about who I was.

  Sometimes, when a child seemed to be struggling to express himself, I would spend time alone with that child, asking questions and taking dictation myself when it seemed too much for him or her to try to both express himself and write. This was the case with Jesus Mendez. When we were alone together in the library, he told me the poem he wanted to write while I did the actual writing.

  He wanted to write a poem about his baby sister. “She was the prettiest thing I ever saw,” he said sadly. Then he told me about going into the baby’s room. He described how his mother lifted her hand and how it fell back on the bed. The tension was palpable.

  “The baby was dead.”

  I worked to write with a calm, steady hand, but my heart was racing. When Jesus went back to his classroom, I sat in the library, remembering his words: “She was the prettiest thing I ever saw.” I remembered how beautiful my long-dead sister’s eyes were. When Jesus told me about the baby’s hand falling back onto the bed, and that she was dead, I was once again in the hospital with Mother and Harriet. As I wrote Jesus’s poem, my head was filled with my own mother’s words: Ring for the nurse, Margaret. Harriet’s dead. Working with Jesus had reopened that old wound, and I went back into the pain.

  When I got home that day, I again wrote about my sister’s near death. Again I cried. Listening to the children was an act of healing for me, just as it was for them. I remembered the dream I’d had years before, that all of human history was stored in my mind. In the dream I was panic-stricken that history would begin to unroll in my bloodstream and my heart would burst with the pain. “Don’t worry,” a voice in the dream had told me. “History will unroll in your heart only as your heart grows large enough to hold it.” Teaching the children at the Donahue School, I felt my heart g
rowing larger every day.

  III

  I could no longer endure the relationship with Suzanne. Both when I was leaving my marriage and later when I was leaving Dr. Turcotte, Suzanne was my major emotional support. For Suzanne, I was the major catalyst for change in both her marriage and her relationship with her mother. I don’t claim this as truth, only as my interpretation.

  I never said that I wanted her to leave Bob. But if she loved me as much as she said she did, if I mattered as much as she claimed, I wanted the respect that love deserved. When she realizes how she’s hurt me, when she finally fully claims her love for me, things will be different, I told myself. But if Suzanne had entered into our relationship fully, if she had given the relationship the respect and attention it required, she well might have lost her marriage. And above all else, she wanted to keep her marriage intact.

  “Do you realize how much pain I’ve gone through for you? Do you think you’re the only one in pain?” Her voice still reverberates in my brain. And yes, she did go through pain. I knew that. But enduring pain solved nothing for either of us.

  “Married woman who will neither stay or go,” I wrote in a poem at the time. I wrote two books of poetry to Suzanne and destroyed them, crushing poem after poem in my fist. I wrote and discarded page after page of journal entries about the relationship. Yet we continued the same old tug-of-war.

  I thought again of how, when I was a girl, Mother’s friend Francis told Mother about people asking how she could love her brain-damaged daughter, Kate, with her wild green eyes, nightmarish noises, and violent stomping. Francis always answered that she loved the daughter Kate could have been.

  What about the daughter she had? What about Kate? I asked myself many times over the years. Thinking about this once again, I looked at my relationship with Suzanne in a new light—that light. I was mourning the relationship I imagined possible with Suzanne, not the relationship we had.