The Prison Book Club

by Ann Walmsley

  Instead of reading, it was more akin to having been read to. The narrator is gently authoritative, like a benevolent grandfather insinuating what is good, and what is questionable.The ultimate message may be that no person has the right to condemn another and that every person does have the right to not only give, but also to receive goodness and love from another.

  These were the very themes we were exploring in The Zookeeper’s Wife.

  Our women’s book club met four days before Easter at Evelyn’s condo, and her fireplace mantel was festive with decorative eggs and tiny rabbit figures. We settled into her comfortable sofa and chairs to talk about The Zookeeper’s Wife. After some initial quibbles from two members about the author’s occasional digressions from the main story to elaborate on points of research, Ruth warmly championed the book for finding a radically different way to talk about war. “I found it incredibly personal,” she said. “I think it was because my house was a zoo.” During the years when Ruth’s five children were young, she and her husband had a menagerie of pets—two dogs, a cat, a raccoon, an iguana and a rabbit—while simultaneously taking in one or two troubled teens at a time and providing them and their families with counselling. She was a family counsellor who had founded an organization in the 1980s for families with wayward adolescents. Some of the kids were involved with prostitution or drugs, were robbing their parents, had come out of juvenile detention centres or their parents had just given up on them. “Our house became a safe place for them for a little while and I would work with the parents,” said Ruth. If her own kids weren’t comfortable with a particular guest, the visitor was invited to use the family’s Arctic sleeping bag to sleep outside in the back seat of their car. In the summer months, the whole human and animal menagerie would move to the family’s lakeside cottage. “I thought, Antonina is a kindred sister,” said Ruth, still beautiful in her seventies.

  We talked about the book’s description of how Poles helped Jewish citizens disguise their faces with bandages and dye their hair blond to evade detection, and I told them about how Peter said the penis re-skinning was what caught his eye.

  “Can I just read you one thing because I found it profoundly moving?” asked Deborah, who was wearing a rustic necklace of Indian silver and rough stones. She read from chapter 20, the passages where Ackerman describes the heroic actions of the zookeepers’ neighbour, pediatrician Henryk Goldszmit (who wrote children’s books under the pen name Janusz Korczak). Goldszmit ran an orphanage for Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he invented plays and other distractions to soothe them. He repeatedly turned down invitations to escape because it would have meant abandoning the children. The men at Collins Bay had talked about the same passage. Deborah tried to read the sentence about how Goldszmit anticipated the fear of the children on deportation day, and then joined them on the train to Treblinka—all two hundred or so of them. “Because—” Her voice quavered and she stopped, then restarted with tears in her eyes, explaining that the doctor had gone along because he felt he could help them stay calm. She read aloud Ackerman’s quote from Goldszmit’s writings describing his belief that just as you would sit with a sick child through the night, you stay with children during an ordeal like deportation. Her hand moved to her throat, and she sat looking down at the page. She managed to read on, to where it describes him at the Transshipment Square marching hand in hand with some of the children, while the other children and ten other staff members walked behind, all under German guard and how none of the children cried or cowered because he was with them. After that, she was unable to read further.

  I reflected on Henryk Goldszmit and the Zabinskis and the difference between their sacrifices. Goldszmit was a Jewish man protecting dozens of children from suffering, but unable to deliver them from their fate. As non-Jews, the Zabinskis’ odds of survival were greater and their opportunity to save lives was greater, but their actions risked endangering more lives, including their own. The risk calculations were very different in each case but both involved a level of heroism that I had difficulty imagining.

  The women’s book club gathering was often more emotional than the men’s. Now the women were eager to hear what the men had said about the book, and I passed around the men’s comments. Lillian-Rose read aloud Parvat’s observations about how, thanks to the book, he now knew that the Nazis’ Aryan breeding program extended to animals as well. They admired Peter’s comment about the zoo as a natural place to mount a defence against Nazi programs to extinguish life. So I told them about what Peter had said in the meeting: that the zoo was a place where goodness could reside, and that goodness was more contagious than evil. The women looked at me with slightly dazed expressions, absorbing the beauty of Peter’s thought. No one spoke.

  We closed up our books, sampled a Quebec-made blue cheese called La Roche Noire that Evelyn had set out and laughed as Carol told us about the time she babysat a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig in their house. The pig toileted on newspaper in the corner of the living room, rather like Antonina’s badger, who used her son’s training potty. “Vietnamese pigs love to have their bellies scratched and to watch TV,” Carol informed us.

  “Rather like some husbands we know,” joked Betty.

  We air-kissed one another good night and drove or walked home. When I opened the front door of our house, our elderly Maine Coon cat, John Small, staggered sideways as he came to greet me. He was eighteen years old and declining, but still dignified and kind. He bore the name of my ancestor, a minor official in the first government of Upper Canada who had shot and killed its first attorney general in a duel. The original John Small was tried for murder and acquitted. I gathered my cat into my arms. He smelled of urine and age. I carried him to a chair and sat and stroked him so that he would know he was cherished. He looked up into my eyes and the darkness of them told me he was in pain. I would have to make a decision soon about when the pain should stop, and I couldn’t bear to contemplate that.

  19

  RECONSTRUCTING A NARRATIVE

  ON MY WALK FROM THE PARKING lot into Collins Bay prison that May, a cloud of stone dust hung between me and the entrance. Either it was construction or a jailbreak. As I drew closer I could see that a restoration company was working on the prison’s limestone walls. Behind scaffolding and netting, the company was drilling out disintegrating limestone blocks and replacing them with new stones from a nearby quarry. In the worst areas, every third stone needed replacing because water seepage had hollowed out its core. The new blocks appeared to come from a different seam of rock in the quarry. They were beige, not the cool grey stone mined in the 1930s when the penitentiary was first built by inmate labour. I stood at the entrance and looked up. If not for the razor wire at the top of the walls, the workmen’s exterior scaffolding would have made an ideal escape route.

  Inside, as I watched my satchel go through the X-ray machine, I wondered if earlier in the day Peter’s scheduled transfer to a halfway house had occurred. He didn’t want to go, having heard stories about other inmates being unable to meet their parole conditions and sensing that his own temperament would make it hard for him to comply with the rules. He would have preferred to serve out his sentence and bypass parole.

  Peter’s plan was to turn himself in to Kingston police even before arriving at the halfway house, a strategy that would likely land him at the temporary detention unit at Kingston Penitentiary and allow him to return swiftly to Collins Bay. On the eve of his release, he wrote a note to hand to the police to explain everything. In anticipation of being dry-celled (a two-day feces watch for prisoners who might have swallowed contraband), he planned to swallow a “package.” It was a dummy package containing only a pencil eraser and a note saying, “I don’t enjoy being humiliated. Do you?”

  How ironic that he might end up in Kingston Penitentiary on the very day that we would be talking about it in book group. That sunny May day we were discussing Alias Grace, my favourite novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, in which Atwood bril
liantly channels the voice of a young Irish maid in the 1840s. A work of historical fiction, it draws on the true story of a sixteenyear-old Irish immigrant servant named Grace Marks who was convicted for her role in the 1843 murder of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, on Kinnear’s farm north of Toronto. Her accomplice, James McDermott, another servant on the farm, was hanged for the murders. Even though Grace Marks was wearing the dead woman’s clothes and was on the run with McDermott when she was arrested, she pleaded not guilty. In the novel, Atwood creates a fictional character named Mary Whitney as Grace’s friend and the source of Marks’s alias while on the run. The real Marks was spared the gallows, spending nearly thirty years at Kingston Pen and in the “Lunatic Asylum” in Toronto. Ever since, people have debated the guilt and sanity of Grace Marks.

  What’s more, Marks was now back in the news. Just two weeks before our book group session, the federal government announced that it planned to close Kingston Pen, which since 1835 had been home to some of Canada’s most notorious murderers. A maximum-security prison with 346 inmates as well as others in the 130-bed psychiatric unit at the time of the closure announcement, the penitentiary’s current occupants would be distributed among prisons like Collins Bay. The local paper, The Kingston Whig-Standard, published a special section about the prison and its most high-profile inmates over the decades. Among the photographs of more recent lifers, such as the serial child murderer Clifford Olson, who had died the previous year, and sex killer Paul Bernardo, was a drawing of a female inmate from the nineteenth century: Grace Marks. As Carol and I walked into book club, she was carrying a copy of the Whig to show the men.

  The image of Grace Marks in the paper fascinated the book club members, but Brad and some of the other men also took a strong interest in the photo of the late Roger Caron, the infamous 1970s Canadian robber who wrote a book on the 1971 prison riot at Kingston Penitentiary, Bingo!: The Horrifying Eyewitness Account of a Prison Riot. The rioters had taken six guards hostage and had beaten and tortured two “undesirable” inmates to death while controlling the prison for four days. After the inmate killings, the army was called in to restore order. When Brad suggested I read it, I thanked him for his recommendation, but resolved in my own mind not to do so until my visits to prisons were over.

  As I scanned the room, I could see that only one of the original six book club ambassadors was present: Gaston. Gaston confirmed that Peter had been released that morning. Frank and Graham were at Beaver Creek. Ben was in a halfway house. And Dread couldn’t attend. I wondered who among the other book club members might shine in their absence.

  Carol called the meeting to order. Dressed in black pants and a black vest that closed with snaps over a blue shirt, she blended in with the dark prison-issue clothing that day. But despite her usual admonition of “no fancy jewellery,” she was wearing her glittery sapphire-and-diamond wedding ring. The longer she was in the prison, the more relaxed she had become. “I guess the first question you might want to ask is, ‘Do you think she did it?’” said Carol. “Let’s go around the circle.” These were men who had an insight into motive and had first-hand experience of courtroom procedure, so I was interested to hear what they would say.

  Joao, whose gentle, slightly startled blue eyes made it difficult to believe that he had once killed another human being, piped up first. “I think she did it,” he said. “I had a girlfriend that was probably worse than me. She spent more time in jail than I have.” He had seen bad girls, so he wasn’t giving Grace a pass just based on gender.

  Gaston wasn’t sure. “At the beginning I would have said McDermott all the way,” he said. “And then as you get further into the book you find that Grace is a little smarter, more cunning. Although she was pretty young—fifteen or sixteen at the time. But she was twelve years old when she started work, so she grew up pretty quick. With nothing. You know someone who has nothing could probably be persuaded to try anything because she wanted out so badly.” From the eruption of comments among the others, I detected agreement.

  “So for you, the jury’s out?” asked Carol.

  “The jury’s out,” said Gaston. “I can see both sides.”

  Then Brad advanced another theory, and because he was a close reader, he had everybody’s attention. “There were certain things or comments that indicated that she might have a mental illness,” he said, his long blond hair pushed back behind his ears. “Schizophrenia, another personality. Quite possibly she actually did it. But she had a whole other side that she wasn’t completely aware of. And she went for thirty years without confessing. I mean how long can you keep up the facade of ‘I don’t remember, I don’t know’ unless you really don’t?”

  “I sensed that too,” I said. “Perhaps dissociative identity disorder.”

  Carol then turned to Tony, who had come in late to the meeting.

  “I think she’s definitely guilty of accessory,” said Tony, sitting forward in his chair, his voice strong and confident, his hair slicked flat on his head. “But I think she’s very manipulative, number one. Number two, I think that she not only used Mary Whitney as her alias, but it was kind of like her alter ego because her friend Mary had this vivacious joy of life that Grace was so envious of. When Mary died it was ‘Oh my God what am I going to do?’ She was left with this void in her life.”

  I had forgotten that Grace envied Mary.

  Tony went on to trace the trajectory of Grace’s further disappointments when she arrived at Kinnear’s farm, concluding, “In actuality, I think she had a bigger part in it.”

  I said that Atwood’s Grace reminded me of the Toronto teen who was jailed in 2009 for counselling her boyfriend to murder her perceived rival. She came to be known in the press as “the puppet master,” and she received the harsher sentence, even though she did not physically carry out the act. A few of the guys agreed with me. They knew the case well.

  “It was either Stockholm syndrome or she was down with it,” said Parvat, adjusting his L.A. Dodgers baseball cap. I noticed for the first time that Parvat, convicted for dealing cocaine, breathed audibly through his nose in the manner of James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano character. The air whistled slightly on the intake and sometimes he sniffed, as though the cocaine business had made him more conscious of inhalations.

  “So am I the only person who thinks that Grace wasn’t guilty?” asked Carol. The room went silent. “I thought she was incredibly complex, smart as heck, very manipulative,” she continued. “But she grew to be that and learned all that through living in the prison. So would anybody join me in saying that she’s not guilty?”

  No one could bring themselves to agree with Carol’s argument that Grace was innocent, particularly Colin, who said he had done time with plenty of inmates, later exonerated as wrongfully convicted. Unlike them, Grace never protested her innocence, he said.

  Derek was interested in finding out how the mid-nineteenth-century prison life depicted in the novel compared with prison life today. He quoted the passage in the novel in which Grace describes inmates fighting over a piece of cheese. “Does that still happen?” he asked.

  I think he knew what the answer might be, given that just a month earlier an inmate at Toronto’s Don Jail had admitted to murdering another inmate who had stolen his partially eaten bag of Ruffles potato chips. The guys in the book club all jumped in, not only to confirm that this kind of thing happens, but to offer their own examples. Joao reported that another inmate had threatened him just because he had a cup of coffee. And Colin, who was rumoured to have had a relationship with a female guard at a previous institution, told the group: “There’s so much pettiness in prison it’s unbelievable: the lady guard that’s talking to you more than the other guy and that guy’s jealous. Guys get seriously hurt.” I knew from his tone that he meant physically.

  It is easy to imagine why these petty jealousies erupt. Inmates have so few possessions. Peter had once told me that he had been denied access to an electric k
eyboard that his mother had sent him, so he drew a keyboard on paper and practiced his music on that.

  There wasn’t time to get to the question that had been nagging at me all through the discussion: was it true that perpetrators of violent crimes blank out about the details of the event, as Grace claimed, or do they remember every detail? I resolved to put the question to Gaston in my visit with him after book group.

  We sat down together in the chapel storage room. I noticed Gaston was missing one of the new teeth that he had proudly worn last time we met. I asked him whether he had clear recollections of his bank robberies. He said he had spoken to some twenty murderers in prison and all of them had vivid recollections of their crimes and there wasn’t a day in their lives when they didn’t think about them. As for himself, he said he could relate every detail about every holdup, including what was said and what the tellers looked like. He especially remembers the botched jobs.

  “Tell me about one of those,” I said.

  He related the story of his own bungled getaway from a bank robbery in Toronto. One of the packs of money the teller had given him contained a dye pack that exploded as he and his accomplice were trying to escape in their car. The dye pack’s cloud of red smoke and pinky-red dye powder filled the vehicle before they had even left the parking lot. The force of the blast was so powerful that it shot out the window and fifteen feet into the air as Gaston sat holding the cash in the passenger seat. The driver aborted their planned escape route and steered the car to the closest exit, careening down a narrow pedestrian walkway through a too-tight stone gateway to the street.

  “I had the door open trying to save all the rest of the money but get the dye pack out,” he told me. “But the driver hit a post, which hit my arm. I thought it was broken for sure. And I still didn’t want to drop the big pile of money so I held this money in my lap. There’s people on the sidewalk scrambling to get out of the way and I’m like, ‘This is insane.’ I’ll never forget it.” What he remembers most as he was yelling in pain and the car was speeding down the sidewalk was the panicked eyes of a pedestrian.