by Ann Walmsley
Mary and Grace represented opposite extremes of Victorian womanhood, according to Pino, an observation that made everyone’s head turn to hear him speak. Without straightening from his habitual slump, he suggested that when they were young teenage servant girls together, Grace was repressed and uneducated while Mary was bold in ways that Grace longed to be. But if you accepted the theory that Mary was a secondary personality inside Grace, as Pino maintained, and not a separate character, then the dichotomy represented the self-denial that all Victorian women faced. His insight forced me to rethink everything about Mary, who, to me, had been so fully realized as a separate individual. “That’s a classic multiple personality,” said Pino. “Mary Whitney is Grace’s other hidden personality. That’s the way I saw it anyway.”
And not just Victorian women. I thought about my own daughter’s episodes of dissociation when her eating disorder was most intense. Imperceptibly to others, on some days there were periods when she blanked out while continuing to function on autopilot. For her, it wasn’t a different personality emerging, but a numbness, because she was unable to tolerate being in her own body.
Raymond said that if it was a critique of the Victorian period, it wasn’t Dickensian enough in its portrayal of prison conditions. But as Phoebe said, it was possible that the women’s prison was less harsh than the men’s. Even so, two of the men volunteered that they felt the book’s scenes of prison guards’ belittling treatment of prisoners reflected similar scenes in prisons today.
For Hal, it wasn’t just the prison guards’ conduct, but other things that hadn’t changed significantly. “There’s a lot of talk in the book about whether criminality is a condition from birth, a bad seed, the vapours,” said Hal. “And once you’re a criminal, you’re a criminal forever and that stigma follows you. Again none of that thinking seems to have changed at all today and that’s something that a lot of us have a direct kind of experience of.” I reminded myself that Hal had been in prison for almost twenty years for killing his family. He sounded desperate for a chance to be believed that he had changed, but also hopeless.
Picking up on Hal’s point, Pino noted that the doctors who came in to see Grace were interested in the shape of her skull. “That was a Spinoza theory,” said Richard, saying that the phrenology in the book pointed to the ideas of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher. He tossed that off casually as though everyone in the room would know Spinoza. And sure enough, when I researched his point later, I found a book by the late philosopher H.S. Harris, who asserts that phrenology was inspired by Spinoza’s theories.
We dissected the characters of the murdered housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, and of James McDermott, Grace’s co-accused. Tom’s assessment that McDermott committed the murders for reasons of jealousy went unchallenged. However, Doc made one keen observation: that one of the reasons we can’t fully penetrate McDermott’s culpability is that we only see him through Grace’s point of view.
I was itching for the discussion to finally come round to Grace. When it did, most of the book club members concluded that Grace was innocent of the murders of her employer, Mr. Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery.
“I wholeheartedly believe that Atwood decided that this was a woman wronged,” said Tom, arguing Atwood portrayed Grace as demure and introverted, even though somewhat calculating. Raymond agreed. Richard said he wanted her to be innocent. And Frank said he felt sorry for Grace and wanted a good outcome for her.
But even though Frank was in the cheering section for Grace, he also planted a seed of doubt. He pointed out to us that when Grace and McDermott were on the run together after the crime, McDermott wasn’t afraid of Grace turning him in. For Frank, McDermott’s lack of fear indicated that she wasn’t his hostage, which in turn spoke to Grace’s complicity in the crime. In essence he was saying ‘follow the fear’ because fear can tell you a lot about a person.
Grace had given several accounts of the incident over the course of the novel. In the book club meeting it dawned on me that maybe the whole point of Alias Grace is to show how unreliable storytelling can be. Byrne asked us to turn to page 25 to consider a passage in which Grace is staring at a flowering tree design on a shawl from India. She stares at it so long that the branches seem like vines twisting in the wind. “I thought that was a pretty interesting little bit of symbolism,” said Byrne. “So over a century and a half later, her whole story, we can twist those vines whatever way the wind blows.” He wasn’t trying to impress. He was just revelling in the beauty of literature.
Byrne wasn’t the only reader who had appreciated Atwood’s use of symbolism. Tom jumped in, observing that the names of the quilt patterns, Puss in the Corner, Pandora’s Box and Solomon’s Temple, that serve as the titles for each section of the novel, could generate a whole conversation. No one picked up on that point, but it would have been interesting to explore with him which quilt-pattern names were recognizable metaphors for chapter content.
I then asked the book club members the same question I’d put to Gaston and Dread at Collins Bay: given Grace’s seeming amnesia in the book, is it true that perpetrators of a violent crime tend to blank out on the details of the incident, or do they recall everything vividly? Tom said that one man he’d done time with told him that he was in a fog after killing his wife. “He always used to talk to me about the fog of what happened and how he ended up sitting on the couch afterward in a daze and his dead wife sitting beside him,” said Tom. The room fell silent at that.
I was glad of the direct answer, but also grateful when Raymond switched the topic to the hypnosis scene and how many questions it raised that Atwood never answered. “All these dangling participles over and over and if the author doesn’t solve these issues, it drives me crazy,” said Raymond. I could see from his smile that he was pleased with finding the phrase “dangling participles” to serve as a metaphor for loose ends.
“The novel leaves you with more questions,” agreed Phoebe, who also admitted to disliking the loose threads in the tale.
Richard was okay with that feature of the novel, though. “There’s lots of things in life we just don’t get the answers to,” he said.
“I tend to agree with you, Richard,” said Carol. “As well, she was trying to be true to history.”
Then it was time for some housekeeping. Frank announced that this would be his last meeting because he would be out on parole and another book club ambassador was needed to take his place. Earl volunteered to take Frank’s place in the fall. I could see that Earl was already beginning to fill Frank’s shoes. Phoebe told the men that Graham might also be leaving before book club restarted in the fall and that anyone willing to replace him should speak to him over the summer. All those who had participated since the beginning of the year received participation certificates, copies of which were provided to their parole officers for their case management files.
Finally we came to what many of the men had been waiting for: the vote on the books for the 2012–13 book club season. Carol had distilled the recommendations from our Book Selection Committee with requests from the men to come up with a long list of twenty books from which they had to choose nine for eight meetings. The extra book would serve as a backup in case one of the other books was out of print or hard to obtain. In deference to the men’s request for the inclusion of sci-fi, I had added Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano to the list of options. And there were classics: Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and two novels by John Steinbeck: Cannery Row and The Grapes of Wrath. Also on the list was a book that Raymond had lobbied for at the last meeting: Ragtime, by American novelist E.L. Doctorow. Everyone voted by secret ballot. Many of the men came up to me at the end of the meeting to say goodbye.
“Thank you so much, Ann,” said Richard, taking off his black-framed reading glasses and shaking my hand. I thanked him for his comment on Spinoza. “Oh please,” he said, and flushed slightly.
Then Byrne came up, his eyes alive with
enthusiasm. He wanted to tell me about how the opening sequence in Alias Grace had triggered a strong memory of his own time at Kingston Penitentiary. “When it talks about the grey stone walls and plants growing up through the pebbles, I was there and picking up flowers thinking of my little girl,” he said. The flowers were buttercups and chicory, not the peonies that Grace imagines in the novel. He had observed that moment in his life as a writer might do and was offering his observation as a gift. He also said he identified with the image of Grace’s shoes as she walks. For him, it brought back memories of the shoes that inmates receive when they enter the federal penitentiary and his gratitude to get a new pair at that time.
Many of them asked hopefully if I would be back in the fall. I said it wasn’t certain, but thanked them for making me welcome.
That evening I opened Frank’s journals. He had lots more to say about Alias Grace and he described it as the best book he had read in the prison book clubs.
The next morning I was scheduled to meet Graham for coffee in Toronto. He suggested a local coffee shop in his mother’s neighbourhood. It was my first time to meet him alone outside the prison and I was a little nervous, not knowing whether former gang members might be after him. He was already inside with a newspaper and a mug of coffee, looking out the window. We waved, and as I lined up to buy a bottle of water, I looked around. The place had a folksy log cabin decor and light-stained knotty pine furnishings, with branded coffees carrying backwoods names like “The Grizz.”
When I sat down, Graham was full of talk about how the inmate pay cutbacks were lousy policy. On the subject of increasing inmate contribution to room and board, he said it would be like double-dipping, since the extremely low pay stipends already reflected amounts for room and board.
It sounded as though he would have very little time for reading if he were granted parole the following month. The John Howard Society in the area where he had requested a spot in a halfway house had asked him to address their general meeting to give them a briefing about the federal penitentiary system. He was writing a practical manual for criminology students and inmates in the federal system. And he was thinking of getting paid work with a moving company.
We were finishing up our drinks when a policeman walked by and took a good look at Graham. My reaction must have been transparent because he said, “I see them all the time. I’m used to them now.” I felt very self-conscious. Was this just a chance encounter or did the police keep a close eye on parolees on their “unescorted” absences—especially high-profile offenders like Graham? I wondered whether my photo was now in a police file as an “unknown woman” or “associate.” Were disgruntled Hells Angels members also likely to drive by? As I was mulling that over, Graham asked, “What time is it?” He had to check in with his parole officer at eleven. We hadn’t had time to talk about Alias Grace. He gave me a big hug—by now his typical greeting and send-off for Carol and me whenever we got together. And he walked me to my car.
“Bye Graham,” I said.
“Bye.”
21
THE EXMATES
IT WAS CAROL who gave me the courage to meet with some of the book club members once they were no longer inmates and had become parolees. “Exmates” or “outmates” was her joking term for them. She dared them with her trust and referred to them as “graduates of the book club.” They lived up to her trust, for the most part.
It had started months earlier with Vince, her special protege from the Collins Bay Book Club, who had left the prison before I even arrived. When he was transferred to a halfway house and found work with a moving company, she bought him some of the books that the men in his old book club were reading and urged him to read along. Because he had had an addiction, she deputized a Circle of Support for him, manned by volunteers who were friends of hers. Circles of that type were originally developed to support sex offenders as they re-entered the community, but a CSC community chaplain helped her adapt the program for other federal offenders like Vince graduating from her book club. And when Vince had trouble lining up housing after the halfway house, Carol and her husband acted as guarantors on his rental agreement. For other men, she supplied books, helped calm spouses and encouraged further education. None of this was part of Book Clubs for Inmates. It was just her seemingly insatiable need to help and her desire to see her graduates succeed.
I was not as bold as Carol, but I was eager to see whether the men would sustain their reading habit after leaving prison. I began to find out on July 4, when my cellphone rang and an unfamiliar number appeared on the screen.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me, Frank.”
“Hello, Frank!” I said. I had left my number for him at his new Salvation Army halfway house, a converted Victorian house with a wraparound porch in a downtown Toronto neighbourhood. He slept there and had a curfew, but was allowed to visit his home during the day.
“I’m calling you from a computer,” he said.
“Voice over internet?” I asked.
“No, it’s a phone. I just wanted a plain phone but my wife convinced me I had to be able to text as well.” He had been in prison such a long time that he had missed how cellphones had evolved to include the internet, email and texting.
It was great to hear his voice. He told me that he already had a library card and a job on a landscaping crew. A library card! I told him that I was worried about him working in the heat that day. It was thirty-six degrees Celsius with 95 percent humidity and torpid air. The sky was grey with particulate matter. He said that the team had quit work at noon because it was dangerously hot.
According to Frank, his house had become chaotic in his absence. His mother-in-law had moved in, bringing her furniture with her, and the number of pets had spiralled out of control. “There are two dogs and a cat chasing each other and birds flying free,” he said, complaining that the pets seemed to live forever. “It’s like Tweety Bird and Sylvester.” Now that he was back in town, the birds had to stay in their cages and his mother-in-law was moving out before Christmas.
“It must be great to see your family every evening,” I said.
He said it was, but that he had eaten the previous evening’s Chinese-food dinner of duck and rice alone. His wife worked long hours and his son and daughter had numerous after-school activities. He had to weave himself back into his family’s busy lives.
I was hardly surprised at what he told me next. He and Gaston were joining a book club that was just starting up at their halfway house, and Frank hadn’t had to organize it. He had arrived just as someone else in the halfway house was hunting for a book club for herself—Renata, a staffer there. Frustrated by the waiting list at her local library’s book club, Renata had persuaded her supervisor to let her start one at work, with parolees. Carol had offered resources from Book Clubs for Inmates, but Renata was determined to go it alone and buy the books at thrift stores whenever possible.
When the call ended I felt exhilarated. Finding time to read while in a halfway house was much harder than finding time to read in prison. As parolees, the men had multiple new responsibilities. Gaston and Frank both had to work, attend programs, observe curfews, see their parole officers and re-establish their lives with their wives and children. The fact that they had also made a commitment to a book club was an indicator that Carol’s big idea was having long-term positive effects.
Three weeks later, I drove to meet Graham at his halfway house about an hour’s drive outside of Toronto. Beaver Creek had released him a week earlier. As I was driving, a text came in from Frank. I pulled over and had a look at my phone. “The book group met,” his text read. “Renata is not a bad facilitator. The group is small right now with six members. The book she chose is Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. The movie bored me but maybe I will pay more attention to the book if I can find the time to read it.”
I pulled back onto the road, enjoying the lushness of the roadside sumac bushes, their drupes the colour of dried blood. I was still a
little nervous about meeting Graham outside of prison because I imagined that people from his past might want to target him. But I used the passing natural scenery to soothe myself, and Frank’s news to give me confidence.
Graham’s halfway house was on a dreary residential street in the city’s downtown just five kilometres from a Hells Angels clubhouse. A broad-shouldered three-storey brick building, the halfway house was painted pale grey and had a wooden bench outside, presumably for smokers. The front door had been lowered to street level and there was no porch, only a tidy awning over the entrance door. What appeared to be a security camera was aimed at the entrance. Graham came out of the building wearing workout gear. I guessed that the staff inside were watching via the camera.
I suggested that we go to a café and then the library, since he was spending a lot of his time there. Halfway houses keep new parolees on a tight leash in the early days following release, so Graham had to go back inside to get permission for my suggested itinerary. And then it was time for me to take another brave step— unlock my car door for Graham and get into a car alone with him for the drive to the library. He lowered his towering frame into the passenger seat and used the mechanical lever to slide the seat back as far as it could go.
I asked if a ROPE (Repeat Offender Parole Enforcement) squad was following us, even though I knew that their focus was on parole violators. “Probably,” he said. I looked over my shoulder as I guided the car to a parkade across from the library, but no one appeared to be tailing us.
“I have this niggling concern that we’ll be gunned down,” I said, thinking of his former gang members.
“No, the people who have a problem are the guys who are making up stories or who testified about people. I’ve got all the skeletons in the closet and they’ll stay in the closet and they know that.” I reminded myself that he’d left the gang on good terms. Nevertheless his parole restrictions required him to avoid a large area of the city around the Hells Angels clubhouse.