Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It was early Sunday afternoon. The chill October sun was high overhead and in the near distance behind the weatherworn prison wall topped with cruel-glinting razor-wire was a mountain like a painted backdrop on a stage.

  The mountain, in the southern Catskills, was partly covered with fir trees and a scattering of deciduous trees with bright splotches of foliage like a Fauve painting. It seemed to loom close beyond the prison wall like a taunt but had to be miles away.

  What would Vivianne have been doing on this bright-chilly October Sunday, in her old, lost life? It did no good to wonder.

  Hudson Fork was one of the older prisons in the New York State prison system, originally built in 1891. Of course it had been partly rebuilt, remodeled. But the old buildings remained, like fossilized rock.

  Until 1967, Hudson Fork had executed men. Now the old death row quarters had been refashioned into a part of the prison yard that housed the Education Unit office and classrooms.

  “The inmates joke about ‘ghosts,’ ” their guide told them. “They’re referring to the old death row prisoners and they aren’t serious—anyway, most of them.”

  There were forty-three hundred prisoners in this facility designed to hold approximately two thousand men. Yet, there could not have been more than forty inmates scattered about the vast open space inside the prison—the “yard.”

  In their blue prison-issue the inmates resembled actors in a desultory and uncoordinated action in which no single individual was prominent—some were making their way, with a kind of studied slowness, around a weedy track, which brought them in proximity with the civilian-volunteers on the other side of the wire-mesh fence. Vivianne was surprised to see an older man, in his sixties at least, wispy-bearded as a figure out of mythology, walking with a cane.

  An unexpected number of the men were middle-aged and a majority appeared to be Caucasian unless you looked more closely—to the far left of the yard, in a scrubby-grassy area abutting a protective stucco wall where there was a primitive basketball court and a hoop with frayed netting, young African-American men shot baskets and milled about restlessly.

  Elsewhere, in their sequestered corners of the yard, were Hispanic men, “mixed-blood” men, a very few Asian-Americans.

  Why are you here, why’d you sign up?—Vivianne was asked by her companion/co-instructor Cal Healy, and she told him because she wanted to help prisoners adjust to life outside prison—“I want to be of help.”

  In fact, not all of their inmate-students would be paroled any time soon, or possibly ever: this was information the civilian-volunteers didn’t generally know.

  Vivianne’s response was awkwardly pious, but true: she did not add that in this late phase of her life, to be of help was all that remained.

  In turn, she’d asked Cal Healy why he’d volunteered and he’d said, “For a selfish reason, I suppose—I can list this course on my résumé, when I’m looking for a job.” He paused, and laughed, as if he’d said too much. “And I want—like, to contribute. I want to be a part of—y’know—making things better for ‘disenfranchised’ Americans.”

  Cal Healy was a tall slight-bodied young man in his late twenties who wore a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, a nylon parka, corduroys. He’d described himself to Vivianne as a “social-eco-activist” enrolled in the Ph.D. program in social psychology at SUNY Purchase. Vivianne wondered if he resented her as a co-instructor or if he was grateful for her presence, as he’d said: “We can’t teach in the prison alone, y’know. The class I assisted for, last spring, there were three of us—plus the primary instructor.”

  Vivianne liked it that she, with her lengthy teaching career, and her administrative career, was now “assisting” a young Ph.D. candidate with virtually no experience in teaching. There was something consoling about this like the sensation she felt—sometimes—waking abruptly from sleep without remembering where she was, what time in her life it had become.

  The Education Unit was inside the prison facility, a sequence of wood frame buildings with a look of the temporary, like Quonset huts.

  In the Education Unit were an office and several classrooms and to access this space, you had to pass through three checkpoints manned by prison guards; the Unit was segregated from the prison itself and from the yard by a twelve-foot wire-mesh fence topped with razor-wire. Several inmates, including the old man with the cane, passed close by on the other side of this fence, staring at Vivianne and her companions, covertly; it was eerie, how neither the inmates nor the civilian visitors acknowledged one another, despite their physical proximity of only a few feet.

  Vivianne only just glanced at the inmates in their blue prison-issue clothes, and looked quickly away.

  Her social instinct was to smile, nervously. She knew it was an instinct to be resisted.

  This was a season in her life when often helplessly she glanced at strangers—felt a premonitory kick in her heart—and looked quickly away.

  Of course you won’t see him. How could you hope to see him.

  In her profession she’d met so many people, she’d shaken the hands of thousands of people, locked eyes with so many—sincerely, for the most part—for Vivianne Greary was indisputably a sincere person—yet in Hudson Fork Correctional Facility she seemed to have forgotten, or mislaid, her composure.

  She could not determine why: she knew there was no danger to her, physically. Not behind the wire-mesh security fence, and not in the presence of guards.

  The inmates in the yard were observed, too, continuously by armed guards in watch towers. No gesture of theirs could go unnoticed, unrecorded.

  A woman, sighted by inmates in the yard, would naturally be of interest—any female, any age.

  Though there were a number of female volunteers in the program. And, to Vivianne’s surprise, there were a number of female guards in the all-male facility, who wore uniforms identical to the male guards’ uniforms and were, at a short distance, indistinguishable from the men.

  Did Vivianne imagine it?—the female guards at the checkpoints, scrutinizing civilian volunteers, seemed even more disapproving than the men.

  Greary, Vivianne C. had had to show her driver’s license and photo I.D. several times and she’d had to print and sign her name several times so that the name might be matched with a roster of “cleared” names provided by the State Prison Education Program. The tender inside of her right wrist was briskly stamped with an invisible code, to be checked when she left the facility.

  Civilians were warned not to “wash off” the invisible ink.

  If they did, they might be detained for hours. Possibly, the prison would be locked-down.

  The prison guards wore military-looking uniforms the color of brackish water. It was indeed difficult to distinguish between female and male in these singularly ugly clothes.

  “Ma’am. Lift your arms please.”

  A stout unsmiling black woman had drawn a wand over Vivianne—across her shoulders, her chest and back, along the length of her legs, and behind her legs—sounding impatient with her.

  “Ma’am—turn around.”

  The guard had seemed annoyed by Vivianne as one who, judging by her age, her demeanor, her tasteful but clearly expensive black-woolen clothing, was out of place in Hudson Fork.

  The presence of civilians in the maximum-security prison was offensive to many of the guards, for civilians were a potential source of danger. At the three-hour orientation class Vivianne had attended two weeks before, she’d learned that the prison had a no-hostage policy.

  Some of the volunteers had laughed, hearing this. Their laughter was edgy, anxious. What did no-hostage policy mean, exactly?

  Vivianne hadn’t had to ask. She knew: if prisoners take hostages, there would be no negotiating for their release.

  Ma’am? Sign here.”

  Greary, Vivianne C. Co-Instructor English 101.

  What relief to her, that no one knew her here! Her identity was no more and no less than that of the other civilian
instructors: a person who’d volunteered to teach in a maximum-security prison for men, to be of help.

  This was a new life. A remnant of a life.

  Or maybe not a life but a shrewd stratagem for getting through the day, the week, the weeks, a month.

  “Now, through here. All of you show your I.D.s to the guard—hold them up so she can see them.”

  A small contingent had gathered in the holding-cage—both civilians and guards on their way into the inner facility. Without needing to be told, the civilians let the guards—silent, unsmiling, indifferent to the courtesy—go ahead of them.

  Vivianne, who’d hiked as a girl, and continued to walk distances as often as she could, was made just slightly breathless by the walking—uphill, and down—inside the prison walls. Even Cal Healy was becoming winded.

  The distance from the front gate to the Education Unit at the far end of the yard must have been a quarter mile, most of it outdoors.

  Above the Catskill Mountains, the sky was massed with clouds that seemed to have blown up from nowhere: cumulus clouds bearing shadowy pouches of rain, like just-visible tumors.

  As the sun faded, the air turned colder. Already when Vivianne and Cal had hurried from his car, parked in the distant visitors’ lot by the river, they’d shivered in the gusty air blowing off the choppy slate-covered Hudson River.

  Oh why am I here. Why, this terrible place!

  She’d laughed, she’d been so chilled, and so discomfited.

  She’d laughed, her life of which she’d once been so proud had become ridiculous as a weathered old wind sock whipping in the wind.

  Still: she held herself in perpetual readiness—(how exhausting this was, her slender body taut as a bow!)—that if somehow she failed to see him—(through the wire-mesh fence, for instance, with its look of latticed neurons)—he might see her.

  Here was a surprise. Vivianne supposed it was a disappointment.

  Sunday classes at the prison were scheduled at the same time as once-weekly visiting hours. This was unfortunate!

  Was this deliberate, was it a hostile act, to force the prisoners to choose between taking a course and seeing visitors?—indignant Cal Healy had to ask. And Mick McKeon said, in a lowered voice, so that no guards or prison authorities might overhear, “Well—try to see it this way. Visiting hours are likely to be Saturday or Sunday—weekends. Classes are usually weekdays. Why they’ve scheduled these Sunday classes at the same time as visiting hours I’m not sure, no one in the program knows, and we can’t really ask. We are here—we are in here—only because the prison authority has allowed us in. We have no rights and privileges and our prison program can be canceled at any time.”

  “But it’s hostile, then? Essentially.”

  Since they’d arrived at the prison Cal Healy had become increasingly excitable. Initially he led Vivianne to believe that he had taught a course at Hudson Fork, but in fact he’d only assisted another instructor for just two class meetings. At the checkpoints he’d been edgy and defensive; he’d been stunned when a guard told him he hadn’t been “cleared”—his name hadn’t been on the roster—until it turned out, after closer inspection, that Cal Healy was on the roster, at the smudged bottom of a printed page.

  (Had the guard meant to harass him? Or had it been a simple mistake?)

  At the final checkpoint Cal had been informed by a guard inspecting his clothing that he couldn’t remove his jacket inside the facility since he was wearing, beneath, a gray-green shirt that might be confused, at a distance, with blue—no civilians were allowed into the facility wearing blue.

  Cal had begun to protest—his T-shirt wasn’t in any way blue—but the guard only just repeated, his shirt might be mistaken for blue by a sentry in one of the towers.

  Cal had promised, he would only remove the jacket when he was in the classroom, not outdoors. But the guard insisted, he could not remove the jacket anywhere inside the facility, since he was wearing a T-shirt that might be confused with blue.

  Furious, Cal zipped up his jacket. His lean young face had been suffused with indignation. Vivianne had felt for him the kind of concern—sympathy tempered by exasperation—a mother might feel for a headstrong son.

  Now as Cal complained to Mick McKeon of the prison authorities and of the state legislature that had recently rescinded a bill providing state funds for prison education and rehabilitation, Vivianne only half-listened, in silence. She’d become a quiet woman, a brooding woman, one who half-listens. She recalled how in her old, lost life she’d been a lively and provocative conversationalist—she’d been a popular teacher and administrator—but none of that mattered now, and certainly not in this place where no one knew her name. She’d taken to heart what incoming volunteers had been told at the orientation meeting: Don’t expect answers to your questions from prison authorities. Don’t trust your judgment and never rely upon “common sense” inside the prison.

  This, too, was good advice. Vivianne had lost all faith in her own judgment and she could not believe that “common sense” had any relevance to the world she’d come to know.

  In the Education Office they’d signed another roster—printed their names and signed and indicated the date and time—and again showed their photo I.D.s. And another time led back along the now rain-wetted wooden ramp, again passing close by the open urinal less than twelve feet away on the other side of the wire-mesh fence. Vivianne wasn’t a squeamish or even a fastidious woman—she didn’t think so—but she couldn’t imagine finding herself in such close proximity to men using the urinal just outside the Education Unit.

  This curious awkwardness had not been mentioned at the orientation meeting though the instructor—a woman of about thirty-five, with a plain fierce face—had stressed the importance of “respecting” the prisoners’ privacy: not to ask personal questions, and not to share personal information.

  It was crucial, the volunteer instructors were warned, to avoid “familiarity”—“over-familiarity”—with their inmate-students.

  Never touch a prisoner, even lightly on the wrist.

  Never position yourself close to a prisoner.

  Never come up behind a prisoner unannounced.

  Never engage in flirtatious banter with a prisoner.

  Never give a prisoner your telephone number and address.

  Never give a prisoner any gift however small. And never any money.

  Never accept a gift from a prisoner however small.

  Never deliver any message even a verbal message from one prisoner to another, this is a felony.

  Mick McKeon was saying: “The area we’re in, which is the only part of the prison you will ever be in—is a ‘safety zone.’ It’s completely surrounded by this fence—twelve feet high, with razor-wire at the top. Only inmates cleared for classes are allowed in here through the checkpoint. And we are only allowed in here, through the checkpoint. At the end of your class which should be ended promptly at 4:30 P.M.—no earlier, and no later—I’ll try to get back to escort you through the checkpoint. If I’m held up, I’ll send my assistant Dana. We can’t ask officers to escort us. Remember what you were told at orientation: never leave the men in the classroom alone, not even to look for me or Dana. And never walk alone anywhere—always be with another instructor or with an escort.”

  Cal objected: “The men cleared for our classes aren’t ‘violent offenders’—that’s ridiculous. I thought it was policy, no prisoner who’s had behavior issues is cleared for the program.”

  “These are prison regulations, Cal. Forget ‘common sense.’ ”

  McKeon singled out a key from a ring of many keys to open the classroom door. Inside, the air was chill and damp. A smell of something dark, melancholy like the stirring of rotted leaves—Vivianne felt a touch of vertigo.

  Thinking I am strong enough for this. I have never been a weak woman—you will see.

  She’d taught for much of her adult life. She’d been a dean, and even a college president—of a highly regarded liberal a
rts college in the lower Hudson Valley. Still she was on the faculty of the college though she’d retired as president after twelve years and now she was taking a much-postponed sabbatical in what she didn’t want to think, from a purely statistical perspective, might be called the “twilight” of her career.

  No one knew her name here: this was relief!

  This was freedom, and relief.

  Vaguely the prison education organizers knew who Vivianne Greary was, or had been. They’d welcomed her request to be a volunteer instructor with an excited flurry of e-mails.

  Since the state legislature had cut aid to prison programs, the program had to depend upon private donors. Vivianne would pay for the photocopying that her part of the course required and Vivianne would have happily donated books to the class—except there was the prison regulation, no gifts to prisoners.

  “Not even books?”

  “Not even books.”

  They—the new instructors—had been bemused to learn that hardcover books could not even be brought into the facility, along with more plausible contraband—money, keys, cell phones, computers, tape recorders, cameras, wallets and purses, shoulder bags, any and all weapons and sharp objects.

  Hardcover books, which with their “sharp” edges might be used as weapons.

  And chewing gum—which might be fashioned, in some ingenious Smokey Stover–way, to thwart locks.

  The classroom to which Mick McKeon had brought them was larger than Vivianne would have expected, and not nearly so dreary—two walls were lined with windows. Still, Cal Healy complained that the tables weren’t positioned for teaching—the room must have been hastily, carelessly cleaned, and tables and chairs shoved about.

  Long ago as a graduate student Vivianne had taught night school at a branch of the state university in Yonkers, New York. Her Ph.D. studies were in political science and philosophy but she’d been grateful to teach remedial English and expository writing whenever she could, as her young husband had also been grateful for these arduous, low-paying jobs. In fact, there had seemed to both Vivianne and her husband a curious sort of romance, gritty, melancholy, exhausting, in such expenditures of spirit.