When I turned, she was watching me, crows-feet noticeable around her blue eyes, a smattering of freckles visible against her pale skin. Her hair fell around her shoulders, wavy in the place that had held a ponytail.
“Someone slashed my arm with a shank while I was in line for dinner.” She said it so quietly, I almost couldn’t hear. “At first, it didn’t hurt. I didn’t even know I had been cut until I felt something wet, and then it burned like a blow torch.”
I watched her shake her head, as though dismissing the memory. She put the brush back into the bottle and screwed on the cap. “They took me to the infirmary and stitched me up and sent me back to my room,” she said quickly. “I never found out who did it.” Tapping out a cigarette, she held it between two fingers, carefully reaching for her Bic so as not to smudge her polish.
I tried to see her scar, but her cotton blouse covered it. “I thought that scar was from the hit and run.”
“Don’t tell Mom,” she said. “She thinks it was the hit and run, too.”
That was the way with Gracie. I thought I knew everything about her, but I was always understanding there was more. She was labyrinth-like, a maze of known and unknown stories. I closed my eyes. Julie’s last letter seemed to settle in my mind like one of the sheets on the line, settling after a breeze. Suddenly Julie and Gracie seemed to fuse, twin-like in my mind. I wondered vaguely about the ways we allow certain people to fill the spaces in our lives. Gracie blew out a stream of smoke.
“You know what prison does?” she asked. And when I didn’t answer she said, “Prison makes you strong.”
She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
The Doctoral Student
from Faile Street
On a beautiful spring weekend, the same weekend Chris received his first Communion, I received my tassel—gold—not the black that adorned hundreds of others. “Magna cum laude,” I shouted to James, so that everyone within a quarter mile could hear.
“I’m so, so proud of you.” James twirled me around, sending my hat flying. The boys didn’t know what magna cum laude meant, but James did, but they laughed along with us.
We gathered at the house—the Martins, the Murrays, and the Morans—so many we spilled into the backyard next door. My mother posed with me for a photograph in my cap and gown. Her red hair had been done at the beauty parlor, and she had on her pretty green dress.
“This is my degree too,” she said.
“I know it is.” I kissed her cheek and felt a special tenderness toward her. She had made it easy for me to hole up in my office and study for exams, brought over trays of macaroni and cheese and chaperoned dozens of sleepovers while James and I migrated our first years of fake marriage into a new decade.
Gracie and I posed for pictures and ate barbecue. I saw my mother laughing with Aunt Delia and watched Brian’s brother Dennis set up a Whiffle ball game for Keith and Chris. Dennis was more square-jawed and bigger framed than Brian, and I saw something of him in Chris. He was an FBI agent, a man used to taking charge, but he was here today for us.
“Congratulations,” he said when he hugged me, his voice so similar to Brian’s it took me back in time. “What now?” he asked, and I laughed and told him I had just graduated, now I needed some time to decide.
“What now” was the same question James asked that day on Hot Dog Beach. Now I had a bachelor’s degree in my hand, I could pursue a writing career, but something held me back. The boys had adapted to James, but they were still vulnerable, the way kids are who have lost a parent and gained a new one. I wanted to stay as close as I could to them. And then, standing there watching my youngest son on home base, ready to hit, I realized what I had wanted since I was a ginger-haired girl in a kindergarten classroom in borrowed clothes.
The house was filled with everyone I loved, and it was James I sought out to tell the news. “I’ve decided,” I told him when I found him filling the ice bucket in the kitchen. “I want to be an English professor. I’m going to apply for the doctoral program.” James took me in his arms and kissed my forehead. “You can do anything you put your mind to Kathleen, I have no doubt about it.”
__________
“Seventeen applicants will be chosen out of hundreds who have applied,” the Dean of Graduate Programs told me during my interview. It seemed a long shot.
I filled out the applications and read over the course catalogues spread out on the dining room table. Next to them was Julie’s most recent letter. She was the one who had been born with all the opportunities. I was the kid from the Bronx who loved to read. Then, with the acceptance letter in my hand, I planned out the next four years when I would receive my doctorate degree.
__________
We bought my mother a small house in Northport that she shared with Gracie and Billy. She was happy to be close to the boys, and I was happy to have help as I began my journey toward my last year in the program. But while I was teaching one afternoon, I found myself overcome with dizziness.
After collapsing in a chair in the office I shared with Jenny, another doctoral candidate, she looked at me in alarm. “What’s the matter?”
“Can you take my class?” I asked her. “I’m sick.” Putting my head down on the desk, I closed my eyes.
A while later Jenny brought back my purse and books. “The flu?” She put her hand on my forehead, motherly concern in her eyes.
“You don’t feel hot. Maybe you’re pregnant.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t be pregnant.” But then I remembered buying a box of Tampax that month and, without a thought, adding it to a full box still on the shelf.
“Oh God. You might be right.”
Could I have gone two months without noticing? The panic came back. I knew she was right. My breasts had been sore, but I had not thought much of it. James and I did want a child together, but after trying for years, we decided it wasn’t meant to be, and I went on with the PhD program.
It was late afternoon on a warm day in May. The kitchen smelled of the rich coffee James was brewing. When I told him about the baby, his hug knocked the breath out of me, and as he let me go I saw tears brimming in his eyes. We couldn’t stop smiling at each other.
“You’re going to have a new baby brother or sister,” James told the boys after we had called them into the room. Keith’s scarlet face told us he knew where babies came from, and Chris yelled, “I want a sister this time.”
While the boys went back to their video games we sat on the couch, held hands, and smiled. And then we made plans for how I would have a baby and complete my doctorate.
“It will work out fine,” James told me. I hoped he was right.
__________
We were at Timmy and Jean’s for a Halloween party, dressed in roaring-twenties garb. We had just asked them to be godparents when my water broke. The ambulance rushed me to the ER where our daughter was born early. Kaitlin Jean Moran weighed in at four pounds five ounces. At home, she took two ounces at a time, and I spent most of the day feeding and changing her, and realized how much special care a premature baby would need.
I would have to withdraw from the doctoral program, but would leave Stony Brook University with a Masters degree. It was still something to be proud of, I knew, and I thought about that time so long ago when I had shared a tiny room in a Bronx tenement with Gracie. Back then I had little chance of higher education, but by some miracle, I had succeeded.
The eyes of others our prisons;
their thoughts our cages.
— Virginia Woolf
Gravitational Pull
The call came in the middle of the night, as most bad news does.
“The ambulance just took Mom to the hospital,” Gracie said. “I’ll meet you there.”
; I woke Keith to tell him to listen for Kaitlin, that we were leaving for the hospital where his grandmother was, and then James and I dressed and tiptoed from the sleeping house and drove to the hospital.
“She had a massive heart attack,” the doctor told us. “And considering the damage already done to her heart by her previous attacks, her heart is significantly weakened.”
Gracie and I sat by her side in the emergency room. When the rest of the family had all gathered around her, she opened her eyes and smiled a tight smile.
“Looks like I’m not ready yet,” she said, like she was in control.
“She is right,” Dr. Balzac told me when I spoke to him in the hallway. He was an elderly man with half glasses perched on the end of his nose and a slight accent I couldn’t place. “But the damage has been done,” he said, as he stared past me into her room. “She will be on medication that can cause excessive bleeding, and she will need to be cared for by professionals.” He removed his glasses and looked at me out of grey-green eyes. “Blood is no longer circulating properly to her legs. She will never walk again.”
Never, I realized as I sat with her, feeding her canned peaches from her hospital tray, never get to live out her life in the house she had come to love.
She was transferred to St. James Nursing Home where we played checkers and listened to Frank Sinatra sing about New York. One morning I wheeled her chair outside so she could feel the warmth of the sun. But when the chair hit a blip in the sidewalk, my hands left the grip, and she began rolling into the street.
“Let me go,” she said to me when I caught the chair.
“But Mom,” I said. “I have you.” She waved me away.
“Let me die,” she whispered.
That afternoon I watched her sleep. A part of her had withered away, her face now drawn and wrinkled. After all those years feeling that I was a child without a mother, I finally had her in my life. I had given up the resentment and accepted a new kind of love she offered, and now I would lose her. It seemed, sitting by her side, that time was the worst thief.
__________
I stood in church on Sunday, singing hymns next to James and my children, thinking about my mother. She had been the first family member there after Brian’s death. She had picked me up during those horrible post-death days, found me things to wear, taken care of the boys, and finally come to live with us. Whatever faults my mother had, when the worst crisis hit, she had appeared. And now I realized her objection to Julie Busic was a sound one. I could see the folly of writing to the person who had turned my family’s life upside down. She was an accomplice to killing the father of my two innocent boys and had threatened a nation.
I knew it made no sense, but my appetite for Julie’s letters and their intensity felt almost sexual in nature. She wrote like a lover, crawling back to me, and sometimes I found I had memorized lines of her letters without meaning to, as though they were actual conversations, stamped into the mind’s eye.
I still agonize over what you have been through, I still feel that I must do something to atone, I must help you in some way, but how can I do this? So much I know now that I didn’t know then. But it’s just too late now. At least I have become wiser with the years. I have not remained stuck in the past.
We got up to file out of the church. I said hello to our priest, and ushered Kaitlin and the boys into the blaring sunshine, and felt the secret of those letters, the weight of them, moving with me. I realized as I climbed into the hot car, James behind the wheel, with the kids buckled into their seatbelts, that the letters threatened to send me back to a time when I couldn’t see the sunlight but felt powerless to stop. I knew she was toxic, and I did not care. I was drawn to her the way I was drawn to the wayward girls in my South Bronx neighborhood when I was a teenager. I was drawn to her in the same way I had been drawn to Gracie, even while she was using.
The letters had a gravitational pull to them, as though they were alive, and I often stayed up until after midnight reading and replying. That night I slipped in bed next to James. The moon was high outside the bedroom window, and I could just make him out, his tousled hair, the sweet way his mouth opened slightly when he slept. I wanted to wake him and tell him. It had been two years, and I didn’t want to keep the secret anymore. Sliding between his arms, I felt his big hands around my waist. He worked every day to support our family, and not telling him felt like living a double life.
I closed my eyes and remembered that he told me early on in our relationship that the details of my marriage to Brian and all that came with it troubled him, and he preferred living in the present. He once had a dream where he walked into the living room and found Brian dressed in a suit of armor. When James asked him what he was doing, Brian said he was waiting for me.
And so we built our own foundation. My life with James was what I longed for since losing Brian. I had someone to love and take care of me. I had three healthy children, an excellent education, great friends, and a beautiful home. But I also had a secret that I knew would hurt him if he found out and decided I would not tell him.
But while I lay there in the dark next to him, I knew, too, that something was missing, some part of that child I had been, who wanted to know what heroin felt like but was too afraid to try, the one who surreptitiously admired a monstrous brother with a voice like an angel when he rhapsodized crowds on street corners, the child who loved to roller-skate on Bronx streets in the middle of the night and was secretly thrilled when police raided Calvin’s Chinese Laundry. That girl was pulled toward Julie’s letters in the same way many of us are pulled toward the illicit. I realized that the illicit held a familiar charge. It was part of my DNA. Like a child raised on certain foods who then longs for them throughout her adult life, a part of me longed for something dangerous, something that felt like a brush with fire when you did not quite understand you’d been cold.
Drifting off to sleep, my hand over James’s, I felt the comforting familiarity of the wedding ring on his left hand, but shame washed over me. Keeping Julie’s letters secret reminded me of how I felt about the black eye and the broken hand Corky had given me, it was equal to trying to hide that my favorite older sister had used heroin. It was equal to the feeling that maybe I would really never be better than that kid who got sent home from school with borrowed school clothes and lice in her hair.
__________
“I wonder what Julie thinks about me,” I said to Gracie the next afternoon when the boys were at school, and she had come by for lunch.
“She probably wishes she never heard your name, but I don’t think she spends too much time thinking about you.”
“I’ll bet she would be surprised at how much time I spend thinking about her.”
Gracie took a sip of her Coke. She had not touched the sandwich I made her. And then she said suddenly, “I’m moving to Florida. Billy wants to go down there to fish.”
Billy: vodka, cigarettes, stained yellow teeth, fingertips brown from filter-less Chesterfields.
“Florida’s for old people,” I said shakily. “People go there to die.”
“Clearwater,” she said, as if I had not spoken. “We’re leaving in a month.” I watched her pull out a Lucky and push her sandwich away.
I turned silences and nights into words.
What was unutterable, I wrote down.
I made the whirling world stand still.
— Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
Red Flag
When Gracie first moved to Florida we talked almost every day, about the weather, the flamingos and seawater sunsets, my mother’s static health condition, the restaurants in the old city and how the humid air smelled of salt. I tried to tell her about Julie, but Gracie got very quiet when I did, and yet I couldn’t help myself. Gracie was still the only person I confided in. She was my only outlet for the pressure of keeping the communication cloistered. I told her that Julie wrote abou
t some of the passengers who went to visit her in prison.
“They said they appreciated life more now that they’ve learned the difference between what is trivial and what is important,” I read from Julie’s letter.
On Gracie’s end I heard the lighter spark, the inhale of smoke.
“They were glad they had the experience, as it caused them to think about the things in their lives they wouldn’t have explored otherwise.”
Gracie was quiet. I heard her breathing. Finally she said. “You think that’s true?”
I did not know whether she was asking if the passengers really came to visit her or if the passengers themselves appreciated being hijacked.
“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully.
“Well,” Gracie inhaled. “Hijacking is trauma.” She was quiet for a minute.
“And trauma is hell, no matter how you slice it.”
And then she abruptly changed the subject. She talked about her cat and the dress she wanted to buy, and I let my attention slide from my sister to the last letter I had received. Julie wrote that Patty Hearst was in the same prison and had relayed to Julie what it felt like to be kidnapped and then to go along with her captors.
I have, of course, had many different kinds of experiences here over the years, met lots of interesting people. Sara Jane Moore is here now, Ma Anand Sheela, the Bhagwan follower. We’ve had a wide assortment of characters, gangsters, public officials, Russian spies; you name it, they’ve been here.
I wanted to tell Gracie that Julie had been beaten with a hammer by Squeaky Fromme, the nut-job who tried to kill President Ford, but I saw the tables had ever so slightly turned, and now it was Gracie who was looking down at my wayward behavior, wondering when I would fly straight again.
__________
I chose to ignore the first red flag that showed Julie’s true colors. The warning call came from an odd source: McTigue. In a strangely intimate gesture, Julie had begun to send me excerpts from her journal, and in it she described McTigue:
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