Who Named the Knife Read online

  “You love animals,” I said.

  Maryann said, “But what if I get called out to court in Hawaii?”

  I teased her about not being able to commit when she was serving a life sentence. I said it was the way her father had been when he came home from the war. Paralyzed. I said, “If you get called, you’ll go. You have to let them see you. Represent yourself. But you should do the dogs.”

  She answered quickly. “If I go out of here, even for a night, I lose my room. I lose my roommate and my neighbours in the unit. If I don’t have to go, I won’t.”

  That summer, along with phone calls from Maryann, I had an invitation from my old Topeka girlfriends, who were going to get together for several days on a lake in Minnesota. It would be our first glimpse of each other in forty years, since none of them had come to the high-school reunion. Most of us had gone to nursery school together. We had lived within a few blocks of each other. Our mothers were our Scout leaders and had something called the Mothers’ Group while, among the daughters, relationships varied in intensity over the years. All through grade school I was closest to Joyce, who lost her hearing in the fifth grade. Would she mind me telling this? No, it is one of the things that has defined her life. Another is her Jewish family, therefore her difference from the rest of us. I thought it was exciting that they had no Christmas tree, that the four daughters received gifts for eight consecutive nights. I thought it was miraculous that she learned to read lips so I could talk to her silently from across the room.

  In high school, I was closest to Wendy, who lived in the house behind mine. We shared double dates with two boys who were best friends. The car, the drive-in movies, the path between our houses, the phone every night. Joyce, Wendy, and the rest of them would be together in Minnesota and the thought of it terrified me. The rest of them had kept in contact. The rest of them had seen each here or there or somewhere between. The rest of them knew about husbands and children and parents. Who had been born, who had died. These childhood friends would still be married to original husbands. Would have lived normal lives. They had never burned bridges. What did we now have in common? We had known each other’s parents: the mothers who stayed home except when they went to the beauty shop or the grocery store; the fathers who drove off in new model American cars every morning and who were each and every one Republican to the core except for mine, who stood out with his old car, his liberal views, and his returns from the office at midnight. I wondered how Maryann would feel about meeting old friends again. For three years, I’d wanted to go back with her to Honolulu. I had pictured her there, running down those courthouse steps, as if all the stories I’d read and all the movies I’d seen and all the TV shows I’d watched were promises of what could really happen. It had seemed significant that her lawyer decided to reopen the Hawaii case the week I first wrote to her – as if something was pulling us together.

  I found a pair of denim shorts in our country store. I had brought a tape measure. I tried to forget about Mr. Hasker, his bitterness, his ache. And Kimberly. For an entire week, the quarterly box and the invitation kept my mind elsewhere.

  44

  “Why didn’t you ever answer my letters?” Wendy asked. “Didn’t you know that I loved you?”

  “After Mexico,” said Joyce, “I never saw you again. We were so close. I was closer to you than to anyone else in my life.”

  I did my best to explain, but I noticed that much of the time I spent with my childhood friends in Minnesota was concerned with our mothers.

  All being dead except three.

  Liz’s mother, in fact, drove over to see us and stayed for a glass of champagne. She was alert, interested in each of us, and stimulating. Sitting gracefully in her chair with her ankles crossed, wearing stockings and small heels, wearing jewellery that suited her and attractive clothes – pants and a silk shirt – she made me ache. We all felt the same. We hovered around Liz’s mother and drank in her intelligence, her questions and opinions. Mulled wine, she was, to our motherless bodies.

  So here we are, tending our mothers in memory or in the flesh, my own most intimate moments with my mother being after her death. I cannot really tell my friends about this, although without those minutes in the basement of the funeral home, I would never have recognized my terrible need. Instead, we talk about living mothers, the ones that are left. We talk about their depressions, their housing, the long curled toenails on arthritic feet. How much are we willing to give of ourselves to our parents? How angry or selfish are we? How much do we still resent the old brutalities and withheld faith? Someone says that being a grandmother will change me. I will give up my investment in judging. I will finally see another person uncritically.

  It’s odd, but we are not much interested in our children during these magical four days. What we have in common is our own childhoods and the secrets we never shared back then and the secrets we didn’t even know we had. Because we grew up in Topeka, we talk about the famous court case that bears its name and what it meant to them and to me. Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that summer, and we had been hearing about it in the news. SCHOOL SEGREGATION BANNED, the headlines had read back in 1953. And now, sitting on folding chairs by a Minnesota lake, someone says, “But in fifth grade we already had Alice and Fanny in our school.”

  I say that was because my father was president of the schoolboard. How could they not have realized? And suddenly I’m thinking, what a father. He ran for the schoolboard because I couldn’t spell. He ran because he wanted to restore the teaching of phonics to our schools. He wanted the best public education possible for me. For everyone. Then he got embroiled in schoolboard politics. He wanted teachers to be promoted according to merit and that enraged the teachers’ union. Most of the teachers turned against him. They were about to build a school on a floodplain that belonged to someone powerful and rich – another dangerous enemy. My father stopped the contract. There were threats, a lawsuit. It was a scandal. And when the Browns sued the schoolboard because their daughter was refused admission to a certain public school, my father said the Browns were right. Schools that were separate facilities could not, by definition, be equal. And equality of opportunity is what the U.S. Constitution guaranteed.

  As a ten-year-old, I had no idea that the Supreme Court decision was going to change the world. What I knew was that my father was never home, was always at meetings, was more and more volatile. He was losing friends and clients. There were stores we didn’t enter, people my parents wouldn’t see. There were children I didn’t play with any more. Teachers who didn’t seem to like me. I kept getting in fights and being sent to the principal’s office.

  If Topeka decided to integrate the schools, as my father wished, should the board still defend itself at the Supreme Court or should it drop out of the case? For the first time, schoolboard meetings were open to the public. My father wanted the town to decide for itself. But he wanted the Supreme Court to establish a precedent. He wanted the case to be heard and won by the Browns and he wanted Topeka to be a model for everyone else. It was an odd fence to straddle, but he managed to straddle it, starting the process of desegregation with my classroom on the privileged side of town, so there would be less argument. Linda Brown’s school would have to wait.

  Often, I heard him shouting into the phone. I heard him get up in the middle of the night. He had a workbench in the garage, and he’d go out there and work on the sailboat, although he never managed, after that year, to put it back in the lake. In the morning, he would rush off to his law practice, but he grew more and more exhausted, more and more short-tempered, and I began to run when I saw him coming.

  Up to the bathroom again, where I locked the door.

  But now, telling the story to my friends, it began to make sense.

  That long ago year, I had two best friends. Joyce was one of them and Alice Smith was the other. Alice was accomplished in all sorts of ways that were new to me. Sh
e hit homeruns at recess and rode her bike without touching the handlebars. She was full of jokes and good at arithmetic. I’d never known a black person before, except for our cleaning lady, but Alice was convincing proof that ability had nothing to do with race. Secretly, I felt a certain pride in her accomplishments, knowing that my father had given Alice to our school.

  Looking back on it from this distance, my father seems to have struggled for something that would have happened anyway, but maybe there is more to it than that. In a pile of papers in Mother’s house I found the old news clippings about Brown vs. The Board and read enough to understand the part my father played in an important part of history. He was thirty-nine years old when he was elected to the schoolboard and he died sixteen years after Linda Brown won her case. But what my father did was deliver a cogent argument against segregation and helped Topeka do what was right before it was ordered to do it. While he was at it, he gave the Browns room to win their case.

  The news clippings were part of a mess of papers I found in my mother’s house when I was going through everything after she died. I also found the single-spaced instruction sheet I was given before the mock trial about the goat – the trial I had a role in at the law school as a witness, knees together and back straight. At the bottom of the first page it says: Return this script to the Dean’s office after the trial, as if it is to be held in strictest confidence. And something else. In the mess of papers there was a fat manila envelope. Hard to believe, but finding the old newsclippings and the goat story and a fat envelope was as important to my growing sense of understanding as talking to Maryann or sitting with childhood friends beside a Minnesota lake.

  As it turns out, the injured party in the mock trial was not a goat but a little boy. The boy’s arm was broken. There was a car involved and a goat too, but the goat was unharmed. Not so my father. The manila envelope was full of letters from various doctors and certain close friends and associates. They were written to the Internal Revenue Service because my father had not paid his taxes for several years. Many years. Each of the letters said, in one way or another, that my father’s mental health during the decade before his death was deteriorating. Along with his friends, medical professionals testified – doctors and psychiatrists – that my father was clinically depressed. They put the start of his condition at about the time of the Topeka tornado in 1966, when a company he had invested in was badly hit. He had put all our money into this business, trying to save it for one of his clients. He had put other peoples’ money in as well, although he should not have done that. Without enough insurance, the damage should have meant the end, but my father took out further loans and cashed in his life insurance and mortgaged our house. He did not want the men at the plant to be out of work. He could not lose the money he’d put into the company or the money he had borrowed from other clients. Who knows what else was at stake? The letters were written after his death because my mother had been left nearly penniless and the IRS was going to make her pay.

  I probably shook my head, sitting there on the floor reading those letters, because I knew that the condition they described had started much earlier – years before the tornado in 1966. “Spell precipitous,” he’d snap his fingers. “Now! And look at me. Stand up straight. What did I say? Answer me.” This temper, this lack of patience, this chronic irritability came home with my father from the war, that’s what I think, the way Bert’s indecision and paralysis came home with him. My guess is that when my father got out of the Studebaker that day in 1945 and was told that he’d have to get the ladder out of the garage and climb up to the second-floor bathroom window to see his two-year-old daughter, he felt the first prickling of rage. He had come from the train station, where my mother had gone to pick him up. He had climbed out of the car and, because of the injury to his back, because of jumping down to the ground from that troop plane in Honolulu and then reaching up to catch his bag, he must have limped as he walked up the driveway. I can see my brother running out of the house and grabbing his father around the waist, so happy to see him after that long year away. He’s been watching from the front-room window or even crouching by the bushes outside. “Linda’s locked herself in the bathroom,” he says, and my father, who would never again sleep painlessly through a night, had to fetch the ladder and lean it against the side of the house he had tried to defend with his life.

  45

  There is also this. I’m in the backseat of my father’s car with Joyce. He’s put his favourite hat on the seat and told us not to touch it, but we are suffering from excitement, driving to Kansas City to see the Ice Capades. We are jumping around, pinching and tickling and laughing and the outcome is clear. I see us pulling up at the curb in front of my grandmother’s house to bring her along with us. I see us still giggling as my father opens our door and spies his hat. We notice it too, squashed, beyond repair, beyond ever wearing again, and I know this will be the end of everything – the wonderful Ice Capades, the dinner out, the sleepover at my grandmother’s house. Even in front of Joyce who, of all my friends, is my father’s favourite, the happiness we’ve brought with us from Topeka will collapse. All the silliness disappears. We watch him brush off the hat, push at its crown, look at us for a moment, and smile.

  “I used to go to the Ice Capades,” Maryann says when I tell her this story. And then I decide to go see her again and this time meet Valere. Because how can I know Maryann unless I know the cellmate who probably knows her better than she knows herself? Friends are like that. They give us context. And I will have to come with a friend of my own, because only one prisoner is allowed per visitor. Susie lives in northern California and she agrees to apply for approval to visit the prison as long as we can make the entire trip in one day. She has animals to look after. So we fly.

  Down south the cows are sadder than ever, but the day is cool and where there is grass, it’s green. Susie can see the guard tower looming over the vast herds and I tell her there are sixteen hundred women on the human side of the fence. Having a companion along offers me a new set of eyes. I can see that those of us who are waiting outside the prison look exactly like any group clustered anyplace. We are quiet. We are variously dressed. What is unusual is our patience. The grandparents with youngsters never flinch at the flies or dust. When we get inside, we can see the people that are already lucky enough to have been reunited behind the glass. They’re sitting in clusters and visiting the vending machines and by 4:00 pm, we’re beginning to make jokes about the empty slots that will be left for us. “Yesterday they refilled them,” someone says.

  There is a slight sense of collegiality, but it is slight.

  What we can see through the soundproof glass is only a tiny percentage of the two million Americans who live in prisons but, even so, Susie is astonished. “It’s not even two million,” I tell her. “It’s more than that. Since I started writing to Maryann, another two hundred thousand people have been sent to jails. She more or less keeps me up to date.” I tell Susie that her state built San Quentin first, and then, in the next hundred years, only eight more prisons got built. But during the five short years Ronald Reagan was president, nine big prisons were built. So much damage. So much harm. The death penalty was resumed. Then twelve more prisons were built. One person out of every one hundred and thirty-eight lives in one of them. “It’s a business,” I say. “Not just in California but all over the States. Some are privately owned. They turn a huge profit. The corporations that own them lobby for longer sentences and tighter laws because they make money off of every inmate.”

  “How?”

  “Contracts. They’re paid by the head. Like cows.”

  In the outside waiting area, three people are talking about the need for stricter and longer punishment. “They’re someone’s family?” Susie sounds horrified. But by the time we meet Maryann and Valere, we have set politics aside. We are just four women getting our food, warming it up in the microwave, making the kind of small talk any four women might make. Rain has begun outs
ide, so we bring in the last four available plastic chairs, dry them off and sit. I’m happy to see Maryann. I no longer have to remind myself that I am the reason she is here. She is someone to whom I owe something, but there is a feeling in the room brought on by the outside rain, by the long wait, by the reunited families. And as a foursome we seem to be able to say anything. “Tell us about the strip searches. Who does them? The wardens?” Susie points to a woman in uniform with the usual weapons around her middle.

  “Those are COs. The old ones were okay. But now because of Schwarzenegger they all want to retire and the new batch is overtrained. They’re always just itching for something to happen.”

  “For what kind of things?”

  “Fights,” Valere says. “Yesterday they used pepper spray.”

  Maryann says, “It gives them a chance to strip-search us again, look for scratches or something with their flashlights.”

  “Do you believe her?” Susie had asked me on the plane. “I mean, is she innocent?” I had said how could I ever know. It was my usual defence. “What do we really know about anyone?” Normally, any four women I’d be chatting with over tacos and burritos might discuss a thing like strip searches done to women in prison, but normally none of us would have experienced it. On the other hand, if Valere and Maryann share our outrage, they’ve learned to live with it. It might be bravery or it might be something different, something I know no name for yet. Valere says Maryann is most notable for this, since she’s served twenty-three years for two murders she didn’t do. “I took a life,” she says. “I deserved to do time.”

  “But why do you think so? What about the battered woman argument? Maryann says he beat you up all the time.”