Defending Jacob(73)
Witness: Step back, Neal.
Mr. Logiudice: You knew.
Witness: Step back. Get out of my face. Act like a lawyer, for once.
Mr. Logiudice: Well, now. There’s the Andy Barber we all know. Back in control of yourself. Master of self-control, master of self-delusion. Master actor. Let me ask you something: those thirty years when you forgot who you are, where you came from, you were telling yourself a story, weren’t you? For that matter, you were telling everyone a story. In a word, you were lying.
Witness: I never said anything that was not true.
Mr. Logiudice: No, but you left a few things out, didn’t you? You left a few things out.
[The witness did not respond.]
Mr. Logiudice: And yet now you want the grand jury to believe every word you say.
Witness: Yes.
Mr. Logiudice: All right, then. Go on with your story.
23 | Him
Northern Correctional Institution,
Somers, Connecticut.
The visiting booth at Northern seemed designed to disorient and isolate. A claustrophobic sealed white box, about five feet wide by eight feet deep, with a windowed door behind me and a plate-glass window in front. A beige dial-less phone on the wall at my right hand. A white counter to rest my arms on. The booth was designed to keep the prisoners caged in, of course: Northern was a level-five maximum security facility that permitted only no-contact visits. But it was I who felt entombed.
And when he appeared in the window—my father, Bloody Billy Barber—hands cuffed at his waist, a tangle of ash gray hair, smirking down at me—amused, I suppose, at his pissant kid showing up here finally—I was glad for the thick glass slab between us. Glad that he could see but not reach me. The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you. There is a shared understanding in that moment, nonverbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure. That feeling, standing at the leopard’s cage, is edged with shame, at the animal’s superior strength, at his hauteur, his low estimation of you. To my own surprise, what I felt in those first moments in my father’s presence was precisely the zoo-goer’s subtle shame. The surge of emotion took me by surprise. I had not expected to feel much of anything. Let’s be honest: Billy Barber was a stranger to me. I had not seen him in forty-five years or so, since I was a kid. But I could not have been more frozen by him. He held me as surely as if he had somehow materialized on my side of the glass and wrapped me in his arms.
He stood there framed in the window, a three-quarter-length portrait of an old con, his eyes on me. He gave a little snort.
I broke eye contact, and he sat down.
A guard stood several feet behind him, near the blank wall. (Everything was blank, every wall, every door, every surface. From what I could see, Northern C.I. seemed to be made up entirely of unbroken white plaster walls and gray concrete walls. The facility was new, completed only in 1995, so I assumed the lack of color was part of some crazy-making penal strategy. After all, it is no harder to paint a wall yellow or blue than white.)
My father picked up his phone—even as I write the words my father I feel a little thrill, and my mind reverses the film of my life back to 1961 when I last saw him, in the visiting room at the Whalley Avenue jail; that is the moment of divergence, the whole contingent, ramifying course of our two lives begins there—and I picked up my phone.
“Thanks for seeing me.”
“They’re not exactly standing in line.”
On his wrist was the blue tattoo I had remembered for so many years. It was actually quite small and indistinct, a little fuzzy-edged crucifix that had darkened with age to plum purple, like a deep bruise. I had misremembered it. I had misremembered him: he was only average height, thin, more muscular now than I’d imagined. Ropy jail-house muscles, even at seventy-two. He had picked up a new tattoo as well, much more intricate and artful than the old one: a dragon that coiled itself around his neck so that its tail and snout met at the base of his throat like a necklace pendant.
“About time you come see me.”
I sniffed. The risible suggestion that his feelings were hurt, that he was the victim here, pissed me off. What balls. Typical con, this guy was—always wheedling, angling, gaming.
“What’s it been,” he went on, “a whole life? A whole life I’m rotting away and you don’t have time to come see your old man. Not even once. What kind of kid are you? What kind of kid does that?”
“You practice that speech?”
“Don’t smart-mouth me. What’d I ever do to you? Huh? Nothing. But a whole life you never come see me. Your own father. What kind of kid doesn’t visit his own father for forty years?”
“I’m your son. That should explain it.”
“My son? Not my son. I don’t know you. Never laid eyes on you.”
“Want to see my birth certificate?”
“Like I give a shit about a f*ckin’ birth certificate. You think that’s what makes a son? One squirt fifty years ago, that’s what you are to me. What’d you think? I’d be happy to see you? Did you think I’d be jumping up and down, whoop-dee-f*ckin’-doo?”
“You could have said no. I wasn’t on your visitor list.”