The Mars Room(73)

Every time Geronima went before the parole board, which Gordon pictured as a series of Phyllis Schlaflys all in a row, frowning, with stiff hair, in industrial pantyhose and little rippling American flag pins like Republican candidates wore for political debates, she told the board she was innocent. Her supporters said she’d done her time and was no longer a threat. She faced the parole board and said, I’m innocent. It made no sense. But Gordon understood why she said it.

Whatever space Geronima would have needed to find a way to face what she had done was not provided in prison. Prison was a place where you had to be strong to get through each day. If you thought about some awful act you’d committed, every day, in graphic detail, enough to prove to a parole board that you had insight, the proverbial insight they wanted, needed, to let you go home, you might lose your mind. To stay sane, that was the thing. To stay sane you formed a version of yourself you could believe in.

And if she did show insight, tell them what was on her mind the day she killed her husband, why and how she did it and what she felt after, excitement, guilt, denial, fear, revulsion, if she showed the board how honest and precise she could be in her knowledge of her crime and why she committed it, if she spoke openly about the impact it had on her victim and on others, on society, if she trotted out the whole horror of it, she would, at the same time, freshly reactivate for the parole board all the reasons why they had wanted to lock her up. You could not convince them. There was no way to win.

Just let her go home. Free Geronima.

But the contradiction, that Geronima faced the parole board and said, “I’m innocent,” while her advocates outside said, “She’s done her time. She is no longer a threat”: that bothered Gordon.

Still. Geronima, and Sanchez, and Candy, all of them were people who suffered and along the way of their suffering they made others suffer, and Gordon could not see that making them suffer lifelong would accrue to justice. It added new harm to old, and no dead person ever came back to life that he had heard about.



* * *



Alex had been calling, e-mailing, but Gordon had nothing to say to him because all he thought about was women in prison and it wasn’t fun conversation. He was in some kind of exile.

He felt hopeless as he sat in Baressi’s and envied the others at the bar, men in construction and farming, who made it seem as if the Central Valley was not about prison, and for them it wasn’t.

“Aw, come on, there’s plenty of hope,” Alex might have rejoined, playing Kafka, “no end of hope, but none for you, Gordon.”

There was a new singer on the piano. She was good, or maybe just Stanville-good. Gordon got a bit drunk without meaning to, walked over and put a twenty-dollar bill in the big brandy snifter, the international standard piano-tip container.

“Would you like anything special?” Her voice was happy and light.

He could not think of a single song to request. He’d tipped her because he could. “Sing your favorite? What you sing alone, when no one can hear.”

“?‘Summertime,’ then,” she said without a pause.

Walking back to his seat, he wondered if asking her to sing for a stranger what she sang in private was creep territory. Some people violate others regularly as the natural course of the day, of life. He knew this. He was not those people. Still, he wondered.

As she sang, he understood that whether or not it was her private song, she gave him nothing. She was performing. She was a performer by profession. She sang “Summertime,” and Gordon was swept away by the passionate range of her mediocre voice.



* * *



“I’m sorry about your fiancé,” he said one night as Romy Hall lingered after class. He was stacking photocopies in an unnecessarily fastidious way to draw out their few minutes together, before a guard oversaw the students’ transfer through work exchange.

“What happened?” It was easy, he found, to affect the concerned tone of an advisor, when really he was fishing for information, to know if there were competitors.

“He wasn’t my fiancé. And he’s not dead. He moved on.”

She said there were women on her unit who got married to men they met through the mail. “Jimmy wasn’t a loser like that,” she said. “He had a life. I’m sure he’s out there living it.”

She made fun of the crafting craze in prison, but said it was good to work with her hands. She was doing jewelry, she told him, in explanation for what she asked Gordon to bring her. He didn’t entirely believe her, but in a sense he did, because he didn’t let himself speculate. He was all done speculating. He would be leaving Stanville soon. He was going back to school, to get a master’s in social work. It was probably an improvident time to quit a job, with the economy tanking, but the rhythms of the world did not always coordinate with the rhythm of the person.



* * *



How’s the life of nature and captivity? Alex asked by e-mail.

This morning I saw a peregrine falcon eating babies from a sparrow’s nest, he replied. A lot of commotion. High drama in the Sierra Nevada.

Oh, I bet those are delicious, Alex wrote back. There’s a little songbird eaten whole, bones and everything, by French aristocrats. Illegal, and, by custom, enjoyed with a cloth over the face and head, like an executioner’s hood. Maybe what we lack is tradition and elegance in our relentless destruction of nature. So when are you coming back?