Wallkill had been built in a spirit of experiment, when FDR was governor of New York. Its perimeter was not enclosed by a wall or a fence. Its tree-lined walkways and gray Gothic stonework reminded visitors of a small men’s college or seminary. It had a library, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a profitable dairy farm, a horse barn, machine and craft shops, greenhouses and vegetable gardens, an orchard, livestock, and bees. Under qualified instructors, inmates were required to learn and paid to work at manual or agricultural trades, or to put in a daily shift for making eyeglasses or plastic novelties in one of Wallkill’s two manufactories. The warden recruited the prison guards personally to ensure that they were in sympathy with Wallkill’s philosophy and methods. The guards dressed like park rangers. They carried handcuffs but no guns or batons. You had your own cell with a small outdoor terrace on which you were free to grow vegetables or flowers. You carried a key to your cell. Between lights-out and reveille you were confined to quarters, but once you had proved trustworthy you were given a fair amount of liberty to come and go. As long as you reported promptly for work, chow, exercise, chapel, and other mandatory activities, your spare time was your own.
The first night in his cell my grandfather had trouble sleeping. Outside the window the prison yard was flooded with light. The cell door was inset with a large peephole that let in light and noise from the gallery. The mattress crinkled. The air felt close and heavy. Sleeping inmates made a racket out of a cartoon, a barn at night transformed into a calliope of cows, pigs, and chickens playing a wheezy polka. At intervals too random to anticipate or adjust to, the prisoner in the next cell would break into spasmodic coughing. It sounded like a drum falling down a flight of stairs. It sounded painful.
My grandfather lay for hours with his arms folded under his head, bothered by thoughts of his wife and daughter. He pictured my mother jostled in the grandstand of a racetrack, losing tickets snowing down around her as a crowd rose to its feet and roared. He pictured her alone at a table in the back of a poolhall in some godforsaken place like Hagerstown, hair falling across a page of algebra or Modern Screen, while Uncle Ray sandbagged some dumb bastard who afterward beat him to death in an alley before raping my mother. My grandmother, he envisioned shorn and strapped to a table in a harsh-lit operating theater, plunged into tubs of ice, wound into a straightjacket, and force-fed medicated pap. He sat up, shuddering.
My grandfather went to the window to look at the night sky, but it turned out that the floodlights of Wallkill abolished the stars. Returning to the cot, my grandfather determined to map the ceiling of his cell with the stars he knew to be overhead. He pretended that the ceiling could be rolled away like the roof of an observatory dome. With a clear view of the heavens he contemplated the Dolphin, the Indian, the Microscope. He found the Ring Nebula in Lyra. Cassiopeia and Andromeda ascended the inner surface of his skull with their uncomfortable mythology. He saw the mother crooked as an M with torment, the oblique angle of the daughter chained and waiting for something monstrous to arrive. It was nothing he wanted to think about. He switched off the Zeiss of his imagination. The stars winked out.
He rolled onto his side, and in time my grandmother returned to his thoughts. She lay naked across their marriage bed on her belly, with her legs pressed together and my grandfather standing by her feet. His gaze traveled up an arrow of shadow that pointed to the cleft in her ass. Her ass, that ripe and downy apricot. He took hold of her feet by the ankles and opened her legs.
He fell asleep and was roused from a dream of a girl he’d been sweet on in high school by the blare of the bell that must have provoked it. When he opened his eyes, he was in prison. In twenty months it would be 1959.
He put on the dark blue workshirt and gray poplin trousers of the Wallkill uniform and sat down on the cot to lace up his boots. As he sat down, he happened to look out the window at the sky. Mysteriously, that turned out to be a mistake.
As I no doubt have made clear by now, my grandfather was not a man for tears, and when tears did come he fought them. The last time he had allowed himself to weep freely, he’d been in short pants and Herbert Hoover had been the president. Like blood, tears had a function. They served to indicate the severity and depth of the blow you had absorbed. When your friend died in your arms, your wife had lost her sanity, or you were saying goodbye to your daughter in Mrs. Einstein’s front hall, tears flowed, and as with blood, you stanched them. So what the fuck was this? A blue sky on a clear morning at the end of a Catskills summer. Big deal. A matter of wavelength and refraction. An agitation of the rods and cones.
Meanwhile, breakfast was at seven o’clock sharp. If you showed up at 7:01, he had been informed, you would be shut out of the mess hall and then go hungry until lunch. The bathroom was all the way down at the end of the gallery. There might be a wait for the toilet, for the sink, for a place in front of the mirror. What was more, he needed to take a piss. Any second now he was going to stop looking at the sky and tie his boots and go. It was time to get moving.
There was a knock on the door. My grandfather jumped. “Yes?” he called. He cleared his throat. “Yes, what is it?”
“Excuse me. I don’t mean to intrude.” There was something arch about the intonation—mannered was the right word. “I’m— It’s Dr. Alfred Storch.”
On arrival yesterday my grandfather had been examined by an internist and interviewed by a psychiatrist. Neither of them had been named Alfred Storch. The name of the warden was Dr. Wallack.
“Just a minute.” My grandfather knotted his bootlaces and got up off the cot. When he opened the door, he was surprised to find another prisoner standing there. He had noticed this man in the mess hall the night before. Well over six feet tall, gaunt, silver in his black brush mustache. An apologetic stoop from a lifetime of ducking through doorways. He wore heavy-rimmed black glasses, and his eyes were a mess. The left one turned outward. It was hyperopic and swam huge behind its lens. The right eye was nearsighted, and its correction left it looking shrunken by comparison. He appeared to be wearing not ordinary spectacles but some kind of crude device of his own manufacture that would let him see around corners or in opposite directions. Dr. Storch held out his right hand, large and long-fingered. On a piano keyboard it would have spanned an octave and a half without stretching.
“I’m just next door,” Dr. Storch said. I’m chust next door. It was a German accent, tinged with British instruction. It sounded pretty classy, Leslie Howard playing a Prussian count. “I wanted to make sure you, ah—” He broke off and averted his face from my grandfather’s, though the left eye maintained its vigil. “Terribly sorry. I see I’m disturbing you.”
My grandfather wiped his cheeks savagely on the sleeve of his workshirt. “Not at all,” he said. “I was just going to wash up before breakfast.”
“Right,” said Dr. Storch. “You know I, I saw your door was closed, you see, and you’re new here, so I wasn’t sure if you knew—”
“I know,” my grandfather said. “Seven sharp or they lock you out.”
“Oh, they really do,” Dr. Storch said. “They are sticklers.”
It was worded like a complaint, but to my grandfather it sounded more like boasting. You would have thought Dr. Storch himself had formulated the policy on promptness at mealtime.
My grandfather followed into the gallery and closed the door of his cell behind him. He took the key from his pocket.
“Oh, nobody locks them,” Dr. Storch said. “Of course, you do as you think best. But the locks are so flimsy. There’s really no point.” My grandfather detected a note of bitterness, as though Dr. Storch had fallen prey to pilfering more than once. “You can pick them with a playing card.” My grandfather locked his door and Dr. Storch shrugged graciously. “There’s no harm in it, certainly,” he said.
They went past the door of Dr. Storch’s cell and he pushed open the door. “Same as yours, in every drab particular.”