Body Leaping Backward Read online

  Billy Wagner sat at the edge of his property as if it were the edge of flat earth and watched the neighbor kids playing. When we came near him, he’d say, “Will lou play with me?” (He couldn’t pronounce the letter y.) Billy looked like a child-sized white Sidney Poitier, with a round face and full mouth, bright brown eyes. To play with Billy we’d have to enter the Wagners’ yard, but Mrs. Wagner was always watching. We glimpsed her figure sieved through the screened porch, or her face in the kitchen window. We knew she was watching; she knew we’d transgress. Transgression was the mission of childhood: to push against boundaries. “Let’s go exploring,” we’d say, which meant turning over rocks and poking into vernal pools, breaching new neighborhoods like Oak Street Extension and Ridley Avenue, riding our bikes alongside the train tracks farther and farther.

  Nobody played with Billy, so he punished us. “Caca-head,” he’d yell. “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you,” my mother said, but that was a lie; the names people called you, the labels, broke through your skin, got under it. Sometimes Billy made a mad dash a few feet over the invisible line and attempted to poke one of us with a stick. Our defense was simple: I’ll tell your mother. Billy would whimper, beg us not to tell.

  One day I sat inside my mother’s old navy-blue Ford, which we called the Beetle. I loved to play inside the car, because it was toasty warm and smelled like heated plastic, but mostly because it was quiet and private. Nobody knew where I was, and I took pleasure hiding in plain sight if my mother or one of my sisters called my name, searching for me. That day I saw Mrs. Wagner yell out the front door, “William!” Billy was the sleeping dog of trouble; William meant trouble as fait accompli. Billy’s face got that horrible, wide-eyed, close-to-tears look, as if he were breaking. I saw Billy cowering behind the rhododendron next to the chimney. I saw Billy hiding and I saw Mrs. Wagner on the front steps, the whole inevitable circumstance unfolding before me.

  I watched from the car like I was watching a drive-in movie, spellbound, with a sick, anxious feeling in my stomach. When Mrs. Wagner found Billy, she hauled him along with a firm grip on his skinny upper arm. I could almost feel the clench of her fingers. She pushed him with her hand on the back of his neck, Billy half running to her long strides. Just before they reached the garage door, she fully extended her arm and struck him, as if she could not restrain herself five seconds longer until they were inside, where I couldn’t see, where nobody could see. I heard the thwack of her hitting him again, his high-pitched crying, the door slamming.

  Billy was always bad, and Judy, his older sister, was always good. They were the real-life versions of Goofus and Gallant, my favorite section of Highlights magazine, parallel drawings of the good boy and bad boy elucidating right from wrong behavior. Judy had silky white-blond hair, which she usually wore in a stretchy headband, sapphire-blue eyes, and a longish face. In my memory, Eugene and Joan and Judy Wagner all had long faces, chins slightly stretched as if made of Silly Putty, but now I think their faces seemed long because they never smiled.

  Perhaps I was obsessed with Billy Wagner because I recognized in him a shadow of myself. I, too, was bad, it seemed. At the dinner table I sat on my father’s left, and somehow on many nights I did something that irritated him. Barbie, the youngest for six years, until Mikey was born, remembers watching the sequence unfold—my speaking out, being “fresh,” reaching for something with my “long hands.” Barbie knew I was going to be slapped and it made her anxious. She wondered why I wouldn’t just be quiet. Shut up. This dinner-table sequence happened so often that my mother confessed to me years later that she told my father, “You’ve got to stop hitting Maureen.”

  I can’t remember specific incidents of freshness at the dinner table, only that I was compelled to speak my mind and apparently it could not be slapped out of me. Loudmouth. Long hands. Dunderhead. Fresh. I was “more outspoken” than the other kids, my mother told me. “Like what did I say?” I asked her. “There’s too many to remember,” she said. “You’re not supposed to sass your mother. You don’t sass your father.” What lesson was my father trying to teach me, slapping sense into me? Do not take, grab, reach. Do not defend yourself. Do not “talk back” or be a “smart-mouth.” It was my nature—critical, inquisitive, outspoken—that he was trying to squelch, the slaps a slow steady pressure like water over stone. I was a girl who acted as girls should not; there was a need to smooth the rough edges.

  Is it possible I was born with a tendency to freshness? One of our annual family portraits, taken when I was three, is revealing. My mother and father sit side by side, five children arranged around them. I’m standing on the bench next to my father, my pudgy right arm behind his head, my fingers in rabbit ears, a prank. Was I headstrong? Have poor impulse control? Or did I possess ordinary desire that had to be tamped down, the expectation of girls to be polite, to acquiesce, to be good? I was “nosy.” When my mother was angry, she said, “Jesus H. Christ,” but she wouldn’t tell me what the H stood for. It was just Jesus’s middle name. Why can’t I know that? I sensed taboo like a fragrance on the wind, like faint smoke from the leaf piles neighborhood fathers burned in the fall.

  One day in the bathroom wastebasket I spied an interesting waxy blue bag. When I unwrapped it, to my horror I found a huge white bandage soaked with blood. I ran to my mother. “Mom, who was hurt?” She looked puzzled. “Nobody.” I showed her the evidence. “Mind your own business,” she said, “and stay out of the trash.” I have a history of seeing for myself, taking that step over the line. When I was five, I stood behind Doug Frick as he aimed his metal horseshoe at the post thirty feet away. He told me to back up, but when he turned around, I crept closer for a better view. He swung the horseshoe and whacked me in the forehead. Blood dripped down my face as my mother drove me to Dr. DeRoma, whose crude stitch left a small scar over my left eyebrow.

  Here was a glimpse of the girl I was, my desire too much, a lesson I’d have to learn again and again. One Thanksgiving I asked my mother to put extra barley in the turkey soup because I loved barley. She assured me that she’d added plenty, but I didn’t trust her. When nobody was around, I climbed onto the kitchen counter, my head grazing the plaster ceiling. I reached into the cabinet for the barley and dumped some into the pot, a huge warped aluminum cauldron filled with bubbling broth. Somehow my foot bumped the pot, which sat off-kilter on the electric burner, and it crashed to the floor, steaming broth spreading across the linoleum, the turkey carcass surfing to the middle.

  I was embarrassed about ruining the soup, but more so for being caught wanting.

  Sometimes my freshness was for a good cause. One afternoon Patrick threw a rock at Billy Wagner, who’d been pelting my brother with pebbles in the hope that Patrick would play with him. Billy ran crying into his house, and soon Mrs. Wagner walked onto their screened-in porch. “Patrick,” she said. “Were you throwing rocks at Billy?” Billy smirked as he wound himself around his mother’s legs; he knew that he’d rechanneled her enormous wrath onto someone else. If Patrick told the truth, Billy’s mother would beat him. If Patrick protected Billy, then Patrick would be in trouble. Patrick said nothing. He was probably six, so I was nine.

  My mother stepped onto our porch as Mrs. Wagner said, “Answer me, young man!” The mounting tension of the confrontation, the hypocrisy of Mrs. Wagner scolding Patrick, boiled up in me, boiled over. “Shut up!” I yelled at Mrs. Wagner. I believed that I was rescuing my brother, defending his honor. I thought my mother would be proud of me. I sensed that she didn’t like Mrs. Wagner, but I didn’t yet comprehend that you were not supposed to be honest, that you should suppress your real thoughts and feelings and be polite. Shut up, I’d said to an adult (the admonishment I so often received from adults). My mother was furious. She dragged me into the bathroom and shoved a bar of soap in my mouth, a too-literal punishment.

  I was only trying to heed my mother’s advice after Frank Richards pushed me down one day when I was seven and I ra
n sniffling to her as she folded a mound of laundry in the cellar. “You’ve got to learn to fight your own battles,” she said. I remember the shift in my psyche that day—that I could no longer count on my mother to extricate me from trouble or come to my defense. I had to fight my own battles, but I was not supposed to be fresh. No wonder I was confused.

  In fourth grade I ordered a paperback from the Scholastic Book Club, Sacco and Vanzetti, Murderers or Murdered? The two men on the cover—Italian immigrants, one with a sad scraggly mustache draping his mouth—were found guilty of murder, which troubled me. They had alibis! Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927 in spite of protests worldwide, especially in Boston. That book haunted me—innocent men put to death, a wrong that could never be righted.

  Sacco and Vanzetti had been held in Charlestown State Prison in Boston, built in 1805, one of the oldest prisons in the country. By the 1950s the antiquated Charlestown prison needed to be replaced, so the Department of Corrections built a new state-of-the-art prison in Walpole, an institution meant to be progressive, to rehabilitate inmates, 97 percent of whom would be released eventually. “Most men and women in the state’s prisons want to return to society as better citizens,” said Russell G. Oswald, Massachusetts’s corrections commissioner then, who became corrections commissioner in New York in 1971, just months before the Attica Prison riot that left twenty-nine prisoners and nine hostages dead.

  Before the new Walpole State Prison opened in 1956, some of the walls had already cracked because of “insufficient thickness,” and locks were found to be easily popped open with a penknife. Once the problems had been fixed, five hundred or so prisoners were relocated to Walpole and the decrepit Charlestown State Prison was razed. For forty years Walpole was the state’s only maximum-security prison—security level six—where the most notorious, most dangerous criminals were sent.

  To get to Walpole Prison from my house, you drove down a steep hill past a cemetery, where on summer days I rode my bike between the rows of headstones. At the bottom of the hill was the blacksmith’s shop, a dark sooty garage where a stooped white-haired man fixed our bikes when our mother ran over them with her station wagon. In spite of her constant reminders, we dropped our bicycles in the driveway behind her car, and so, because we’d been warned, “it serves you right” that your bike was crumpled. My mother didn’t say this maliciously but as if it were a law of nature; we got what we deserved. My father took our bikes to the blacksmith, who for $5, under the blue flame of his blowtorch, hammered the rims straight.

  At the blacksmith’s shop, you turned right on Main Street to downtown, past Dixon’s Five and Dime, Friendly’s restaurant, the A&P, past Joe’s Produce, which always smelled of overripe tomatoes, with fruit flies swarming the wooden bins, past Watson’s candy store, where hairnetted ladies in white uniforms hand-dipped chocolates, past the skinny street, which we begged my mother to take for the novelty—only one car could pass at a time and the steps to the buildings emptied right onto the asphalt. The skinny street was where the Wests lived, six children with wide-set eyes and limp black hair. Whenever you passed through downtown, you almost always saw a Westie. Main Street became Route 1A as buildings thinned and you entered a stretch of forest. Emerging from the greenery like Oz was the prison on the right, its white walls a blank canvas.

  The prison reminded me of the castle we visited in France, in the Loire Valley, where we lived for two years when my father worked on computer systems for the military. Originating in the ninth century, the Château de Blois was expanded over the centuries to 564 rooms. During the tour, Joanne, who was two, began to fuss, so my parents held us back, my mother jostling Joanne in her arms. When we tried to catch up with the group, we found ourselves alone, the tour leader having forgotten about the American family with four little girls in matching home-sewn dresses. We walked down a winding staircase to a vaulted antechamber with stone walls and two enormous wooden doors, which were locked. My father knocked, but nobody answered. He knocked and knocked, then pounded his fists against the door, yelling, kicking the door, all four girls crying now. It was as if we were in some horrible fairy tale, our lonely shouts reverberating in the gloomy castle, darkness falling; trapped. A half-hour later, a guard heard my father and freed us.

  For years after I had dreams of wandering in the castle, the damp stone walls, those tall wooden doors. When my mother said, “If you’re not good, I’ll put you in Walpole Prison,” I envisioned the castle in France.

  Walpole Prison was not the only, the first, or the largest prison in the area. A mile away and closer to my house was Norfolk Prison, a medium-security prison for 1,500 or so men. Combined, Walpole and Norfolk Prisons housed more than half of the male convicts in the state then, an epicenter of incarceration and punishment. Originally called Norfolk Prison Colony in 1927, Norfolk was world-renowned as a “prison of the future,” with dormitory-style housing, not cells with bars. In the early years, inmates tended cows, pigs, and chickens and grew vegetables to feed their brethren. They learned carpentry, plumbing, and welding or took college classes. Norfolk Prison offered music and theater, and there was an extraordinary debate team that regularly defeated teams from Harvard, Princeton, MIT.

  One member of Norfolk Prison’s debate team was Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X. At twenty-one and addicted to drugs (he smoked pot and snorted cocaine daily, he wrote in his memoir), Little was caught with loot from armed robberies around Boston. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years, even though two years was the average term for first-time offenders of those crimes. At Norfolk, Little joined the debate team, a “baptism in public speaking,” he wrote, where he found his voice.

  Walpole Prison, opened thirty years after Norfolk, was also a beacon of hope at first. “All the cells are spacious and airy, with good lighting and plumbing,” said Oswald, the corrections commissioner. “There are three chapels, a gym, a three-chair barber shop, and the ‘better-behaved’ inmates may be allowed to use the guards’ bowling alleys.” Even the inmates were optimistic. “There’s a new spirit here,” said John Flaherty, serving thirty-one to forty years. “Here we are living. All we could do in Charlestown was die.” Articles about the prison were mostly positive, like one about prisoners building wooden models of the SS Hope, a floating medical center treating poor people around the world, and folding five thousand milk-carton collection boxes to raise money for the ship, like the boxes we assembled in school to collect donations for UNICEF. Inmates rebuilt used toys and bikes donated by Walpole’s citizens and gave the toys to orphans at Christmas. “Behind those cold cement walls there are some warm hearts,” editorialized the Walpole Times, the town newspaper.

  After the prison opened, the majority of Walpole citizens surveyed felt “a responsibility to help make the prison a part of the community,” and they lived up to that belief, the town showing “a fine spirit of interest in its new neighbor,” the newspaper reported. The United Church Bible Group and the Toastmasters “lent a hand” to demonstrate the “good will of our community.” Walpole residents donated books to set up a prison library, and the Footlighters, an amateur theater group, staged productions with the inmate troupe, the Masquers. A Walpole mother with the Footlighters said the inmates “treated us in a most gentlemanly way, and then some.” Methodist Church members toured the new prison (separate tours for men and women), and Jim Regan, a former Walpole High School football star and the prison’s new athletic director, appealed to Walpole residents for donations—“a catcher’s mask, mitt, bat, or a football.”

  My music teacher, Mr. Willey, helped inmates stage a variety show in the prison for five hundred guests, including Walpole’s prominent citizens. “There were dancing teams, acrobats, crooners, comedy acts, a saxophonist. A man who used to play organ in some of the most magnificent churches in the country, now a Walpole inmate, was called back for several encores.” I wonder if Mr. Willey liked working with prisoners, grown men, more than with schoolchildren, who didn’t appreciate his e
fforts. Mr. Willey seemed ancient when I had him in elementary school, silver hair rippling across his head. He’d stand at the front of the room in a suit and tie, conducting us through patriotic songs—Over hill, over dale, / as we hit the dusty trail / and those caissons go rolling along—What was a caisson? Nobody explained—then it’s hi! hi! hee! / in the field artillery / shout out your numbers loud and strong. We especially liked shouting HI! HI! HEE!, which pleased Mr. Willey, who mistook our volume for civic pride. We always sang Mr. Willey’s favorite, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” the mimeographed lyrics held in our hands, his eyeglasses steaming up from emotion as we shout-sang the rousing finale, Le-et free-dom ring.

  When I was growing up, nobody called the prison by its long awkward title—Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole. They’d say “Walpole Prison” or just “Walpole,” the prison synonymous with the town, as if we all lived in one huge barbed-wire pen. I felt a perverse pride that Walpole Prison was in our town, named after our town, a pride of ownership; it was ours, for better or for worse. The prison made us famous, notorious. Don’t mess with Walpole. We had a state champion football team, a winning field hockey team, and the maximum-security prison.

  The prison was like a watermark on the town, seeping into our psyches in subtle ways. One Halloween my mother sewed prison attire for herself and my father for a costume party—not guards’ uniforms, but inmates’. She cut long-sleeved shirts and pajama-like pants from black-and-white-striped fabric, using as her reference the cartoon jailbird from Monopoly. She stenciled numbers on the backs of the shirts and spray-painted black two Styrofoam balls, larger than softballs, which she and my father chained to their ankles with a construction paper chain. With their matching striped pillbox hats, they were the hit of the party, my mother told me the next day.