Eileen (11 page)

When the orange curtains parted, a spartan set was revealed, made up to look like the interior of a prison cell. A bunk bed, a Bible on a small table. One of the boys, bloated and pale and dressed in the standard inmate uniform, a blue cotton jumpsuit, walked out onto the stage, hands in his pockets. He mumbled under his breath, but I can guess what he was meant to say since it was the same every year: “Oh, what am I to do? Sentenced for
three years to sit indoors among boys of my same creed—plain bad. So much time to plot what evildoings I'll undertake as soon as I get out. But in the meantime I suppose I could read a book.”

“You can't read!” a voice cracked from the first row as the blushing actor picked up the Bible. The boys all laughed and throttled each other in their seats. Randy approached, gestured casually with one hand raised in a fist and the other holding a finger to his lips. The play went on.

The boy onstage sat on the bottom bunk bed and opened the Bible. Two more children crossed the stage toward him, both dressed in robes, one wearing a wig and, it seemed, a pillow over his abdomen under the robe. From where I was sitting, I could see Rebecca shifting in her seat. Of course it bothered me to watch what was happening on stage, that kind of humiliation. But I put up with it. I did not have the courage to care enough to get upset. Nobody did. The boy dressed as Mary spoke in a high voice: “Well, I'm pretty tired, can we rest in that barn over there?” and pointed offstage, fey as a rabbit. The audience laughed. The boy dressed as Joseph set down a sack and wiped his forehead. “Better than paying for a hotel.” Rebecca looked around, craning her neck as though searching for a particular face in the crowd. I hoped the face she was looking for was mine. I could just barely make out her expression in the darkened chapel. I nearly swung the spotlight at her to illuminate her delicately furrowed brow, her mouth pinched adorably with displeasure. She was so pretty, a miraculous sight in such an ugly place, it surprised me that others weren't pointing and staring. How was it that Dr. Morris, Randy, all those boys
carried blithely on, as though she were invisible to them? Was my assessment of her beauty wrong? Had I lost all perspective? Was I seeing things? Was she not the most radiant, most elegant, most charming woman in the world? I wondered. She continued to scan the audience row by row.

The play went on, Joseph and Mary reciting lines sometimes stiffly, sometimes with tongue-in-cheek bravado. More children in multicolored robes appeared, heads bowed in embarrassment or boredom. Their voices were barely audible through the taunts and laughter from the boys in the crowd. One of the players, a younger child, began to cry, chin wobbling, jaw gritted. That was when Rebecca stood up, scowling, and trudged back up the aisle, her pendant bouncing between her small bosoms as she strode. I watched her. Her body was very beautiful, slender as a ballerina and just as tense. She noticed me when she reached the back of the chapel, then waved and shook her head in disbelief, mouthed something I couldn't decipher, and walked out. I remember thinking, “We are united now, us against them.” I would adopt her rage, or pretend to at least, if it meant I could be on her side. That's what it felt like.

 • • • 

I
t wasn't that I didn't care at all about the boys. It was just that I was young and miserable and had no way of helping them. I felt, in fact, that I was one of them. I was no worse or better. I was only six years older than the oldest of the boys in there. Some of them looked like men already—tall, lanky with beards and mustaches coming in and big, thick hands,
low voices. They were mostly white from blue-collar families, but there were quite a few black boys, too. I liked those boys the best. I sensed they understood something the others didn't. They seemed to be more relaxed, to breathe slightly more deeply, to wear perfect death masks while the other boys winced and frowned and spat and chided one another like little children, brats in a schoolyard. I often wondered what they all thought of me when they saw me standing outside the door during visitations, if they even noticed me at all. They rarely looked my way, never once lifted their grainy, warm slow eyes to mine in recognition. I thought perhaps they couldn't identify me from one day to the next, as though my role were played by innumerable similar-looking young women. Or maybe they sat with their mothers during visitation and called me “that bitch,” and motioned with their chins when my head was turned and I was thinking of Randy and not listening. Or maybe they said, “She's the only one I don't hate.” Or maybe they thought I was crazy. I certainly could have passed for crazy on days when I'd not slept and showed up unkempt and hungover, rolling my eyes at every noise and gnashing my teeth at every flicker of light. In my childish self-centeredness, I fantasized that this was what the black boys talked about with their mothers: how much pain Eileen is in, how Eileen seems to need a friend, how Eileen deserves better. I hoped they saw right through my death mask to my sad and fiery soul, though I doubt they saw me at all.

I wouldn't be the first to admit that working as a young woman in an all-male institution had its perks. This is not to say that my position at Moorehead gave me any sense of my power
as a female, nor did it bring me closer to realizing any imagined romantic encounters—none of that nonsense. But working at Moorehead did give me a sneak peek into the male disposition. I could, at times, stand quietly and observe the boys like animals in a zoo—how they moved, breathed, all the nuanced gestures and attitudes that made each of them seem special. It was through studying the comportment of imprisoned youngsters that I developed my understanding of the strange spectrum of male emotions. Shrugging meant “I'll punch you later.” Smiling was a promise of undying love and affection or severe hatred, cutthroat fury. Did I derive erotic pleasure from looking at these boys? Only a little, honestly, since I didn't get to observe them on a regular basis, and never in their natural state. I only watched them filing in and out of assembly meetings or the cafeteria, and during their visits with their mothers. I wasn't in a position to observe them at rest in their bunks, at work in the rec room, or playing in the yard, where I imagine they were more at ease, more animated, and expressed more subtlety, more vulnerability, humor, spontaneity. In any case, I liked their fluctuating, miserable faces. The best was when I could see the hard face of a cold-hearted killer breaking through the chubby cheeks and callow softness of youth. That thrilled me.

It may not have been at that particular Christmas assembly performance, but I remember a boy who played Mary ripping out the pillow from under his costume and throwing it on the ground and sitting on it. A wise man mimed a strip tease once. So the boys were charming in a way. Would I miss them once I was gone? Of course I wouldn't, and I didn't miss them, though
I wondered, staring at the backs of their heads in the chapel that day, if I'd remember any of their faces, if I'd be sorry if any of them died. Would I have helped them if I could have? Would I have sacrificed anything for their benefit? The answer was a shame-faced but honest no. I was selfish, solely concerned with my own wants and needs. I remember watching Randy standing there in the dark of the auditorium. I wondered if his nether regions were squashed inside his pants. I imagined he must have kept them to one side to accommodate the way the pants were made. They were tight. I can't bring back the precise image right now, but I regularly studied the arrangement of folds in the groin area that would have suggested which side he preferred. I wasn't completely unfamiliar with the male parts. I don't actually remember seeing any male parts in my father's dirty magazines, now that I think of it, though they were inferred, I guess. My knowledge was limited to anatomical drawings. I'd sat through health class sophomore year of high school, after all. Sweating behind that hot spotlight, I worried that my inexperience with men would make Rebecca think I was childish and pathetic. If she found out I'd never had a boyfriend, she would dismiss me, I feared.

Once the drama onstage had unraveled, the warden reappeared and started a long soliloquy on the nature of sin. I abandoned my post behind the spotlight and left the chapel to stroll down the prison halls, hoping to run into Rebecca. The rec room and offices were empty. The library, which held mostly religious tracts and encyclopedias, the dining hall with its long steel tables strewn with dirty plastic cutlery—all was quiet. The
boys' sleeping quarters were in the far back. The small windows there looked out on the rolling, snow-filled dunes. The ocean beyond like a canyon of woe, tumbling and icy all day and night, was so thunderous, I pictured God himself emerging from the water, laughing at us all in spite. It was easy to imagine the depressive thoughts that view must have inspired in those little boys. The windows were at such a height from the floor that one had to either stoop down or kneel to get a good look out there. I listened to the waves rumbling in the empty room for a moment. Bunk beds lined the circumference of the room, which was bell-shaped and had lines painted on the floor in guiding paths that showed where to stand during morning announcements, where to kneel at night to pray, which way to walk to the showers, which way to the cafeteria. The baby-blue laminate squeaked under my feet so loudly on my way out, I thought I'd stepped on a mouse.

I remember scurrying back up to the kitchen and stealing a carton of milk from the vacant cafeteria line. It was a very impressive kitchen, all gray steel, heavy machinery. When the boys were being punished for bad behavior, they were made to do double duty washing pots and pans and forced to sleep in a room that had been the old meat locker behind the kitchen—solitary confinement. They called that room “the cave.” A boy sent to the cave would not be allowed out except to use the shower and wash more dishes. He'd eat his meals in there, use a bucket as a toilet. I remember that bucket was of great interest to me. As one might guess, I was easily roused by the grosser habits of the human body—toilet business not least of all. The
very fact that other people moved their bowels filled me with awe. Any function of the body that one hid behind closed doors titillated me. I recall one of my early relationships—not a heavy love affair, just a light one—was with a Russian man with a wonderful sense of humor who permitted me to squeeze the pus from his pimples on his back and shoulders. To me, this was the greatest intimacy. Before that, still young and neurotic, just allowing a man to listen to me urinate was utter humiliation, torture, and therefore, I thought, proof of profound love and trust.

There was a boy who'd been in the cave for several weeks. I went around back and found the old meat locker whose original stainless steel door had been replaced by a heavy iron one with a small window, and padlocked. The Polk boy was inside, sitting on his cot, staring at the wall. I recognized him as the Polk boy from the day he'd arrived at Moorehead a few weeks earlier. My father had been following stories about him in the
Post
. During the intake procedure, the boy had been silent and withdrawn. He hadn't struck me at first as particularly attractive or special. He had a stiff posture, I remember, and was thin but had broad shoulders—the awkward confluence of a young boy's ease and a man's imposing heft and brutishness. There were newly tattooed letters on the knuckles of his right hand but I couldn't make them out clearly. I watched as he lifted his gaze as though reading something written on the ceiling. His eyes were light, skin olive, and his hair shorn and brown. He seemed contemplative, wistful, sad. The saddest boys at Moorehead were the runaways locked up for vagrancy
or prostitution. How much, I wondered as I watched through the window, would it cost to defile a young boy like this one? He had intelligent eyes, I thought, long elegant limbs, a pensive tilt to his head. I hoped he'd charged a lot, whatever he'd done. Back then I still pictured male prostitutes working in service to wealthy housewives, entertaining them while their husbands were away on business—I was that naive. I watched as the boy bent his neck this way and that, sensually, as though to relax himself. He yawned. I don't think he saw me through the window. To this day, I don't know that he ever even knew my name. I watched as he lay down on the cot, turned on his side, closed his eyes and stretched. For a minute he seemed to be falling asleep. Then his fingers, mindlessly it seemed, fell to his groin area. I held my breath as I watched him cup his genitals under his uniform. His body curled up like a small animal. In my effort to understand the movements of his hand, I pressed my face to the window. My tongue, cold from the milk, met the surface of the glass. I watched for a minute or two, rapt, stunned, mystified until noise from the hall made me jump and scurry back up to the office. I really don't think the boy saw me. I learned later on he was only fourteen. He could have passed for nineteen, twenty. I wasn't immune to him either.

 • • • 

T
hat afternoon, as Mrs. Stephens was putting on her coat to leave for the day, I deigned to ask her what the boy had done to get put into solitary.

“Polk,” she said in a huff, double-chinned. She pulled linty
woolen mittens over her fat, chapped hands. “Troublemaker,” she said. “Nasty boy.” It strikes me now that I was relentlessly unforgiving of Mrs. Stephens. Everything she did I interpreted as a personal affront, as a direct attack of some kind. Though I never retaliated, I considered her my enemy. It's true she wasn't warm or even pleasant, but she never really harmed me. She was just endlessly crabby. Once she was gone, and the other office ladies had left for the day, I found the Polk file, the papers slightly yellowed inside the folder. “Crime: patricide.” The file was thick with Dr. Frye's notes, mostly dates and times and incomprehensible Latinate scribbles. In a newspaper clipping affixed to the short rap sheet, I read that Leonard “Lee” Polk had slit his father's throat while he was asleep in bed. The boy had no history of violent behavior, the report said, and neighbors had called him a “quiet child, well mannered, nothing special.” Something like that. His face in his mug shot was surly, with tight, down-turning lips and unfocused, exhausted eyes. In his file, under “comments,” it read “mute since day of crime” in my own messy schoolgirl cursive.