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 I went around back and found the old meat locker whose original stainless steel door had been replaced by a heavy iron one with a small window, and padlocked.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 During the intake procedure, the boy had been silent and withdrawn.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.
• • •
That 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.
Just then, like birdsong at midnight, a magic, melodic voice rang out from down the dim hallway. It was Rebecca saying good night to James. I tried to collect myself, listening as the ticktock of her heels got louder. After a moment, she stood before me in a long black coat, briefcase in hand. Hours had now passed since the ridiculous Christmas pageant. I tried to smile, fumbling to put Leonard Polk’s file back in order, but I lost my grasp on the folder and its contents spilled out, pages flapping onto the dirty linoleum.
“Uh-oh,” I said like a fool. Rebecca came behind the office counter to help me pick up the papers. I watched her from behind as she squatted down to reach under Mrs. Stephens’s desk. She gathered the fabric of her skirt up so that it wouldn’t drag on the floor, revealing her calves — refined, gentle curves, nothing like mine, which were spindly and childish. “My goodness,” she said, reading the document in her hands. “Can you imagine killing your own father?” She handed the paper back to me, eying me knowingly, I thought.
“Thank you,” I said, blushing.
“It’s a story for the ages, of course. Kill your father, sleep with your mother,” Rebecca went on. “The male instinct can be terribly predictable.” She leaned over my shoulder, squinting at the photograph of the boy. Her hair fell like a curtain between us. She swept it back and strands fluttered against my cheek like feathers. She bit her lip. “Leonard Polk,” she read aloud. I could smell cigarettes on her breath, and violet candies.
“He’s been in solitary,” I told her. “I’ve never seen him out here at all. No visitors.”
“Now that’s a shame,” said Rebecca. “May I?” She spread her palms open before me. I handed her the folder.
“I was just doing some filing,” I told her stupidly, hoping she wouldn’t suspect me of snooping.
Rebecca flipped through the papers in the folder. I pretended to look busy, rearranging things on my desk, scanning an old questionnaire. “Name your favorite celebrity. What time do you go to bed at night?”
“I’ll just borrow this,” Rebecca said, slipping the Polk file into her briefcase. “Fun bedtime reading,” she quipped. I sat back down at my desk, anxious and awkward, while she buttoned her coat. “Some show today.”