When the little arsonist was seated across from his mother at the table, he did what all the younger boys did. They crossed their arms and faced the wall, steeled themselves, pouty and squinty, unreachably cool. But once they took one look at their mothers’ pained faces, they burst into tears. The arsonist burst into tears. His mother pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and handed it across the table. Randy bolted into the room, holding one firm open palm in front of the boy, blocking the mother’s extended hand with the other. “Sorry,” he said, monotonously. “That’s not allowed.”
“You can hug him when you leave,” I chimed in, “but you can’t give him anything. It’s for security, to keep the children safe.” I had some practiced speech like that.
Of course, the rule wasn’t there to protect children from handkerchiefs. I knew what I’d said just wasn’t true. But I was young enough, and had been enslaved enough by my public school education and my father and his Catholicism, and was frightened enough of being punished or questioned or singled out, that I obeyed every rule there was at Moorehead. I followed every procedure. I clocked in and out every day on time. I was a shoplifter, a pervert, you might say, and a liar, of course, but nobody knew that. I would enforce the rules all the more, for didn’t that prove that I lived by a high moral code? That I was good? That I couldn’t possibly want to hike up my skirt and move my runny bowels all over the linoleum floor? I understood perfectly that the rule that prohibited parents from giving gifts to their children was to keep the boys in a state of desperation. The warden proselytized at every possible occasion. His logic was quite sound, I believed. Only a desperate soul would feel remorse for his sins, and if the remorse was deep enough, the boy would surrender and hence he’d be pliable, finally willing to be transformed, so the warden said. The last people on Earth I’d put in charge of transforming anyone were that warden and Dr. Frye, or Dr. Morris — though I never knew him — or, sorry to say, Rebecca. She may have been the worst of all. But I speak with hindsight. At first, yes, Rebecca was a dream to me, she was magic, she was powerful and everything I wanted to be. So no handkerchiefs. No toys, no comics or magazines or books. Let the children cry. No one was offering me any tenderness, after all. Why should any of those boys have any more or better than I had? I lowered my gaze down to Randy’s crotch as he walked back out of the visitation room. He just sucked his teeth and sighed.
“I’m fine,” said the little arsonist, wiping his face with the hem of his smock. His mother whimpered. I remember she wore a white scarf, and when the scarf fell away I saw that the skin on her neck was raised and welted in pink and yellow scars from burns. The visitation was over when the clock showed that seven minutes had passed — visits were seven minutes long and I suppose that had some religious significance — at which point I waved to James, who delivered the arsonist back to the rec room or wherever and brought in the next boy. Randy stood around in the doorway while I collected a final signature from the weepy mother on her way out. Her vitriol came through in her penmanship. While the earlier signature was clean, careful, the outgoing signature was violent, jagged, and rushed. It was always like that. Everybody was broken. Everybody suffered. Each of those sad mothers wore some kind of scar — a badge of hurt to attest to the heartbreak that her child, her own flesh and blood, was growing up in prison. I tried my best to ignore all that. I had to if I was going to act normal, maintain my flat composure. When I was very upset, hot and shaking, I had a particular way of controlling myself. I found an empty room and grit my teeth and pinched my nipples while kicking the air like a cancan dancer until I felt foolish and ashamed. That always did the trick.
Something struck me as I watched Randy scratch his elbow, then lean against the door frame of the visitation room: I was no longer in love with him. Looking at him with eyes now glazed over in my new affection for Rebecca, he seemed like a nobody, a face in a crowd, gray and meaningless like an old newspaper clipping of a story I’d read so many times, it no longer impressed me. Love can be like that. It can vanish in an instant. It’s happened since, too. A lover has left the warm rapture of my bed to get a glass of water and returned only to find me cold, uninterested, empty, a stranger. Love can reappear, too, but never again unscathed. The second round is inevitably accompanied by doubt, intention, self-disgust. But that is neither here nor there.
When James returned, the boy he was guiding up the hall was, to my great surprise, Leonard Polk. Leonard walked casually, almost jauntily with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was taller than I expected, and loose limbed with that awkward softness young men have before their bodies harden. There was a strange bounce in his step. His face was bright and relaxed, awake and serene in a way no other boy’s face had ever seemed, a loose reservedness which I found myself admiring. He looked pleased, impenetrable, and cold as though nothing could ever disturb him, and yet still as innocent as the silent creature I’d seen earlier touching himself absentmindedly on his cot in the cave. I searched for something in his face, anything his mask of contentment might betray, but there was nothing. He was a genius in that sense — a master. His was the best mask I’d ever seen.
James ushered him by the glass wall of the waiting area. When they passed Mrs. Polk on the other side, Leonard smiled. I imagined this boy in his parents’ darkened bedroom, standing over his sleeping father with a kitchen knife, moonlight flickering on the blade like lightning as he brought it down hard and fast, tearing across the man’s throat. Could this strange, supple creature have done such a thing? Randy took him into the visitation room, set him in the chair, undid his cuffs, and stood in the doorway.
“Mrs. Polk?” I called out.
The woman rose from her seat in the waiting area and came toward me. I remember this first vision of her with excellent clarity, though she was utterly unremarkable. She wore sharply creased black trousers, tight around her swollen thighs. Her sweater looked like an afghan blanket, the different colored squares lined up over her chest and large gut. She was repugnant, I thought, in her fat and dishevelment. She was not an obese woman, but she had quite a paunch and seemed bloated and tired and nervous. She walked stiffly, shifting from side to side with each step as some fat people do, and carried a brown coat over her arm, no purse. As she entered the room I noticed some white pieces of fluff stuck in the back of her frizzy hair, which was pulled tight into a bun. Her lipstick was a cheap and insincere fuchsia. I stared steadily at her face, trying to determine what sort of intelligence was there. Since she was overweight, I assumed she was an idiot — I still tend to judge those types as gluttons, fools — but her eyes were clear blue, sharp, with the same strange twist as her son’s. I saw the resemblance in the eyes, the freckles, the pouty lips. She looked nervous handing her coat to Randy as I patted her down. My palm landed with a thud on the small of her back, which was soft and wide. I stifled an odd impulse I had to embrace her, to try to comfort her a little. She seemed so dowdy, so pitiful, like a sow awaiting slaughter.
“All set,” I told her. She took her coat back from Randy and sat across the table from Leonard, or Lee, as he was called. Mrs. Polk was shifty-eyed. The boy just smiled. I looked from mother to son. If Rebecca’s theory of Oedipus was correct, perhaps I had grossly misjudged what kind of women young men found attractive those days, because Mrs. Polk was nobody I could imagine anyone would kill for. Then again, maybe Lee Polk was out of his mind. It was impossible to tell what he might be thinking. His mask didn’t waver. It was not my stony, flat mask of death, nor was it the stiff, cheerful posturing popular among housewives and other sad and deranged women. It was not the cutthroat bad boy mask set to ward off potential threats with the promise of violence and hot rage. Neither was it the lily-sweet bashfulness of men who pretend they’re so weak, so sensitive, they would crumble if anyone ever challenged them even a little. Lee’s look of calm contentment was an odd mask, peculiar in its falseness as it hardly looked fake at all.