Maybe—had it been Eduardo?
(There was a listing for Eduardo, in Trenton.)
Also listed were Giovanne, Christopher, Anthony, Thomas, E.L. Mattia …
None of these names seemed quite right to her. Yet she had to suppose that her former student, an inmate-student at East Jersey State Prison (formerly Rahway State Prison), was related to one or more of these individuals.
Impulsively she called the listing for Mattia, Eduardo.
If there is no answer, then it isn’t meant to happen.
The phone rang at the other end. But no one picked up. A recording clicked on—a man’s heavily accented voice—quickly Agnes hung up.
Later, she returned to discover the phone directory which she’d left on a kitchen counter, open to the Mattia listings. She stared at the column of names. She thought—Was the name Joseph?
It had been a traditional name, with religious associations. A formal name. When Agnes had addressed the young man it was formally, respectfully—Mr. Mattia.
Other instructors in the prison literacy program called students by their first names. But not Agnes, who’d taken seriously the program organizer’s warning not to suggest or establish any sort of “inappropriate intimacy” with the inmate-students.
Never touch an inmate. Not even a light tap on the arm.
Never reveal your last name to them. Or where you live, or if you are married.
Agnes remembered the eagerness with which she’d read Mattia’s prose pieces in her remedial English composition class at the prison several years before. The teaching experience, for her, in the maximum-security state prison, had been exhausting, but thrilling.
A civic-minded colleague at the university had recruited Agnes, who’d been doubtful at first. And Agnes’s husband, who thought that prison education was a very good thing, was yet doubtful that Agnes should volunteer. Her training was in Renaissance literature—she’d never taught disadvantaged students of any kind.
She’d told her husband that she would quit the program if she felt uncomfortable. If it seemed in any way risky, dangerous. But she was determined not to be discouraged and not to drop out. In her vanity, she did not wish to think of herself as weak, coddled.
Her university students were almost uniformly excellent, and motivated. For she and her historian-husband taught at a prestigious private university. She’d never taught difficult students, public school students, remedial students, or students in any way disabled or “challenged.” At this time she was fifty-three years old and looking much younger, slender, with wavy mahogany-dark hair to her shoulders, and a quick friendly smile to put strangers at ease. She’d done volunteer work mostly for Planned Parenthood and for political campaigns, to help liberal Democrats get elected. She had never visited a prison, even a women’s detention facility. She’d learned belatedly that her prison teaching was limited to male inmates.
Of her eleven students, eight were African American; two were “white”; and one was Mattia, Joseph (she was certain now, the name had had an old-world religious association), who had olive-dark skin with dark eyes, wiry black hair, an aquiline nose, a small neatly trimmed mustache. Like his larger and more burly fellow inmates, Mattia was physically impressive: his shoulders and chest hard-muscled, his neck unusually thick, for one with a relatively slender build. (Clearly, Mattia worked with weights.) Unlike the others he moved gracefully, like an athlete-dancer. He was about five feet eight—inches shorter than the majority of the others.
In the prison classroom Agnes had found herself watching Mattia, in his bright-blue uniform, before she’d known his name, struck by his youthful enthusiasm and energy, the radiance of his face.
Strange, in a way Mattia was ugly. His features seemed wrongly sized for his angular face. His eyes could be stark, staring. Yet Agnes would come to see him as attractive, even rather beautiful—as others in the classroom sat with dutiful expressions, polite fixed smiles or faces slack with boredom, Mattia’s face seemed to glow with an intense inner warmth.
Agnes had supposed that Mattia was—twenty-five? Twenty-six?
The ages of her students ranged from about twenty to forty, so far as she could determine. It would be slightly shocking to Agnes to learn, after the ten-week course ended, that Mattia was thirty-four; that he’d been in this prison for seven years of a fifteen-year sentence for “involuntary manslaughter”; that he’d enrolled in several courses before hers, but had dropped out before completing them.
The dark-eyed young man had been unfailingly polite to Agnes, whose first name the class had been told, but not her last name. Ms. Agnes in Mattia’s voice was uttered with an air of reverence as if—so Agnes supposed—the inmate-student saw in her qualities that had belonged to his mother, or to another older woman relative; he was courteous, even deferential, as her university students, who took their professors so much more for granted, were not.
Mattia was the most literate writer in the class, as he was the sharpest-witted, and the most alert. His compositions were childlike, earnest. Yet his thoughts seemed overlarge for his brain, and writing with a stubby pencil was a means of relieving pressure in the brain; writing in class, as Agnes sat at the front of the room observing, Mattia hunched over his desk frowning and grimacing in a kind of exquisite pain, as if he were talking to himself.
Sometimes, during class discussion, Agnes saw Mattia looking at her—particularly, at her—with a brooding expression, in which there was no recognition; at such times, his face was mask-like and unsmiling, and seemed rather chilling to her. She hadn’t known at the time what his prison sentence was for but she’d thought, He has killed someone. That is the face of a killer.
But, as if waking from a trance, in the next moment Mattia smiled, and waved his hand for Agnes to call upon him—Ms. Agnes!
She loved to hear her name in his velvety voice. She loved to see his eyes light up, and the mask-like killer-face vanish in an instant, as if it had never been.
Instructors in the composition course used an expository writing text that was geared for “remedial” readers yet contained essays, in primer English, on such provocative topics as racial integration, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, freedom of speech and of the press, “patriotism” and “terrorism.” There was a section on the history of the American civil rights movement, and there was a section on the history of Native Americans and “European” conquest. Agnes assigned the least difficult of the essays, to which her students were to respond in compositions of five hundred words or so. Just write as if you were speaking to the author. You agree, or disagree—just write down your thoughts.
Most of the students were barely literate. In their separate worlds, inaccessible to their instructor, they were likely individuals who aroused fear in others, or at least apprehension; but in the classroom, they were disadvantaged as overgrown children. Slowly, with care, Agnes went through their compositions line by line for the benefit of the entire class. The inmate-students had ideas, to a degree—but their ability to express themselves in anything other than simple childish expletives was primitive; and their attitude toward Agnes, respectful at first, if guarded, quickly became sullen and resentful. Even when Agnes tried to praise the “strengths” in their writing, they came to distrust her, for the “suggestions” that were sure to come.
Mattia was quick-witted and shrewd, and usually had no difficulty understanding the essays, but his writing was so strangely condensed, Agnes often didn’t know what he was trying to say. It was as if the young man was distrustful of speaking outright. He wrote in the idiom of the street but it was a heightened and abbreviated idiom, succinct as code. From time to time Agnes looked up from one of his tortuous compositions thinking, This is poetry! When Mattia read his compositions aloud to the class, he read in a way that seemed to convey meaning, yet often the other inmates didn’t seem to understand him, either.