On the original charge of aggravated assault, my grandfather might have been looking at five years. But by 1957 New York was already struggling with the judicial backlog that, at the end of the sixties, brought its court system to the point of collapse. As a veteran and a family man with no criminal record, my grandfather was persuaded to waive his right to a trial and plead guilty to a lesser charge of simple assault. He was sentenced to twenty months in Wallkill Prison.
Wallkill had been built in a spirit of experiment, when FDR was governor of New York. Its perimeter was not enclosed by a wall or a fence. Its tree-lined walkways and gray Gothic stonework reminded visitors of a small men’s college or seminary. It had a library, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a profitable dairy farm, a horse barn, machine and craft shops, greenhouses and vegetable gardens, an orchard, livestock, and bees. Under qualified instructors, inmates were required to learn and paid to work at manual or agricultural trades, or to put in a daily shift for making eyeglasses or plastic novelties in one of Wallkill’s two manufactories. The warden recruited the prison guards personally to ensure that they were in sympathy with Wallkill’s philosophy and methods. The guards dressed like park rangers. They carried handcuffs but no guns or batons. You had your own cell with a small outdoor terrace on which you were free to grow vegetables or flowers. You carried a key to your cell. Between lights-out and reveille you were confined to quarters, but once you had proved trustworthy you were given a fair amount of liberty to come and go. As long as you reported promptly for work, chow, exercise, chapel, and other mandatory activities, your spare time was your own.
The first night in his cell my grandfather had trouble sleeping. Outside the window the prison yard was flooded with light. The cell door was inset with a large peephole that let in light and noise from the gallery. The mattress crinkled. The air felt close and heavy. Sleeping inmates made a racket out of a cartoon, a barn at night transformed into a calliope of cows, pigs, and chickens playing a wheezy polka. At intervals too random to anticipate or adjust to, the prisoner in the next cell would break into spasmodic coughing. It sounded like a drum falling down a flight of stairs. It sounded painful.
My grandfather lay for hours with his arms folded under his head, bothered by thoughts of his wife and daughter. He pictured my mother jostled in the grandstand of a racetrack, losing tickets snowing down around her as a crowd rose to its feet and roared. He pictured her alone at a table in the back of a poolhall in some godforsaken place like Hagerstown, hair falling across a page of algebra or Modern Screen, while Uncle Ray sandbagged some dumb bastard who afterward beat him to death in an alley before raping my mother. My grandmother, he envisioned shorn and strapped to a table in a harsh-lit operating theater, plunged into tubs of ice, wound into a straightjacket, and force-fed medicated pap. He sat up, shuddering.
My grandfather went to the window to look at the night sky, but it turned out that the floodlights of Wallkill abolished the stars. Returning to the cot, my grandfather determined to map the ceiling of his cell with the stars he knew to be overhead. He pretended that the ceiling could be rolled away like the roof of an observatory dome. With a clear view of the heavens he contemplated the Dolphin, the Indian, the Microscope. He found the Ring Nebula in Lyra. Cassiopeia and Andromeda ascended the inner surface of his skull with their uncomfortable mythology. He saw the mother crooked as an M with torment, the oblique angle of the daughter chained and waiting for something monstrous to arrive. It was nothing he wanted to think about. He switched off the Zeiss of his imagination. The stars winked out.
He rolled onto his side, and in time my grandmother returned to his thoughts. She lay naked across their marriage bed on her belly, with her legs pressed together and my grandfather standing by her feet. His gaze traveled up an arrow of shadow that pointed to the cleft in her ass. Her ass, that ripe and downy apricot. He took hold of her feet by the ankles and opened her legs.
He fell asleep and was roused from a dream of a girl he’d been sweet on in high school by the blare of the bell that must have provoked it. When he opened his eyes, he was in prison. In twenty months it would be 1959.
He put on the dark blue workshirt and gray poplin trousers of the Wallkill uniform and sat down on the cot to lace up his boots. As he sat down, he happened to look out the window at the sky. Mysteriously, that turned out to be a mistake.
As I no doubt have made clear by now, my grandfather was not a man for tears, and when tears did come he fought them. The last time he had allowed himself to weep freely, he’d been in short pants and Herbert Hoover had been the president. Like blood, tears had a function. They served to indicate the severity and depth of the blow you had absorbed. When your friend died in your arms, your wife had lost her sanity, or you were saying goodbye to your daughter in Mrs. Einstein’s front hall, tears flowed, and as with blood, you stanched them. So what the fuck was this? A blue sky on a clear morning at the end of a Catskills summer. Big deal. A matter of wavelength and refraction. An agitation of the rods and cones.
Meanwhile, breakfast was at seven o’clock sharp. If you showed up at 7:01, he had been informed, you would be shut out of the mess hall and then go hungry until lunch. The bathroom was all the way down at the end of the gallery. There might be a wait for the toilet, for the sink, for a place in front of the mirror. What was more, he needed to take a piss. Any second now he was going to stop looking at the sky and tie his boots and go. It was time to get moving.
There was a knock on the door. My grandfather jumped. “Yes?” he called. He cleared his throat. “Yes, what is it?”
“Excuse me. I don’t mean to intrude.” There was something arch about the intonation—mannered was the right word. “I’m— It’s Dr. Alfred Storch.”
On arrival yesterday my grandfather had been examined by an internist and interviewed by a psychiatrist. Neither of them had been named Alfred Storch. The name of the warden was Dr. Wallack.
“Just a minute.” My grandfather knotted his bootlaces and got up off the cot. When he opened the door, he was surprised to find another prisoner standing there. He had noticed this man in the mess hall the night before. Well over six feet tall, gaunt, silver in his black brush mustache. An apologetic stoop from a lifetime of ducking through doorways. He wore heavy-rimmed black glasses, and his eyes were a mess. The left one turned outward. It was hyperopic and swam huge behind its lens. The right eye was nearsighted, and its correction left it looking shrunken by comparison. He appeared to be wearing not ordinary spectacles but some kind of crude device of his own manufacture that would let him see around corners or in opposite directions. Dr. Storch held out his right hand, large and long-fingered. On a piano keyboard it would have spanned an octave and a half without stretching.
“I’m just next door,” Dr. Storch said. I’m chust next door. It was a German accent, tinged with British instruction. It sounded pretty classy, Leslie Howard playing a Prussian count. “I wanted to make sure you, ah—” He broke off and averted his face from my grandfather’s, though the left eye maintained its vigil. “Terribly sorry. I see I’m disturbing you.”
My grandfather wiped his cheeks savagely on the sleeve of his workshirt. “Not at all,” he said. “I was just going to wash up before breakfast.”
“Right,” said Dr. Storch. “You know I, I saw your door was closed, you see, and you’re new here, so I wasn’t sure if you knew—”
“I know,” my grandfather said. “Seven sharp or they lock you out.”
“Oh, they really do,” Dr. Storch said. “They are sticklers.”
It was worded like a complaint, but to my grandfather it sounded more like boasting. You would have thought Dr. Storch himself had formulated the policy on promptness at mealtime.
My grandfather followed into the gallery and closed the door of his cell behind him. He took the key from his pocket.
“Oh, nobody locks them,” Dr. Storch said. “Of course, you do as you think best. But the locks are so flimsy. There’s really no point.” My grandfather detected a note of bitterness, as though Dr. Storch had fallen prey to pilfering more than once. “You can pick them with a playing card.” My grandfather locked his door and Dr. Storch shrugged graciously. “There’s no harm in it, certainly,” he said.
They went past the door of Dr. Storch’s cell and he pushed open the door. “Same as yours, in every drab particular.”
Again there was the note of sham complaint, as if the uniformity of prisoners’ cells obeyed some principle that Dr. Storch endorsed. Anyway, it was true: same cot, lamp, chair, table, same small chest of drawers. Same boxed ration of blue sky. No photographs. A few pocket books piled on the table with typed library labels taped to their spines. The topmost book was Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. My grandfather had adored this classic of “hard” science fiction when it was first serialized in Astounding, enough to drop three dollars when Doubleday brought out a hardcover edition a year later. In 1974, when he pressed a fresh copy on me, it remained one of his all-time favorite books.
My grandfather did not acknowledge to Dr. Storch this evidence of a shared interest that might form the basis of a friendship. It was like when you dropped by the neighbors’ at suppertime with a piece of misdelivered mail, and their house had a warm smell of carrots and bay leaf, and before they had a chance to ask you to sit down, have a glass of water, try a little of the soup, at least take off your coat, you shook your head and said, Don’t worry, I’m not staying.
“Very nice,” he said.
They went along the gallery toward the bathroom. Most of the other prisoners had already gone down to the mess hall, leaving their cell doors unlocked or ajar. Calendar girls, some photographs of children. Prisoner watercolors of fruit, Ava Gardner, the green Shawangunks. A porcelain Virgin with a halo of gold wire.
“I think you’ll find the food quite palatable,” Dr. Storch said.
“Dinner was all right. Beef and macaroni. Hard to ruin.”
“We do get a lot of macaroni.”
“It’s filling.”
“And cheap. I’m a dentist, by the way,” Dr. Storch said. “Not an MD. If you were wondering. And I would like to tell you the truth about why I’m here before you encounter the remarkable mythology my accent has engendered—every day a fresh outrage seems to have been added to the catalog of my mythical crimes! I feel it’s imperative I tell you the truth, you see, because I think . . . Do I perceive that you are a Jew? Yes. Well, here it is: Rest assured, I am not a Nazi. I am a German, yes, of course. But I detested Hitler, and I was never a member of the Nazi Party. I left Germany just before the invasion of Poland, and lived through the Blitz in London, where I was nearly killed on three occasions by German ordnance, including a V-2 rocket. It was never my job to extract the gold teeth from mouths of deportees when they arrived at Auschwitz or Belsen. I lived my whole life in Hamburg and was never near any of those places. I never conducted hideous dental experiments or operated on patients without anesthesia. I never gave anyone a forked tongue or implanted a whore’s jaw with shark’s teeth. After the war I emigrated to Buffalo, where in 1953 I was arrested for practicing dentistry without a license, a felony in the state of New York, alas. And that’s why you find me living in the cell next to yours.”
It all came out in a burst, as though Wallkill regulations required that confession be done promptly, before one reached the bathroom door. There was a lot to digest in Dr. Storch’s confession. It was hard to know what to say in reply.
“I’m a salesman,” my grandfather said.
As they walked into the bathroom, Dr. Storch stiffened. He sidled around my grandfather and ducked into one of the stalls. At the trough-style sink a prisoner with a cauliflower ear and a barrel chest stood washing his hands. His forearms were blotched with dull tattoos. He closed the tap and went over to one of the continuous loops of linen towel that were mounted in white boxes on the wall. Patiently, he dried the blocks of pink marble that served him for hands. He smiled at my grandfather and said, “Hiya.” Preceded by a half-second of cool appraisal, it was a friendly smile. Ex-marine, my grandfather guessed. Middleweight to light heavyweight. Good reach. Bad knees.
“Morning,” my grandfather said.
“Name’s Hub. Hub Gorman.” He winked at my grandfather and called out, “See ya at breakfast, Al.” He had a lazy midwestern drawl that reminded my grandfather of Dean Martin’s.
If Dr. Storch had a reply, my grandfather didn’t catch it. Hub angled his head at the stalls and rolled his eyes in that direction. “Want to watch yourself around that shitbird,” he said cheerfully.
My grandfather didn’t reply. He had an aversion to people who winked at him. The jury was out on Dr. Storch, but he was reasonably sure he would still hate Hub Gorman a week from now. There was nothing to be done or said about it. Bad blood, pissing contests, ongoing feuds, that would all constitute a surrender to Wallkill, every bit as much as would making a friend. Even if he had to serve the full twenty months, my grandfather’s plan was to be always just dropping by.
Gorman stepped toward my grandfather, using the lurch imparted by bad knees as a pretext to push his face in much too close. His breath smelled like a cast-iron skillet.
“Word of advice,” he said, arranging his ugly and genial features into a solemn mask. A pregnant pause followed. My grandfather endured it. “Never let a dentist put you under.”
He shambled out, whistling a few aimless notes. My grandfather went to one of the urinals. The relief of urination helped to mitigate a feeling of foreboding brought on by the interaction of Dr. Storch and Hub Gorman. Dr. Storch came bustling out of the stall.
“There you are!” he said, as if he and my grandfather had become separated while hiking through the woods. “Ready for breakfast?”
They got to the mess hall one minute past seven. Since it was my grandfather’s first breakfast at Wallkill, the guard at the door cut him a break. “Go on, then, you, and get your pancakes,” he said, shoving with his shoulder against one of the swinging doors to let my grandfather in. “Don’t let it happen again, all right?”
After my grandfather went through, the guard stepped into the doorway. The warmth went out of his voice. “You can just go hungry this morning, Doc,” he said.
* * *
“That’s why you always say that?”
“Say what?”
“‘Never let a dentist put you under,’” I quoted. “That’s what you always say.”
“I do?”
“It’s one of your major pieces of advice.”
“It’s just common sense,” my grandfather said. “I don’t give advice.”
I searched my memory to see if I could contradict him. I found statements on the order of Get the hair dryer away from the bathtub and It will heal faster without a Band-Aid and, of an approaching Doberman, He can smell that you’re afraid.
“So you’re anti-advice,” I said.
“I’m not anti-advice, just there’s no point to it.”
“Okay.”
“They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns out bad.”
I was not entirely certain, and thought of asking him, who this they were, pointlessly wasting his time. I decided he was in all likelihood talking about the human race.
“So next time a dentist wants to give me gas, I should just say, ‘Go for it.’”
“Feel free. People die every day in dentist’s chairs.”
“Poor Dr. Storch,” I said. “Did you get a little nicer to him later on?”
“I wasn’t unkind to him. I just didn’t talk to him. I didn’t talk to anybody, and I didn’t want anybody talking to me. That was the plan.”
This did not strike me as necessarily marking a radical change in approach.
“Yeah, but, I mean, that guy Hub was tormenting him for months . . .”
“A year.”
“And then you move in right next door. And you haven’t been there for the whole history of Dr. Storch getting picked on and called a Nazi and treated like shit, even by the guards, who it sounds like were basically decent to the other prisoners.”
“They were more than decent.”
“And you’re, you know, all muscley and tough-looking and whatever. He couldn’t’ve known what a total, like, badass you were. But I bet he was maybe hoping you might want to stick up for him.”
“‘Badass.’” My grandfather sampled the flavor of the word. It did not seem to revolt him, but it was nothing he needed ever to sample again.
“I bet he was hoping you’d be his friend. It sounds like he needed one.”
“He was,” my grandfather said. “He did.”
He closed his eyes and appeared to drift for a little while, and I thought the afternoon’s conversation might have come to an end. It was nearing four. The palliative care nurse was due at four-thirty. But then his color deepened and he opened his eyes. They had the clarity of pain. The meds were wearing off.
“Every infraction at Wallkill, you got time added to your sentence. Fighting, getting into a dustup with another inmate, they would add a lot of time. Months. Months for one fight. The only thing worse was if you tried to escape, ‘going over the hill,’ they called it. And then? If you got into another fight after that? The way you probably would, if you started something serious with a hard-on like Hub Gorman? They shipped you off to Green Haven. Or Auburn. Maximum security. Where they put the bad guys, prison prison. Your mother was fourteen when I went in, Mike. Stuck in Baltimore, where she didn’t know a soul. Living with a pool hustler and a grumpy old lady. Stuck there till the day I come get her. And your grandmother . . .”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m not reproaching you. Hey, I’m sorry, Grandpa.” He was looking out the window. The momzer sat on the top of the fence, facing the ivy-tangled slope, its back to the birdfeeder. Making a show of indifference or surrender. “It’s time for your pill.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Come on. I’m really sorry, okay? Come on, you need it. Grandpa.” I said Grandpa again, but in an Eeyore voice. Then I said it in the voice of Darth Vader. He kept looking out the window at the squirrel, who was so much less trying company than his grandson. “What do you want to take it with?” I said.
He rolled his head in my direction. “Cold beer.”
“Seriously? Is that okay?”
He lifted an eyebrow no more than a quarter of an inch. Just high enough to say, What the fuck difference could it possibly make?
I went to the kitchen, opened a bottle of Dos Equis, and poured some into a plastic cup. I was fairly new to California at the time, and Mexican beer still held considerable allure. On further reflection, I transferred the beer from the plastic cup into a tall glass and topped it off from the bottle, tilting it so he could swallow his pill without getting a mouthful of foam. I carried the glass of beer into the guest bedroom with a certain ceremoniousness. For some reason I was really looking forward to seeing him drink a little beer.
He put the Dilaudid onto his sueded tongue and washed it down with a healthy swallow of Dos Equis.
“Rock and roll,” I said.
He closed his eyes. In his contentment he looked handsome and severe. “Mmm,” he said.
“Good, right?”
“Good.”
“Have a little more.”
I passed the glass to him again and he took another long pull. He handed me back the glass. “Enough,” he said. “Thank you. Go ahead, honey, you finish it.”
I sat down in the chair and had a sip of beer and watched him smack his lips. The complicated bitterness seemed to linger and resonate on his tongue.
“Storch, what a nudnik,” he said. “I must have been nuts.”