Reporter lies on the hotel bed, rereads a few pages of Sutton’s second memoir. He laughs. Sutton must be the only person ever in the history of literature to write two memoirs that directly contradict each other, even on basic biographical facts. In one memoir, for instance, Sutton says that before breaking out of Sing Sing with Egan, he’d arranged to have an empty getaway car waiting outside the prison. In the other memoir Sutton says the mother of his daughter drove the getaway car. And yet Reporter can still hear Sutton, more than once, describing the way Bess looked at the wheel as he and Egan came running up the hill.
In one memoir Sutton meticulously describes robbing the Manufacturers Trust of Queens. In the other memoir he swears he didn’t do it. And so on.
How many of the contradictions in Sutton’s memoirs, or in his mind, were willful, and how many were dementia, Reporter doesn’t know. His current theory is that Sutton lived three separate lives. The one he remembered, the one he told people about, the one that really happened. Where those lives overlapped, no one can say, and God help anyone who tries. More than likely, Sutton himself didn’t know.
Reporter has looked everywhere for Bess Endner, but she’s vanished. He’s searched high and low for Margaret—again, no trace. He’s obtained hundreds of documents from the FBI, pored through scores of old newspapers and magazines and court transcripts, rooted through long-lost police files on Arnold Schuster, files he found rotting in the attic of a retired police sergeant. It all leads nowhere. FBI files contradict newspaper clips, newspaper clips contradict police files, and Sutton’s two self-negating memoirs refute everything. The more Reporter digs, the less he knows, until it seems that he spent Christmas eleven years ago with a shadow of a phantom.
Among the hundreds of FBI documents is one headed: Interesting Narrative. A summary of Sutton’s psyche, it was written by an agent in 1950, when Sutton was the nation’s most wanted fugitive:
RELIGION: Sutton was a Roman Catholic but his belief was destroyed through reading.
LEISURE HABITS: Spent most of his time reading, attended movies once in two weeks, dramas once in six months, attended football games, took long auto rides for pleasure, and smoked. Read classics.
PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT: Introverted temperament, chronic but benign; depression with occasional suicidal moods; emotional instability with suggestion of sensory petit mal; tendency to worry and anxiety; general neurotic failure to achieve happiness.
Except for the business about reading, and smoking, Reporter doesn’t recognize in this Interesting Narrative the Sutton he knew. Which doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate. All we can have of Sutton, of each other, is Interesting Narratives.
Last week Reporter visited the Farm Colony, and Attica, and Sing Sing, and Eastern State, where he suffered an attack of claustrophobia in a cell exactly like Sutton’s. Eastern State is now a national historic landmark, and though the curator didn’t know exactly which cell was Willie’s, they were all alike, all equally squalid and inhuman. Reporter left with a new appreciation of Sutton’s grit, and more questions than ever about why Sutton wasn’t able to put his good qualities to better use.
Reporter didn’t set out to become such a hard-core Suttonologist. He doesn’t know why he feels compelled to accumulate all this information, enough for fifty articles. Last night on the phone his editor, losing patience, called it jerk-offery. Reporter answered coolly, in a tone Sutton would have commended, that at least it wasn’t clusterfuckery.
Reporter tells himself that he wants to know all he can about Sutton because he’s a reporter, driven by curiosity, and because he’s an American, titillated by crime. But mainly he wants to know because of Bess. She’s only part of Sutton’s story, but for Reporter she’s the central part. It doesn’t matter if the old clips seem to suggest that Sutton’s love for her was delusional. All love is delusional. What matters is that the love endured. Near the end of Sutton’s life he was still talking about Bess, still describing her to his ghostwriter. There were other women in Sutton’s past—he married at least twice—but he wrote about them with detachment, in contrast to the delicacy and melancholy with which he recalled Bess. Whether or not Bess returned Sutton’s love, in any portion, she’s the key to Sutton’s identity. And maybe to Reporter’s. As a writer, as a man, Reporter has spent much of his life in two vaguely related quests—storytelling and love. Sutton never gave up on either. Through all his confinements and wanderings, he was a storyteller and a lover to the end. Reporter finds this inspiring. He finds it sad. Maybe Reporter is only projecting his psyche onto a dead bank robber, but so what? Storytelling, like love, requires some degree of projection. And if someone, someday, wants to project their psyche onto Reporter, so be it.
Closing Sutton’s memoir, Reporter clicks on the TV. The news. A story about John Lennon’s murder two weeks ago in New York. A story about President-elect Ronald Reagan promising to deregulate banks. A story about rising unemployment, and another about global population nearing five billion. A confusion of people. Finally, a feature about Christmas celebrations at a local roadside park, the oldest roadside park in Florida, called Weeki Wachee. A bizarre little rabbit hole, it’s a glass dome built on an underwater spring, with pretty girls in mermaid costumes performing underwater acrobatics.
It sits just five miles down the road from where Sutton died.
Reporter jumps off the bed.
In the morning he heads south on Fort Dade Avenue, turns right on Cortez, left on U.S. 19, follows the signs until he sees plastic flags along a wall. Then a tall turquoise statue of a mermaid. It looks like the Statue of Liberty. Reporter never realized how much the Statue of Liberty looks like a mermaid.
Reporter buys a ticket and a program, which says one hundred million gallons of water bubble up daily from vast underground caverns beneath the park. Just fifty feet down the water surges up so violently, it will rip the face mask off a diver. Which is why no one knows just how far down the caverns go. No one, the program says, has ever gotten to the bottom of it.
Reporter enters a small theater. Instead of a stage there’s an enormous glass wall. Music starts up, a sheer curtain rises, revealing an enormous canyon of blue-purple water. Suddenly on the other side of the glass are two mermaids. They wave at Reporter, and he forgets that they’re pretending to be mermaids. They’re too beautiful to be pretending. They swim backwards, sideways, upside down, their long blond hair twirling in their wake. They twist, tumble, waggle their fins, exult in the absence of gravity. Every few minutes they swim to the side of the tank and take a long suck on an air hose. The only break in the vivid dream.
After the show Reporter runs backstage, finds the dressing room. A sign on the door reads: Mermaids Only. He approaches the first mermaid who emerges. He introduces himself, says he’s a reporter writing about Willie Sutton. The mermaid, now wearing her walking-around fin, made of shimmering aquamarine skintight fabric, like a pencil skirt that goes a foot past her feet, gives him a blank look.
You know, Reporter says, Willie Sutton? The bank robber? He died last month?
Blank.
Anyway, Reporter says, I just have this hunch that Sutton might have spent a lot of time here—at the end. That he might have stopped by this dressing room. Maybe spoke to you or one of the other mermaids?
She runs her fingers through her long wet hair, trying to untangle it. Guys come back here all the time, she says.
Right, Reporter says. But this guy would have referred to himself in the third person. Willie thinks you’re beautiful. Willie thinks you look like a girl he knew in Poughkeepsie. That kind of thing.
The mermaid adjusts the waistband of her fin. I don’t know what to tell you, mister. The name doesn’t ring a bell.
Maybe you could ask some of your fellow mermaids?
She takes a deep breath, as if sucking on the air hose. Hold on.
She pivots—not easy in her fabric fin—and waddles back into the dressing room.
Reporter leans against the wall. A
minute passes. Two. He’s never smoked in his life, but he has the strangest craving for a Chesterfield.
The dressing room door opens. A different mermaid emerges. She’s not quite as pretty as the other mermaid. But—blond hair, blue eyes—her beauty seems more wholesome. More old-fashioned. Willie’s type, Reporter thinks.
She too is wearing a fabric fin. Skin-tight. Gold-specked. She sashays toward Reporter, smiling.
Reporter knows, he sees it in her blue eyes, she’s got an envelope containing a letter from Willie. Or else the manuscript of The Statue in the Park. She’ll say Reporter’s name, and Reporter will ask how she knows his name, and she’ll say: Willie—he had a hunch you’d be stopping by. Then she and Reporter will go for coffee, and discover a thousand things in common, and eventually fall in love, and get married, and have babies, and their life together will be Willie’s everlasting gift to Reporter. He can see it all. He reaches out his hand, starts to speak, but the mermaid sidles around him, past him, into the arms of a young man just behind him.
You look beautiful, the young man tells her.
Uck, she whispers, I can’t wait to go home and get out of this stupid costume.
Reporter walks slowly out to his car. He drives to the airport. Along the way he turns on the radio. A story about the first-ever space shuttle, which is due to blast off in six months, directly east of Spring Hill. Reporter looks out over the black swamps and the dense woods and pictures the launch. He knows Sutton would give anything to see it. He suddenly remembers something Sutton said. Though it was eleven years ago, almost to the day, he hears that craggy voice, that smoke-cured Brooklyn accent, filling the car, clearer than the radio, and it makes Reporter smile.
Hey kid—did you know that when the astronauts got back to earth, Collins was a mess. He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep. He’d drift off in the middle of a sentence. The man could not function. Finally he told the docs at NASA that after gazing at the moon all that time, after orbiting it again and again and never actually touching it, he’d fallen hopelessly in love. His words, not mine. In love with the moon—imagine kid? Imagine how fuckin lonely you have to be to fall in love with the moon?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deepest thanks to Andre Agassi, Hildy Linn Angius, Ellen Archer, Spencer Barnett, Violet Barnett, Lyle Barnett, Aimee Bell, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, Fred Favero, Gary Fisketjon, Rich Gold, Paul Hurley, Bill Husted, Mort Janklow, Ginger Martin, Eric Mercado, McGraw Milhaven, Dorothy Moehringer, Sam O’Brien, J. P. Parenti, Joni Parenti, Kit Rachlis, Derk Richardson, Jaimee Rose, Jack La Torre, and Peternelle van Arsdale.
Readers Group Guide
Introduction
Willie Sutton was one of the most notorious, infamous and frequently quoted figures of the twentieth century—yet little is known about him. From the 1920s to the 1950s he robbed dozens of banks, made off with perhaps two million dollars and escaped three maximum security prisons—but how? And why? Who was Willie Sutton and what drove him?
From scattered facts and widely conflicting accounts J.R. Moehringer builds a cohesive narrative of Sutton’s life and an intriguing portrait of his psyche. Charming, gallant, loyal, romantic, honor-bound, self-deluded, Moehringer’s Sutton is essentially driven by two things—an indomitable will to survive and the boundless memory of one lost love.
Discussion Questions
1. How is Willie Sutton an atypical criminal, unlike those more commonly found in gangster movies and noir novels?
2. Before they set out on their journey, Sutton tells Reporter that newspapers deal in myths, as do “comic books, Horatio Alger, the Bible, the whole American Dream.” Sutton adds, “I used to buy in . . . That’s what got me so mixed up in the first place.” What does Sutton mean? What myths have been highly influential in your own life?
3. For good or ill, how did growing up in Irish Town shape Willie? What did he learn from the neighborhood code of honor? From seeing his parents struggle financially? How did his abuse at the hands of his brothers forever alter the trajectory of his life?
4. Discuss Willie’s best friends Eddie and Happy. What do they provide for Willie, and what do they cost him? How do they mirror his brothers?
5. What’s the larger significance of the brutal scene at the slaughterhouse? Does it come to mind at other moments in the book, such as when Willie crosses paths with Arnold Schuster?
6. Sutton tells Reporter and Photographer that the “real hero” of the 1969 moon landing was Mike Collins, the one astronaut who never set foot on the lunar surface. What does Sutton mean? In what ways does this remark open a window into Willie’s worldview?
7. What role does Daddo, a relatively minor character, play in Willie’s development and later life?
8. Discuss the symbolism of eyes and the connection among characters who lose their sight or suffer some eye injury—Daddo, Eddie, Margaret, Arnold Schuster.
9. Willie flatly claims: “Money. Love. There’s not a problem that isn’t created by one or the other. And there’s not a problem that can’t be solved by one or the other.” Do you agree?
10. At the start of Part Two we learn that Willie is fascinated by the safe “as an intellectual subject, as an abstract concept.” How does the idea of a safe, of something valuable locked inside something impenetrable, recur throughout the story?
11. What do we learn about Willie through his interactions with Wingy?
12. While at Eastern State, Willie receives an off-the-cuff but elaborate diagnosis from the prison psychiatrist. Do you agree with the doctor? Is he too harsh? Too soft? Is it possible the doctor is the only person who ever sees Willie for what he really is?
13. Do you think Willie is a good person? If so, how to explain his inability to live by society’s rules? If not, how to explain his dedication to nonviolence, his love of literature, his genuine empathy for the suffering of others? And if he’s a rare mix of both good and bad, did his punishments fit his crimes?
14. Sutton seems struck and slightly bothered by the notion that he’s not a hero but an antihero. Which does he seem to you—hero or antihero? Or neither?
15. Willie argues that to live in society, to survive, each of us must take something away from somebody. Each of us must rob. Is he being glib, or does he make a valid point?
16. When Sutton meets Bess’s granddaughter, Kate, he provokes her to reveal a different version of his affair with Bess. Does he accept her version or simply ignore it? Which version of the novel’s love story do you believe—the one Willie remembers or the one Kate heard from her grandmother? Does the scene with Kate change how you feel about Willie? Does it make him seem delusional, or does it simply raise the idea that there is much about him—and Bess—that we’ll never know? Do you agree with Reporter, in the final chapter, when he muses: “All love is delusional”?
An Interview with J.R. Moehringer
How did you hear about the story of Willie Sutton, and what made you want to turn it into a novel?
I used to hear about Willie Sutton all the time when I was a boy. My grandfather was fascinated by Sutton, and the fellas who hung out at the corner saloon with my Uncle Charlie spoke about Sutton with a kind of perverse admiration. For them, as for countless Americans, Sutton was a lovable rebel, a gentleman bandit, a kind of Robin Hood. So maybe it’s natural that he popped into my head during the global financial meltdown of 2008. As I watched with horror, and anger, the chaos and suffering caused by banks, I thought of this legendary figure who’d dedicated his life to taking down banks. And I thought this would be an interesting time to write a novel about him.
What are the challenges or benefits of writing a novel that is rooted in historical fact? What forms did the research take?
The benefit is that you have a readymade story, with a basic structure and chronology. You have a real person, with a real date of birth and a real date of death and some indisputable facts in between. You’re grounded by those facts, secured and comforted by them, as is the reader. But you’re also constr
ained. Sometimes you want the story to go in a completely different direction, and it won’t; the facts won’t let it. Sometimes you want the protagonist to make different choices, better choices, and he simply can’t.
In your Author’s Note you say this book is your “guess” about what happened to Willie when he got out of prison, but it’s also your “wish.” What do you mean by this?
Picturing Willie’s life, trying to divine his motivations, I didn’t always feel as though I was imagining. I was often guided by a kind of wishful novelistic thinking. I believed, or wanted to believe, that Willie was a good person at heart, and thus that’s what he became in my book. A good person gone bad.
Did you take the tour yourself and visit all of the locations in the book?
Every last one.
Why did you make Willie so literate, reading classics, poets like Ezra Pound and Hart Crane?
I didn’t. Life did. That’s one of those indisputable facts about Willie. By all accounts he was a voracious reader. Maybe it was all the time he had on his hands in prison, but I don’t think so. I think he was a born reader. He had a gift for language. I got my hands on a letter he wrote to his publisher and I was amazed by how beautifully it was written.
Do you agree with Sutton about the pervasiveness of myth in our culture? And is the novel still able to contribute to mythmaking?
Yes, I think we’re inundated with myth. It takes different forms, it evolves with technology, but it’s still a vital part of us. Which is good and bad. Myths can mislead us, yes, but they can also help us find meaning. And I think the novel, though it’s on the wane, though it’s been overtaken by other media, can still have mythic power. And I hope it always will.
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