Save Johanna!

by Francine Pascal

  “Well, it does.”

  “It shouldn’t.”

  David doesn’t answer. He’s still working on his shoe but with less concentration. It’s the old argument, and I know he doesn’t want us to fall into the same untenable positions again, but it’s tough for him. This project is always going to give him trouble, but, damn it, he’s going to have to deal with that himself. I stand there watching, waiting for my David to conquer his David, and finally it happens. “You really don’t have a choice, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have to go.” He stops what he’s doing. “Look, Jo, maybe I can help you. Is there any legal work I can research?”

  “Nothing right now, but I know it’s going to come up.”

  “Do you want me to go out to San Francisco with you? I don’t know what I can do out there, but it’s fairly slow this week. I could get away.”

  “That’s OK, I can handle San Francisco. It’s sort of cut-and-dried, two interviews and I come right home, but I love you for offering.” By now two teenage boys and an elderly woman walking her Pekingese have stopped to watch David. In New York, if you pause to sneeze you can pick up a crowd.

  “You’re terrific! I’m mad about you.” And right in front of everyone I hug his arm and kiss his shoulder. He smiles, I smile, and the old lady smiles. The kids laugh.

  “Hey, lady, watch where you’re stepping!”

  “Oh no . . .”

  Chapter Four

  I’m a highly disciplined writer. It’s a trick I was lucky enough to learn fairly early in my career. Weekday mornings I try to get to the computer by ten and stay there, breaking only for a modest lunch, until I’ve written four pages. Unless, of course, I have a good excuse. Fortunately for me, they grow on trees.

  The first thing I do each morning is reread the four pages from the previous day’s work, do some editing and rewriting, move to a new page, and I’m ready for action.

  This morning—and it is, by the way, a most magnificent spring morning, clean and sharp with dazzling sunshine flooding my office—I take my time getting started, and instead of only four pages I read the entire first chapter. I know it’s still very rough, but I’m not dissatisfied because I can see that the pacing is right. I know I haven’t caught the true character of Avrum yet, but it’s still too early in the book to be concerned. Besides, I expect his actions to fill him out just as they do in his real life. For the moment I’m using Avrum’s real name and Swat’s and Imogene’s too for my fictional characters, but only during the writing process. Later, when I’ve finished the book, I’ll change them. But for now it’s an enormous advantage to be working with the clarity of real identities.

  I see some changes I could make, but my policy is, unless there’s a major problem, to keep the flow going by always moving ahead. I’ll catch the revisions on the rewrite.

  There are always little things I have to check on along the way. The cabin I describe in the first chapter, the one in upstate New York, is an example. I myself have never been up around there, but my friend Louis has gone on any number of religious retreats not far from the Opalescent River and knows the whole area quite well. I got enough information from him for the first draft, but I’ll need more details for later in the book. He’s promised to round up some photographs, a hiker’s map, and some other things he thinks will be helpful. I’ll also have to pick up some more information on motorcycles. Harley Davidson was the only brand I could come up with, but I need a couple of other names and a close look at a real bike. Speaking of names, I also need a good one for the young girl who will come in at the end of the first chapter. Chores like these are lumped under the broad title of research and done in bits and pieces all along the way. And there’s nothing I like better. It’s a perfect escape from the computer. Picture an entire day, particularly a magnificent one like today, worked around staring at motorcycles. But I resist. Instead, I pull down the shades to block out some of that tempting sunlight, and click on the machine.

  Souls in Darkness

  Chapter Two

  Time crawled by for Swat until at last the writhing and pressing, the touching and sliding of the wet and shiny bodies on the floor slowed and then ceased.

  Now only Swat was awake, and the pungent odor of their sexual emissions tortured her brain as she watched them with a hatred so vicious that were it given life it would have torn through the room and ripped them apart.

  Except Avrum. Swat would sooner give up her own life than cause harm to Avrum.

  My phone rings.

  I grab it before the end of the first ring. People are always put off guard by my fast response, but the phone, besides being inches from my hand, is my pipeline to the outside world and irresistible. The promise of an emergency great enough to warrant my immediate attention is always a hopeful possibility.

  “Hello?” I try to control my anticipation.

  “Joey?”

  It’s my friend Claudia.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing much. I just wondered if you could tear yourself away from the great god Maheely long enough to have lunch.”

  I must admit her attitude about Avrum annoys me a tiny bit. There’s no denying that people are repelled by him. He is, after all, a murderer. Still, it’s disappointing that no one seems to make any attempt to take a three-dimensional look at him. I’m particularly bothered by the fact that my own close friends, knowing my involvement in the project, have settled for the same superficial view. Maheely’s a lunatic. Period.

  I punish her a little. “I don’t know if I can. . . .”

  But it’s obviously a slow day for her so she overlooks my little sulk. “It’s so beautiful out, Joey. Su . . . shi . . .” she singsongs my current passion for Japanese food.

  “There is some outside research I could do on motorcycles. . . .”

  “Of course there is. I’ll write you the note myself.”

  “You shit.”

  “Good. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes. Be downstairs. OK?”

  I hang up and simultaneously close down Swat and the rest of the group and turn the monster off.

  In less than fifteen minutes I’m downstairs in the lobby, dressed and ready for lunch and heartened by the possibility that all over the country, wherever the sun is shining, other writers are also heading out of their caves to spend the day motorcycle staring or whatever staring they can come up with.

  Avrum will have to wait. And since I leave for the coast tomorrow I’m free of the computer for at least four days. Hallelujah!

  Chapter Five

  I haven’t been to San Francisco since I last visited my sister, Sephra, and that was at least five years ago. The city doesn’t seem to have changed much, but, of course, that’s its charm. With the exception of a few new glass eggboxes it’s pure 1916. Paris and London give me the same feeling. Maybe that’s what people mean when they say San Francisco seems European.

  The first time I came here I was very impressed. It seemed to me the perfect city. Everything worked. As a New Yorker, I really appreciated it. Amazing, I thought, but after a few days I began to feel that something was missing. I didn’t know what it was, and then along about the fourth day, late in the afternoon, with that special brilliant San Francisco sun glistening on the sparkling-clean streets and the carefully dressed people briskly making their way home from the day’s work, it came to me. I’m an old New Yorker, and you can’t fool me easily. I said to myself, OK, where are they? What have they done with the poor people?

  That night I found the answer. They ship them across the bay to Oakland. After that, San Francisco ceased to be amazing. Anybody can do it that way.

  Since I’m not that anxious to be here in the first place, and the interviews are certain to be difficult and I still haven’t figured out whether I should see Sephra or not and that’s bothering me, I decide to be very kind to myself and go directly to the Cleft Hotel. It’s a lovely hotel, small but elegant and a little too expensive for me,
but I figure I’ll only be here for three days so I can splurge a bit.

  My room is probably half the size of something comparably priced at the Holiday Inn, but it’s furnished with the charm and style of a good country inn-cum-Plaza Hotel, and there are people who turn down your bed at night and a towel warmer in the bathroom and windows that open to catch the gentle breeze that always seems to blow in this city whose weather is the perfect combination of the freshness of spring and the energy of fall. Whatever it costs, I’ve already unpacked, so I’m certainly not checking out.

  My plans are to hire a car first thing tomorrow morning and drive up to Northern State Prison about forty miles north of here in time to catch the morning visiting hours. My first interview is with Swat. I can’t see Imogene until the following day. I’ll spend most of tonight going over questions for Swat’s interview. I have to find the right approach because even though we’ve never met, she’s very hostile to me. I’m not going to bring up the letter she wrote to me, and I’m going to try to keep the conversation out of the present. My object is to find out why she allowed herself to be taken over so completely by Avrum. I heard her at the trial, and she sounded smart and strong-minded, an extremely independent woman and probably very much of a loner. She was all these things except when it came to Avrum. That’s what I want to know—why and how did that happen?

  Though I feel tired, when I finally get into bed it’s hard for me to fall asleep. I’m nervous about tomorrow, I can’t deny that. I’m going to be dealing with someone who’s been openly antagonistic toward me, and that’s unnerving. Add to that the fact that my sister is right here, maybe twenty miles away, an uncomfortable element that I can’t bring myself to deal with. Finally, David doesn’t want me here at all, and that bothers me. Still, strangely enough it isn’t any one of those real difficulties that is keeping me awake. My overriding emotion isn’t fear or loneliness or dread of tomorrow. It’s quite the opposite. It’s a high pitch of excitement that keeps my mind racing too fast for sleep, the anticipation I feel at plunging into that netherworld again, that place so foreign, so unbelievably different from anything I’ve ever known. And so fascinating.

  The profile I did on Maheely gave me my first hint that such a world even existed. In the beginning I dismissed it as some aberration scraped off the underbelly of humanity, but as I moved in closer I began to see that it had a pattern and a structure to it. All the codes I’d ever considered moral were bent and twisted out of shape until they became virtues for evil. And Maheely used the very nature of those changes to unify his followers and give them the power of defiance. As I studied them at the trial, I intuited that if I hoped to reach any true understanding of them I would have to withhold my own ethical judgments, set my moralities aside for the moment and allow theirs to unfold like life on another planet. And with my own moralities temporarily suspended I experienced an unexpected freedom. It was a new sensation, a new experience, and somehow, as I progress through the book, I know I’ll find some way to exercise it. The key lies with Maheely. I don’t know the man yet, but I’m getting closer. I must move on with the book. If only so many people weren’t trying to spoil it for me.

  But I’m not going to let them.

  Chapter Six

  The prison’s visiting room is small and must be near the kitchen because it’s heavy with that peculiarly institutional wet-rag odor of food steaming for long hours. The smell is so repugnant to me that I feel I’m going to gag unless I can get near some fresh air. Fortunately there’s a window in the corner. It’s open only a crack so I ask the matron if I can open it wider, and she smiles understandingly, though she couldn’t possibly be aware of the smell anymore, and opens it as much as she can. A pleasant breeze wafts in, carrying lightly scented salt air. I fill my lungs and feel revived.

  Choosing the chair closest to the window, I hang my pocketbook over one side and, with pen and pad in hand, sit and wait for Swat.

  The matron has left me. No other visitors have arrived yet. I’m tensed, bracing for Swat’s entrance. Though I know she has to be coming through the door on the other side of the mesh screening, I hear sounds and keep turning to watch the door behind me. I’m uncomfortable. I shouldn’t be. I’m the interviewer, supposedly the one in control. Still, I feel vulnerable, naked in this empty room, alone on alien turf. And yet excited, tingling with anticipation.

  The door behind me opens, and an elderly man, neatly dressed in a frayed brown suit that has reddened in spots with age, comes in. He’s wearing a straw hat. I haven’t seen a straw hat in years, and it makes me smile. He accepts the smile and tips his hat. My involuntary reaction is—what’s a nice man like that doing in a place like this? Falling right into such a cliché makes my smile even broader. Now he offers a pleasant greeting, “How d’ya do?”

  “Very well, thank you,” I say. He comments about the weather and I comment right back, and we might just as well be having this conversation on a park bench on upper Broadway. Certainly more probable than a maximum-security prison on the opposite coast. He even has a New York accent. There’s a momentary comfort in being together with such a nice person in a strange place. The door behind the screen suddenly opens, but it’s not Swat. It has to be Mrs. Straw Hat because she’s too old to be his daughter.

  Of course, she doesn’t look at all like a prisoner. She belongs on the bench on Broadway too, though her crime must be heinous indeed to keep her in this kind of prison.

  I try to give them some privacy, but the room is small and I can’t pretend not to hear. I become very involved in my notebook.

  Her name is Nancy, a name that sounds too cute for a sixty-year-old woman so plain and drab in her dull beige-gray prison uniform and matching hair. His name is Leo, and their talk, small and familial, is about their daughter Margie, her son Elliot who didn’t get into the air force—obviously not too promising a young man—and then lots of admonitions from Nancy about remembering to fill out insurance forms, tax forms, a Medicare bill to be mailed, two or three other small chores none of which Leo has taken care of yet. A testy Nancy snipes at him a bit, and Leo looks at his watch in retaliation. It works as a warning and Nancy gets nicer, but there’s very little to say. Finally, they sit in silence.

  The matron pops her head in the door to announce that Miss Rheinlander—Swat—will be along in a minute.

  Now, unfortunately, all three of us are waiting for Swat. Even though the presence of Nancy and Leo is somewhat inhibiting I feel a little less tense being part of a group.

  A different matron escorts Swat in. She’s wearing the same uniform as Nancy, but Swat’s is probably fresh from the laundry this morning with stiff creases that hold the already too-large dress even further from her body. The short sleeves stick out inches from her bony arms. She’s lost weight in prison, and her normally pale complexion is grayish enough to look slightly dirty. Her hair is shorter than it was at the trial, thin and dull brown, chopped off just below her ears with, to my surprise, bangs. I know she didn’t have them the last time I saw her, yet she seems to care so little about her appearance that I can’t imagine her doing anything even vaguely stylish. Actually they’re an improvement, but I would never dare to tell her.

  She barely looks at me but takes the seat opposite.

  “Hi,” I say, trimming my smile to fit the occasion. “I’m Johanna Morgan.”

  “Go on.”

  Tough lady, but I try once more for some rapport. “Would you prefer I called you Alice?”

  “Swat’s good enough. You know, you only got about twenty minutes.”

  “I thought possibly I could come back for the afternoon visiting.”

  “No way.”

  “I was able to get permission from the warden.”

  “I don’t give a shit about the warden. Finish this morning or forget the whole fucking thing.” She shakes her head, and her hair flips back. Now I see why she cut bangs. They hide a forehead lumpy with acne. A pathetic attempt, but at least a modicum of vanity still exi
sts.

  The friendly approach is pointless so I move directly on to my business. “Whatever you say. How did you first get involved with Avrum Maheely?”

  “Through a friend. I don’t know. I don’t remember anymore.”

  “What were you doing at the time?”

  “Working.”

  She’s purposely being uncooperative, but I expect that; still, I strain to keep my tone pleasant.

  “What kind of job did you have?”

  She takes almost a full moment to study me and then, making it sound more like a challenge than an answer, “I was a nurse.”

  I try to cover my surprise, but I’m not quick enough.

  “Why not?” Again the challenge.

  “No reason.” But there is. She seems so unkind and coarse to minister to the sick. “I just didn’t know. It never came out at the trial, and besides, nursing is such a definite, disciplined profession, and I always think of the people around Avrum as less . . . I don’t know, anchored.”

  “You think we’re all stupid like Imogene?”

  “Is she stupid?”

  “You got to be kidding.”

  “I haven’t spoken to her yet, and she had very little to say at the trial. All I remember about her is that she was extremely beautiful.”

  “A cunt, that’s all.”

  Her vulgarity makes me wince, especially because of Leo and Nancy, but when I sneak a glance at them, they’re listening without expression. Swat enjoys my discomfort so I try to give it back to her. “Was Avrum in love with Imogene?”

  “You mean did he fuck her? Yeah, he fucked her plenty. Is that love?”

  “You tell me.”

  I hit a soft spot. Aggravated, she mutters, “asshole.” She gets very busy studying her chewed-down nails and is, I think, deciding whether to get up and leave. I’m counting on her dislike of me to keep her here. I think she has more to say than she put in the letter, and this is her opportunity. I’m right. She decides to hang in.