Who Named the Knife

by Linda Spalding

  “Are you known by any other names?” the sheriff asked him.

  “He had a thing about my dad,” Maryann says. “He used to call him all the time from jail. Collect, you know. And when my mom answered, she’d just hang up. But Dad would take the call.”

  “My father used to say he would never bail me out.”

  “Were you ever mad at him?”

  “I never got as far as that. Just scared. But I was mad at my mother once.”

  “My dad took those calls out of love,” says Maryann proudly, and we move from that to the love so evident all around us … the sight of these relatives and friends, of these church mentors and penpals and strangers going through the loops, taking the time: the husband who comes week after week, year after year. The mother. The teenager in a black hooded sweatshirt, pulling the hood up around his face and then letting it down. Even the evident affection between Maryann and Anika, between Maryann and Pat. Her tone when she mentions Valere … “We went to dinner last night because they were serving something edible.” And the story of Valere eating all the fudge Maryann had made in the immersion pot. Don’t you want your cocoa and chocolate pudding too?

  “What was it with your mother?” Maryann asks now.

  “She told me to give up a certain boy.”

  Maryann is quiet. Then she laughs.

  “Lucky you.”

  41

  Now, when it is too late, I remember Maryann telling me her two regrets. The first one was William. The other one was not being with her parents when they were dying. Next to my desk there are two photographs of my mother. One, taken in her early thirties, is the face I gazed at from my crib or from my highchair or even from her lap, although I don’t remember her holding me. This photograph is an enlargement that Michael and Kristin made for the funeral. They also enlarged the other one, taken at her ninetieth birthday lunch, where she is holding up an icy glass of vodka and looking bemused by all of us. We had gathered to celebrate a birthday she could not accept. We had bullied her out of her bed and up onto her feet. We had dressed her in creamy silk and put a corsage on her breast. We had come from hither and yon, from the now and the past, and we had made a party for her with all the love that she had given us. Sometimes I look at the second picture and sometimes at the first. They are both my mother. Since her death, I seem to have fallen in love with her along with my brand-new granddaughter, as if I am a link between what is gone and what is to come. How not to think of the boy who unzipped his pants at the beach? Or the woman in prison. Unwanted babies and babies who represent life.

  By the time we got to Topeka, my mother was lying on a steel table in the storage room of a funeral home. She was cold, having been in a freezer. I had told them not to touch her. I did not want her embalmed.

  Kristin and I went in with a paper bag. Is all grief more or less the same? Ask Mr. and Mrs. Hasker, who did not have the satisfaction of a finished life. Ask Maryann, who lives on both ends of it. The bag held a silk dress, a pair of stockings, earrings, and the Fabergé egg she liked to wear on a chain.

  Someone closed the door behind us.

  Mother was naked, covered with a sheet. Her hair had been washed a few days before, but had lost its set. Falling back from her face as she lay on that table, it was longer than usual, and her beautiful nose was more hooked, the nostrils open and dark. Her mouth was drawn back. Here was flesh pared down as if carved by a careful knife. Mother used to say, “I don’t know who will see me dead. I worry about this.” But as Kristin and I combed her hair and washed her face and thought about what underwear she would want – all of it? – but that was so much, too much – we both cried as we talked to her. A ruby red slip. Panties. Stockings: the old-fashioned kind in two separate pieces. (We had found a pair ready, in her bureau. Who put them there? She always wore the other kind.) A touch of lipstick. Her silver earrings. So that here is my mother stretched out in her purple dress and when I am alone with her I can climb on the table and bury my face in her breast as I never could do in her air-breathing life. I can open her lips to pour her last pleasure of vodka between them. I can open her eyes and rub my tears into them, flakes of anger washed away.

  I know she will do as she has always done: wait for my father, who is late, for my brother, who is gone, for her comforts, which are private, and her long death, which is begun.

  Because of the funeral, I was late getting to Vancouver but I arrived a few hours before the twins were born. Two months early. The littlest one did not survive.

  As a family, we are shaken to the bones. Have known death and birth and death. Have grieved and rejoiced and grieved.

  Sometimes now, I lie half-awake for fifteen or twenty minutes in the morning, having dreamed that I am not in a coffin but in prison. Worrying up the details. That watching of clocks. On the one hand, time stretches out like those railroad tracks in pictures that describe infinity. But the other clock, the one that lives in our bodies, ticks faster and faster. I am going to die and never get out. I imagine that as an old woman I’ll take to my bed and live like this, in the half-light, exactly as my mother did at the end. “There may come a day,” she would say, “when I just refuse to get up. Like the old aunt did in Proust.”

  Only when a nurse forced her into the shower and down to the hairdresser did she decide she had really had enough.

  Of course I am grateful to this nurse, as I am grateful to every single one of the good people who took care of my mother over the last two years of her life. Would that I had done it all! I felt so heroic, so necessary when I flew into Kansas City, rented a car, drove to Topeka, and stumbled into my mother’s apartment – the place I had foisted on her. Usually, I found her in bed. Usually it was time for lunch. “You’re not dressed!” I’d bark at her, before we had managed our usual furtive kiss.

  “Oh well, I thought you’d have eaten. I didn’t know what time you’d be here.”

  “But you! It’s lunchtime for you. I could smell the food downstairs when I came in.”

  “Oh well. I’ve had something.”

  “Such as what?” I actually liked the food downstairs. For some idiotic reason, eating in this dining room always cheered me up. It made me feel young, vital, and compassionate. I took an interest in each old face, each trembling conversation. I leaned into the space between the tables the better to eavesdrop. There were moments when I wanted to embrace every resident. I loved the staff. Once, when Kristin and I were visiting together, we asked for a meeting with them to discuss Mother’s lethargy. Mother came to the meeting with us. We said we were becoming really worried. She had given up on the exercise class in the morning and there was the new tendency not to eat. They had turned off her stove after she sent billows of smoke down the hall. That was awful, like having to give up her car. She had a toaster oven, but she kept trying to make toast on the heating pad of the coffee pot. She cooked her eggs in the water as it slowly heated up. What should we do?

  The director told Mother that she should come to the exercise class. “Oh my,” said Mother coyly. “I had no idea. Why of course I’ll come. What time is it, did you say?” She had always complained about the early hour of this class, but now she smiled and said, “Fine. Fine,” and I knew that she was really done. She had defended my father, dead now for thirty years. She had been stylish and witty and charming and smart. She had kept her chin up when my brother’s death had mangled her heart. She had learned to speak Spanish; she liked to conjugate. She had made elegant meals. She had knit and embroidered and sewn and created exquisite decoupaged boxes and eggs. She had entertained the Ballet Russe and made light of my obvious failings. She had taken care of me, of my cats and dogs and fish. With her bare hands. Even when they were arthritic. She had said, When you feel envy and wish you were someone else, remember that you have to take the whole life.

  My mother was my age when she became a widow. Then she survived for another thirty-three years. And thirty-three is a good number. In that time she learned to manage her own smal
l pension and the few stocks left to her. She sold the big house and moved into a tiny one two blocks away and seemed not to look back, although she dreamed, she said, only of the larger house, the place she had created in her prime. Because she lived those thirty-three years so very well, I have my map to a good old age. Yes, I see it coming and it cannot frighten me. I feel her legs in my legs, her back in my back. I go to the kitchen to make coffee and remember that she always readied hers before she went to bed. Soon I will do the same. We do not practise age. It is performed for us. We see the lines and movements in our elders. In our retrieval of those things, we capture the people we have loved. Contain them once they are lost.

  42

  Maybe I liked flying down to Corona, jumping in a rented car, and arriving at the prison with my good cheer and health intact the way I liked flying down to my mother when she was still within reach. Maybe I liked knowing that neither Mother nor Maryann could get up and follow me. I was in charge.

  When Maryann describes her life, she talks about the jobs she’s held and her two-year college degree. Her accomplishments feel as real to her as mine do to me. She sent me a basket she’d made out of pine needles, although acquiring the materials takes weeks. She reads books on tape for blind students. She belongs to organizations that manage to do things for people outside. So, when she learned that her sister had cancer, she was stunned, then hurt, then angry; she felt cut off and betrayed. Penne had known for three years. She’d been through three surgeries, chemotherapy, and the usual dose of fear, but Maryann had never been told. “It was along the lines of finding out I had a great-nephew when he was three years old,” Maryann wrote to me. “It’s like I don’t count as close-enough family to share these little tidbits with.” When the anger passed, she thought about Penne being the last of her family. She had not let Maryann call her for several years, saying it ran up her phone bill, but she had been out there – someone in the world who knew Maryann from the very beginning. “I wonder if I’ll make it out of here in time to see her and spend some time with her. Even though we haven’t been the closest of sisters, I don’t like the thought of losing my whole family while I’m in here!”

  It was impossible to write back to her dying sister. At the time of their parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, Maryann had asked her father on the phone if anyone was going to throw a party. He had sounded rueful. “No one to do that but Penne,” he’d said. “And you and I know that’s doubtful.” Maryann had contacted Penne and suggested that they do something to mark the event. “I can’t do much in here,” she had written, “but I saw a cross-stitch sampler I’d like to do and maybe you could help.” At that point Penne had rallied. And in 1992, when she read about William’s confession in California Legal Magazine, it was Penne who contacted Deborah Fraser about the confession and then helped Fraser worry up legal and historical details. This was something; this was almost good. But when Gladys got sick, Penne abandoned Maryann. “She said there was a bank account with my name on it and that she was in charge of it. I guess she’d always been jealous of me in a lot of ways,” Maryann says. “My logical mind says she didn’t tell me about her cancer because she didn’t want me to worry.… But another part wants to let her know how I felt like she still doesn’t accept me as her sister and that I just really don’t matter to her.”

  “But she sent your father’s letter.”

  “Long after the fact and reluctantly. And the will. I’ve never seen it. I don’t know what’s in the bank account. Maybe nothing. She won’t tell me.”

  I told her about my mother’s brown suitcase. How she had been proud of it – stylish and round with a long, looped strap. I said she had used it, over the last years of her life, to store a collection of letters my father had written to her during the war. Once, I had asked if I could read them. He was my father. I had no similar pile of letters from him, not even one letter to keep in a private drawer. My mother had made a sound. They were sent to her, she’d told me flatly. Her alone. What’s more, she’d taken scissors to them so I would never read certain words.

  Scissors.

  I promised myself that I would read what was left of those wartime letters the minute my mother died. When she moved to the shiny new apartment, I shoved the round suitcase under her bed and tapped it with a hand or a foot whenever I came to see her. On each visit, I slid it an inch or two farther under the bed so she would not notice it. The day would come, I told myself, when it would not matter if I opened the suitcase and read those letters. But when I had her belongings sent up to Toronto after her death, there was no brown suitcase among the boxes. I’ve been through the papers, the books, the photographs. I’ve wanted to learn how he spoke to her, how he thought about things, how he expressed himself when he was different.

  There must have been such a time.

  But she kept his secrets, even as she lay dying.

  A few weeks later, when Maryann called to tell me Penne was dead, I couldn’t believe it. Then I realized Penne had never been real. Not to me. After all our letters and conversations, I still didn’t believe that Maryann had a life or a story beyond the walls of the prison. Oh dear God, I said, and I meant it, because Maryann would never have a chance to make things right with Penne now. This sister who refused her phone calls. This sister who sent her a form letter explaining her terminal disease. This sister who had better things to do than visit an inmate. “Will you send flowers for me?” the inmate asked. “There’s no way to do it from in here.”

  43

  Of course summer, as usual, followed that wild spring. We went back up to the cottage as we have always done. When I got phone calls from Maryann, I didn’t remind her that our correspondence had been going on for three years, that this was a kind of anniversary, that three years before, her attorney was about to reopen her case. He had filed a writ. Delays and more delays. Postponements. I didn’t tell her that I should have gone to Topeka instead of Corona, that I will regret that decision for the rest of my life.

  She told me she’d dreamed that she called home to talk to her father and Governor Davis answered the phone. Maryann asked him why he wouldn’t let anyone out of prison when so many women deserved to be released. And how could he visit her father and yet deny him the chance to spend his last years with her?

  I told her I’d called Larry Hasker’s father. “I said I might want to write about the murder and about your case and would he tell me about Larry. I wanted to know about his childhood, about his personality, about his hopes and dreams because it seems wrong to leave him out of your story.”

  For a few seconds, Maryann didn’t say anything. Then she said, “What happened?”

  “With Mr. Hasker? Well, he didn’t want to talk to me about Larry if I was writing a book about you.” Then I said I had tried to find Kimberly, Larry’s sister. In the courtroom she was just a girl, a sister, someone who had been called to testify. But later, in my mind, she became a person with unbearable grief. That was after I knew what it was to lose a brother, although it was a grief I could never describe. A brother is a piece of your flesh. Arm. Leg. The very same consciousness. A brother is your image in the mirror and his death is your suicide.

  I said, “Kimberly seems to have disappeared.”

  Maryann said she was hot and I told her that I was about to jump in the river. Why protect her from the truth of my life? My hands were dirty. I’d been planting a star-gazer lily in a place where it will stand out and be noticed. I told her I had visions of a more civilized landscape – a bush here, a clump of flowers there. I had a brand-new granddaughter to think about. Since her birth and my mother’s death, I could see my life played out on this landscape. But what does a person do without such a set of rocks and trees, board and roof? I was still reading through the pages Maryann had sent – bits and pieces of old testimony. They included the actual plea agreement William had signed with Charles Marsland. And Jan Futa’s name was there as well. Another set of papers in the box involved jailhouse informants. In 1
988, the L.A. district attorney announced that no more jailhouse informants were to be used as witnesses. But William was gone by then, of course, practising his trade in other states.

  When I drove off to our little town with its one clothing store, one drugstore, one grocery store, it was because Maryann had asked me to send her a quarterly box. Sheron was sick and there was no one else, so I told Maryann it would be a pleasure to send the thirty pounds of candy and nuts and dried tuna and tea and coffee she was allowed to receive, although the denim shorts she needed were required to have an eleven-inch inseam and they might be hard to find.

  In California, there was about to be a recall of Governor Davis. This was not because he had never, in all his years in office, paroled a prisoner with a life sentence. Instead, he was accused of abusing state funds. In Texas, the democrats had gone into hiding in order to prevent a vote that would redistribute legislative districts and thereby give Republicans a decisive majority in Congress. In Hawaii, there was going to be a conference call with Maryann’s lawyer. Would Jan Futa have done what she was supposed to have done?

  At the prison, the warden had invited a few people from a program called Canine Service Training in for a tour. Not only did they come, inspecting cells, yards, and prisoners, they also brought four dogs along with them. The dogs were trained to help people with disabilities. Some of the trainers were nuns. The morning of the tour, Maryann had gone to work and someone mentioned the visiting dogs. Maryann looked at her boss, who said, “Oh, go on!” and she found the dogs in front of her housing unit along with their trainers, the warden, several administrators, and a number of lifers, who hadn’t been close to a dog in twenty or thirty years. The nuns were allowing them to pet the dogs and some of the women were crying. All of this had an impact on the warden, who decided that CIW should participate in the program.