The White Rose

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

There is general amusement at this idea.

  “Jus’ push,” the woman adds. “Go on.”

  Marian gives a tentative push. The door emits a meager click and swings open. Feeling it give beneath such a pathetic effort irritates her, but the lack of security in the building is not today’s problem, she tells herself. Today’s problem is enough for today.

  The smell of bacon pervades the third-floor hallway, although there is no telling which of the dozen doors it originates behind. Number 26, near the end of the corridor, is gunmetal gray like the rest but bears an index card with a florid purple NELSON, taped above the security peephole. Marian presses the bell. From inside, she hears the unmistakable sounds of The Price Is Right.

  A woman, small with a great ring of flesh around her middle, opens the door. She grins. “Come on!” she says, gesturing. “I’m Marisol. Soriah’s waiting.”

  Soriah is indeed waiting, Marian sees, stepping inside. She is seated on the couch, half watching the television. Over her several meetings with the eleven-year-old, Marian has been struck by certain jarring dichotomies in the girl’s character. Soriah possesses a truly nimble mind—capable of admirable concentration and elegant leaps of insight—but her deficiencies are significant. She has been completely untouched by music written before the year 1990, has never been to a museum, and does not understand why someone would want to sit in a dark theater watching other people move around and talk. She also suffers a lack of manners so appalling that only her innate sweetness redeems her.

  “Soriah,” Marisol says eagerly. “Your friend is here.”

  Soriah gets up and comes over to Marian. Awkwardly, they shake hands. She is, Marian notes, wearing one of her new bras.

  “Is this your grandmother?” Marian says, indicating Marisol.

  “Oh, no, no,” the little woman laughs. “I’m the home health. Gloria!”

  “Granma?” Soriah says at the same time.

  “She probably in the bathroom,” Marisol says, unconcerned. “She be out. This is nice, you know. Taking her.”

  “Oh, it’s no problem,” Marian says.

  The apartment is small and clean, with a kitchen alcove off the room in which they stand and presumably a bedroom on the other side of the closed door. Oxygen tanks flank the couch like matching lamps, connected by plastic tubing, but there is otherwise little evidence of a chronically ill person living here. Neither has Soriah, who uses the couch as her bed, Marian knows, made much of an impact on the décor; the only things signifying her presence that Marian can see are the library copy of Emma on the armrest and the short stack of textbooks and notebooks on the floor beside the television. On top of the television, a photo in a plastic frame shows a grinning Soriah, but when Marian looks closer, the faded colors of the picture give its true subject away: Soriah’s mother, seventies Afro and checked dress, à la Cindy Brady. The resemblance is strong, the grin identical. I don’t suppose she’s grinning now, Marian thinks.

  The bedroom door opens, and Marisol ambles to the side of an elderly woman, who makes her way across the floor with a metal walker, her head down. Only when she has reached the couch and painfully descended does the woman look up and put out a hand.

  “Hello,” Marian says. “You must be Soriah’s grandmother. I’m Marian Kahn.”

  “Thank you for taking her,” the woman says simply. “It’s very nice.”

  “Oh, I didn’t have any plans,” Marian says. This is not strictly true. When Soriah phoned her to say that her caseworker had cancelled their appointment, Marian had cancelled her own appointment, with Oliver. Marshall is in England (sweetening his two-day string of meetings in Birmingham with a weekend of London theater), and Marian had meant to compensate Oliver, at last, for their lost weekend. Even so, she did not hesitate to tell Soriah she was available. Not, Marian tells herself, because she is looking for a way out of her entanglement with Oliver, and certainly not because she views the day’s expedition with anything but dread, but perhaps simply because the service she is now being asked to perform seems so much more straightforward than any of the other tasks currently facing her. Pick up a kid, take her somewhere, take her home…Isn’t that blissfully uncomplicated? she thinks, considering the complex nature of her other commitments. Still, she had caused Oliver pain, and lied to him about why she was doing it, which had caused herself pain. All for a girl who still has one eye on The Price Is Right.

  “Marisol,” Mrs. Nelson says, pointing a bony finger. “You got the cookies? For Denise?”

  “I got them,” Marisol says. She retrieves, from the kitchen, a packet of Pepperidge Farm Mint Milanos.

  “For Denise,” says Soriah’s grandmother. “It’s her favorite cookies.”

  “All right,” Marian says. “Soriah can take them in, right?”

  “She’s allowed. And Soriah, you mind your manners.”

  “Okay,” says Soriah.

  “You’re very nice to do it,” says Marisol, settling herself beside her charge on the couch and picking up a remote control. Marian gets the feeling that she is observing these two in their natural habitat. Marisol lifts the plastic tubing from one of the oxygen tanks and adjusts it beneath Mrs. Nelson’s nose.

  “I’m not sure what time we’ll be back,” says Marian.

  “It’s okay,” the home health comments. “It’s fine. You take your time.”

  “But—” They haven’t asked her for her number, she thinks. They may not even know her name, really. Don’t they want to take down her license plate, or her phone number? Aren’t they concerned?

  “It’s okay,” says Soriah, putting on her coat. She is used to being removed by strangers, it occurs to Marian. And the two women on the couch are used to witnessing it.

  Marian says good-bye and goes downstairs with Soriah, emerging from the building’s front door into the bright midday light. Two men are leaning against the front fender of the Volvo, but they shift without complaint when Marian unlocks her door. Soriah gets in the passenger seat.

  “It’s a nice car,” she says.

  “It’s fine,” Marian says. “I’m not that interested in cars, really. Fasten your seatbelt, Soriah.”

  “But you could have a really cool car if you want, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Marian says, making her way down Hughes Avenue toward, she hopes, Route 87. “I guess so. What’s a cool car?”

  “Lexus,” says Soriah. “Mercedes. Jaguar.”

  “Oh, I don’t need a Jaguar. And I don’t like Mercedeses. They used slave labor in the concentration camps. You know, during World War Two?”

  Soriah frowns. “Yeah, but, that was like fifty years ago.”

  “Sure,” says Marian, spotting a sign for the highway and merging left, “but if you have a choice of lots of different companies to buy a car from, why would you pick the one that participated in the enslavement of your own ethnic group?”

  Marian can see Soriah turn to look at her. “Are you Jewish?” she says.

  “Yes, I’m Jewish. My family was already here when the Nazis came to power.”

  “Do you, like, wear that little hat?” says Soriah.

  It takes Marian a minute to decipher the meaning of this. “A yarmulke? No. Only men wear those. And besides, I’m not religious at all. I don’t even really believe in God, but that doesn’t make me any less Jewish.”

  Soriah shakes her head. “I don’t get that.”

  “Well, look at it this way. I’m Jewish the same way you’re black. Sorry, would you rather I said African-American?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Whatever.”

  “Anything anyone’s done to the Jews over the years, I kind of take personally. Like they did it to my great-great-great-great-grandmother. Which they probably did. Maybe it’s the same way you feel about slavery. I mean, there may not be anyone alive in America today who owned a slave, but I can assure you, there are people walking around this country spending money that was earned by enslaving people. I think if I were an African-Am
erican, there might be a couple of products I wouldn’t buy, on principle.”

  Soriah sighs. “That was so long ago.”

  “Not to a historian,” Marian says. “To people like me, everything just happened, and we’re all living in the aftermath.” She accelerates onto 87, and moves into the center lane. “Besides, look at the two of us. We wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation if not for a slave trader.”

  Soriah turns in her seat to look at her.

  “Well, think about it. You wrote to me because of a book I’d written. I wrote the book because of a person who lived a long time ago who had an interesting life. She had an interesting life because a very rich man in England paid for her to sail from America to Britain. And how do you think that rich man got to be so rich? Because he kidnapped Africans, transported them to America, and sold them into slavery.”

  “Okay,” Soriah says with the beginning of a smile. “I get that. Well, that’s something good that came from slavery, then.”

  Marian, touched, keeps her eyes on the road.

  “Does your mom know you’re coming?” Marian says.

  “I guess so. The caseworker fixes it. She usually brings me, but she said one of her kids was sick or something.” Soriah is quiet for a minute. “I probably shouldn’t have called you. It’s just…I didn’t see my mom since August, and I thought, maybe, if you weren’t busy, it would be okay.”

  “It is okay, Soriah. I told you last time, if you need something, ask me. I might not always be able to help out, but you never have to worry about calling.”

  “All right,” the girl says with palpable embarrassment.

  Marian drives. The route is happily clear and the river glints on her left. At Yonkers, she exits onto the Hutchinson Parkway and continues north on 684. She is surprised to realize how close it is, how many times she must have driven within a few miles of the prison, en route to Tanglewood or Canyon Ranch or—in the years before their rift—to visit Marshall’s business partner, Robert Markowitz, in North Salem. The incongruity of Bedford Hills the correctional facility and Bedford Hills the sylvan, moneyed enclave is not lost on Marian as she exits the highway, passing first through the trim, prosperous town of Katonah and then skirting a synthetically bucolic golf course flanked by gargantuan new homes. Beside her, Soriah silently points out the prison entrance on Harris Road.

  Marian parks in the visitors’ area and locks her car, then she follows Soriah to a small, cement-block hut at the front gate. Inside, Marian produces a driver’s license and Soriah, to Marian’s surprise, withdraws a laminated card from her jeans pocket and hands it over.

  “What’s that?” Marian asks.

  “My caseworker gave it to me. For when I come here.”

  The guard tells them both to remove their coats. He takes from Marian her heavy leather bag and meticulously unloads it onto his desk: wallet, reading glasses, bottle of Evian, and a great wad of files. As he moves through these objects, touching everything, he recites a prison catechism:

  Who are you here to see?

  We are here to see Denise Neal.

  What is your relationship to Denise Neal?

  This is her daughter. I’m not visiting. I’ve just brought her.

  Are you carrying any of the following materials. Alcohol, prescription drugs, cell phones, beepers, weapons, or anything that might possibly be used as a weapon?

  “Well, I have a cell phone,” says Marian, pointing to the smart red leather case on the table, a gift from Marshall. The phone is taken and put on a shelf, as are the Pepperidge Farm cookies, which are not, after all, allowed.

  Have you answered each and every one of these questions truthfully, and are you aware that failure to answer truthfully may result in criminal prosecution?

  Marian has always been cowed by authority. “Yes, we have,” she says, looking down at Soriah, but Soriah is impassive. Then both of them are scanned with a handheld sensor—a vaguely lewd and humiliating experience—and given stamps of invisible ink on the backs of their hands, as if they were entering a fun fair, or a party. After this, they are allowed to put their coats on again.

  Just past the first guard, a second man, seated inside a glassed-in booth, opens the gate for them and they go through it to a small holding area where their new stamps are illuminated beneath a black light. Behind them, the gate closes, and for a moment they are trapped there, between locked doors, before a second gate is opened, and they are outside again. Marian, though she realizes that she is now actually within the prison, emerges from the small enclosure with relief. Soriah begins to walk up a long hill by a pathway bordered by dormant flower beds toward a building marked ADMINISTRATION, and Marian follows, hoisting her great bag. Inside the new building, they each sign a large logbook and have the stamps on their hands illuminated again. A guard, behind his glass partition, makes a phone call, and Marian understands that Soriah’s mother is being summoned. He pushes a button under his desk and the gate before them slides open. Soriah leads the way through, then turns left past some vending machines to a bright waiting area, lit by windows all along one wall. At the far end of the room is a yellow door, marked with a NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE sign. Soriah stands looking placidly at this door, which—Marian supposes—marks the way to where her mother is waiting. Almost immediately, it opens, and a woman in a gray guard uniform calls Soriah’s name. Soriah goes without a backward glance.

  Marian sits in one of the chairs and lets her bag fall to the floor. From parking lot to waiting room the transit has taken no more than fifteen minutes, but the effect is wearying, as is the realization that she is—for the first time in her life—inside a prison. The room is clean, and the view of the lawn through the wall of windows is pleasant, but nothing alleviates the sadness lingering here. Stacks of withered magazines teeter on one table in the corner, and Marian, by force of habit, gets up and goes to look. Family Fun, says the issue on the top of the pile. She returns to her seat.

  Being caught without work is a circumstance Marian tries to avoid, a precaution responsible for the current weight of her leather bag. Today’s burden is comprised of applications for two tenure track openings in her department. Given the glut of newly minted PhDs on the market, Columbia’s ad in the American Historical Review has netted more than eight hundred CVs, the majority of them belonging to qualified applicants. Whittling down these applicants to a shortlist of serious contenders (each of whom will have to be interviewed at the AHA) is a task that will surely consume an unreasonable, painful proportion of her time over the next month, and of course she begrudges it. They’re all fine, Marian thinks, flipping past a specialist in medieval fortification design, a postcolonialist with an interest in the Belgian Congo, an Americanist with a major work on the French and Indian Wars due out from Yale. It would be one thing if the department had an actual hole to fill, she thinks, shaking her head, and noting the fourth Marshall Scholar out of just the first ten CVs she has managed to get through. But the vacancies only exist because two new chairs have been endowed, creating openings at the other end of the tenure track. The hiring committee has the luxury of choosing whoever wows them most, which Marian knows is an enviable position to be in, but the wall of achievement and aspiration and urgency lurking behind the circumspect language of the cover letters (Isn’t the New York native desperate to return from exile in Texas? Isn’t the associate professor at Stanford married to a woman who teaches at NYU?) is already overwhelming. And she’s still at the top of the pile.

  Marian looks up. Across the room, seated before one of the windows, a woman with unnaturally red hair is hard at work on her own stack of papers. On a chair beside her, a little girl sits, looking directly at Marian. The girl’s hands are politely clasped together, and her hair is tightly braided in cornrows. She looks about four, Marian thinks. Maybe five. She is dressed in good clothes: pretty green dress, pink tights, white sneakers. She has gold studs in her ears. The woman beside her is writing on a pad. The girl’s face is perfectly
expressionless, even when Marian attempts a smile. The woman beside her does not look up.

  “Sheree?” someone says.

  Marian turns to see the same corrections officer who took Soriah.

  “Come on, honey. Your mama’s waiting to see you.”

  The red-haired woman stops writing.

  “Go on, Sheree,” she says, not unkindly. “I’ll wait here for you.”

  Sheree hops off the chair. She looks at Marian. Marian tries another smile, but she does not feel remotely like smiling, and the resulting grimace must not be very reassuring. The girl walks slowly to the door and disappears through it. The woman in the next chair has already gone back to her work.

  “Uh, Marian?”

  It’s Soriah’s voice. Marian turns in her seat.

  “That was quick,” she says, trying for a light tone.

  “No, it’s just—my mom was wondering if you’d come back and talk to her.”

  Marian goes still. The unexpectedness of this request has caught her completely by surprise, and she wants very badly to say no. But of course she can’t say no. Soriah stands in the doorway, waiting, the gray uniform of the corrections officer just visible behind her. How close to this can I come? Marian thinks. To walk through this scuffed yellow door is to abandon all hope of detachment.

  Marian gets to her feet.

  Beyond the yellow door is a yellow corridor lined with library posters. Soriah leads her to a large open room, lined on one side with bookshelves and filled with low plastic tables. There are women in the room, and children running everywhere, crawling everywhere, being held. The place looks like a day care center, Marian thinks, looking around and trying to get her bearings. She has, she realizes, been expecting the kind of bleak setting she has seen in films and on television, where inmate and visitor face each other through glass and speak via telephone. There is no glass here, except for the windows, which admit white winter light. It is very nearly pleasant.

  “So many kids!” she says wonderingly to the slim black woman standing a few feet to her right. Soriah has crossed to a far corner of the room and begun reading a picture book to three small girls, one of whom—Marian is glad to note—is the child from the waiting room, Sheree.