Part 22 (1/2)

Is it?

Willie and Eddie are shackled together, loaded onto a train. September 1923. Neither speaks as the train rumbles up the Hudson. Each stares out the window at the russet and gold hills, the trees wavering in the mirror of the river. The way the gold leaves sparkle in the blue water-Willie thinks of Bess. He wonders if he'll ever see her again. It doesn't look promising.

He wonders if she read about the trial. It was in all the papers, partly because he and Eddie were able to afford a top lawyer. But Clarence Darrow couldn't have gotten them off. The Pinkertons had them dead to rights. Brought in quietly by First National, the Pinks had no trouble tracing the oxygen tanks. Though Willie and Eddie used aliases when they made the purchase, the Pinks showed the salesman a book of mug shots-local boys convicted of breaking and entering. The salesman fingered Willie, the Pinks staked out Willie's apartment, tailed him to Yankee Stadium. After the arrests they searched Willie's apartment. Then Eddie's. In a wastebasket at Eddie's they found the receipt for the tanks. Open, shut.

Willie and Eddie didn't steal any money, but they broke into a bank and their intent was clear. A botched bank robbery is still a bank robbery, the judge said. Five to ten years. Sing Sing.

During the forty-mile ride Eddie stares at the river and speaks only once: Bet they got a lot of Dagos in Sing Sing.

He and Willie had both hoped for one small silver lining. A reunion with Happy. But their lawyer checked and found that Happy was released from Sing Sing six months ago. No one's heard from him since.

A truck takes Willie and Eddie from the train station through the front gate of Sing Sing. When Willie sees those soaring walls, those black-uniformed guards holding black batons and black Thompson submachine guns, his mouth goes dry. This isn't Raymond Street. This is real live hard-a.s.s prison. He might not be able to take it.

Just as the gate swings open, the prison begins a routine test of Big Ben, the deafening siren that sounds whenever there's an escape attempt or riot. Big Ben can be heard for miles, up and down the river, alerting people in nearby villages to stay indoors, savage convicts are on the loose. Within the prison walls it makes men clap their hands over their ears, pray for silence. As Big Ben cleaves the air, as guards strip-search Willie and Eddie, and shave their heads, and spread their a.s.s cheeks, Willie turns. Eddie, bent over a chair, meets his gaze for one long moment-and winks.

One wink. The slow closing of one eye. Years later it will seem impossible to Willie that it could have made such a difference. But in those first days at Sing Sing, those pivotal moments when every man adjusts to his new reality or loses his mind, Willie lies in his seven-by-three cell, beside the bucket filled with disinfectant that serves as his toilet and washbasin, and listens to the thousand men above and below, cursing and crying and pleading with G.o.d, and he remembers Eddie's wink, and the quiet center of his mind holds.

After one week Willie and Eddie are brought to meet the warden, though they already know what he looks like. Warden Lawes is a celebrity, every bit as famous as Harding or Ruth. With his oddly perfect name, his raptor eyes, he's become a symbol of law and order, especially to Americans alarmed by the exploding prison population. He's written acclaimed magazine pieces and a smash bestseller about his quest to reform Sing Sing. A movie is said to be in the works.

To the outside world Lawes is a saint. Having done away with some of Sing Sing's older, harsher punishments, he's now sprucing up the library, organizing a prison baseball league. Inside, however, old-timers warn Willie and Eddie that Lawes is insane. Simply to demonstrate his manliness, his fearlessness, he lets a lifer with a straight razor shave him every morning. He's also recently declared a ban on masturbation. He thinks it leads to insanity, blindness. Prisoners caught in the act are thrown into solitary. The irony is lost on Lawes.

Standing before Lawes's desk, Willie and Eddie play stupid. They pretend to know nothing about him. They answer no sir, yes sir, and Lawes is fooled, flattered, or else just playing along. He gives them each a plum job. Eddie is a.s.signed to the dining hall, where he'll be able to get extra chow. Willie is designated to help Charles Chapin, Sing Sing's most celebrated inmate. Chapin might be more famous than Lawes.

Not long ago Chapin was America's finest newspaperman. As editor of Pulitzer's Evening World he made his reputation by having no heart and few scruples. He reveled in human misery, took glee in exploiting the victims of sensational crimes and tragedies, and in crus.h.i.+ng his compet.i.tion on all the big stories of the age. He even somehow had a man onboard the Carpathia, which pulled survivors of the t.i.tanic from the North Atlantic. While the Carpathia steamed back to New York, Chapin's man conducted the first-ever interviews with those survivors. And when the Carpathia's tight-a.s.sed captain wouldn't let Chapin's man wire his notes to sh.o.r.e, Chapin rented a tug and met the Carpathia as it entered New York Harbor. Maneuvering the tug alongside the s.h.i.+p, Chapin shouted to his man to toss his notes overboard, then caught them just before they hit the water. Chapin got an extra on the streets before the survivors were disembarked and fully dried off.

Chapin had the brains, the nerve, the drive to become another Mencken. His brilliant career, however, came to an abrupt end in 1918. About the time Willie was courting Bess, Chapin was killing his wife. One shot to the head while she slept. Chapin told cops that he was secretly bankrupt and didn't want his wife to suffer the scandal and indignity of poverty. He considered the murder an act of mercy. The judge did not. He gave Chapin life.

Lawes, however, makes life soft for Chapin. He gives the old newsman free run of the prison, lets him do what he pleases, go where he likes, so long as Chapin ghosts Lawes's magazine pieces and memoirs. Recently Lawes even granted Chapin permission to turn Sing Sing's south yard into an English rose garden. Now he's making Willie the a.s.sistant gardener.

The first time Willie visits Chapin's cell, in the old death house, he sees that it's not one cell but two, the wall between them knocked out. It's also lavishly appointed-bookshelves, leather chairs, a rolltop desk. Suites at the Waldorf aren't half so nice. Willie raps lightly on the barred door, which stands open. Chapin, an elegant, bespectacled man in his mid-sixties, wearing gray flannel slacks and a tan cardigan, is entertaining visitors. They're all actors, including one in a natty Panama coat who played in a film Willie quite disliked. Danny Donovan, the Gentleman Cracksman-it was the story of a safecracker with style. The details, the nitty-gritty were all wrong. Willie is about to introduce himself, set the actor straight, when Chapin cuts him short.

You're Sutton.

Yes sir.

I'm frightfully busy at the moment. Come back at four.

As if Willie is dropping by Chapin's stateroom. To see about a game of shuffleboard. Willie wants to tell Chapin to kiss his Irish a.s.s, but he holds his tongue. Chapin is the warden's pet, it won't do to cross him.

In the weeks that follow, Chapin high-hats Willie time and again, and Willie merely smiles, takes it. A small price to pay, he thinks, for peace with Lawes, and the privilege of working outdoors.

Then, gradually, Willie finds his dislike of Chapin ripening into a perverse fascination. Kneeling beside Chapin, planting tumbleweeds that Chapin claims are rosebushes, Willie steals frequent sidelong looks at that famous face. He studies Chapin's wide brow and alert gray eyes, marvels at Chapin's immaculate grooming. Most prisoners don't bother combing their hair, but Chapin never leaves his cell without his gray locks sliced precisely down the middle and wetted with fragrant oil. Just as he refuses to look the part of a prisoner, Chapin also never speaks like one. His voice is commanding, musical, a deep ba.s.so. It puts Willie in mind of this new invention everyone's so excited about-the radio. Except that Chapin is better than the radio, because he's less staticky. Sometimes Willie asks Chapin a mundane question to which he already knows the answer, just to hear him vocalize. He especially enjoys the way Chapin intones the names of different roses.

What did you say these bushes are going to be sir?

Those, Chapin says, will be General Jacqueminots.

Is that so sir? And these?

Lovely Frau Karl Druschkis. Some Madame b.u.t.terfly as well.

And here sir?

Ah. Yes. Dorothy Perkins.

You have a very fine voice, Mr. Chapin.

Thank you, Sutton. Before becoming a journalist I was an actor. Pretty fair one too. I played Romeo. I played Lear. That's why Warden Lawes permits us to stage a few plays each year.

Oh?

If you're interested, we need a new Regan. The governor pardoned our last one.

Uh-huh.

Willie spreads a bag of bonemeal, embarra.s.sed. Chapin, catching the silence, frowns. I have a copy of the play in my cell, Sutton, you're welcome to it.

Thank you sir.

How far did you get in school, Sutton?

Eighth grade sir.

Chapin sighs. Every man in here tells the same tale-little or no schooling. The surest first step on the road to crime.

What's your excuse? Willie wants to ask.

You must use this time to read, Chapin says. Educate yourself. Ignorance landed you here. Ignorance will keep you here. Ignorance will bring you back.

I love to read sir. I always have. But when I walk into a library or bookshop, I get overwhelmed. I don't know where to start.

Start anywhere.

How do I know what's worth my time and what's a waste?

None of it is a waste. Any book is better than no book. Slowly, surely, one will lead you to another, which will lead you to the best. Do you want to spend your life planting roses with me?

No sir.

Then-books. It's that simple. A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death.

Working together under the hot sun, both of them dizzy from the fumes of manure, Chapin entertains Willie with the raciest plots from Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chaucer. He unfolds the plots like lurid newspaper stories, and when he comes to the climax, when Willie is salivating to know what happens next-Chapin stops, tells Willie to read the book. Willie gets the feeling that Chapin is trying to fertilize his mind.

It's a shame Chapin can't fertilize anything else. Clearly the old newsman has a black thumb, black as the plague. Willie and Chapin have been hard at work for weeks and all they have to show for it is row after row of purported rosebushes, each of which looks irredeemably dead.

At the start of summer Willie is stricken with the flu. For ten days he's unable to work in the garden, too weak to get off his cot. He loses eight pounds and vomits so often that he hears the guards talk about transferring him to a hospital. Or morgue.

When his fever finally breaks it's a bright windy morning. June 1924. Walking slowly to the death house just after breakfast, he stops in his tracks. Before him rolls a sea of scarlets and creams, pinks and umbers, deep purples and delicate corals. A breeze wafts over the new roses and carries to Willie a soft sugary scent.

Willie now sees Chapin sauntering toward him from the death house. Ah! Sutton. Good to see you back among the living.