few minutes later, our wives had entered the dining room, plates of pie à la mode in one hand, coffee mugs in the other. “These two big lugs must’ve never heard of women’s lib,” Hennie had mock-complained. “Next time, we oughta burn our bras on the stove and make them get their own damn pie.”
Mo had nodded in good-natured agreement.
I CAUGHT MYSELF DOING SOMETHING I’d often done as a kid: kicked a stone along the side of the road, trying to give it a ride all the way down to the cornfields. But I kicked it crooked and a little too hard, and it hopped into the poison ivy sprouting up along the roadside.
In that aerial-view photo back at the farmhouse, you could see that the prison property was wedge-shaped, as if Connecticut had come along and cut itself a big slab of Quirk family pie. Narrowest near the road, the prison compound fanned out from there, encompassing Bride Lake and, surrounding its shore in a semicircle, the six two-story brick dormitories that housed the inmates. “Cottages,” they’d called them. Per Great-Grandma Lydia’s orders, they were left unlocked, Lolly had told me, and because “the girls” could walk off the compound, few of them had. Behind the cottages had been the barns, coops, pastures, and fields that had made the prison self-sufficient and had provided surplus dairy and vegetables to the almshouse and the orphanage. The rear of the property was woods and, beyond that, an abrupt drop-off. A stone thrown from the cliff’s edge would land in the town of New London.
A woman had thrown herself from that ledge once—a prisoner for whom Bride Lake had been a revolving door. I was in college at the time, and Mother had sent me a clipping about the suicide because the victim was someone I’d known as a boy. Zinnia, her name was. She’d worked for us during cider season. We’d been friends of a sort, Zinnia and me; she’d had a son my age and was always hugging me. Borrowing me, I realized now—borrowing my eight-year-old body. But at the time of Zinnia’s death, I was nineteen or twenty, consumed by college work and college life, and grateful for both the reprieve from Three Rivers and the anonymity of Boston. I was momentarily sad to read my mother’s news, I remember, and then the next moment I was over it…. I hadn’t thought about Zinnia in years. Decades. But on that April day that Lolly died, I felt, again, Zinnia’s fat, sun-warmed arms around me, and felt, along with her unequivocal embrace, the biting shame of my betrayal of her—my having let her take the rap for food I’d stolen.
Just past the curve in the road, the new high-tech complex came into view: a boxlike eyesore of a building, surrounded by chain link and crowned with spools of razor wire. “Makes me want to puke every time I come around the corner and see that goddamn thing, parked up there where the cow pasture used to be,” Lolly had grumbled during one Sunday evening phone call. “It’s like they’re sticking their middle finger up at everything Grandma stood for.”
“They” was the regime of Governor Roland T. Johnston, a law-and-order conservative from Waterford whom I’d had the pleasure of voting against before we moved out West. Johnston had come to power on the basis of his campaign promises to abolish the state income tax and put an end to the coddling of Connecticut’s convicted felons. “Let every Willie and Wilma Horton in this state take note,” I’d heard him say on TV the night he won. “The Carnival Cruise is over. The ship’s been docked.” Shortly after his inauguration, the custody staffs of the state’s seven prisons were paramilitarized, Police Academy trained, and armed with Mace and billy clubs. For the first time in Bride Lake’s history, male guards now roamed the compound, maintaining order largely by intimidation. Ground was broken on the state-of-the-art facility that would house the new, hard-core female inmate population, which, the governor maintained, had been the unfortunate byproduct of women’s liberation.
“That’s bullshit!” Lolly had declared. “There are some bad apples in the barrel over there—always have been. But it’s not right, the way he’s painting them all with the same brush. Most of the gals come in so beaten down by life that they’re more dangerous to themselves than anyone else.”
By the time the new “supermax” was open for business, Maureen and I were living out in Littleton, removed from state politics, but the age of Internet propaganda was upon us. “I had my friend Hilda write it down so you could take a look,” Lolly phoned to tell me. “She’s Miss Computer these days—Internet this, e-mail that. You got a pencil? It says double-ya, double-ya, double-ya, period, p-o, period, s-t-a-t-e, period, c-t, period, g-o-v. Whatever the hell that mumbo jumbo means. Hilda said to spell it out and you’d know.”
By logging onto the Department of Correction’s Web site, I was able to take a “virtual tour” of the new facility. During her forty-year tenure as superintendent of Bride Lake, Lydia Quirk had made fresh air and sunshine part of the equation by which female felons could heal themselves. But as the virtual tour proudly showed, the eight-by-ten-foot cells of the new high-tech prison had three-inch-wide window slits that didn’t open or let in light. Air recirculated now, and the electronically controlled cell doors were popped once an hour so that inmates could take a five-minute rec break on the tier. “Recreation? That’s a joke,” Lolly had said. “These days, recreation means standing in line at the hot water pot with your Styrofoam cup and your ramen noodles. All that junk food and sitting around on their asses: they get as fat as pigs now. Half of them are on insulin, or Prozac, or blood pressure pills. Why bother to rehabilitate ’em when you can just drug ’em and fatten ’em up. Grandma would roll over in her grave.”
Lolly went on and on during those Sunday night calls. “Uh-huh,” I’d say, straining for patience. “Really?…Unbelievable.” When I’d lived in Three Rivers, I’d invested in my aunt’s outrage—had felt some of it myself because I knew how much she cared about those women in custody, and about how disheartened she’d become. But now, hundreds of miles away from her, I only half-listened. The trouble with Lolly, I told myself, was that she’d never escaped home port. It was too bad she hadn’t gone to college. Hadn’t traveled out West and worked on one of those reservations. But because she hadn’t, she was hopelessly provincial and, well, boring. She walked to work, for Christ’s sake. “Maureen’s standing right here, waiting to talk to you,” I’d say, waving Mo over to the phone. “Let me put her on.” I’d have managed maybe five minutes of conversation, and Maureen would talk with her for the next twenty. Which was why, I guess, it was Mo who knew that the cat’s name was Nancy Tucker. That Lolly had been taking an antidepressant since Hennie died and had prepaid for her own funeral at Gamboa’s.
Had my long-distance disconnect from my aunt stemmed from indifference? Uh-uh. No way. It had stemmed from pain. Our move to Colorado had separated me from the one person I’d loved my whole life. The one family member who’d remained a constant after everyone else had either died or up and left me. But then I’d up and left—had put the Rocky Mountains between my aunt and myself in order to save face after my arrest and save my crumbling third marriage. And rather than own up to the pain of that separation, I had masked it. Hidden behind my guyness. Don’t cry, we’re told. Big boys don’t cry. And so, on those Sunday nights when I’d hear the pain in her voice, or her old familiar chuckle, I’d safeguard myself against them. “No kidding,” I’d say. “Wow. Well, here’s Maureen.” Oh, yeah, I was one armored and inoculated son of a bitch. Shit, when her companion died—the woman Lolly’d loved and lived with for thirty-something years—I hadn’t even flown back for the funeral. But, it’s like they say: hindsight’s twenty-twenty. The night before? When she’d opened her eyes and stared right at me without registering who I was? Maybe that’d been some kind of karmic payback for the guy who’d never been honest with her about how much he missed her. How much, all his life, he had loved her. Well, I was facing the pain now, all right. Walking along that road and choking back sobs. Turning my face to the trees, so that people driving by wouldn’t see that one of the big boys was crying….
Approaching the prison’s main entrance, I paused to look at the new sign they’d erected: my great-grandmother’s name chiseled into a granite slab spanning two brick pillars. When the state opened
