Jamila’s arms and legs were thinner than my thinnest finger. Her threadlike veins were always breaking down from the pressure of I.V.’s. Since I.V.’s were keeping her alive, the nurses would have to search for new places to stick the needles. Each time she received an injection or had her veins probed for an I.V., Jamila would holler as if she’d received the final insult, as if after all the willpower she’d expended enduring the pain and discomfort of birth, no one had anything better to do than jab her one more time. What made her cries even harder to bear was their tininess. In my mind her cries rocked the foundations of the universe; they were bellows anything, anywhere with ears and a soul could hear. In fact, the high-pitched squeaks were barely audible a few feet from her glass cage. You could see them better than hear them because the effort of producing each cry wracked her body.
My reactions to the preemie ward had embarrassed me. I couldn’t help thinking of the newborns as diseased or unnatural, as creatures from another planet, miniature junkies feeding in transparent kennels. I had to get over the shame of acknowledging my daughter was one of them. Sooner than I expected, the shame, the sense of failure disintegrated and was replaced by fear, a fear I had yet to shake. Would probably never completely get over. The traumas attending her birth, the long trial in the premature ward, her continuous touch-and-go flirtation with death had enforced the reality of Jamila’s mortality. My fear had been morbid at first but gradually it turned around. Each breath she drew, each step she negotiated became cause for celebration. I loved all my children, but this girl child was precious in a special way that had brought me closer to all three. Life and death. Pain and joy. Having and losing. You couldn’t experience one without the other. Background and foreground. The presence of my daughter would always remind me that things didn’t have to be the way they were. We could have lost her. Could lose her today. And that was the way it would always be. Ebb and flow. Touch and go. Her arrival shattered complacency. When I looked in her eyes I was reminded to love her and treasure her and all the people I loved because nothing could be taken for granted.
I had solemnly introduced the new baby to my brother.
This is your Uncle Robby.
Robby’s first reaction had been to say, grinning from ear to ear, She looks just like Mommy. . . . My God, she’s a little picture of Mom.
As soon as Robby made the connection, its lightness, its uncontestability, its uncanny truth hit me. Of course. My mother’s face rose from the crib. I remembered a sepia, tattered-edged, oval portrait of Mom as a baby. And another snapshot of Bette French in Freeda French’s lap on the steps of the house on Cassina Way. The fifty-year-old images hovered, opaque, halfway between the crib and my eyes, then faded, dissolving slowly, blending into the baby’s face, alive inside the new skin, part of the new life, linked forever by my brother’s words.
Robby took the baby in his arms. Coochy-cooed and gently rocked her, still marveling at the resemblance.
Lookit those big, pretty brown eyes. Don’t you see Mommy’s eyes?
Time continues to loosen my grasp on the events of Robby’s last free night. I’ve attempted to write about my brother’s visit numerous times since. One version was called “Running”; I conceived of it as fiction and submitted it to a magazine. The interplay between fiction and fact in the piece was too intense, too impacted, finally too obscure to control. Reading it must have been like sitting down at a bar beside a stranger deeply involved in an intimate conversation with himself. That version I’d thought of as a story was shortened and sent to Robby in prison. Though it didn’t quite make it as a story, the letter was filled with stories on which I would subsequently draw for two novels and a book of short fiction.
Even as I manufactured fiction from the events of my brother’s life, from the history of the family that had nurtured us both, I knew something of a different order remained to be extricated. The fiction writer was also a man with a real brother behind real bars. I continued to feel caged by my bewilderment, by my inability to see clearly, accurately, not only the last visit with my brother, but the whole long skein of our lives together and apart. So this book. This attempt to break out, to knock down the walls.
At a hearing in Colorado Johnny-Boy testified that Robby had re-counted to him a plot to rob a fence, a killing, the flight from Pittsburgh. After his performance as a cooperative witness for the state, a performance he would repeat in Pittsburgh at Robby’s trial, Johnny-Boy was carted away to Michigan, where he was wanted for murder. Robby and Michael were extradited to Pittsburgh, charged with armed robbery and murder, and held for trial. In separate trials both were convicted and given the mandatory sentence for felony murder: life imprisonment without possibility of probation or parole. The only way either man will ever be released is through commutation of his sentence. Pennsylvania’s governor is empowered to commute prison sentences, and a state board of commutations exists to make recommendations to him; but since the current governor almost never grants commutations, men in Pennsylvania’s prisons must face their life sentences with minimal hope of being set free.
Robby remained in custody six months before going on trial. Not until July 1978, after a two-year lockup in a county jail with no facilities for long-term prisoners, was Robby sentenced. Though his constitutional rights to a speedy trial and speedy sentencing had clearly been violated, neither those wrongs nor any others—including a prejudiced charge to the jury by the trial judge—which were brought to the attention of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, moved that august body to intercede on Robert Wideman’s behalf. The last legal action in Robby’s case, the denial of his appeal by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, did not occur until September 1981. By that time Robby had already been remanded to Western State Penitentiary to begin serving a life sentence.
You never know exactly when something begins. The more you delve and backtrack and think, the more clear it becomes that nothing has a discrete, independent history; people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance that after all could have produced only one result: what is. The intertwining strands of DNA that determine a creature’s genetic predispositions might serve as a model for this complexity, but the double helix, bristling with myriad possibilities, is not mysterious enough. The usual notion of time, of one thing happening first and opening the way for another and another, becomes useless pretty quickly when I try to isolate the shape of your life from the rest of us, when I try to retrace your steps and discover precisely where and when you started to go bad.
When you were a chubby-cheeked baby and I stood you upright, supporting most of your weight with my hands but freeing you just enough to let you feel the spring and bounce of strength in your new, rubbery thighs, when you toddled those first few bowlegged, pigeon-toed steps across the kitchen, did the trouble start then? Twenty-odd years later, when you shuffled through the polished corridor of the Fort Collins, Colorado, courthouse dragging the weight of iron chains and fetters, I wanted to give you my hands again, help you make it across the floor again; I shot out a clenched fist, a black power sign, which caught your eye and made you smile in that citadel of whiteness. You made me realize I was tottering on the edge, leaning on you. You, in your baggy jumpsuit, three days’ scraggly growth on your face because they didn’t trust you with a razor, manacled hand and foot so you were theatrically displayed as their pawn, absolutely under their domination; you were the one clinging fast, taking the weight, and your dignity held me up. I was reaching for your strength.
Always there. The bad seed, the good seed. Mommy’s been saying for as long as I can remember: That Robby . . . he wakes up in the morning looking for the party. She’s right, ain’t she? Mom’s nearly always right in her way, the special way she has of putting words together to take things apart. Every day God sends here Robby thinks is a party. Still up there on the third floor under his covers and he’s thinking, Where’s it at today? What’s it gonna be today? Where’s the fun? And that’s how he’s been since the day the Good Lord put him on
