Blue Moon (26 page)

The greed of the Empress and the Shadow niggled me, although a secret bank account in Buffalo, New York, allowed me to meet all their financial demands. All of my life I had been a silent witness to evil, but in this instance I rebelled. I was offended by the way those two miscreants preyed on the very young for sexual favours and refused to do anything to assist the older prisoners who had no money.

I requested an audience with Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. White. After waiting almost two weeks, I was given a brief appointment: when requesting—and paying for—the interview through the Empress, I
indicated that I needed to speak to the warden in connection with an appeal being launched by Mr. Robinette.

As was the custom, I was required in the warden's presence to stand, as if a soldier at attention in the presence of a general. No inquiries were made as to my state of body or mind. The warden and her assistant were startled when I told them the real reason for my request to see them: unless they did something about the two head guards, I would inform Robinette of the true state of affairs at P4W. Mrs. Nelson did not respond well to blackmail.

“Evelyn, you have little knowledge of the ways of the world. I am perfectly aware of what June and Juliet are doing, but we live in a world of free enterprise. It's called capitalism. I cannot provide the prisoners with many of the necessities of life. Sometimes, even the basics are beyond my reach. They are useful coadjutors to me.”

“Most assuredly,” Mrs. White interrupted her, “we are doing our very best to help the prisoners. We can't do more.”

I pointed out to them that much of the labour of myself and my fellow prisoners was undertaken for the public sector. Surely, someone was lining her pockets with this money?

Mrs. Nelson now became heated, her expensive accent giving way completely to coarse, North Country sounds. “I'm not going to be lectured on morality by a child killer!”

“The crime I am accused of has absolutely nothing to do with what we are talking about, which is abuse of power.
Your
abuse of power.”

“As far as I am concerned, you have nothing to complain about.”

“Perhaps you'd like to address that issue in a public forum? Mr. Robinette is on the verge of becoming one of Canada's foremost criminal lawyers. He likes to champion underdogs. He could start with all forty-six of us under your charge.”

The warden had heard enough. “Mrs. White, remove this churlish woman from my sight.”

As she accompanied me back to my cell, the under-warden assured me I had completely misunderstood the nature of the operations at P4W. June and Juliet interceded between the prisoners and the higher echelons of the administration. The best contemporary research suggested that modern wardens use underlings in this fashion. To put it bluntly: wheels had to be greased. I simply did not understand the latest trends in penology.

Then Mrs. White changed the direction of her monologue. She remembered I was an avid reader. We could stop on the way back to my cell at the prison library. “Just a small assortment of books. Perhaps you could find something there to your liking?” I accepted the bribe, and we stopped at the small alcove outside her office. I glanced quickly at the six or seven shelves, my eye attracted to what were obviously the oldest: an eight-volume set from 1768 of Richardson's
Clarissa,
originally published in 1748-9, over a million words in length.

“A masterpiece,” Mrs. White assured me. “One of the greatest novels in English. It's about a wronged woman.” At that point, having heard so much recently about the injustices inflicted upon women, I almost decided against the eight volumes. But something drew me to the name. Clarissa. Clarity. I removed the books from their resting place.

Sometimes, famous people are asked to name a work of literature that transformed their lives: what book left an indelible mark on your soul? In my case, the answer is Richardson's leisurely examination of the psyche of his tortured heroine.

The novelist was an ambitious man. He was a successful printer who wrote a book of letters upon which others could model their own correspondences. If one had a rich, shrewish old aunt living on the Sussex coast who repeatedly invited herself to your London home, Richardson had the perfect response for her, guaranteed to put her off and yet not offend her. A destitute niece in Yorkshire wrote asking for a handout: Richardson knew how to say no decisively and politely. From its commonplace beginnings, Richardson's imagination caught fire: he enjoyed imagining himself in difficult situations and then finding the perfect responses to rid himself of them. So he began writing fiction in the form of letters—an epistolary novel—in which he imagined himself as a poor servant girl whom the lecherous Mr. B wanted to seduce. In
Pamela,
he created a shrewd woman, one who refuses her employer's advances and manipulates him to the altar before they ever get into bed.

Clarissa
is an altogether different kind of story. At the outset, the dashingly handsome Lovelace is courting Arabella Harlowe, the elder sister of Clarissa. When he meets and subsequently shifts his attention to Clarissa, the Harlowe family turns against him and—to a large
degree—Clarissa, who, her parents and siblings determine, must marry Solmes, a fussy, much older and extremely wealthy merchant. Clarissa defies her parents and is locked up by them until she changes her mind. The wily Lovelace—completely smitten by Clarissa—offers to help her escape from the domestic tyranny imposed on her. He whisks her away to a brothel, which she assumes is a respectable lodging. Unwittingly, Clarissa has placed herself in the hands of another, even more rapacious enemy. She refuses her would-be lover/captor's advances and is eventually drugged and raped by him. Thrown completely asunder by the horrible chain of events that overtake her, Clarissa escapes, only to find herself trapped in a debtor's prison. She no longer wishes to live and, with considerable flourish, prepares herself for death.

At one level, Clarissa's story seems to be about a woman victimized by her family and by the man who supposedly loves her. The novel is particularly vivid in its description of Clarissa's loneliness, her self-imposed isolation, and her confinement in her home, a brothel and, finally, a prison.

After a while, reading the novel became compulsive for me, its claustrophobia—not unlike some of the settings I had lived in—removed me imaginatively for hours at a time from my own confinement. At first, I was puzzled by the heroine's single-minded wish to preserve her chastity—and her eagerness to surrender to death once it was violated. Read symbolically, her chastity represents a part of herself over which she rightly wishes to maintain control. Once penetrated sexually in a violent way, she wants to abandon her creaturehood. She has no reason to live. The book is not so much about Christian belief as it is about personal integrity.

As I feverishly consumed that book, I identified with Clarissa, badly treated by her parents and her lover. And, yet, that novel prodded me in a new direction. Clarissa dies because she is a rebel: She says no to her parents, her jealous brother and sister, and a possessive man. Clarissa is victimized, but—because she refuses to succumb to tyranny—she moves to a whole new level of existence. In dying, she preserves her essential self. There is nothing passive about Clarissa, although on the surface all she accomplishes is to write hundreds of letters examining her state of mind in its fluctuating conditions. At some level, the book spoke to me about my
previous life, although its only direct effect on me was to fix my resolve to resume the diary I had begun in Hamilton, where I had haphazardly recorded some of the evidence presented against me and made observations on my existence on Barton Street.

One of my first entries in my prison diary was made twelve days after my encounter with Nelson and White.

Trouble falling asleep—suddenly, a glaring light in my face—then a hand near my head—my right shoulder yanked violently—“Get up! You're coming with me! Now! Get up now!”—I stumble up and see the Shadow hovering over me—“How many times do I have to tell you? Right now! Quick! You don't need to change.”—My cell door is wide open and the Shadow pushes me out the door—an eerie yellowish light bathes the second floor corridors—we hurry down the stairs, and I am shoved in the direction of the warden's office, the door of which is open—the Shadow and I cross the threshold and make our way to the inner sanctum—the lamp on Nelson's desk sheds the only light in the room—the warden sits, White stands in her usual position behind her—the Shadow moves away from me to the edge of the room, where she takes her place in the darkness at the side of the Empress—the Empress tells Mrs. Nelson to “begin the meeting of the coven”—Mrs. Nelson clears her throat: “I don't know how you got that message to Mr. Robinette, Evelyn—I tell the truth—“I gave Gertie a message to give to her sister. Nothing strange about that.”—She gives me a look of complete disdain: “He's going to visit you next week. That's why we're here.”—She's embarrassed, put on the spot. Not sure where to go—the Empress intervenes: “You'd better tell her
what you've
decided to do.”—“Alright, June. I know what I'm doing.” Then she turns her face in my direction. “The wayward sisters will be leaving us in a month's time—they're taking jobs in British Columbia. So, if you keep your mouth closed, you need not worry about those two ladies in the future. Do we have a deal?”—I nod my head in full agreement and am accompanied back to my cell by a silent Mrs. White.

The Empress and her Shadow have become warden and sub-warden of the new maximum security prison for women on the outskirts of Vancouver—the two vixens have let all the prisoners know I played stool-pigeon—made it impossible for them to stay at P4W—with their customers, I'm even more unpopular than when I was simply a baby murderer.

Things have settled down—am only mildly hated—everything will be back to normal in a few more weeks—Clarissa's horrible nightmare existence haunts me—she felt guilty about being a nonconformist—knew she had a tendency to be self-destructive—how can anyone live like that?—what kind of strange man creates Clarissa?—must have imagined himself a woman—did he take on a female identity in order to know her from the skin outwards?—did he, like Lovelace, want to sleep with her?—did he want to penetrate her but she wound up penetrating him?—why does anyone bother to make up people in order to put them on to paper?

Since early girlhood I had been an avid reader; later, I used story-telling to entertain my clients. Always aware of the power of the written word, I had succumbed as a youngster to its powers and, very much like a musician quelling the savage beast, I had recycled the stories of others to feed the men with whom I endured sex. Reading
Clarissa
was a completely different experience, as if the spirit of a woman who never lived infiltrated the core of my being.

The impulse to record the events of my dreary existence in P4W was, I realized, not only an attempt to form a bond with Clarissa but also a way to appease her. We were both wounded, women who removed themselves from the sexual arena because such experiences were so deeply threatening. Clarissa was in essence a proto-feminist: her sensitivity to any kind of sexual activity was symptomatic of her conviction that she must discover her identity as a woman in isolation. I
could not claim such lofty motives: my sexuality was cauterized like living flesh burnt to a crisp by my father's abuse. That strange word “schizoid”—the condition of wishing to remain alone from human contact—does not really apply to Richardson's heroine or myself. Sometimes, unfortunately, life gives us no alternative but retreat.

My regimented life at P4W was irrevocably changed when I had been there for almost six months. Mrs. White—with her passionate commitment to the three Rs of research, rehabilitation and reading—pushed books in my direction which were either about confinement—Dickens'
Little Dorrit,
Shakespeare's
Measure for Measure,
Diderot's
La Religieuse
—or written during confinement—Cervantes'
Don Quixote,
Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress,
Boethius's
Consolation of Philosophy,
Wilde's
De Profundis.

She was a great admirer of the murderer Robert Stroud, the “bird-man of Alcatraz”; from his late teenage years until his death in 1963, he spent fifty-four years in prison. In 1933, he published
Diseases of Canaries
and, ten years later,
Digest of the Diseases of Birds.
He was a diligent reader and researcher who rehabilitated himself through his work on birds. Years before Burt Lancaster made him a folk-hero in the film biography of 1962, Stroud had written eloquently about the tiny creatures to whom he devoted his life. Mrs. White called my particular attention to this passage: “Years of work, of study, of careful observation; the lives of literally thousands of birds, the disappointments and heartbreaks of hundreds of blasted hopes have gone into these pages, almost every line, every word, is spattered with sweat and blood. For every truth I have outlined to you, I have blundered my way through a hundred errors. I have killed birds when it was almost as hard as killing one's children. I have had birds die in my hand when their death brought me greater sadness than that I have ever felt over the passing of a member of my own species. And I have dedicated all this to the proposition that fewer birds shall suffer and die because their diseases are not understood.” Her eyes filled with tears, Mrs. White informed me how much her late, law-abiding husband had found a kindred spirit in Stroud. “A man after his own heart.”

In me, Mrs. White had put her hands on the ideal candidate for rehabilitation. My native intelligence which had previously been
doubted and my newfound ability to question authority sat well with her, if not with Nelson. If she nourished me on good literature, perhaps my pent-up abilities would be released, much in the same manner as the bird-man's? Or so she reasoned. When that initiative seemed to be working, she came to visit me one afternoon. As usual, her hair was dishevelled and her clothing an ill-fitting assortment of violently clashing colours. More than usually nervous as a cat in heat, she wrung her red, large-boned hands as she spoke.