I reread your letters daily and am lifted by them. I never gave much thought to the idea of justice before. I believed in it, and fairness, and equality, but without stopping to consider the assumptions made about those words. I supported those good ideas, and many others that thoughtful people believe in and practice. They all seem based on common sense. That’s a wonderful phrase, isn’t it? Common, suggesting an agreed upon, simple standard, and sense, the collective mind connected to the universal body that gathers data from the real world and not only from itself. Common sense, grounded in the real. It seems to me that people across the globe and the centuries have arrived at the same set of good ideas that honor life and promote well-being for all. Truth, with or without supernatural guidance or intervention.
Justice isn’t an idea in a place like this. It is concrete, literally, meted out in ponderous footsteps as men think about whatever they can manage to put their minds on. A lot of the time it is justice. I don’t believe a single man here agrees with his capture or his sentence, his treatment or the food; everyone disagrees with some aspect of our present life. The worst off among us, the men in solitary confinement, are living under entirely unjust conditions. To be alone involuntarily is surely torture. In the outside world there are so many distractions. Here there are few, and those few are pathetic or vile in nature. But to have none is misery on a scale that is evil.
No one thinks this is justifiable. Nor does anyone say why he is here, though the news gets around. It doesn’t matter. Everyone has his reasons for whatever he did or did not do. Few want to go back and think about it. Better to live in the present, complain about the present, make trouble or not in the present.
In a just world, there would be no need for conscience, and no cause for regret. I think about that a lot—how people would behave if they fully understood how their behavior affects others.
It must be hard to keep up a correspondence with me and to think about the specter of prison every time you sit down to write. I should say, please don’t write again, but I can’t do that. I look forward to your letters. There may be a stack of them somewhere in this place, languishing undelivered. The guards and wardens here test people beyond any reasonable limits, then punish them severely for their human responses.
Please give my regards to Polly and your family.
She opened another.
Thank you for the Hemingway. The piece that strikes me hardest, right between the shoulders, is “Big Two-Hearted River.” I’ve never read it before. Hemingway came to me at school. I had the same response as I guess most do—I was wildly excited by his style. We read some of the famous stories in class, in eleventh grade, and learned about the iceberg method. It had never before occurred to me that there could be much more to a story than what I was reading. Good books always seem complete and inevitable. How could satisfaction of curiosity be only the tip of an iceberg, with most of the vast truth, and the entire basis for the truth, out of sight? Yet I instantly grasped the idea. It’s an innocent perspective; the smallest child knows there is more to his surroundings than what he is seeing. Much is above his head, for one thing. Things are behind closed doors. The sun disappears. Hemingway’s iceberg fathoms these things that are mysterious for being invisible. They make his stories tragic.…
Polly read through the letters slowly, losing her place over and over in favor of strangling sorrow, but returning until she grasped what Robert was saying. She placed each letter back in its envelope and into the pile on her lap. When she took a break and closed her eyes, she found in that darkness a memory of Dick sitting on a bench in town, reading one of Robert’s letters. She’d never once wondered what Robert was writing. Her thoughts had only been about Dick. And, even now, reading Robert’s words, she wondered if Dick had written back in kind, with an equal offering of self? She looked into the shadows in the direction of his study, feeling the presence of a cabinet of letters there as carefully kept as the ones in Haverford. None were personal, not even to his children.
Today one of the guards came in with a bright red wet maple leaf pasted to the back of his shoe.
Isn’t that like a Zen koan?
She’d always noticed the same thing, wet leaves on her bare legs, the rush of adrenaline as if a thing alive had leaped on her. It was in the category of small mishaps, and not a memory she’d have ever drawn up for pleasure, but she saw that for a person in prison the sight of a bright red maple leaf pasted to the back of an ankle could be a conduit to a storehouse of sensations missed now, cut off.
What must Robert have thought of Dick before he knew of his death—for not responding to such searching thoughts?
In the morning she wrote a letter of her own.
Dear Robert,
I arrived back on Fellowship Point just yesterday and picked up several letters from you to Dick that had been held over the winter. The postmarks were after he had died, and it bothered me to think that you were writing to him but not receiving any response. Your last letter is postmarked October 14. I know Agnes let you know about Dick, and I did receive your letter of condolence. If I didn’t write back—I was useless, truth be told. I am planning to make up for my months of blurriness.
It is only this gap in time that concerns me now, and I am writing to reassure you that Dick had every intention of maintaining a robust correspondence with you until you came home.
Please tell me if there are things I can send—any book you’d like, or whatever comforts you are permitted. Nothing feels right with both you and Dick not here. But soon you will return, and we can build the pink wall, only if you want to, of course.
A week later she received a reply from Robert Circumstance. He wrote back sympathetically, reassuring her that he hadn’t had a moment of doubt about Dick. For all he knew the return letters had been lost or withheld—it happened. And Agnes had written, and he had grieved. The letter went on, pondering the baffling nature of a patterned life, be it marriage or a job or prison—and the exposure of the soul to equally baffling, wilder elements when the pattern was interrupted. Contrary to the accepted idea that all experience was valuable, he hadn’t been able to find any good or lesson or utility in many of the sorrows in life, especially not from Dick’s death. Nothing good or wise or bracing had come of it. She agreed. She hadn’t found she had the strength to go on, she merely went on. Life was mere, now.
She took her time making a tuna sandwich. Mayo, pickle relish, red onion, toasted bread. She set a place for herself at the dining room table and ate slowly. After lunch she sat down to write Robert back and tell him how her own feelings mirrored what he’d expressed, but when she picked up her pen she felt shy and wrote instead about the garden, going on about her plants, and how she made decisions about which flowers to pick for the vases, be it eeny meeny miny mo or copying the palette of a famous painting. And then, finally, in a burst, she wrote how oppressive it was that she was supposed to more easily accept Dick’s death because he was old. They’d been together for sixty years! The time she had on her hands now gave her the sensation of waiting. She made the best of waiting, that was all. She guessed it was disbelief—secretly believing he’d come back. At first she’d thought she could tell no one this, it sounded so crazy. Then she realized she could tell nearly anyone who’d had something bad happen to them, some setback, accident, disease, death. Everyone who’d lost something of crucial importance wished he or she could go back to the moment when it was still theirs. The wish was so powerful it seemed it might reverse the direction of time. It bore apparitions and ghosts.