Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

Listening to her words, I remembered the dictum — Truth is the best lie .

“Who did he meet with?”

“I don’t know. It was out of the office. A woman called, a young woman.”

“You didn’t tell me you were taking time off,” I said, trying to take on the authority of a boss.

“I’m sorry.” Mardi looked at her desk again, willing me to go so she could get away from the inquisition.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

The expression on her face was equal parts surprise, anger, and don’t you know who the fuck you’re talking to?

“Talk to me, M.”

“My father has been writing me from Ossining over the past year,” she said. This truth dispelled her shyness. Now she was returning my stare.

Mardi’s stepfather was Leslie Bitterman. Once he was an office manager by day and daughter molester by night; that was before he became a full-time resident of the maximum security prison.

“You want me to talk to some people?” I offered.

“What?” she said, almost angrily. “No. No. At first just getting the letters really upset me but not after a while.”

“Does he want something?”

Mardi clasped her hands and pressed her lips against her left wrist — a kiss that was not a kiss.

“Mardi.”

“He sent a letter every week for seven months before I even opened one. He said things like nothing ever happened between us, like he was a normal father trying to reach out to me and Marlene. He asked about my job and if I had a boyfriend...”

The motherfucker.

“I just thought it was sick,” she said, “that he was trying to fuck with us even though he’s locked away.”

Mardi had never cursed in my memory.

“Then I answered him,” she said. If any four words ever sucked the air out of a room it was these.

“What did you say?”

“I was angry. I told him that he didn’t even have a right to think about us much less send letters. I told him that he destroyed my life and he was going to do the same to my sister. I told him that he made me into a murderer because I would have surely killed him if you hadn’t gotten in the way. I don’t know everything I said but it was eight handwritten pages long.”

Mardi wrote in a tiny chicken scrawl. And she only used purple ink.

“Did he give you an answer?” I asked.

“No.”

“No? Then why did you go up there?”

Mardi looked at me and I saw that she had become another person; someone related to the young woman I knew and loved, but now she was both stronger and weaker, more vulnerable.

“I kept thinking about the letter I wrote to him,” she said. “The anger inside me was bigger than anything I’d ever felt. It was even more than the fear I used to have when he’d come into my room when I was a child. I realized that that anger was the largest part of my heart and if I ever wanted to be my own person, my own Mardi, I’d have to do something... extreme.”

I wanted to ask but my breath wasn’t acting right.

“I wrote another letter,” she said. “It was very short and I wrote it in pencil because I erased it a dozen times until it was exactly what I wanted to say.”

“And?”

“I wrote, ‘I forgive you’ and signed it ‘M’ because when you call me M I always feel that you’re my father. And so I was your daughter letting go of that old corroded anchor that was pulling me down.”

I don’t know how long the silence was that followed those words. I don’t remember reaching out but at some point I realized that we were holding hands.

“And,” I said. I had to clear my throat. “And did he answer?”

“He sent another letter. It was the same old gibberish. Me growing into a fine woman and how much he’d learned and thank you about a hundred times. I didn’t read it very closely. I just wrote him and said that I was coming to visit; that I was only coming one time and so he should know what he was going to say.”

“Wow.” For some reason I thought about my earlier sparring session with Chin Wa. If he’d had Mardi’s will I’d’ve never won that match. “And so you went last week.”

“It was horrific,” Mardi said. I’d never heard her use that word before. “They took me to what they call an isolation hut and had me meet him in a room with two guards standing on either side of his chair. Before they’d even let me in I had to let a woman guard give me a body search.”

The conversation stopped for a minute while all the experience and feeling coalesced in the young woman’s mind.

“He had aged twenty years,” she said. “His hair was gray and falling out. He had scars from a knifing and over the left side of his face where somebody had thrown acid on him. He’s blind in his left eye and something’s wrong with his right hand. It was curled up like a bird’s claw.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Nobody likes a child molester in prison. Nobody.”

“He was pathetic. They had him in isolation because otherwise he’d be dead. You know, I wondered why he didn’t mention anything about his troubles in the letters and then I understood that he was trying to pretend that nothing ever happened.

“We had forty-five minutes and talked the whole time. I don’t remember anything we said but he asked if I would kiss him good-bye and I said no.”

That was the end of her story. Her posture was saying that she needed to get up and walk away from the tale. But she stayed in the chair because of me and my relationship to her self-enacted deliverance.

I still wanted to know about Twill but couldn’t bring myself to question her further.

“You’re a strong woman, Mardi Bitterman,” I said at last.

“You think I did the right thing?”

“Every moment since the day you were born.”

The rest of the morning was spent behind my big ebony desk going through the mail that had piled up while I was down in Philly. The bills all had checks attached to them, filled out with everything except my signature. Mardi was thorough in that department too.

I endorsed the back of the check given me by Camille Esterhouse for the return of Eddie Martinez and put it, along with the fifteen hundred-dollar bills Marella gave me, into a black envelope that I placed in the outbox on the right front corner of my desk. Mardi knew by the color that she had to make a deposit.

There were phone messages on little pink pieces of paper, phone messages on the service, and e-mails by the score. But there was nothing important, nothing I felt that had to be answered immediately.

At some point I sat back in my chair and swiveled around to look down on southern Manhattan. I had lived on the island my entire life; running wild, committing almost every crime imaginable. For the last six years I’d been trying to climb out of the dung pit and wash myself clean. I think it was just then, on that Tuesday morning, that I understood the metaphor of baptism — it’s funny how some truths hide away in a pocket or a forgotten drawer and show up when they hardly matter anymore.

Considering and then giving up on the notion of salvation, I turned my restless thought-pad to the last twenty-four hours. This had been my time to encounter powerful women: Katrina, who had the will to end her own life either by knife or just waiting in that sanatorium bed to expire; Mardi, who could face the greatest terror in her life and make something good out of it; Aura, who loved me, I knew that, but whose morality was more powerful than our needs. And then there was Marella Herzog, a woman with a dog whistle that could call out the beast in me. I felt that if I could spend a week in her company I might grow back a full head of hair.

These were people who faced their fears and created the world as they moved through it. For some reason this notion made me take out my telephone. I’d call Twill myself and ask what he was up to.