The Prison Book Club (35 page)

Raymond found it unbelievable that the doctor would abandon his extensive work with Grace and run back to the U.S., especially since his psychological report on her could establish his credentials so that he could set up a clinic. Just like last month, when Raymond had argued passionately that the protagonist in
Ordinary Thunderstorms
was unlikely to shed his professional aspirations and his hunger for status, he was raising similar doubts about Jordan. And worse, in Raymond's view, Jordan's departure comes right after a hypnotized Grace seems to reveal that she has a second personality. “Just as it was reaching its crescendo, it completely fizzled,” said Raymond.

“I don't find it all that surprising,” said Richard calmly. “I think a lot of us fizzled when we were having our crescendo, or we wouldn't be here.” Everyone laughed.

“It reflects life,” said Doc. “Atwood created this huge void.” He thought the doctor's decision to abandon his project was evidence of Atwood employing her literary tools to create character and successfully evoke an emotional response from the reader. It had worked on Raymond.

“I think it makes for a more believable character,” agreed Earl. “Jordan had an idea to open an asylum and help heal the sick and it was all noble and everything, but then it turns out that he's just as human as everyone else.”

“It's the Victorian era,” said Richard. “It's hard for us today to imagine how people repressed their emotions and subscribed to this way of behaviour that was so puritanical.” Jordan's decision to run away, he suggested, may have been a way to deal with underlying impulses.

Phoebe took that cue to ask what Atwood was trying to say about the Victorian era.

“I think she used Mary Whitney to put forth her critique of the era,” said Tom. He talked about how limited Mary's aspirations were. “You sew your quilts and then you marry someone who already has a farmstead so that you can then hire another maid who will then do the exact same thing.”

And then Doc skilfully summed up how badly it actually turned out for Mary: “She had sex with her employer's son, got pregnant for the price of a gold ring, went to get an abortion and bled to death and was buried in the backyard.”

Mary and Grace represented opposite extremes of Victorian womanhood, according to Pino, an observation that made everyone's head turn to hear him speak. Without straightening from his habitual slump, he suggested that when they were young teenage servant girls together, Grace was repressed and uneducated while Mary was bold in ways that Grace longed to be. But if you accepted the theory that Mary was a secondary personality
inside
Grace, as Pino maintained, and not a separate character, then the dichotomy represented the self-denial that all Victorian women faced. His insight forced me to rethink everything about Mary, who, to me, had been so fully realized as a separate individual. “That's a classic multiple personality,” said Pino. “Mary Whitney is Grace's other hidden personality. That's the way I saw it anyway.”

And not just Victorian women. I thought about my own daughter's episodes of dissociation when her eating disorder was most intense. Imperceptibly to others, on some days there were periods when she blanked out while continuing to function on autopilot. For her, it wasn't a different personality emerging, but a numbness, because she was unable to tolerate being in her own body.

Raymond said that if it was a critique of the Victorian period, it wasn't Dickensian enough in its portrayal of prison conditions. But as Phoebe said, it was possible that the women's prison was less harsh than the men's. Even so, two of the men volunteered that they felt the book's scenes of prison guards' belittling treatment of prisoners reflected similar scenes in prisons today.

For Hal, it wasn't just the prison guards' conduct, but other things that hadn't changed significantly. “There's a lot of talk in the book about whether criminality is a condition from birth, a bad seed, the vapours,” said Hal. “And once you're a criminal, you're a criminal forever and that stigma follows you. Again none of that thinking seems to have changed at all today and that's something that a lot of us have a direct kind of experience of.” I reminded myself that Hal had been in prison for almost twenty years for killing his family. He sounded desperate for a chance to be believed that he had changed, but also hopeless.

Picking up on Hal's point, Pino noted that the doctors who came in to see Grace were interested in the shape of her skull. “That was a Spinoza theory,” said Richard, saying that the phrenology in the book pointed to the ideas of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher. He tossed that off casually as though everyone in the room would know Spinoza. And sure enough, when I researched his point later, I found a book by the late philosopher H.S. Harris, who asserts that phrenology was inspired by Spinoza's theories.

We dissected the characters of the murdered housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, and of James McDermott, Grace's co-accused. Tom's assessment that McDermott committed the murders for reasons of jealousy went unchallenged. However, Doc made one keen observation: that one of the reasons we can't fully penetrate McDermott's culpability is that we only see him through Grace's point of view.

I was itching for the discussion to finally come round to Grace. When it did, most of the book club members concluded that Grace was innocent of the murders of her employer, Mr. Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery.

“I wholeheartedly believe that Atwood decided that this was a woman wronged,” said Tom, arguing Atwood portrayed Grace as demure and introverted, even though somewhat calculating. Raymond agreed. Richard said he wanted her to be innocent. And Frank said he felt sorry for Grace and wanted a good outcome for her.

But even though Frank was in the cheering section for Grace, he also planted a seed of doubt. He pointed out to us that when Grace and McDermott were on the run together after the crime, McDermott wasn't afraid of Grace turning him in. For Frank, McDermott's lack of fear indicated that she wasn't his hostage, which in turn spoke to Grace's complicity in the crime. In essence he was saying ‘follow the fear' because fear can tell you a lot about a person.

Grace had given several accounts of the incident over the course of the novel. In the book club meeting it dawned on me that maybe the whole point of
Alias Grace
is to show how unreliable storytelling can be. Byrne asked us to turn to page 25 to consider a passage in which Grace is staring at a flowering tree design on a shawl from India. She stares at it so long that the branches seem like vines twisting in the wind. “I thought that was a pretty interesting little bit of symbolism,” said Byrne. “So over a century and a half later, her whole story, we can twist those vines whatever way the wind blows.” He wasn't trying to impress. He was just revelling in the beauty of literature.

Byrne wasn't the only reader who had appreciated Atwood's use of symbolism. Tom jumped in, observing that the names of the quilt patterns, Puss in the Corner, Pandora's Box and Solomon's Temple, that serve as the titles for each section of the novel, could generate a whole conversation. No one picked up on that point, but it would have been interesting to explore with him which quilt-pattern names were recognizable metaphors for chapter content.

I then asked the book club members the same question I'd put to Gaston and Dread at Collins Bay: given Grace's seeming amnesia in the book, is it true that perpetrators of a violent crime tend to blank out on the details of the incident, or do they recall everything vividly? Tom said that one man he'd done time with told him that he was in a fog after killing his wife. “He always used to talk to me about the fog of what happened and how he ended up sitting on the couch afterward in a daze and his dead wife sitting beside him,” said Tom. The room fell silent at that.

I was glad of the direct answer, but also grateful when Raymond switched the topic to the hypnosis scene and how many questions it raised that Atwood never answered. “All these dangling participles over and over and if the author doesn't solve these issues, it drives me crazy,” said Raymond. I could see from his smile that he was pleased with finding the phrase “dangling participles” to serve as a metaphor for loose ends.

“The novel leaves you with more questions,” agreed Phoebe, who also admitted to disliking the loose threads in the tale.

Richard was okay with that feature of the novel, though. “There's lots of things in life we just don't get the answers to,” he said.

“I tend to agree with you, Richard,” said Carol. “As well, she was trying to be true to history.”

Then it was time for some housekeeping. Frank announced that this would be his last meeting because he would be out on parole and another book club ambassador was needed to take his place. Earl volunteered to take Frank's place in the fall. I could see that Earl was already beginning to fill Frank's shoes. Phoebe told the men that Graham might also be leaving before book club restarted in the fall and that anyone willing to replace him should speak to him over the summer. All those who had participated since the beginning of the year received participation certificates, copies of which were provided to their parole officers for their case management files.

Finally we came to what many of the men had been waiting for: the vote on the books for the 2012–13 book club season. Carol had distilled the recommendations from our Book Selection Committee with requests from the men to come up with a long list of twenty books from which they had to choose nine for eight meetings. The extra book would serve as a backup in case one of the other books was out of print or hard to obtain. In deference to the men's request for the inclusion of sci-fi, I had added Kazuo Ishiguro's
Never Let Me Go
and Kurt Vonnegut's
Player Piano
to the list of options. And there were classics: Ernest Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and two novels by John Steinbeck:
Cannery Row
and
The Grapes of Wrath
. Also on the list was a book that Raymond had lobbied for at the last meeting:
Ragtime
, by American novelist E.L. Doctorow. Everyone voted by secret ballot. Many of the men came up to me at the end of the meeting to say goodbye.

“Thank you so much, Ann,” said Richard, taking off his black-framed reading glasses and shaking my hand. I thanked him for his comment on Spinoza. “Oh please,” he said, and flushed slightly.

Then Byrne came up, his eyes alive with enthusiasm. He wanted to tell me about how the opening sequence in
Alias Grace
had triggered a strong memory of his own time at Kingston Penitentiary. “When it talks about the grey stone walls and plants growing up through the pebbles, I was there and picking up flowers thinking of my little girl,” he said. The flowers were buttercups and chicory, not the peonies that Grace imagines in the novel. He had observed that moment in his life as a writer might do and was offering his observation as a gift. He also said he identified with the image of Grace's shoes as she walks. For him, it brought back memories of the shoes that inmates receive when they enter the federal penitentiary and his gratitude to get a new pair at that time.

Many of them asked hopefully if I would be back in the fall. I said it wasn't certain, but thanked them for making me welcome.

That evening I opened Frank's journals. He had lots more to say about
Alias Grace
and he described it as the best book he had read in the prison book clubs.

The next morning I was scheduled to meet Graham for coffee in Toronto. He suggested a local coffee shop in his mother's neighbourhood. It was my first time to meet him alone outside the prison and I was a little nervous, not knowing whether former gang members might be after him. He was already inside with a newspaper and a mug of coffee, looking out the window. We waved, and as I lined up to buy a bottle of water, I looked around. The place had a folksy log cabin decor and light-stained knotty pine furnishings, with branded coffees carrying backwoods names like “The Grizz.”

When I sat down, Graham was full of talk about how the inmate pay cutbacks were lousy policy. On the subject of increasing inmate contribution to room and board, he said it would be like double-dipping, since the extremely low pay stipends already reflected amounts for room and board.

It sounded as though he would have very little time for reading if he were granted parole the following month. The John Howard Society in the area where he had requested a spot in a halfway house had asked him to address their general meeting to give them a briefing about the federal penitentiary system. He was writing a practical manual for criminology students and inmates in the federal system. And he was thinking of getting paid work with a moving company.

We were finishing up our drinks when a policeman walked by and took a good look at Graham. My reaction must have been transparent because he said, “I see them all the time. I'm used to them now.” I felt very self-conscious. Was this just a chance encounter or did the police keep a close eye on parolees on their “unescorted” absences—especially high-profile offenders like Graham? I wondered whether my photo was now in a police file as an “unknown woman” or “associate.” Were disgruntled Hells Angels members also likely to drive by? As I was mulling that over, Graham asked, “What time is it?” He had to check in with his parole officer at eleven. We hadn't had time to talk about
Alias Grace
. He gave me a big hug—by now his typical greeting and send-off for Carol and me whenever we got together. And he walked me to my car.

“Bye Graham,” I said.

“Bye.”

21

THE EXMATES

I
T WAS CAROL who gave me the courage to meet with some of the book club members once they were no longer inmates and had become parolees. “Exmates” or “outmates” was her joking term for them. She dared them with her trust and referred to them as “graduates of the book club.” They lived up to her trust, for the most part.