Read Online In the Slammer With Carol Smith by Hortense Calisher - Free Book Online Page A

us—’ she says. ‘How you were orphaned. Why you had to live with your aunts.’
    In my childhood, half the people in town knew some of it. Or thought they knew all of it. But once you turn yourself in, you are mostly a footnote. The facts are there, but in a public facility nobody much notices them. Still later on, from transfer to transfer, from a detention set-up to a medical one, public to private, the case-record fattens, the facts all but disappear. And the names—I had so many. But in any record, your conduct—the most recent—is what counts.
    ‘No. I never did say.’ I did tell the private hospital the trust could only half pay for what was owed. But their records are never revealed.
    ‘I know your father died in a war, Carol. I never told you, did I—that so did mine?’
    ‘Oh?’ The SW’s aren’t supposed to tell you, about themselves.
    ‘But about your mother, how she died … an army nurse, is all the record says. Let go, because of her relationship with a non-commissioned officer. When he was killed, his family’s long-time former employers took the child in.’
    So they did. The town thought the aunts were misguided, if charitable. Or perhaps that, with no money except what they earned, I too would be indentured to the big ruin of a house that must be saved. Perhaps Titus, staring at me like an owl each time he came to deliver the coal, thought that too. When asked how his wife did he always answered the same. ‘Poorly. Ever since Hezekiah was los’.’ Though from well before the son was lost she had been known to be odd, finally retiring early from the library. I remember her, a light-skinned lady, a little mumbly, who no longer worked at the front desk. In the town there were a great many I would remember, with whom I was never to connect.
    ‘I knew about my father, of course. I would have had to.’ I see Gold’s eyelids flicker; she agrees, staring down at my face. ‘About my mother, I was only half-told. And not until I was half-grown. They thought it best.’
    … That summer before I went off to college, Titus came for what was to be the last time before he died. By then I knew who he must be to me, but it was too late for either of us to remark upon it. ‘College?’ he said to my aunts ‘—that’s good. We none of us knew how much you had toward it, short of what’s needed for the house. But now she has the scholarship.’ The house was a monster, yet also half ancestor to him as well; he was in agreement that it had to be kept. Once the horse died I had grown indifferent to the old pile and its haze-filled barns, as the aunts knew. To my mind, I had no further stake in it. That was why I was told.
    Until then, my mother had been a cipher. I could sneak a look at the man whose by-blow I had been admitted to be, in the line of dead soldier’s faces at the American Legion Hall. On Independence Day I sometimes had. And once on Memorial Day, when the parade ganging up to go to the cemetery had again opened up a hall off limits to kids except at events. That time I had even asked if I could help sell the poppies always sold on that day. ‘In Flanders Field, where poppies grow’—the poem was in our reader. Though that was not the war the face on the Legion’s photograph had fallen in, it seemed the thing to do. But the marshal I asked said, ‘Only veterans can sell them poppies, young lady. Got to wear one of those khaki hats, so’s people know.’ But then he reached over to a table for a bunch of those red cotton flowers and gave me one, for free. Maybe, looking at me had made a connection.
    But of my mother—dead in childbirth, or vanished after?—no pictures, not even a name. ‘His family was willing for us to adopt you,’ was all the aunts ever said. And we sure wanted you. Now let’s rustle up the peanut butter sandwiches. ‘And have us a game.’
    In senior high, by which time, in order to qualify for the normal legalities I was required to present a birth