The Corrections

Billy was lucky the tent was too crowded for the cops to shoot him. He was also lucky, given the obvious premeditation of his crime and the politically awkward shortage of white inmates on death row, that Rick Flamburg didn’t die. (Less clear was whether Flamburg himself, an unmarried Dartmouth grad whom the attack left palsied, disfigured, slurred of speech, blind in one eye, and prone to incapacitating headaches, felt lucky about this.) Billy was indicted for attempted murder, first-degree assault, and assault with a deadly weapon. He categorically rejected any plea agreement and chose to represent himself in court, dismissing as “accommodationist” both his court-appointed counsel and the old Teamster attorney who offered to bill his family fifty an hour.

To the surprise of nearly everyone but Robin, who had never doubted her brother’s intelligence, Billy mounted an articulate selfdefense. He argued that the mayor’s “sale” of the children of Philadelphia into the “technoslavery” of the W—— Corporation represented a “clear and present public danger” to which he’d been justified in responding violently. He denounced the “unholy connivance” of American business and American government. He compared himself to the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. When Robin, much later, showed Denise the trial transcript, Denise imagined bringing Billy and her brother Chip together over dinner and listening while they compared notes about “the bureaucracy,” but this dinner would have to wait until Billy had served seventy percent of his twelve-to-eighteen-year sentence at Graterford.

Nick Passafaro had taken a leave of absence and loyally attended his son’s trial. Nick went on TV and said everything you’d expect from an old red: “Once a day the victim’s black, and there’s silence; once a year the victim’s white, and there’s an outcry,” and “My son will pay dearly for his crime, but W—— will never pay for its crimes,” and “The Rick Flamburgs of the world have made billions selling phony violence to America’s children.” Nick concurred in most of Billy’s courtroom arguments and was proud of his performance, but after the photos of Flamburg’s injuries were introduced in court, he began to lose his grip. The deep V-shaped indentations in Flamburg’s cranium, nose, jaw, and clavicle spoke to a savagery of exertion, a madness, that didn’t square well with idealism. Nick stopped sleeping as the trial progressed. He stopped shaving and lost his appetite. At Colleen’s insistence, he saw a psychiatrist and came home with medications, but even then he woke her in the night. He shouted, “I won’t apologize!” He shouted, “It’s a war!” Eventually his dosages were upped, and in April the school district retired him.

Because Rick Flamburg had worked for the W—— Corporation, Robin felt responsible for all of this.

Robin had become the Passafaro ambassador to Rick Flamburg’s family, showing up at the hospital until Flamburg’s parents had spent their anger and suspicion and recognized that she was not her brother’s keeper. She sat by Flamburg and read Sports Illustrated to him. She walked alongside his walker as he shuffled up a corridor. On the night of the second of his reconstructive surgeries, she took his parents to dinner and listened to their (frankly boring) stories about their son. She told them how quick Billy had been, how in fourth grade he’d already had the spelling and handwriting skills to forge a plausible note excusing him from school, and what a fund of dirty jokes and important reproductive information he was, and how it felt to be a smart girl and see your equally smart brother make himself more stupid by the year, as if specifically to avoid becoming a person like you: how mysterious it all was and how sorry she felt about what he’d done to their son.

On the eve of Billy’s trial, Robin invited her mother to go to church. Colleen had been confirmed as a Catholic, but she hadn’t taken communion in forty years; Robin’s own church experience was confined to weddings and funerals. Nevertheless, on three consecutive Sundays, Colleen agreed to be picked up in Mount Airy and driven to her childhood parish, St. Dymphna’s, in North Philly. Leaving the sanctuary on the third Sunday, Colleen told Robin, in the faint brogue she’d retained all her life, “That’ll do for me, thanks.” After that, Robin went by herself to mass at St. Dymphna’s and, by and by, to confirmation classes.