Mattia’s prose pieces in her remedial English composition class at the prison several years before. The teaching experience, for her, in the maximum-security state prison, had been exhausting, but thrilling.
A civic-minded colleague at the university had recruited Agnes, who’d been doubtful at first. And Agnes’s husband, who thought that prison education was a very good thing, was yet doubtful that Agnes should volunteer. Her training was in Renaissance literature—she’d never taught disadvantaged students of any kind.
She’d told her husband that she would quit the program if she felt uncomfortable. If it seemed in any way risky, dangerous. But she was determined not to be discouraged and not to drop out. In her vanity, she did not wish to think of herself as weak, coddled .
Her university students were almost uniformly excellent, and motivated. For she and her historian-husband taught at a prestigious private university. She’d never taught difficult students, public school students, remedial students, or students in any way disabled or “challenged.” At this time she was fifty-three years old and looking much younger, slender, with wavy mahogany-dark hair to her shoulders, and a quick friendly smile to put strangers at ease. She’d done volunteer work mostly for Planned Parenthood and for political campaigns, to help liberal Democrats get elected. She had never visited a prison, even a women’s detention facility. She’d learned belatedly that her prison teaching was limited to male inmates.
Of her eleven students, eight were African American; two were “white”; and one was Mattia, Joseph (she was certain now, the name had had an old-world religious association), who had olive-dark skin with dark eyes, wiry black hair, an aquiline nose, a small neatly trimmed mustache. Like his larger and more burly fellow inmates, Mattia was physically impressive: his shoulders and chest hard-muscled, his neck unusually thick, for one with a relatively slender build. (Clearly, Mattia worked with weights.) Unlike the others he moved gracefully, like an athlete-dancer. He was about five feet eight—inches shorter than the majority of the others.
In the prison classroom Agnes had found herself watching Mattia, in his bright-blue uniform, before she’d known his name, struck by his youthful enthusiasm and energy, the radiance of his face.
Strange, in a way Mattia was ugly. His features seemed wrongly sized for his angular face. His eyes could be stark, staring. Yet Agnes would come to see him as attractive, even rather beautiful—as others in the classroom sat with dutiful expressions, polite fixed smiles or faces slack with boredom, Mattia’s face seemed to glow with an intense inner warmth.
Agnes had supposed that Mattia was—twenty-five? Twenty-six?
The ages of her students ranged from about twenty to forty, so far as she could determine. It would be slightly shocking to Agnes to learn, after the ten-week course ended, that Mattia was thirty-four; that he’d been in this prison for seven years of a fifteen-year sentence for “involuntary manslaughter”; that he’d enrolled in several courses before hers, but had dropped out before completing them.
The dark-eyed young man had been unfailingly polite to Agnes, whose first name the class had been told, but not her last name. Ms. Agnes in Mattia’s voice was uttered with an air of reverence as if—so Agnes supposed—the inmate-student saw in her qualities that had belonged to his mother, or to another older woman relative; he was courteous, even deferential, as her university students, who took their professors so much more for granted, were not.
Mattia was the most literate writer in the class, as he was the sharpest-witted, and the most alert. His compositions were childlike, earnest. Yet his thoughts seemed overlarge for his brain, and writing with a stubby pencil was a means of relieving pressure in the brain; writing in class, as Agnes sat at the