The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism

20. Viola

20 Viola Viola Irene Cooper’s letters marked the beginning of Chapin’s literary escape from Sing Sing. If he couldn’t physically leave the prison, he could certainly write his way out. On Thursday, December , , the day he received Cooper’s reply to his Thanksgiving supplication, he retreated to his office to savor its every word. He waited until the last whistle had blown and quiet had descended on Sing Sing before placing a sheet into his typewriter. ‘‘I am alone, dear one, with you,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I’ll not write to another or permit any save you to come into my thoughts tonight. This is your night—consecrated wholly and exclusively to you— just you. So cuddle up close, so close that I may look deep into your eyes, and tell me again, and over again, what I have just read in the sweetest letter that has ever come into my Gethsemene.’’1 In her letter, Cooper called Chapin ‘‘pal o’ mine.’’ The expression ‘‘so fraught with meaning’’ made Chapin delirious as he read it aloud. ‘‘How I wish you were seated in that comfortable chair before me now, as I almost feel that you invisibly are, and I could hear you say it, ‘pal o’ mine.’’’ ‘‘Would [there] be room for me in your friendship?’’ asked Cooper. ‘‘There is room for you, my Viola Irene, so come in if you will and we will lock the door and throw away the key. Will you come? I want no other. It seems as if you have belonged to me from almost the protoplasmic stage of your existence, psychogeni- cally mine, in the sense of the operation of a higher agency than natural selection.’’ But a new fear now crept into Chapin’s mind. The book. If Cooper read it and was repulsed by ‘‘the man who bared his soul in its pages,’’ he would never hear from her again. ‘‘I am growing to detest the sight of it,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Why should you need to read it, or know, or even care? Why cannot we both slam the door on all of the yesterdays in both of our lives and get all we can out of each day as we live it—you and I?’’ In the morning, he walked over to the warden’s office and entrusted his letter to the secretary who, thanks to Warden Lawes, personally mailed all of Chapin’s correspondence, thereby sparing him a reading by the censor. Not that the censor would have necessarily excised what he had written. But knowing that another’s eyes would read it might have cooled his ardor. In the privacy of letter writing that Lawes gave him, Chapin could blurt out, as he did in the closing lines of his letter, ‘‘God! how utterly unconscious one can become of his age when his heart remains young and is hungering for the one he long has sought and now, perhaps , found too late.’’2 In unseasonably warm weather for December, Chapin traversed the prison yard to his office, where he spent the day finishing a short story for the Christmas issue of the Bulletin. This was a new pursuit for Chapin. Not having written fiction while a free man, the incarcerated Chapin recently found solace in it. In fact, he often became so lost, pecking out his stories on his Underwood in his two-fingered style, that only the sounds of the prison dynamos reminded him that he was still in Sing Sing and not in his imagined locale. He had published the first of his efforts in the combined August/September issue of the Bulletin. It consisted of two stories set in Colorado, a place he knew well from his days of vacationing in the West. They were romantic tales, one concerning an outlaw, the other a painter who rescues a rarified woman from her dismal rural existence and brings her back to New York City.3 The story Chapin worked on this day was ‘‘Jim’s Christmas Visitor,’’ the tale of Jim Gauline, whose tranquil reveries in the prison library are disturbed one day with the news of a surprise  Viola  The Rose Man of Sing Sing visitor. It is Agnes, his old girlfriend, who has come from New York City in a limousine to see him. For five years, Agnes has shunned Jim because she believed he was...