The Glass Cell

  6

  In the month that followed Cherniver’s death, Carter had two more interviews with Magran, who was now going over the ground that Tutting had, but in a more thorough manner. Magran had found one more witness, a certain Joseph Dowdy, a postal employee, who remembered assigning a post box to Wallace Palmer last July at a town called Pointed Hill, some sixty miles away from Fremont. Dowdy remembered Palmer from his photographs, though Palmer had taken the box out in another name. During the trial, there had been much talk of a Box 42 in Ogilvy and a Box 195 in Sweetbriar. Palmer had them noted on a card in his wallet. But no letters had come for him at those boxes after his death. Some of the supply companies that Triumph paid (with school board funds) did not exist. Palmer had invented the companies and the supplies from scratch, and received money for them at the vari-ous boxes that he took out under other names. Carter asked Magran outright if he thought Gawill might have been taking money from Palmer, and Magran had answered in his solemn, conservative way, “There is a possibility. That money went somewhere.”

  David Sullivan on the other hand—he visited Carter once during that month, his third or fourth visit to the prison—seemed overconfident of Gawill’s complicity and also overconfident that he could pin it on him. Sullivan said he was talking often with Magran, that they were working “together” on the material they were gathering to present to the Supreme Court. But Sullivan was a corporation lawyer, not a criminal lawyer, and not in Carter’s pay. Carter had a faint but disquieting suspicion that Gawill was right, and Sullivan was trying to make a good impression on him and counteract any resentment Carter might feel because he was seeing so much of Hazel.

  Easter came and went in that month. Carter had seen Magran on Easter Sunday. He had had a good shot of morphine just before the interview (Carter now gave the shots to himself, holding the needle between his fingers and pushing it with his palm), and the morphine and the businesslike tone of the interview had helped to lift Carter’s vague gloom because Hazel was not coming that day. Later, lying on his bed in the ward, he had been able to smile as he thought of what Hazel might be doing at that moment, sunning herself with a tall drink by her host’s swimming pool, laughing and talking with Sullivan and the Fennors, and perhaps in the background good music would be playing on a stereo hi-fi. Then they would sit down at a long table with a crisp white linen cloth on it and thick napkins, and every item of food would be superb. And perhaps Sullivan would be paying Hazel compliments and giving her affectionate, even amorous looks across the table? Well, Carter didn’t mind that. Hazel liked flattery.

  The night of Easter Sunday he could not sleep, despite all the morphine. Time after time, he staggered up in answer to some moan or a mumbled call for Pete. He felt very humble that night. He felt in fact like nothing at all, and somehow like no one, as if something, some mysterious Parcaean scissors, had cut his tie even to Hazel. He could conjure her up as distinctly as ever in his memory, but he felt nothing when he did. It was as if they were no longer married and had never been married, as if she did not love him and had never loved him, and it seemed unbelievable, like a fantasy, that he had thought, only the day before, Nothing can really hurt me, because Hazel belongs to me and she loves me.

  Back in his bed, Carter had visions of Sullivan and Hazel lying in bed together, perhaps sleeping now after having made love. No, Sullivan would have tiptoed back to his room, of course, in the Fennors’ house. Carter turned in his bed. He didn’t really believe that. Or did he? If he didn’t believe it, why did he think of it? Or if he didn’t really fear it, why did he think of it? Of course he feared it. He had admitted that long ago, hadn’t he? Yes.

  Carter turned over in bed and forced the ugly thoughts away. He had to arrive at a “right attitude” or else. One had to have hope, and at the same time not take things too seriously. His thumbs— Well, some people got their hands taken off in prison machinery. It was difficult to arrive at a right attitude, when the letters Hazel had written and made him write also to congressmen and civil rights organizations had resulted in nothing but brief acknowledgments or politely sympathetic replies. He thought of Magran’s new witness, Joseph Dowdy, and wondered what kind of man he was. Then Carter remembered the prosecution’s witness, and he suddenly grew tense. Louise McVay. She was a bank teller, and she remembered Carter coming into the First National Bank of Fremont with a $1,200 check on Triumph made out to Wallace Palmer and signed over by Palmer to Carter. Palmer had needed some cash in a hurry that day, and had asked Carter to pick it up for him, as Carter had to go to the bank anyway for himself. And the prosecution, the school board with its unlimited funds for tracker-downers and its unlimited wrath for having been exploited by crooked contractors and engineers, had managed to find Miss McVay, who remembered what Carter had done that day with the check from Wallace Palmer. Carter had cashed it and pocketed the money. The check had been a perfectly legitimate paycheck, but it looked as if Carter were being paid off. It had made a strong impression on the judge and jury.

  There was a clatter at the elevator, cries for Dr. Cassini, and, sitting up in bed, Carter saw two guards with a bleeding, half-conscious inmate standing in the hall outside.

  The wounded man was young, with curly blond hair. He had been stabbed in the throat, and there was also a cut on his head from which most of the blood was coming. Dr. Cassini, in the little room off the end of the ward called the “operating room,” stitched up the boy’s head. The doctor said the throat cut had not hit the artery, but blood came out of the boy’s mouth every few seconds, and it looked bright red to Carter. The neck wound was a jagged shiv cut, the second Carter had seen. The shivs were made from mess-hall spoons, and Dr. Cassini said there were plenty of shivs in the cell blocks, despite the efforts the guards made to see that every man tossed a spoon back with his tray. Dr. Cassini stitched the neck wound, too, and Carter clipped the sutures for him.

  They got the boy into a bed and gave him a needle, but Carter had hardly got back into his own bed when the boy sat up and screamed, fighting his invisible assailants.

  “Dr. Cassini!” Carter yelled.

  Dr. Cassini came back, disgruntled, tying the belt of his robe. “Ah, these queens. Where’s the needle?”

  Carter and the guard held the boy down, the guard at his head and Carter sitting on his feet.

  “Jesus, nothin’ like peace and quiet,” somebody said from one of the beds.

  “If you don’t like it, go back to your zoo and get a shiv in your neck like this fellow!” Dr. Cassini yelled back.

  The boy began to quieten down, and finally he was only gasping, relaxing. Carter stood up. The guard dismissed himself with a wave.

  Carter walked to his own bed and stood beside it, squeezing his eyes shut. The dim, yellowish purple light from the hall door was a perfect light for his state of mind, he thought, like a sick, false dawn.

  Dr. Cassini slapped him on the shoulder, laughing softly, and Carter recoiled. Emergencies, suffering, blood seemed to put Dr. Cassini in a crazily chipper mood.

  “I’ve seen this guy many a time,” Dr. Cassini said. “His name is Mickey Castle. Older than he looks. The queens know how to hang on to their youth. Ha! He gets cut up every few months. C-zoo, a nasty zoo.”

  A man down the line of beds groaned aggressively, annoyed by Dr. Cassini’s chatter.

  Carter sank down on his bed, and the doctor went back to his room down the hall. It was twenty past 3. The night seemed endless.

  A wild scream roused Carter from his pillow. Mickey was up again, stumbling from his bed, punching with sleepy fists at the air.

  Carter walked toward him. “Take it easy, Mickey! You’re in the hospital ward!”

  Carter hurried to the hall to call Dr. Cassini and the guard—who must have gone to the toilet, because he wasn’t there—and Mickey came at him. Carter heard him and sidestepped, and Mickey crashed against the doorjamb and sank to
the floor. By now the ward was in an uproar, and Dr. Cassini came down the hall at a run.

  The guard and Dr. Cassini got Mickey on to his bed again. This time the boy had knocked himself out.

  “He’s bleeding at the throat again,” Carter said.

  “Oh, that’s not too serious. I’ll take care of that in the morning,” said the doctor.

  The morning was only forty-five minutes off, so Carter said nothing else. Carter lay down on his bed again, and thought for a few seconds of Mickey’s stitches having possibly opened under the bandage on his throat, thought that if he had not been protecting his own thumbs, he might have blocked the boy’s charge against the doorjamb. But if Mickey did not get it this way, he would get it another, and was it up to everybody else in the world to be his keeper, his protector?

  Mickey was dead in the morning. Carter noticed him before anyone else. Under the sheet and blanket the bed was soaking with blood, caught by the rubber sheet below the bottom sheet. Carter was unnerved by the sight. Pulling the sheet and blanket back was like unveiling a crime—which of course was what it was.

  Dr. Cassini blew his stack. He cursed the screws and he cursed the animals. He addressed the entire ward, and many of the men propped themselves up on their elbows to listen, impressed by the fact that one of them had been murdered. “So it’s another pop goes the weasel. And what are the damned screws for, if not to prevent things like this? But how can anybody prevent things like this, if you all behave like a bunch of mad dogs?”

  Carter listened, like the rest, standing motionless. Breakfast trays went uncollected from the dumbwaiter. Carter and Pete could not have done anything about removing the blood-soaked sheets, anyway, as Dr. Cassini was using the bed and the corpse as props for his harangue. Some of what he said sounded quite noble and sincere, reminding Carter of the first words he had heard from Dr. Cassini when he had been brought into the ward almost unconscious. But Dr. Cassini’s righteous indignation had not lasted long. There were two people in Dr. Cassini, at least two. The morphine might create still more personalities in time. Carter was now sure he took it, because he had seen a supply the doctor kept in the room in which he slept.

  That day, Carter could not write anything to Hazel. He was too shaken, not entirely by Mickey, but by everything. Was Dr. Cassini reliable enough to make a judgment on the X-rays of his hands? Carter doubted it. Reliable enough to perform an operation? That was a grim, nightmarish prospect. Carter gave himself a seventh shot of morphine before he went to bed at 9 o’clock. There had been no letter from Hazel that day. Of course, on Saturday, taking off with Sullivan, she had probably been too busy for a letter, but she might have dashed a card.

  An unhappy idea came to him in the middle of the night. He felt he should suggest to Hazel that she move to a bigger town as long as he was in prison. She would probably protest that she didn’t want to go to New York or anywhere else that would keep her from seeing him frequently, but Carter thought he ought to insist. If she went to New York, it would also take her away from David Sullivan, he realized. Carter sighed. That wasn’t his main objective, it really wasn’t his main one.

  On the following Sunday, Carter mentioned it to her.

  “New York,” Hazel said, and was silent for a few seconds, but Carter saw in her face that she had considered it before. “No, Phil, don’t be silly. What would I do in New York?”

  “What’re you doing here? I know how boring that town is. I can’t see that we’ve met any fascinating people in the year we’ve—”

  “I told you in a letter just last week I might go in with Elsie on her shop idea. She doesn’t need any capital from us, you know, just a little hard work.”

  “She’s over fifty. You’d be doing all the hard work.”

  “The town needs a good dress shop.”

  “Is there anybody with taste enough to patronize it?— Are you getting interested in that lousy town?”

  “As long as I’m there—”

  “Honey, I don’t want you to be there. Not another month, not another week! I want you—”

  “Quiet!” said a guard, coming toward Carter. “You think you’re the only guy in here?”

  Carter said a four-letter word under his breath, looked at Hazel, and saw that she had heard it, or seen it. “Sorry. What I was going to say—the fact that you’re twenty miles or so from where I am isn’t doing anything about getting me out of here any faster, honey.” He glanced at the clock. Six minutes to go.

  “I don’t want to talk about it any more, Phil. I want to see you just as much as you want to see me. That’s all we’ve got—just now.”

  Carter drummed with his fingertips on the table, desperate for something to say. “So you—you had a good time Easter, you said.”

  “I didn’t say a good time. I said it was all right.”

  What was she angry with him about, he wondered, the four-letter word? His proposition that she move to New York? The time was so short to straighten things out! “Darling, don’t be annoyed with me. I can’t stand it!”

  “I’m not annoyed with you. You don’t understand,” she said, and looked at the clock also, as if she were eager to be off when the time was up.

  Carter went to the movie that night. He was going to the prison movies more frequently, though the bill of fare was always, or had been so far, stuff that he would never have wasted time on outside of prison. He realized that he listened with enjoyment now, too, to the mediocre and usually filthy jokes for which Alex, the sweep-up, often buttonholed him. Without some compromise, without the movies, and maybe even without the wild stories that passed for jokes, he’d go mad. Men who tried to buck prison life, rejected the movies, counted off their time, became stir-crazy, like animals pacing cages in a zoo. Carter had heard Dr. Cassini talk about such cases, men brought up to the ward with nothing physically wrong with them, yet completely insane or intractable, so that they had to be sent to the next station on the line, the state mental institution, if there was any room for them there. Carter could see that the men who got along best of all were those in good health with nobody in their lives, not even a sister or a mother or a brother who took any interest in them, the men who could laugh at the whole business of prison with a loud and cyni-cal guffaw. These men never missed a movie or a ballgame. Even the guards seemed to like them. And if they were asked, they said they’d do it again, whatever it was that got them to jail. “Like they say in the sociology books, I’m just here improving my style. Ha! Ha!”

  Do a good deed, find God, learn a trade, pray to be a better man, realize that your time in prison can be a blessing, because it can provide time for meditation on your mistakes, and so forth and so forth, said the prison newspaper. It was a four-page newspaper called The Outlook, written entirely by the inmates, except for the warden’s column, which had just as many grammatical mistakes as the rest. Lots of times Carter flung the rag, with its lousy cartoons, its Bible lesson, its corny jokes, its line-up of baseball or basketball players that looked like teams recruited from Skid Row—flung it to the foot of his bed or the floor and indulged in a quiet, “Oh, Jesus.”

  7

  Hazel went into partnership with Elsie Martell in the dress shop venture, and in May her letters were full of descriptions of the shop’s decor, the colors of this and that, even the details of certain dresses and suits they had stocked, though she knew Carter was not very interested in women’s clothes. “You only like dresses once I’m in them,” he remembered Hazel saying once.

  The Dress Box was on Main Street, “next to the big drugstore almost,” Hazel said in a letter. Hazel a partner in a dress shop called the Dress Box on Main Street in a town called Fremont. It seemed fantastic and ludicrous. But it seemed quite real when Hazel wrote that David Sullivan came by in his car at 8 in the evening, had come by a couple of times when they were still working on the wallpapering and staining the new d
ress racks, to take Hazel out to dinner. Once he’d taken both Hazel and Elsie out (that was nice of him), but on at least three evenings, he’d taken Hazel out, “. . . a real treat since I didn’t feel like going home and fixing anything. I’m afraid I was pooped and not very good company. Absolutely too tired to dance, so you can imagine.” She had gone home at 6 to give Timmy his dinner on those evenings. Millie, a teenager who lived in their neighborhood, was now baby-sitting quite often. Timmy was all right in the afternoons, dropped by the school bus, letting himself in the house with his own key which was on a string around his neck, and getting the snack from the refrigerator that Hazel always left for him.

  Carter was brushing up his French in his spare time. Hazel had sent him his French dictionary and his complete Verlaine, and from New York she had ordered the last Prix Goncourt novel. He had had five or six years of French in high school and college. Now, in his reading ability, he was certainly better than he had been in college, but the speaking of it was another matter. Unfortunately, there was no one with whom Carter could practice.

  He had also begun to learn judo-karate from Alex. Alex had said out of the blue one day, “Do you want to learn judo? You ought to, because you’re not going to be able to sock anybody very hard with those thumbs.” Carter thought Alex had a point. One never knew when it might be necessary to sock someone. So, partly to pass the time, Carter began to take lessons from Alex. Alex was shorter than Carter, but close to him in weight. He was careful not to grab Carter’s thumbs in their mock battles. They used the hall for their practice, to the amusement of the bored guard on duty there, usually Clark. Alex had got from somewhere a couple of filthy, lumpy mats that they put down on the floor. Carter wrote to Hazel after three practice sessions: “I’m learning judo from Alex. He learned it in the army and seems to know a lot, but can you get me a book on it? You’ll probably have to order it from the bookshop in Fremont.” He wanted to add that he was still not very good at wrist-grabbing and pulling, because of his thumbs, but the slicing blows with the side of his hand he could execute quite well. Then he decided not to write that, because Hazel was squeamish about violence. One of the blows Alex taught him, to the front of the neck, was what Alex called “a blow to kill.” Hazel got the book, but it was not passed by the censor and Carter never saw it. It was returned to Hazel. Yet the judo practice went on under the eyes of the guard. Carter practiced banging the sides of his hands against wood to harden them, but it jarred his thumbs badly, and he did not get very far with this.