Glass Cell (3 page)

3

I
t was Wednesday before Carter could walk. Dr. Cassini got for him a new suit of prison clothes, which fitted him better than the ones he had been wearing. He was still weak. His weakness shocked him.

“It’s not unusual,” said Dr. Cassini.

Carter nodded, his mind baffled and blank as it always was when the doctor spoke in his matter-of-fact way about the Hole. “But you said you’d seen other cases—like mine.”

“Oh, yes, a few. After all, I’ve been here four years— Look, I’m not saying what they do is right. I’ve sent letters to the warden. He promises to look into it. He fires a guard or has him transferred.” Dr. Cassini’s hands flew out in a hopeless gesture, then he adjusted his rimmed glasses nervously and blinked at Carter. “You try to fight city hall and you go crazy. I’m not going to be here much longer.” He nodded, as if to confirm himself, and Carter immediately became suspicious. “It’s time for another shot for you, isn’t it?”

Carter wrote a letter to the warden, whose name was Joseph J. Pierson, with regard to Moonan and Cherniver. He had intended to make the letter brief, calm and to the point. The result was such a masterpiece of understatement, Carter was seized briefly by an attack of mirth. It read:

Dear Warden Pierson,

I should like to call to your attention that on the afternoon of March 1, I was strung up by the thumbs in one of the basement rooms of the institution for nearly forty-eight hours. I was repeatedly revived with buckets of cold water when I fainted. The result is that my thumbs are permanently damaged, the second joints having been pulled from their sockets. The guards who did this are Mr. Moonan and Mr. Cherniver. I respectfully request that you exercise your authority in regard to this incident.

Yours faithfully,   

Philip E. Carter

(37765) 

P.S. I would be grateful if I could have a full list of prison rules and regulations so that I may avoid an accumulation of demerits in future.

Carter had heard from one of the inmates that Warden Pierson was scrupulous about acknowledging letters of all sorts, but never answered any of them. At any rate, Carter dropped the letter in the slot marked “Intramural,” and that was that. Patience and fortitude, he thought. It was going to be a long, slow fight, whatever Hazel thought. He was going to see Hazel on Sunday. Dr. Cassini had put in a special request that he might see his wife. In just seventy-two more hours, he would see her for twenty minutes. A cheerful fatalism buoyed him up: they couldn’t very well kill him before Sunday afternoon, so nothing seemed to stand in the way of his seeing Hazel. In the hospital ward it was impossible to acquire demerits, because he was not actually doing anything, walking anywhere, or using any prison tools or facilities other than the toilet.

He reread
Wuthering Heights
, and wrote to Hazel:

My darling,

Imagine sitting in prison and reading Emily Brontë? Things are not so bad, are they? Please do not worry, above all don’t get angry if you can help it. I was angry the first weeks here and it got me nothing but a lot of demerits and ill will from the guards. Best not even to feel the anger if you can help it. Make like the yogis or the passive-resistance boys. We are up against something a lot bigger than we are.

Am glad Timmy is doing better with his reading, glad also he is not getting any heckling lately at school. Or are you sure? He would tell you, wouldn’t he? But I’m not so sure. He might frown and be silent. Is he frowning and silent? Tell me. I am writing him a letter next, so you will miss one from me, but meanwhile tell Timmy I think he is great for doing such a good job as man of the house while I am not there. I mean snow shoveling. After all a half inch of snow is a rough job!

Am helping out in the ward as much as I can—bedpans and other charming chores. Don’t worry about my hands. Am not writing too badly as you see. I love you, darling.

Phil

The effort of writing tired him like hard labor, and the writing was pretty bad—wobbly and nearly every letter separate from the next.

“Mistuh Carter,” said the Negro urgently. “Mistuh Carter—”

Carter went to the foot of the Negro’s bed, lifted between his two palms the bedpan from the low table there, and slipped it under the covers.

“Thank y’, sir.”

“You’re welcome,” Carter murmured, although the Negro could not hear him.

On Sunday, Carter took extra care with his shaving. It was another great advantage of the hospital ward that he could shower and shave daily, instead of twice a week being herded with the others to the showers and the barbers. He had a second shower at noon, and he also shined his heavy shoes. He took as much trouble with himself as he had for his wedding, and he considered telling Hazel that and decided not to, because she might not think it very funny. Carter pressed his baggy trousers in a room down the hall from the ward which had an iron and an ironing board and a sink in it. Then he put on the white shirt that inmates were allowed to wear on Sundays, if they had a visitor. It was a short-sleeved shirt with overlong collar tabs—inmates were not allowed ties because they might hang themselves, Carter supposed—but at least the shirt was white, and a change from flesh color was a treat.

He looked at himself in the mirror by the ward door, and tried to see himself as Hazel would. There were depressions under his eyes, though they were not dark. Certainly his face was thinner. And he looked at least thirty-five, he thought, not thirty. Even his lips seemed thinner and more taut, even his head narrower, but that was due to the prison haircut, of course. His blue eyes looked out at him like the eyes of another person, tired, hard, and vaguely suspicious.

Dr. Cassini walked up and slapped him on the shoulder. “All dolled up, eh, Philip?”

Carter nodded, smiling, and suddenly his heart began to beat faster with excitement. He had a feeling of giddy anticipation, as if time had turned back and he were about to call for Hazel on a date, rushing back down to Gramercy Park in a taxi with a box of flowers across his lap, running up her front steps two at a time—and Hazel opening the brown door with the brass knob before he touched the knocker.

“Want another shot?”

“No, I’m okay, thanks.” His thumbs were starting to hurt a little, but he didn’t want another shot now, at 12:30. He had had a shot at 10, and he thought it should last until 1:50, when Hazel’s visit would be over. By ten past 1, the jabs from the pulses in his thumbs were growing more acute, and Carter was tempted to get a quick shot from Pete, which he could have had just for the asking, but he decided to stick by his little vow to himself that he wouldn’t, just before he saw Hazel. He had Pete bandage his thumbs so they would not shock her.

He went down in the elevator with his pass signed by Dr. Cassini and the guard named Clark in the hospital corridor. Carter had to show the pass three times, each time acquiring a new signature or initials, before he reached his old A-block, at the front end of which was the entrance to the visiting room. By then he was beginning to feel weak in the knees.

Carter saw Hanky’s blobby figure walking ahead of him and along the left side of the corridor, heading for their old cell, probably. Carter slowed his walk so that he would not overtake Hanky or be seen by him. Carter peered through the bars as he walked toward them, but he could not identify Hazel among the figures in the waiting area. The lobby, or waiting room, had benches like church pews with an aisle down the middle. At the back near the outside door was a coffee-vending machine and a candy-and-gum machine. Between the cell block and the waiting room was an area of some twenty feet square enclosed on two sides by walls and on the other two sides by bars that went from floor to ceiling. This enclosure was called the cage. There were always two guards in the cage, and the two doors were never opened at the same time, nor was a visitor ever allowed in the cage while an inmate was in it, even if the inmate was only handing the outgoing mailbag to a guard. In the cage, to the right as one faced the waiting room, was a locked door through which visitors were admitted to the visiting room one floor below the block. Inmates who had visitors were admitted by a door near the cage in the corridor.

Carter saw Hazel when he was about twenty feet from the cage. She was standing at the tall desk on the right in the waiting room, showing her identification card to the officer there. Carter’s heart floated up in his chest, and he slowly turned around, so that the guard who leaned against the wall on his right would not assume he had come to stare.

“Santoz!” called the guard by the prisoners’ entrance door.

“Here!” A man trotted forward.

“Colligan!”

Sullen, indifferent, vaguely envious faces watched as men in white shirts detached themselves from the sluggish mass in the corridor and came alive, hurrying to the visiting-room door with their passes.

“Carter!”

The guard took his pass, scribbled on it, and motioned him through. Carter went down the dimly lighted stairway. It led to a long room divided by a glass wall with a shallow, table-high shelf and straight chairs on either side of it. Nearly all the chairs were taken. The visitors had their entrance at the other end of the room and on the other side of the barrier. There were four armed guards, one in each corner of the room. Carter kept his eyes on the visitors’ door as he walked, looking for Hazel.

Then she came in, and he moved forward, still looking at her, toward a free chair which was on the other side of the barrier, pointed to it, and managed to find an empty chair for himself. Hazel wore her blue tweed coat with a bright scarf tucked in at her neck. To Carter, the colors she wore seemed spectacularly brilliant and beautiful, like flowers or birds’ plumage. Her red lips smiled, though her eyes were tense. She looked at his hands.

Carter pushed his underlip out, smiled and shrugged. “They don’t hurt— You’re looking wonderful.” He tried to speak loudly and distinctly, because of the glass.

“What do they say is the matter with them? Did they say anything else?” Hazel asked.

“Nothing else.” Carter swallowed and glanced at the clock. He sat on the edge of the hard chair. Before he knew it, the twenty minutes would be gone, and he was already wasting precious seconds in silence—except that he was seeing her. “How is Timmy?”

“Timmy’s all right. He’s fine.” Hazel moistened her lips. “You’ve lost some weight.”

“Not much.”

“Mr. Magran said he would come today to see you.”

Her voice reminded him of clear, cool water. He had not heard a woman’s voice in six weeks. “It’s wonderful to see you.” Carter was annoyed by the voice of the man on his left, who was talking to a man in a dark suit on Hazel’s right, perhaps the inmate’s lawyer. The inmate was saying in a loud, annoyed voice: “I dunno, I just dunno. Why d’y’ keep askin’ me that?” The inmate’s voice was louder to Carter than Hazel’s.

“Did you get a statement yet from the doctor?” she asked.

His thumbs pulsed more quickly. His forehead was cool with sweat. “He—he has to take more X-rays. He can’t say what’s the matter yet. Not entirely.”

“Then it’s worse than you told me, isn’t it?”

“I just don’t know, honey. It’s the joints—”
Tell me the names of the guards who did it
, Hazel had written in one of her letters.
It’s absolutely illegal in this day and age
. The word “illegal” was strange, in view of some of the things he had seen in the prison. What about the old man in A-block whose false teeth had broken in half and who couldn’t get them fixed and couldn’t eat anything now but soup? Was that a legal way to treat a man in jail? Carter felt he was choking, as if he might burst into tears. I only want to put my head in her lap, he thought, and he sat up straighter. “I’ll get the statement from Cassini as soon as I can.”

“David can use it, you know,” Hazel said earnestly.

“David? I thought Magran wanted it.”

“David said he’d take it to the Governor in person. David’s a lawyer, too, you know. He’d take it sooner than Magran. Right away.”

“Who’s handling my case, Sullivan or Magran?” Carter said quickly. His hands rested on the table like a boxer’s. The thumbs pulsed as if blood were going to come shooting out the tips of the bandage at any moment. “I hear you’re seeing Sullivan a lot,” he said, and saw in her face that he had hurt her.

“I see him as often as I tell you I see him. I’d really be down in the dumps without him, Phil. All the neighbors calling and dropping in— What can they do? David at least knows something about the law.”

“That might be—might be something we’d all better forget about.”

“What?”

“The law. Where is it? What good is it?”

Hazel sighed. “Oh, darling. You’re tired and you’re in pain.” She reached nervously into her bag for a cigarette, started to extend the pack to Carter before she remembered the barrier that went all the way to the ceiling. “Haven’t you got a cigarette?”

“I forgot ’em. I don’t want one. It doesn’t matter.” He did want one, and he watched her closely as she lighted it. Her hands shook slightly. A frown put a line between her brows. Her forehead was very smooth, quite without lines. Her complexion was very clear, and to Carter it seemed now so beautiful it was unreal, like something painted on canvas or on glass. There was a natural pinkness in her cheeks and in her lips. She had a small mouth and the softest lips Carter had ever seen, or kissed. He wondered if Sullivan had kissed them, or if Sullivan ever would.

“What are the guards’ names?” Hazel asked. “Were you afraid to write them in a letter to me?”

Carter glanced to right and left automatically. “I wasn’t afraid, I just thought it might get censored. It’s Moonan and Cherniver.”

“Moonan and what?” Her dark blue eyes looked directly at him.

“Cherniver. C-h-e-r-n-i-v-e-r.”

“I’ll remember. But I want you to get that statement immediately from the doctor. The X-rays can wait. We’ll get another statement about those.”

“Okay, honey.” He racked his brain for something cheerful to say to her, some incident to make her smile. There had been laughter in the ward over a few things, but now he could not think of one. Carter smiled. “Sullivan taking you out to dinner tonight? As usual?”