Glass Cell (7 page)

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

H
azel 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 dress 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.

The southern summer was long and hot. Despite the fact that the prison was on rather a height, there was almost never a breeze. When a breeze came, it was hot also, but men in the fields straightened to receive it, took their caps off in defiance of the hellish sun, and let the moving air touch their sweating foreheads. The bricks and stones of the old prison absorbed the sun’s rays week after week, and retained the heat as they had retained the winter’s cold, and by August the cell blocks were like vast ovens, breezeless and suffocating even by night, stinking of urine and the sweat of blacks and whites.

In August, when, Hazel said, the town of Fremont was nearly empty and what people there were were so dazed by the heat that they never left their houses, she went to New York with David Sullivan. Sullivan had some friends there called the Knowltons, who had an apartment on West 53rd Street, just opposite the Museum of Modern Art, and they offered their apartment, which was air-conditioned, to Sullivan for the month of August while they were in Europe. Carter had at first been aghast at the idea of her going, then angry, then simply stunned, or possibly defeated. He went through these emotions within three days of getting her letter about it. It was true that the Knowltons’ twenty-year-old daughter would spend a couple of weekends at the apartment (it seemed to be a huge apartment with a penthouse), since she had a summer job at some resort outside of New York and she had weekends off. It was true that Timmy would be with Hazel. But a big apartment to Carter seemed just as private, just as suspect, in plain words, as a single room in a hotel where they registered as man and wife. Carter wrote, “Haven’t we got money enough for a hotel?”

And Hazel wrote back, “Do you know what it costs to stay a
month
in New York at a hotel? And eating every meal out with Timmy also? I’ll see you Sunday and can talk better then . . .”

On Sunday, Hazel said, “I am very fond of Dave, darling, it’s true, but I swear to you he’s become an old shoe—like an old shoe.” And she laughed, in sudden good spirits such as Carter had not seen since the days they had been together in the house in Fremont—the house where Sullivan was now such a familiar figure, he was like an old shoe.

“I don’t think he thinks of himself as an old shoe to you,” Carter said, not smiling at all.

Hazel looked at him and lifted her eyebrows. “Are you saying you don’t want me to go to New York? With David? Go ahead. You have the right.”

Carter hesitated. Sullivan could escort her, of course, to places she couldn’t go to very well on her own. She’d have more fun with Sullivan. Carter couldn’t deprive her of that. “No. No, I’m not.”

Hazel looked a bit relieved. She smiled at him. “Are you saying you don’t think there’s such a thing as a platonic friendship between a man and a woman?”

Carter smiled. “I suppose that’s what I’m saying.”

“I can assure you from a woman’s point of view there is.”

“A woman’s point of view—is never the same as a man’s.”

“Oh, bosh. Male chauvinism.”

“Older women, not so attractive women, maybe. But you’re too pretty. It gets in the way.”

Anyway, she went, and August for Carter was not an easy month to get through, despite the stream of postcards and letters from Hazel. Timmy adored the Museum of Natural History. Sullivan had taken him one day to the Planetarium, while Hazel went shopping for shoes: she bought three pairs at a sale. “The black patents I’ll save. We’ll go dancing one night and I’ll put them on for the first time . . . What did Dr. Cassini say about the last X-rays?”

Dr. Cassini said a lot of mumbo jumbo, but the essential thing was that the posterior end of the second phalanx was abnormally large now and could not be put back into its socket. The paring down of the bone, which Carter suggested, was an operation evidently beyond Dr. Cassini’s abilities. He did not advise trying it. Carter wanted to see another doctor, a hand specialist, but he thought he might be out by the autumn, or by December, after the Supreme Court hearing, so he did not press to get a specialist’s examination in August. It would involve permission from the warden, armed escort in case he had to leave the prison to see the specialist, a snarl of red tape that dismayed Carter even to imagine. The swelling was much less in his thumbs, and he did not wear bandages now, but the skin was pink, as if it glowed with the faint and ever-present pain beneath. There was no strength in his thumbs to mention. They were as useless as appendices, almost, yet not quite, otherwise Carter would have considered having them amputated. He still took at least four big shots, or about six grains, of morphine per day. That amount was a necessity. He had started out with one or two grains per day. So his addiction had increased.

Hazel and Timmy were away three weeks and two days. She flew back on a Saturday so that she could see him the next day. On that Saturday, a day so hot there were seven cases of heat prostration brought up to the ward, Carter received a letter from Lawrence Magran saying with great regret that the Supreme Court of the State had denied the request for a new trial.

Carter had a strange reaction. He sat down with the letter on his bed. He felt no shock at all, no surprise or disappointment, even though in the last month or so he had been feeling more and more confident that he would get a new trial. Magran had found three more witnesses of Palmer’s check-cashing and two more banks had been uncovered to add to the three others where Palmer had been tucking money away like a squirrel. It had certainly seemed “new and significant evidence” to Carter, and that was what was needed to warrant a new trial. Magran himself had thought so, too, even though Palmer’s total deposits amounted to less than $50,000. Magran said he was surprised and profoundly sorry, and that he would come to see Carter, if not this Sunday then the next. Carter got up and walked to the window at the end of the ward. Half a mile away, shimmering in the heat of the sunset, he saw the great arched sign, like signs he had seen at the entrances to amusement parks or cemeteries, that spanned the road to the prison: STATE PENITENTIARY it said, backward, and on clear days without heat waves the letters were quite legible from the window. A black car moved toward it, raising a trail of dust, passed under the sign and out, into the world. Hazel doesn’t know yet, he thought suddenly. At that very minute she was in the air. Her plane was due to land at 7:10 p.m. She was flying home at several hundred miles an hour—for this piece of rotten news.

The prison has absolutely knocked out my feelings, Carter said to himself, and it was this that made him angry.

By 7:30 p.m., his thoughts had entirely changed, and he was sitting at Dr. Cassini’s typewriter in a room down the hall, laboriously (as far as the typing went) writing a letter to Lawrence Magran. After acknowledging Magran’s letter and its news, he wrote:

I see no hope anywhere now except in what David Sullivan may be able to discover in the way of new facts and in particular facts as to Gregory Gawill’s connections, if any, with Palmer’s activities. Or—if any—Gawill’s deposits in various banks. I realize this would only spread the guilt a little more thinly, but Sullivan may yet come up with more witnesses. According to my wife, he is still keenly interested in the case. Would eight or ten witnesses, if we had them, count for more than the few we’ve got?

Carter went to bed, though it was not much after 8 o’clock. He felt too discouraged and paralyzed even to take a morphine shot as he usually did before trying to sleep. His thumbs were throbbing gently, just enough to be annoying, just enough possibly to keep him awake—for how long? Until 1, perhaps, when the pain would get so bad he’d have to take a shot? The morphine he saw as another enemy. Was that going to get him, too, like the prison? A curious enemy, the morphine, both a friend and an enemy, just like a living person. Like David Sullivan, for instance. Like the law, which in some cases protected people—there was no doubt of that—and in some cases persecuted them, there was no doubt of that, either.

Hazel had heard the news when she came to see him on Sunday. Carter knew she had as soon as she came into the visiting room. Her smile was a little forced, there was none of the sparkle that usually radiated from her, attracting the eyes of guards and inmates, too. She said that Sullivan had telephoned Magran that morning, and Magran had told him. Then Sullivan had called her.

“I’m sorry, Haze,” Carter said. He thought of the many letters she had written, angry letters, naïve letters and—with such patience and second drafts—formal letters to the local newspaper, to the
New York Times
, to the governor. Hazel had always sent him the carbons to read.

“David’s here,” Hazel said. “He wants to see you.”

She sounded so low, Carter made a great effort to appear strong. “Well, Magran once said there’s no law against appealing twice to the Supreme Court. Magran didn’t say anything about coming today, did he?”

“No. I don’t know. He might’ve said something to David.”

They made an effort to talk about New York, about pleasant things she and Timmy had done there.

Carter said, “Timmy’s not too bored, back in Fremont?”

“Oh, Phil!” Hazel suddenly plunged forward, her face in her hands.

The top of her head, her glossy hair was very near Carter’s hands, separated from his hands by the glass. “Darling, don’t cry,” Carter said, trying to laugh. “We’ve got eight minutes yet.”

Hazel looked up and sat back. “I’m not,” she said calmly, though her eyes were wet.

And then, somehow, they managed to talk about New York until the time was up.

“I’ll write you tonight,” Hazel said as she left. “Stay for David, darling.”

Sullivan was just then walking into the room.

“I have a visitor,” Carter said, indicating Sullivan.

The guard verified on Sullivan’s pass that he was to see Carter, and then Carter and Sullivan took chairs opposite each other.

David Sullivan was about thirty-five, a couple of inches taller than Carter and more slender ordinarily, though Carter had lost about fifteen pounds since going to prison. Sullivan had blue eyes, rather like Carter’s but the blue in Sullivan’s was stronger. His eyes were smallish, and their expression was nearly always the same: calm, poised, thoughtful, like Sullivan himself. Sullivan did not waste words in commiserating with him over the Supreme Court rejection.

“Of course, you can appeal a second time,” Sullivan said. “I’m sure Magran has that in mind. Don’t take this as a defeat, Phil. We’ll just come at them again with more facts and we’ll have more time to gather them.”

Carter’s feelings were ambiguous, his thoughts also. Carter felt his case had become a sort of hobby with Sullivan. Years from now, if Sullivan ever wrote his memoirs, there would be a few pages devoted to the baffling and maddening Carter case. “Carter’s wife became my wife, the partner of my . . .” Carter checked his wandering mind and tried to listen.