Glass Cell (8 page)

“I’m doing the same with Gawill, in other words, as Tutting tried to do with Palmer. I’m checking even with his liquor dealers, and believe me there’s plenty of them, as to how much and when he spent it. Unfortunately, a lot of the dealers haven’t kept their old bills.” Sullivan’s tanned forehead wrinkled, his sun-whitened eyebrows jutted forward as he ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Gawill was with Palmer in New York on at least two occasions. They were careful enough not to stay in the same hotel or even to fly from here in the same plane. That’s part of what I was doing in New York, inquiring at ten or twenty hotels there.”

Part of what he was doing.

“All this takes time. I know it’s not fun for you spending the time in this superannuated—” Sullivan looked around him, at the ceiling. “They should’ve torn this place down about the turn of the century. If not before.”

“Or never built it.”

“That’s more like it,” Sullivan said with a laugh. He had good teeth, a trifle small for his long face, like his mouth.

Carter knew he should comment on Gawill’s having been to New York when Palmer was there. Gawill had probably been sharing Palmer’s girl friends. Gawill was a party-loving bachelor, too, like Palmer. But Carter couldn’t comment. “So you had a good time in New York—Hazel said.”

“Oh, I hope she did. She was off on her own a lot, except in the evenings. I was introducing my old friends to Hazel and she was introducing hers to me, so the evenings were usually pretty social. Timmy went with us most of the time, because we were at people’s houses a lot and we could just put him in a back room when he got sleepy.”

“How do you think Hazel’s bearing up—really? You can spend so much more time with her than I can.”

Sullivan’s face grew more serious.

Carter waited, wishing his question hadn’t sounded so plaintive, so dependent on what Sullivan thought.

“I think it’s a good thing she went into this dress shop venture. It gives her something to do. Not that she hasn’t enough to do, but to take her mind off— You know. She’s got a lot of strength. Strength of will, I guess you’d call it,” Sullivan said.

“She’s very fond of you—she says.”

“Oh, yes. Well, I hope so,” Sullivan said in a frank tone.

“And—I’m sure you like her, too, or you wouldn’t spend so much time with her.”

Sullivan blinked, on guard, but he smiled slightly and his face was quite unworried. “Phil, if I had any dishonorable intentions with your wife, do you think I’d come visiting you in prison? Do you think I or anyone else could be that hypocritical?”

Gawill had simply said Sullivan was that hypocritical. “I didn’t say you had any dishonorable intentions,” Carter said, feeling uncomfortable now.

“Hazel’s probably the most loyal woman I’ve ever met.”

Because he’d tried her and found out?

“It shows in everything,” Sullivan went on. “All she talks about is you, writing you, seeing you. And around Fremont, when we take drives, she points out spots where you walked or had a picnic.” Sullivan shrugged, looking pensively down at the tabletop now. “She talks about the things you’ll do when you get out. She wants to go to Europe. You two were there once, weren’t you?”

“Yes.” They had had their honeymoon in Europe, a present from Uncle John and Aunt Edna. “Are you in love with her?” Carter asked.

A flush came in Sullivan’s cheeks, and a blank, solemn expression came over his face. “There’s really no reason for you to ask that.”

Carter smiled a little. “No, maybe there isn’t. But I’m asking.”

“I don’t think it’s of the slightest importance.”

“Oh, come on. I think it’s of great importance,” Carter said quickly.

“All right, since you’re asking,” Sullivan said, his voice steady and professional again, “I am in love with her. And nothing can be done about it. I’m not trying to do anything about it.”

“Oh. Did you tell her?”

“Yes. She said—it was impossible. She said maybe I’d better not see her anymore. And she was sorry, that I could see,” Sullivan said with a glance at Carter. “Consequently, I was sorry, too, that I told her.”

Carter’s eyes were fixed on his face.

“So I said, all right, I didn’t ever have to mention it again, but I’d still like to see her.”

“I see,” Carter said, not seeing at all, really. All he saw was a dangerous situation in which something would have to explode at some time.

“I suppose it was six months ago that I told her. Since then I’ve never mentioned it.” He looked levelly at Carter, serious and self-possessed, and rather as if he thought himself pretty noble.

“Do you enjoy this kind of self-torture?”

“I don’t consider it self-torture. I like it better than not seeing her at all,” Sullivan said, without a trace of humor or a smile.

Carter nodded. “If I hadn’t been in prison, would you have told her? Would you even have been in love with her?”

Sullivan took a moment. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you know,” Carter said in a nasty way, and saw it jog Sullivan as if he had poked him in the face.

Sullivan pushed his chair back from the table and recrossed his legs. “Well, you’re right. Of course it had something to do with it. I didn’t know how long you were going to be in prison, neither did Hazel. Neither do we now. A man can ask, can’t he, if he’s in love? That’s all I did.”

Carter pressed his thumbs against the matchbook he was holding on the table. “I thought you said you told her, not asked her anything.”

“I didn’t ask her anything. I told her I loved her. It didn’t go on from there.”

Carter did not believe that. But if Hazel was still willing to see Sullivan, what he had said could not have been too annoying, or importunate. Carter knew Hazel: she wouldn’t spend time with any man who annoyed her. That, in fact, was the most important thing in the picture. “It’s—sort of like working at cross-purposes, isn’t it, being in love with Hazel and trying to get me out of this place?”

Sullivan gave a laugh. “Don’t be silly. As far as Hazel goes, I think I’d have the same chance with her whether you were in or out. The point is, I have no chance.”

What kind of sense did that make, Carter thought, when Sullivan had just said he wouldn’t have said anything to Hazel, if he hadn’t been off the scene—in prison?

“You might say,” Sullivan went on, “if I really care about Hazel, I’ll help her to get what she wants and that’s you.”

Carter spread his elbows on the table and smiled. A couple of colorful prison expressions for that kind of talk came to his mind. “I don’t believe in the age of chivalry. Anymore,” he added.

“Oh. I’m sure you do. From what Hazel tells me here and there. Don’t let prison make you callous, Phil.”

Carter said nothing.

“Do you think I’m dragging my feet on this Gawill investigation?” Sullivan asked, leaning forward. “I’m inquiring about his behavior on his former jobs, too, from New Orleans to . . . to Pittsburgh. Back to here. Gawill knows it. Even if he’s innocent—I mean in the Triumph affair—he hasn’t a clean past and the word is spreading and Gawill’s squirming. Drexel knows about it. Drexel might fire him, just on the suspicions I’ve raised about him. Drexel ought to fire him, but it’d look too much as if Drexel weren’t very bright about his own staff when your trial was on.”

Sullivan looked at him expectantly, then in a baffled, angry way as Carter said nothing: “If I go too far—if I’m a little too successful, Gawill, I’m sure, wouldn’t mind putting me out of commission.”

“How could he?”

“I mean killing me. Having me killed, of course.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“He was with a very tough company in New Orleans, and there was a mysterious killing there. Gawill kept clear of it, of course, so did the whole company he was with. But a fellow named Beauchamp who was in the State Legislature and very noisy about upholding parish laws, was found strangled in a bayou. Then the company Gawill was with pushed their building plans through. Oh, it’s a detail from your point of view, maybe, but my point is, Gawill is that kind of man. He’ll have somebody eliminated who’s—”

A guard touched Carter’s shoulder, and Carter rose. “Sorry,” Carter said.

Sullivan stood up, and his frown of intensity left his face. He was once more upright and calm. “I’ll see you soon again, Phil. Keep your chin up.” Then he turned and walked quickly away.

8

F
rom time to time, Carter took medicines and pills to inmates in the various cell blocks. There were six cell blocks, and C was the worst, as Dr. Cassini had said. The gray stone walls of C-block looked dirtier, it was darker (due to several electric lights not functioning), and the men seemed older and quieter, yet the atmosphere was more sullenly hostile than in the other blocks. The memory of Cherniver’s murder was still fresh in Carter’s mind and perhaps in the minds of all the others. The inmates could pass over a man like a flood. For a few seconds, a score, any score of them could get their whacks in, and then the flood could move on, innocent of face, calm in manner, the guilty ones nameless, unidentifiable, because they were all equally guilty. And if he had been in good health with a strong pair of hands, Carter thought, and if he had been walking close enough to Cherniver that day? Yes, he might have got his whack in, too, even without the added inspiration of having been bullied by Cherniver personally.

The cell blocks of the State Penitentiary were connected, all six of them, though only four, A to D, were of the original structure. These did not connect at right angles and did not form a square. Blocks E and F were simply hitched to each other, E-block to one end of D-block. From a distance, and Carter remembered it from his approach by car in November, the prison looked like an ancient wreck of a six-carriage train in which the carriages had piled up due to a sudden stopping of the first. Double doors with a guard at each door divided blocks A to D, and individual men with passes were let through in the same manner in which guards let men through the cage at the front of A-block. The mess hall and workshops and laundry were below some of the blocks, and men marched in double file to these places. The pairing off and marching began as each batch from its own block entered a new block. The L that E- and F-blocks made had been turned into an enclosure by a high fence of heavy wire topped by barbed wire. This was the recreation yard, where, between 4 and 5 o’clock, shifts of men pranced and trotted under the eyes of a dozen guards who stood around the edges armed with machine guns. The prison was now so overcrowded that not all the inmates could eat at once, and there were two shifts for meals.

In E-block, there was a bull of a man about fifty years old with a sore behind his left ear. Dr. Cassini had seen him up in the ward and dismissed him with instructions to use a certain ointment. Now Carter was delivering a second tin of it. The man was alone in his cell. Carter asked him where his cellmate was.

“Lucky bastard went home. Mother died.”

“Home?”

“Yeah, he’ll be gone for two nights. Chicago. See his wife.” The bullethead lifted and looked at Carter with a sly wink.

The man rambled on. A couple of furlough screws went with Sweepey, and he’d had to go handcuffed, even on the train up, but he’d get to spend two nights with his wife. Carter was lost in a kind of incredulity, as if the man had told him a fantastic story of physical disappearance, metamorphosis, of slipping through keyholes.

Carter shook his head suddenly, shocked by the intensity of his own thoughts. “Lucky guy,” he said automatically.

The bullethead scowled at him, angry at the interruption. Then, to Carter’s complete surprise, he stood up and drew his right fist back.

Carter stepped back, over the raised threshold of the cell and into the corridor.

The man yelled a two-word curse and threw the little tin of ointment as hard as he could. It hit the wall of the cell beside the door, came open and the lid spun, sounding like a silly giggle, before it came to rest on the floor.

Four days later, Carter faked a request, got a pass from Clark, and went back to cell twenty-seven in E-block just to see Sweepey. He carried another tin of the ointment. It was just after 4, when the inmates of E-block were in their cells awaiting the bell for late supper. This time the bullethead was not in the cell, but Sweepey was, sitting with the earphones on, whistling and jigging in his chair and snapping his fingers.

“Hello, pill-pusher, and what can I do for you?” He seemed so elated, he might have been drunk.

“I brought some more stuff for your chum.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell him.”

Carter’s eyes moved from the man’s dark hair down his body to his prison shoes and up again. “Heard you just went home.”

“Yeah, not much fun, but still it was home. My mother died.” He was still in the mood of the music, obviously wanting to put the earphones on again.

“Well—at least you saw your wife,” Carter said with a blunt naïveté. He was ready to leave, he had not even entered the cell, only tossed the ointment onto the lower bunk, but he could not tear himself away. He stared at Sweepey, trying to see some magical sign of it all.

“Yeah, it’s gotta last me a long time.” Sweepey guffawed. “My old man’s dead, nobody left except my sister and she’s the pitcher of health!” He put on the earphones and turned back to the little table. “Thanks for Jeff,” he said.

Carter went away.

It was two or three months after that, around Thanksgiving, that Carter met Max Sampson. Max was in B-block, where Carter was delivering some cough medicine. The delivery was not to Max’s cell. Carter noticed him because he was reading a French book—paperbound with the title
Le Promis
in red—sitting at the little table in his cell. He was alone. Carter paused by the half-open cell door.

“Pardon me,” Carter said.

The man looked up.

“You’re French?”

The man smiled. His face was friendly, calm, and very pale. His large, strong forehead looked almost white below his black and slightly wavy hair. “Naw. I just read it sometimes.”

“Can you speak it?”

“I used to. Yeah, I can speak it. Why?” Again he smiled.

The smile by itself was a pleasure for Carter, a smile being such a rare thing in the prison. Sneers, yes, and guffaws, but not simply a natural, happy-looking smile. “I only asked because I’m studying it—on my own. Vouz pouvez parler—vraiment?”

“Oui.” Now the wider smile showed strong white teeth, whiter than his face.

Carter talked with him for ten minutes, until the bell rang for lunch and Max had to leave. They talked both in French and in English, and Carter became strangely excited and happy. When Carter hesitated for a word, Max supplied it, if he could guess it. Max had about twenty books lined up in a row at the back of his cell, and half of them were French books. Very generously he pressed two of them on Carter, one a book of eighteenth-century French poetry, the other selections from Pascal’s
Pensées
. They were a loan, of course, but Max said he did not care when he got them back. Carter returned to the ward feeling completely changed. Max was the first person he had met in the prison whom he felt glad to know, with whom he felt a friendship could grow. It was a wonderful thing. In that ten minutes, he had learned that Max was from Wisconsin; his father had been an American but his mother was French; and from the age of five to eleven he had lived in France with his mother and gone to school there. He had been in prison five years, he had said airily in answer to Carter’s question. He had not said why he was in prison, and Carter was really not interested in knowing.

Max had said that he was competing with another inmate in B-block to achieve the whitest prison pallor by Christmas Eve. The bet was six cans of instant coffee, and Max thought he was going to win, even though his competitor was a blond. Because of the bet, Max shielded his face carefully in the twice-a-week airings in the recreation yard. A panel of six inmate judges had already been chosen to pick the winner. “I’ve always been pale,” Max had said in his slow, distinct French, with a smile. “Very early it was plain I was marked for a life in prison.”

They had an appointment to meet again at 3:35 in Max’s cell the following day.

In the golden light of his new acquaintance, Hazel’s last letter sounded melancholic, even lugubrious. She had written:

Darling, do you think that fate (or God) put this awful trial in our path to test us? Please forgive me if I sound mystical. That’s the way I feel tonight—and many nights. One way of looking at this—our awful lives now, each awful in its own way—is that it is a test given to very few people. We have come through it so well up to now, I mean as far as fortitude goes. So let us continue and see it through. My thoughts are no doubt influenced by the talk I had (over the phone) with Mr. Magran this afternoon . . .

Magran had told her that they couldn’t appeal again until mid-January to the State Supreme Court, owing to the holidays. That seemed now no blow at all to Carter. He wrote:

You are always asking me why I haven’t met anybody decent in this place, and I’m always saying there isn’t anybody decent, but as of today I take that back. By accident I met a nice fellow who knows French (reads and speaks it) so now I have someone to practice with. His name is Max Sampson, he is about my age, tall, dark-haired, and very pale. More about the pallor when I see you. He is in B-block, but I think I can visit him when I like.

Then Carter realized he had nothing more to say about Max, because he didn’t know anything more, except the bit about his French mother.

In the next days, Carter still did not learn much more about Max, but their twenty- or twenty-five minute meetings in Max’s cell were the highspots of Carter’s day. Max’s cellmate was a large, good-natured Negro, who couldn’t understand more than “oui” of their French, but he kept out of their way in the upper bunk while Carter was with Max, and read his old worn-out comic books or listened to the earphones. Carter’s letters were now full of Max, and he talked about Max to Hazel when he saw her on Sundays. To Carter’s surprise, Hazel seemed almost resentful of his new friend.

“I thought you wanted me to find someone I liked in this hellhole,” Carter said.

“Do you realize that out of nearly twenty minutes you’ve spent more than ten talking about him?” Hazel smiled, but her annoyance was plain.

“I’m sorry. It’s a dull life I lead here, darling. Had you rather I talked about—oh, say, the couple of dimwits in the ward now who nearly blinded themselves drinking alcohol from the typewriter repair shop?” Carter laughed. He laughed more easily since meeting Max. “I’d like you to meet Max. He’s— Well, I think from a woman’s point of view, he’s not even bad-looking.”

But Hazel was never to meet Max. She might have met him by asking to see him one Sunday, by stating that she was a friend, and Carter thought of this, but Max declined it. “Oh, I think it’s better if I don’t. Bad luck,” he said in English, so Carter never proposed it again. He had not proposed it to Hazel either, sensing that she would say no also. Hazel could never see Max even in the visiting room, because Max never had any visitors. He had no family, he said, and the only person who had ever visited him was his former landlord, a man who had rented a room in his house to him just before Max went to prison. He had come twice to the prison, but that had been in Max’s first year. Still, Carter thought it spoke well for Max that his last landlord had visited him twice. But Carter asked no questions about Max’s past. Max had asked none about his, but he had noticed Carter’s thumbs, knew what had caused their deformity, and had said only, “This is a cruel place,” in a tone of resignation, in French.

Max and Carter went to the movie together on Saturday and Sunday nights. It was good to have someone beside him who thought the films just as mediocre as he did. Their friendship was noticed, of course, by some of the guards as well as many inmates. Some of the inmates assumed they were homosexual, and made comments to Carter’s face and behind his back, within his hearing. Carter was not bothered by the comments, but he was a little concerned about what they might lead to. Some inmates took a pleasure in beating up men who engaged in homosexual practices. Carter was careful to look behind him as he walked to Max’s cell block in the afternoons, lest anybody jump on him. The door of Max’s cell was always open when he was there—not that one could not have seen through its bars, anyway—and the Negro was there, too. Carter realized he had never even touched Max, even to shake hands.

“Studying forgery?” the guard in Max’s cell block asked one afternoon as he let Carter by.

“Forgery?”

“I seen you writing sometimes in there.” He nodded toward Max’s cell. “He’s a good forger, Max. One of the best.” The guard smiled.

Carter waved a hand, tried to smile, and went on. He thought of Max’s slow, clear writing which Carter had seen in his notebooks. Max kept a diary sporadically, and occasionally he wrote a poem in French. His handwriting had a curiously innocent look. Forgery. It was an unpleasant shock to Carter, as if someone had snatched off Max’s clothes and Carter saw him in the nude. Well, Carter thought, at least he wasn’t in for murder.

It had occurred to Carter that, because of knowing Max, a second rejection from the Supreme Court, if it came, would be easier to bear. Thus Carter tried to prepare himself in advance for the worst. The second rejection came in the 5:30 p.m. post one day in April. This time, it shocked him more than the first rejection. His impulse was to run at once to Max’s cell, but it was not possible to see Max at that hour. Carter went into the toilet and lost the supper he had eaten an hour before. He did not want to see anyone or talk to anyone, but he could not achieve that condition either. In the prison, there was no privacy.

That night he slept very little, and finally out of sheer boredom with his own thoughts, took a Nembutal. The next morning he did his work with a stony face and mind, ate no lunch, and at 3 o’clock fixed himself a cup of coffee on the burner in the washroom. The coffee was from one of the three cans of Nescafé that Max had given him for Christmas. Max had won the bet for prison pallor, and had shared the spoils with Carter.

When he got to Max’s cell, he sat down on the lower bunk with his hands over his face. He wept shamelessly, not caring that the Negro was standing there beside Max, bewildered, that a screw, an inmate, whoever looked in and saw an inmate sobbing, would stop and stare for a moment.