Establishment (41 page)

“Nine miserable old men who haven't got the guts to face up to that stinking committee. I feel so frustrated I could bust a gut—guts, that's all it is, guts. If they would only hear argument! No, this is the easy way. Sidestep it, pass the buck.”

“Is this the end then, the final word?”

“I'm afraid so, Barbara. Oh, I could go to Washington, and I think my old buddy could get me in to see Justice Douglas, and he might be able to delay it for a while, but so far as legal opportunities are concerned, this is the end of the road.”

“Then I don't want it postponed. When will the public announcement be made?”

“Tomorrow.”

“And when do I go to jail?”

“That depends on how much time you need to clear up your affairs. Thank God for Judge Fremont. I can get a week, even two weeks, before you have to surrender.”

“And where will I serve the time?”

“Well, we can be grateful it won't be Alderson Prison in West Virginia. The usual practice would be to book you in Washington and then send you to West Virginia, where they have this women's prison. But they've opened a new prison for women on Terminal Island off San Pedro, and Judge Fremont has seen to it that you'll be booked at the federal courthouse here and then sent to Terminal Island. I hear myself saying it, and I don't believe it. Jesus, Barbara, I think I'd give my right arm if this didn't have to happen to you. I look at you, and I don't believe it. It's just that it's you—” He shook his head hopelessly.

“Boyd, it could be worse, it could be a year. It's only six months. You can't keep blaming yourself.”

“I have a feeling I did everything wrong, straight from the beginning.”

“There was no right way to do it. Now listen to me. Tell me exactly what I have to do. I don't want two weeks. I want to get this over with just as soon as possible.”

“You don't want us to try for a rehearing?”

“Is there a chance in the world?”

“No. I have to be honest.”

“Then I don't want it. Today is Sunday. I need two days, Monday and Tuesday. I'll surrender on Wednesday. Tell me exactly what we do.”

“I'll come by Wednesday morning. It will have to be early, say seven-thirty. I'll go with you to the courthouse, and they'll book you. You will have to be fingerprinted, or perhaps that takes place on Terminal Island. I'm not certain. Then they'll either drive you or take you by plane to San Pedro. I would guess you'll drive. There will be a woman marshal with you. I'm not trying to make light of it, but in the lexicon of prisons, the federal prisons are the best in the country—if you can think of a prison as being better or worse. I hope you won't be too frightened.”

“Boyd, believe me, I am not frightened. If anything, I'm curious, and a little sad. I'll admit that. To go six months without seeing Sammy is more than I want to think about.”

“You don't have to. He can visit you. Specifically, they have five visiting days a month for adults, once a month for the kids. But then you can spend the whole day with Sam.”

“In a prison? Oh, no. There's one memory I don't want to put on him. I don't want him to see me in prison and then have to carry that around with him the rest of his life. That would be too cruel.”

“Well, that's up to you.”

“What do I take with me?”

“Nothing, Barbara, only the clothes on your back.”

“No toothbrush, soap, things like that?”

“No. Just your clothes. Yes, I'd take a purse, with whatever you normally carry in your purse. And your wristwatch. Take about fifty dollars in cash. They let you draw a certain amount each month for cigarettes and candy, which is just about all you can buy.”

“I don't smoke, Boyd. You know that.”

“Well, then for candy or whatever.”

“Can you and Harvey come to see me?”

“Of course. We're your attorneys.”

“Who else?”

“It's limited to family except by special request. But that's not too hard to work out. The thing to remember is that you're not cut off. You may get the feeling that you are, but you're not. Harvey and I are here, ready to do whatever has to be done. Then there's your mother and father. Your brother, Joe, lives down there in Los Angeles, so he's close by.”

“Boyd,” she said a bit impatiently, “stop being so damned Pollyannaish. There are things you do alone. You give birth alone and you die alone and you go to prison alone, and it doesn't matter who's standing by. All right, I seem to have it all now. I'll be waiting for you Wednesday morning at seven o'clock.”

He nodded bleakly and rose to go, departing just as Sam came rocketing into the house. Barbara prepared lunch for the two of them, reading to Sam from A. A. Milne while they ate. After he had stretched out for his nap, she called her mother.

“What do you and daddy have going for this evening?” she asked Jean.

“Nothing very important. We were going out for dinner.”

“Could you stop by afterward? I think we have to talk.”

Later that evening, after Barbara had spelled out the expected course of events, she said to them, “I want you to know that I'm glad you're the way you are. I couldn't bear it if you made a fuss about this.”

“If I thought it would do any good,” Jean said.

“Well, you always gave me my head. I appreciate that. And when you come to think of it, I've been through just about everything. The main thing is Sam. Make him feel loved and treasured.”

“We'll manage that,” Dan agreed. “The boat is almost finished.”

“You're a good sailor, aren't you, daddy?”

“Just about the best.”

“I don't want you to bring him down to the prison.”

“It's six months, Bobby. That's a long time for a little boy.”

“I know, but I think this way is best. If I change my mind, I'll let you know. Isn't it crazy, my going to prison on Terminal Island? The same place,” she said, “where my father built the biggest shipyard in the world.”

“Well, not quite the biggest.”

“Big enough. Big enough for Admiral Land to say you changed the course of the war. I was there once, in forty-one, I think.”

Dan nodded. Jean sat silently, watching the two of them. She didn't trust herself to speak offhandedly; she had to think of her words and measure them, spacing them properly and unemotionally. Barbara was the one thing she had done right and well, even from the beginning.

“I don't remember the prison,” Barbara said.

“It was a military compound then, a finger of land that sticks out of the island to the west.”

“Then you can see the ocean?”

Dan nodded.

“And ships?”

“Yes, they pass by when they make port at San Pedro or Long Beach.”

“That will be nice. Well, we can't sit around and talk all night, can we?”

“What shall we tell Sam?” Jean asked slowly.

“He knows I've been a correspondent, that I've had to travel all over the world for stories. He knows that I make my living from stories—and incidentally he's been spoiled by them. You can't just put him in front of a TV set. He wants stories, so I'm afraid you'll have to raid the bookstores and read to him. I'll tell him that I must go away for a while, and you back that up. That's all. I'll have all his things packed. It might be a good thing if you could come by on Wednesday as early as possible.”

“We'll be here before you leave,” Jean agreed.

“Good. Anna will stay here in the house, and Harvey's office will take care of the bills.”

“For Christ's sake, if you need money,” Dan began vehemently.

“No, daddy, I don't need money, and if I do, I'll ask you. I think Sam will be all right up there on Russian Hill, and it's only six months.”

On the way home, Jean said nothing. It was not until they were in the house that she began to cry. She sat in a chair, her hands folded, weeping quietly. Watching her, Dan realized that this was the first time in all the years he had known her that he had ever seen her weep.

***

The marshal who drove the government Buick was named Buck Gedding, and he wore a spectacular old-fashioned revolver strapped to his waist. The woman marshal, Sadie Thomas, rode in back with Barbara. “We won't bother with handcuffs, dearie,” she told Barbara. “I didn't need Judge Fremont to tell me that handcuffs were out. Good heavens, I never gave it a cotton-picking thought, I did not. We are not barbarians—although I can tell you this. They are not all like you; no, siree, sir, they are not, not by a long mile. I had women in here would claw your eyes out, and there was one little filly had a knife on her. She pulled the knife on me, and I'll bear the scars to show it until my deathbed day.”

“Sadie, will you can it?” the driver said. “You can talk anyone deaf, dumb, and blind. Furthermore, conversation is not permitted, which is something you know as well as I do.”

“Oh, that is just fine, Buck Gedding, but if you expect me to sit here next to this poor woman for four hundred miles in dead silence, you got another think coming. So I suggest you drive the car and allow me to tend to the prisoner.”

The prisoner was lost in her own thoughts, and in time Sadie Thomas wound down into silence. Barbara was in a muted state of shock. She had allowed herself only the smallest portion of emotion that morning, going through a scene she had rehearsed in her mind a hundred times. It was an instinctive condition of the professional writer to write a scene mentally before it was played. Everything had to be in place; everything had to fit and everything had to function, each sentence and paragraph worked into a specific balance. Barbara could recall a time in Burma when she witnessed an attack of Japanese fighter-bombers on an American installation. They darted in, swooping down one at a time, each dropping its load of small, hundred-pound bombs. She stood covered to her waist in a slit trench, ignoring the pleading of a sergeant who was trying to get her down without actually manhandling her, standing there like an idiot in a forest of unfolding, deadly rosebuds, seeing the whole display in the third person and turning it into words as she watched. It was not a writer's trick, it was a writer's sad destiny; and she had done the same thing today, divorcing herself from herself, even cold inside as she held Sam in her arms and kissed him. Dan was not a storyteller; he clutched her with an agony that transmitted itself. She could feel it in the hard muscles of his body, and she felt belittled by the fact that one part of her mind could wonder how it felt for a father to see his daughter go off to prison.

Jean looked at her out of a face suddenly old. Never before had Barbara thought of her mother as an old woman. Sixty-one is not old, but now that fine, aristocratic face had crumbled. Barbara was almost glad to get away.

“Terminal Island,” Sadie Thomas was saying, “is by no means the worst place in the world, dearie. The air is good, and that's more than you can say of Los Angeles. No smog there. I don't know how people live in Los Angeles. Well, each to his own.”

They stopped for lunch at a roadside stand. “Government buys you lunch,” Gedding said, dispensing largesse as its present representative. “Two sandwiches and coffee. What would you like? You stay in the car.”

“And suppose she has to use the ladies' room?”

“You go with her.”

“You got to use the ladies' room, dearie?”

“Yes,” Barbara said, “but I'm not hungry. I don't want any lunch.”

“The government buys it.”

“I'm sorry, I'm not hungry. I'll have coffee.”

“We're going to the ladies' room,” Sadie Thomas said, “and then we are going to sit down inside like civilized people.”

Barbara sat at the counter flanked by the two marshals, sipping her coffee and thinking that she was not very good at this. It had barely started, and here she was totally depressed. She could remember no time in all her life, not even when the news of Bernie's death came, when she had been overtaken by such a feeling of total hopelessness and despair. She had been removed from everything she loved, cherished, and depended on. She was alone and powerless. She realized full well that the world was full of people who lived their lives alone and powerless, but that had never been her case. In the past, no matter what had happened, no matter where she was, she could reach out to people of power and influence who loved or respected her. Even in Nazi Germany her connection with the power circles of the United States had been noted and respected. Now, for the first time, she was totally cut off; the connections with her life, her past, her family, and her friends had been severed. Two people, sitting on either side of her, owned her body and soul. If some lunatic impulse should cause her to bolt out of the roadside stand and run for freedom, this large, heavy man called Buck Gedding would be justified in drawing his gun and shooting her down. Or at least so it appeared to her. All the rights and privileges that any American citizen takes for granted had disappeared. It no longer mattered what her crime had been; all the discussions of whether her crime was in all truth a crime had become academic, rhetorical games. To everyone she would encounter during the next six months, she was a criminal.

Back in the car, driving south again, unable to bear the chatter of the woman marshal, she pretended to be asleep, lying back with her eyes closed. The night before she had slept for only an hour or two; now the pretense became fact. Curled into one corner of the back seat, she slept for the next two hours.

It was almost twilight when they reached San Pedro and rolled slowly onto the little ferry that would take them to Terminal Island. “You stay in the car,” Gedding said to her, and Sadie Thomas nodded her agreement. “It's the rules, dearie.” They locked the doors.

On the island, they drove past the shipyards, idle now, the old ways empty, the buildings boarded over. They drove past the Customs House to Seaside Avenue, flanked on either side by empty lots and warehouses, and then down Seaside Avenue to the end of the island. Now Barbara could see the harbor waters, a flat, crowded, ugly port, a mass of fishing boats, tugs, rusty freighters, so different from the great, windswept expanse of San Francisco Bay that it brought tears to her eyes.