Establishment (43 page)

What a difference a full stomach makes
, she thought.
Who was it said that revolutions are not made on full stomachs? Well, perhaps it applies to worry as well.
Her head was nodding in spite of the coffee. She undressed and put on the pajamas. Apparently Suzie had decided that nothing would do but the largest pair in stock. The sleeves covered her hands, the trousers her feet.

“Oh, the hell with it,” she said. She pulled the light cord, crawled into bed, and a moment later she was asleep with the sleep of utter exhaustion.

She slept more soundly than she had in days due to the cumulative effect of tension and exhaustion, and she awakened to the sound of a knock at the door. The tiny cell was filled with morning light from a high window, and for a moment or two, so deep had her sleep been, Barbara was unable to remember where she was and experienced a momentary surge of panic at the sight of the tiny room. Then the key turned in the lock, and Ellie entered with another tray.

“Breakfast, sister,” Ellie said. “How you sleep?”

“Like a log.”

“Good. Now you clean up and put yourself together. Then you make up the bed. You fold everything at the foot of the bed—sheet, blankets and pillowcase, nice and neat. This here's your breakfast, so you eat this first, and I take away your other tray.”

“Are you a prisoner, Ellie?”

“I sure enough am. Honor prisoner. Sister, I been incarcerated seven long years.”

“Good heavens, for what?”

“Murder,” Ellie said indifferently. “I been married to this no good sonofabitch who beat up on me and my two kids day in, day out, and one day I just couldn't stand no more of it, so I took his gun, and said, ‘You touch me, you bastard, I kill you.' That's what I did. I kill him.” She shrugged.

“But this is a federal jail.”

“He was a soldier, sister. So here I is. Now never mind all that. Long done and gone. You eat and clean up, and then the physician's assistant going to come by and talk to you.”

“Ellie,” Barbara asked, unable to restrain her curiosity, “they give you the keys to these cells?”

“That is right,” she replied, shaking the key ring. “These here cells ain't really cells, just isolation rooms. Suppose you get out of this cell? Then you is locked in the building. Suppose you get out of the building? Then you is behind the gates and the walls, with the man up there in the tower with his gun. Suppose you go over the wall? Then you is on an island, sister, and you know something, thinking about escaping is like taking stupid pills.”

Barbara laughed. “I'm certainly not thinking about escaping.”

“Good. That laugh is very nice to see. When I see you last night, you got a face like death warmed over. Poor sister, what you do? Kill someone, peddle dope, pass bad checks? You sure enough don't look like no floozie.”

“I committed a contempt of Congress.”

“You committed a what?” Ellie shook her head. “Someday you tell me. Right now I got my work.”

After she brushed her teeth, Barbara sat down to eat. There was a bowl of oatmeal, covered with sugar and already cold. Barbara had a few spoonfuls and then gave up. There was a roll, buttered, that she ate with her coffee. Then she washed her face, combed her hair, dressed herself in her prison clothes, and made up the bed as instructed. There was no nail file in the toiletries, not even a scrap of paper that she could fold into a triangle to clean her fingernails.

“This is ridiculous,” she said aloud. “I'm in jail, and I stink of DDT and disinfectant and my hair is an unholy mess, and I'm worrying about dirty fingernails.”

A knock at the door again. Ellie's voice asked, “You decent, sister?”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

The door opened, and a dark man with thick eyebrows and sloping shoulders entered the cell. “I'm Gallo, the physician's assistant,” he said. “I take your history, and then you go for your physical. Sit over there on the bed.” He dropped down on the chair and opened the folder he had with him.

“Name?” He had hardly glanced at her.

“Barbara Cohen.”

“Married?”

“I'm a widow.”

“Then Cohen's your husband's name. Maiden name?”

“Lavette.” She spelled it.

For the first time, he looked at her thoughtfully. “I'll want your home address and the address of your next of kin.” She gave them to him. “Name and address of family physician, if you have one.”

“Dr. Milton Kellman, Mount Zion Hospital, San Francisco.”

He paused and studied her again. “You're an odd one. Nothing to do with this history, but may I ask what you're in here for?”

“Since it appears to be a common question that pervades this place, I don't mind. I'm almost used to it. Contempt of Congress.”

“Oh? Wait a minute, Barbara Cohen. I remember. But that was ages ago.”

“Like the mills of the gods, the mills of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.”

“No doubt. Contagious diseases. I'll name them. Just say yes or no. Chicken pox?”

“Yes.”

“Measles?”

“Yes.”

“Diphtheria?”

“No. I was inoculated.”

“Whooping cough?”

“No.”

“Mumps?”

“Yes.”

“Syphilis?”

“No,” she said softly.

He looked at her again. “I have to ask. Gonorrhea?”

“No.”

“It's a jail, Mrs. Cohen, not the YWCA.”

Angry suddenly, she said, “Why the hell don't you get on with this and stop apologizing to me! I know damn well I'm in jail! What do you think I'm here as, a social worker?”

He paused with his pen in the air to stare at her.

“I'm sorry. I don't often lose my temper.”

He shrugged. “Let's continue.”

When he finished, he closed his folder and walked out of the cell without another word, slamming the door behind him. A few minutes later, Ellie returned.

“You burned the man's ass, sister. You watch your step, huh? Now we go for your physical.”

“Do I take my things?”

“No. You leave your stuff and we pick it up after they assign you a room. This here building is Administration and Orientation, and you is three weeks here before they assign you permanent quarters. But not in the cell. You get a decent room, which ain't much but better than a cell. But right now you get undressed and put on your bathrobe.”

The doctor was thin, aseptic, and coldly impersonal. His name was Sutter. He wore a white laboratory coat, and Barbara noticed that his collar was dirty and that there were dark moons under his fingernails.

He poked at the scar on her abdomen and said, “What's that—a section?”

“Yes.”

“The child born alive?”

“Yes.”

“Get on the table there and lie down.”

“Why?” Barbara asked.

“I'm going to do a pelvic.”

“You mean a vaginal examination?”

“If you wish to call it that.”

“I don't want it,” Barbara said.

“What do you mean, you don't want it?”

“I don't want it. There is nothing wrong with my vagina. I'm not using it as a receptacle for dope, if that's what you're after. I'm here for six months, and I can't see why on earth that has to include a vaginal examination.”

“Suppose you let me decide that.” He exchanged looks with the nurse, a stout blond woman.

“It's a prison rule,” the nurse said.

“I don't want it!” Barbara said emphatically.

“I'm not going to force you,” Dr. Sutter said, regarding her unpleasantly. “This is not a concentration camp. But it goes on your record. This is your second day in here. You're making a bad start, Barbara, I can tell you that.”

She was back in her cell, putting her things together, when the door opened and a tall, dark-haired woman with striking blue eyes, wearing an officer's uniform, entered, closed the door behind her, and stood looking at her. “I'm Captain Cooper,” she said. “I understand you refused the pelvic. Why?”

“Because I'm not an addict or a dope peddler,” Barbara replied. “I'm here for contempt of Congress. That gives you the right to lock me up. It doesn't give anyone the right to poke around in my vagina.”

“You're pretty damn sure of yourself, aren't you?”

“Oh, no. No, ma'am, I am not. I am depressed and lonely and miserable and frightened. I am also damned angry, because I did nothing criminal—”

“You can can that right now,” Captain Cooper interrupted. “I am not a judge or a jury. I am an officer in a federal House of Correction. Now you listen to me, Barbara. You've done a stupid thing on your second day in jail. For this I could dock your time off for good behavior. I will not tolerate troublemakers. There are rules. You run a prison with rules. You're no fool. You're an educated woman, and you should understand that. Now this time I'm going to let it pass, and count yourself lucky. I am not impressed with your background or your contacts. The next time you step out of line, I'm going to lay it on you with all my weight. By now you've seen enough of this place to know that we run a civilized institution, but we deal with criminals. We have solitary confinement when it is necessary, and we have other ways. Now take your things and follow me.”

Barbara picked up her possessions and followed Captain Cooper down the hall, past the isolation cells. Women in prisoners' dress passed by, glancing at her curiously. Here were open doors to small rooms, each room about eight by ten, with a cot, a small chest of drawers, table and chair. Each room had a window that was unbarred. Captain Cooper pointed to one of them.

“In there. This will be your room for the next three weeks. You will keep it neat and clean; make your bed immediately upon arising, see that no dust or dirt accumulates. The door is never locked. This is the orientation period, when you will learn the rules and regulations of this institution.”

“Thank you,” Barbara said.

The officer looked at her, and their eyes met. “We'll see,” Captain Cooper said.

A loud bell announced lunch. Annie Lou Baker, in the room next to Barbara's, met her in the hall. “Now this ain't bad, honey,” the black woman said. “I been in lots worse places.”

“Where's Rosalie?” Barbara asked her.

“They got her back in that cell we been in, screaming her head off. That kid kicking it hard, hard.”

Ellie came along and told them to follow her. They were joined by about a dozen women in the orientation section, and Ellie led the way to the dining room, which was in another building. It was a welcome shock for Barbara to step out into the open, to feel the cold, clean wash of the sea air against her cheeks and to glimpse the great stretch of the Pacific in the distance. Films of prison life had prepared Barbara for the tiers of cell blocks, the long, narrow tables where prisoners sat side by side, the bleak misery of bowed men in striped suits. To her relief, the dining room resembled nothing as much as the dining room of a somewhat shabby girls' school. The tables seated four, and the food was served cafeteria style at one end of the room. The inmates apparently sat where they pleased; that is, except for the new prisoners, who were confined to one section.

There was ample food. Lunch consisted of frankfurters, sauerkraut, potatoes and green beans, bread and butter and coffee, and Jell-O. Ellie whispered to Barbara and Annie Lou, “Don't take more than you can eat, sister. They don't like for the food to be thrown away.”

“They can't cook up more than I can eat,” said Annie Lou.

Barbara felt no desire to eat, but she forced herself to get through a frankfurter and some green beans. Everywhere in the dining room the inmates were talking, many of them laughing.
It's not awful
, Barbara thought.
It's demeaning and degrading to be here, but it's all right. I'll learn things I could never learn otherwise, and it's not forever.

After lunch, the women who were segregated for orientation had a half-hour to themselves in the yard. There were no gates or barriers on the sea-wall side of the prison. Barbara watched a big white cruise ship sail by, out of Long Beach harbor. It was strange and incredible to be here, locked up on this finger of land, not mistreated, but controlled, manipulated, deprived. Long, long ago, during the bloody San Francisco longshore strike of 1934, Barbara had worked in a soup kitchen that served the strikers. No one had known who she was. She had spent all of her allowance on food for the kitchen. Many of the longshoremen liked her, but one of them fell in love with her. His name was Dominick Salone, and one day, in anger, he said to her, “It's easy for you. You walk into this and you can walk out of it. You make a game out of life. You make a game out of being poor. For me it's not a game. There are no exits for me.”

Now she came finally to understand what he had meant. There were no exits here. It was valid, and terrifying in its validity. This was something she would not be able to explain to anyone, not inside the prison, not outside. Because, she was beginning to realize, everyone in this prison had lived lives without exits. Prisons were for the poor, the truncated, the hopeless, and the desperate; there was no way she would ever be able to communicate to those outside what it meant to be poor. She was not sure she knew, but she was sure that before she left here she would know, for already she sensed that it was not a matter of money alone; it was something that reached into the mind and the heart and the soul.

During the afternoon she sat in a room with Annie Lou and took intelligence and aptitude tests—ridiculous tests, the very taking of which diminished and humiliated her.

After dinner she was given paper and envelopes, and she sat down in her tiny room to write her first letters from prison. The first was to Sam. “My dear, darling Sammy,” she wrote. “Grandma will read this to you, and it will be just like me talking to you. I have my work to do here, so it will be a while before I see you again. But I have decided that each week I'll write a special story, just for you, and send it to you. I know that won't be nearly as good as telling you a story that I make up as I go along, because when I make it up as I go along, I have you there to direct me.