Establishment (46 page)

“I'm not sure that would do any good.”

It began with the visiting day, worsened day by day, and finally Barbara didn't go to work but lay in bed. Officer Davenport came into her room. “You're not sick, Barbara. The doctor says you're not sick.”

“The doctor's an idiot,” Barbara muttered.

“What did you say?” The heightened pitch of Officer Davenport's tones caused several inmates to pause by the open door and listen.

“I said the doctor's a fool.”

“And I say you're shirking.”

“Oh, get out of here and leave me alone.”

“What!” Officer Davenport spread her legs, placed her hands on her hips, and faced Barbara. “Now you listen to me, you society bitch! If there's one thing I hate worse than reds, it's rich reds, and we have had just about enough of your classy, nose-in-the-air superiority. This is not a debutante stable,” she said, mixing her metaphors, “so either you shape up or else.”

To which Barbara replied, “Oh, fuck off!”

The gathering gallery in the hall burst into applause and laughter. Davenport exploded. Barbara's depression broke, and Captain Cooper said to her, “There is no way out of it this time. You want punishment, Barbara, and you'll find I can handle the situation very nicely.”

For the next two weeks, Barbara cleaned toilets and took grim satisfaction in the work. For one thing, compared to being trapped in a deep depression, this was delightful. Of course, compared to other kinds of work, it was far from delightful. But on the other hand, there were certain fringe benefits that derived from her depression, from the incident with Davenport, and from her current status as toilet and shower room stewardess—namely, a new respect from the other inmates. Until now, only Annie Lou and Rosalie Conte had been relaxed and friendly with Barbara. The other inmates kept their distance. They were suspicious of her; she was a foreign creature, the way she moved, the way she spoke, the way she combed her hair. Even her crime was singular and defied their understanding. Now her encounter with Davenport cracked the walls that separated her from the others, and the way she cheerfully and without complaint scrubbed the porcelain pots and burnished the faucets in the toilets earned her respect. Toilets were the most hated job in the prison, yet day by day as she cleaned the toilets, Barbara's spirits rose. And it did not happen again. She emerged from the depression with the horrible memory of having been low and miserable enough to have taken her own life. It burst the bubble of the tremendous self-assurance that had been with her all her life.

Then one of the inmates discovered that the Barbara Lavette who had written a book that actually existed in the prison library was the same Barbara who here in jail was known as Barbara Cohen or by the honorific TQ, toilet queen. It was Barbara's first book, the story of her experiences in France and Germany, and the book was passed from hand to hand and read until it began to fall to pieces. Her fellow prisoners might have been diffident or hostile or uneasy in approaching an actual author, but Barbara's position vis-a-vis yellow stains on the inside of a toilet bowl both complicated and simplified the place of a writer in the prison population. She began to realize more and more clearly that some light brushstrokes of modern penology do not change a prison into a girls' boarding school. Barbara was the only inmate charged with contempt of Congress; and it was her own small, personal triumph to be accepted and trusted by the murderers, thieves, whores, madams, forgers, and dopers.

If anyone had told her a year before that she could be in a position where she would suspend all the moral judgments of civilization, where acceptance by criminals as an equal and a friend would delight her, she would have rejected the notion as unlikely at best. It was many years before the women's movement burst upon the world, and even if Barbara had been preoccupied—which she had not been—with the role of women in society, she would have had no knowledge or any understanding of women who were criminals. She had never lived in or could have imagined a society where a third of the population was black, another third Mexican or Chicano, and still another third Caucasian, and where all had emerged from poverty and deprivation and ignorance.

Officer Davenport searched for additional toilets. She found one that had been abandoned for years. “I want this place to shine,” she told Barbara. It took four hours, and Barbara left it shining. What with harsh detergents, cleanser, disinfectant, and the weeks of digging in the garden, her hands were red and rough, the nails broken, the skin toughened; but she had triumphed over the toilets. Captain Cooper returned her to the garden. “But walk carefully,” Cooper said to her. “You pegged yourself as a troublemaker. I still haven't decided whether to dock your good time. What do you think?”

“I think it's up to you,” Barbara said. “At this point, I truly don't give a damn. You can't hold me more than six months.”

“I wouldn't be insolent if I were you. It doesn't pay off.”

“I'm not bucking for honor status,” Barbara said, “and I really don't give a damn what you do to me. I'll clean the toilets or mop the floors—whatever you say. That's up to you.”

“What's eating you?” Captain Cooper asked. “This is a damned good institution. As jails go, it's as good as any in the world.”

“That doesn't say much for the world, does it? Five thousand years ago, they discovered that if someone does something the top dogs don't like, you build a cell and lock them up, and in all the time since then, we haven't improved on it or found another way.”

“Do you know a better way?”

“No, I don't. But I know this way stinks.”

***

Barbara received a letter from Sally. “Joe tells me you don't want visitors,” Sally wrote, “and I can't understand why. I want so much to see you. Joe and I are trying desperately to work things out, and we're living together again in the house in Beverly Hills, but it isn't easy. It seems so inane to even mention our problems to you when your own problem is so much greater. Anyway, we do have some hopes and we are trying. I'm on another picture now, and I'm trying to set my mind to give it up after this. But I don't know if that will work, Bobby, I'm so selfish.” The letter went on for five pages of closely written script. Reading it in the evening in her tiny room, Barbara tried to feel it, to have a sense of Sally and Joe and their difficulties, but it was all so far away. Sally wrote of Billy Clawson's death, and Barbara felt sick with the waste of it, the hopelessness of it; yet she had hardly known Billy Clawson, and knowing him the little she had, had misjudged him. How many people she had misjudged! How very little of anything she had known, with all she had seen and all of her travels!

The night before, a woman named Reba Fleming, who was in prison for forging her endorsement on someone else's Social Security check, had slipped into Barbara's room after lights out and crawled into her bed. Reba was a buxom blonde of about forty-five. Barbara did not particularly like her, and for that reason she had bent over backward to be pleasant to her. Not too many of the inmates were pleasant to Reba, and she lived in a mournful envelope of self-pity. Now Barbara, asleep a moment before, awakened to find Reba in her bed, caressing her and pleading with her to make love and be made love to. A month before, Barbara would have reacted with annoyance and disgust. Now she found herself wishing that she could satisfy this stout, dull woman's desperate need for sex and love and sympathy.

“It's all right, Reba,” she said, holding her. “Just lie here. It's all right.”

She thought of this, sitting with Sally's letter. She would have to answer it—but not now, not tonight. Tonight she had to write to her father and mother, who were insistent that they both come to see her.

“It's so hard for me to say, don't come,” she wrote. “I don't really know how to explain that I don't want any more visitors. When I first learned that I would have to go to prison, the most important thing I could think of was whether I would be allowed to have visitors. There are women here who never have visitors, and it's a heartbreaking thing, they're so sad and unhappy over it; but the real cause of their sadness is that they have no one outside to visit them. That's the root of it. I'm different. I have so many people outside who love me, and I think both of you know how much I love you, so you will not think I don't love you when I ask you not to come here. Being here is something I must do alone and get through alone. Visitors make it so hard. I try to forget the outside world.” She paused in her writing, then added, “I have made many friends here. As strange as it may sound, I have never been closer to women. I don't know if any of it can survive outside, but in here it's good.”

As time went by, the inmates turned to her more and more frequently. She was their neutral ground, their umpire, their adjudicator; and the more Barbara became the butt of the officers' venom and resentment, the more trusted and resorted to she was by the prison population. Very slowly, bit by bit, the women in the prison came to realize that Barbara was there because she wished to be there, that her freedom could have been purchased at the price of a few words. It was nothing she ever explained or referred to, yet it percolated through the population. They needed no complex explanations of the role of the informer. They understood it only too well. They brought their sorrows to her, their fights with each other, their dreams, their guilt, and their stories. After all, she was a writer, and as a writer, they decided, it was her obligation as well as her vocation to listen.

And listen she did—to an endless, sordid tale of poverty, of human souls squeezed dry, of love given and betrayed, of love given and rejected, of women beaten by their husbands, of women once children and beaten by mother and father, of prostitution, of pimping, of murder, of every conceivable form of brutality—and she listened.

Her marvelous, youthful beauty faded. At thirty-five, she still had the bloom of twenty-five; at thirty-six she looked her age. Her face, burned brown by the sun from her hours in the garden, leaner, the first lines marking it, the first tiny wrinkles around her eyes. She was healthy. She was never sick after that initial bout of depression; and if she was not happy, she was for the most part content.

***

Jean held that she was at an age, considering her life, where nothing could surprise her, but she admitted afterward that she was taken entirely by surprise when her son's wife, Lucy Sommers Lavette, walked into the gallery. Eloise, sitting at a tiny table and working on their catalogue, looked up and saw Jean's expression; she said later that if there had been sound to accompany the look, she would have been certain that the second earthquake had arrived. Fortunately, Dan was not present; he was over at Fisherman's Wharf, where he and Sam were polishing the brass on Dan's new boat—or at least so Jean thought, not knowing what else they could do for hours in a boat tied to a mooring. Dan had not seen either Tom or his wife since their encounter in Tom's office, and Jean was not at all certain how he would react if he came face to face with either of them.

She had to admit that Lucy's appearance had changed for the better, thinking that it could hardly have changed for the worse. Her hair had been cut short, her make-up was professional, and Jean recognized her beige cashmere as a valid Balenciaga.

Jean greeted her pleasantly, with just the proper slight touch of condescension, as if to remind her that in the old days, a Sommers might associate with a Seldon during business hours, but a social relationship would be unlikely. “What brings you here, Lucy?” Jean asked her.

“Curiosity, I suppose. And paintings. Everyone's talking about your gallery.”

“And what are they saying?” Jean asked.

“I'm afraid people feel you're ahead of your time.”

“But that's rather nice, to be ahead of one's time. Are you looking for a painting, Lucy?”

“Well, Tom and I are only beginning to acquire things. We thought it would be nice to have a Picasso. Or a Cézanne.”

Jean and Eloise exchanged looks. “I'm afraid we don't have a Cézanne,” Jean said. “There are very few of them, you know. You might find one for sale in New York or Paris, although I haven't heard of any. We do have one interesting Picasso. I believe he did it in nineteen twelve, when he was working with Braque. You know, around that time, he and Braque were composing pictures that consisted of flat areas superimposed upon a diversified surface. It was very experimental but quite beautiful if you know how to look at it. If I'm not mistaken”—she turned to Eloise—“they did invent the collage, didn't they, Eloise?”

“As far as I know, they did. They laid the groundwork for the Dadaists, who followed them.”

“Why don't you bring it out?” Jean suggested.

Eloise went to the back and returned with the painting, which measured about twenty-four by thirty inches, and placed it on the easel.

Lucy stared at it for a few minutes, then asked, “What is it? I mean, what does it represent?”

“I don't think one sees it that way,” Jean replied tolerantly. “One sees it in terms of space and color, arrangements of space and color—” She paused to glance at Eloise.

“Very much in the style of Braque,” Eloise said pointedly.

“Oh, yes, very much in the style of Braque. Of course, Lucy, it's very much in the eye, the tutored eye and the untutored eye. I would certainly not try to sell a picture like this to the wife of some nouveau whose husband would turn on her in wrath. But Tom was brought up with good paintings, or so I like to tell myself. Of course, my instinct would be to give it to you, but unfortunately Eloise here is my partner—you do know Eloise?”

“I don't think we've ever met,” Lucy said stiffly.

“In any case, it's a splendid painting.”