Glass Cell (9 page)

“I know,” Max said. “It’s the Supreme Court thing, isn’t it?” he asked in French.

Carter nodded.

The Negro heard “Supreme” and understood. “Holy, holy Jesus,” he said mournfully, then lumbered out of the cell so they could be alone.

Max lighted one of his cigarettes and gave it to Carter.

Carter told Max about his job with Triumph, about Wallace Palmer, about the trial, about being sent to prison over last September and how unbelievable it had been to him. He told Max about Gawill and about Sullivan, and about Sullivan and his wife.

“I’ve got to make Hazel go away now, back to New York,” Carter said, banging his fist down on his thigh, heedless of his thumb.

“Don’t decide anything today,” Max said in a calm, deep voice, like the voice of God himself.

Carter sat in silence for a while.

Max began to speak in French, about going to France when he was five, and of his childhood there. When his father died and the alimony stopped, his mother brought him back to Wisconsin, where he had been born. They had a few relatives there on his father’s side. His mother had remarried, but his new stepfather had no intention of putting him through college, so after high school, Max had got a job in a printer’s shop and learned the trade. He had met Annette when he was twenty-one and she nineteen, and they had wanted to marry, but her father had made them wait two years because he did not want his daughter to marry before she was twenty-one. “I waited, but still I was happy because I was in love,” Max said. Then Annette, when they had been married not quite a year, had died. Max’s mother had been visiting them, and Annette had driven a car over a cliff with his mother in the car also. Annette had swerved the car to avoid a deer that suddenly ran across the road, according to a man in another car who had seen the accident. Annette had been pregnant. Then Max had started drinking and had lost his job. He had come south and in Nashville had met a lot of “bad characters,” including ex-jailbirds and forgers. Max had learned how to forge, and the robbers and pickpockets of the gang used to bring him their traveler’s checks and anything else that needed a signature. “Certainly I knew I was a crook,” Max said, “but I was alone in the world, nobody cared, and I didn’t care.” It was a profitable business for all concerned, and he had thought he was in a particularly safe position in the outfit, but their headquarters were raided one night by two plainclothesmen. Max killed one of them in a fight, so he was in for both forgery and manslaughter and had been sentenced to seventeen years.

“And now I’m thirty. It’s a funny life, is it not, my friend? Life is funny.”

Carter sighed. He felt very weary.

Max stood up and pushed Carter back on the bunk. “Lie down.”

Carter collapsed sideways on the lower bunk, and dragged his feet up on the blanket. It was Max’s bunk. Then he suddenly sat up.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s about time for the supper bell. I don’t want to fall asleep.”

Max paced slowly in the cell, swinging his hands in front of him, touching his palms together. His face was calm, his dark eyes alert and almost twinkling. Max looked today exactly the same as he always did. The news he had brought had not affected him at all. Carter took a curious comfort in this.

“Life is funny,” Max said again. “It is necessary both to see oneself in perspective and not to see oneself in perspective, yet either one can lead to madness. The two things must be done at the same time. It is difficult. You are suffering a day of seeing yourself in perspective.” Max stooped and rose up with a book. “Read some of this tonight,” he said, and the supper bell went off on his last words, jangling, nerve-shattering, ten times louder than it needed to be, painfully familiar. Max smiled at Carter with amusement until it was over. “Well, I’m off for this evening’s pièce de résistance,
canardeau à l’orange
, no doubt.” He poked the book at Carter.

Carter took it without even looking to see what it was. He smiled with Max, at what Max had just said. It felt good to smile.

9

O
nce again, Hazel had heard the news before Carter had to tell her. Magran had called her up the day he wrote to Carter. Carter had had one letter from her in which she sounded depressed but quite in control of herself. But he was shocked when he saw her on Sunday. There was a despair in her eyes that made her look almost wild, as if she were drugged.

“You’ve got to get away. You ought to go to New York now.” His mind had not at all changed.

She didn’t answer for a moment. “You say it so coldly. You’ve changed so much, Phil.”

“No, I haven’t.” But he knew he had. “Months ago I said the same thing. Now there’s all the more reason for you to go to New York and less reason to stay here.”

“You don’t talk at all about what’s the next thing to do.”

We can keep on with special pleas, Magran had written. What did that mean? “Magran was pretty vague about it himself in his letter to me.”

“No, he wasn’t. He talked about letters to people and—there’s a committee in New York—I can’t remember the name, but it’s about civil liberties. Mr. Magran mentioned it on the telephone.”

Carter sighed. “You know, Haze, I’m not the only fellow in this kind of a spot. Do you think they’re doing so much to get the other guys out? They write, too. Who’s got the time to help? Who’s got the power, first of all?”

“But there are committees for this very thing,” Hazel said firmly. Her hands were clenched on the table. “Mr. Magran said you were supposed to write them, too.”

“Well, tell me who they are. I’ll write, of course.”

Hazel looked at the clock. “I don’t think Max is doing you any good, Phil.”

“Why?” Carter frowned.

“You’ve changed—since you met him.”

“Really? Well—he makes life here a lot easier to take, Haze.”

“Just because
he
takes it easier— He’s been here five years, you said. He’s a real criminal, Phil. You said he was a forger, an ‘expert’ forger. He’s used to prison. Maybe he wouldn’t know what to do if he got out. I’ve read about people like him. They’re incapable of leading an ordinary life with responsibilities and a job and all that. He seems to be making you that way, too—enough to tolerate people like him. And once you start tolerating them, you’re going to end up being like them yourself. You really give me the feeling you’re beginning to think this place isn’t so bad, and if you feel that way, it’s the end.” Her words were like an ultimatum between them.

Carter had listened patiently but with resentment. An attack on Max was like an attack on himself. “I wanted you to meet Max, but you don’t seem to want to. I wrote you about what happened to him, his wife dying when they’d only been married a couple of months.”

“Lots of things happen to a lot of people. It doesn’t make them criminals.”

“He’s in for one mistake. It’s not as if he had a trail of crime behind him. Max is civilized, at least compared to the morons and the animals that the rest of the guys are here. I’m glad I found him. Maybe there’re a few others, there’re six thousand men here, but I’ll only meet a few hundred, if that.” It was not fair to Hazel to say that she alone hadn’t wanted to meet Max, because Max hadn’t wanted to meet her either. There was also the fact that Max about three months ago had asked Carter to bring some morphine down to his cell. Carter had told Max it was locked up, which was true, but Carter now had the key to the cabinet. Twice a screw had searched Carter when he was on the way to see Max, and if he were found with dope on him, it could go badly for him. Carter had not been surprised at Max’s request, but he was certainly never going to mention it to Hazel. “Darling, I wish you’d understand about Max. I see him only twenty minutes a day, after all, and not even every day.” Twice a week, the inmates went to the showers at that time in the afternoon. “I know what the books say about prisons. And criminals. We’ve got a few books on it in the library here. I’ve read them.”

“Then you know what I mean. Don’t let it happen to you.”

Carter sat rather straightly in his hard chair. He stared down at his hands and was conscious suddenly of the picture he presented through the glass and wire. He wore the Sunday-visiting, short-sleeved white shirt that he no longer felt silly in, but positively elegant, compared to the workshirts of every day. His short hair didn’t bother him, though the cut—compulsory once a week—was never even. There was a little gray at his temples now, hardly visible in the hair that was cut so short, but Carter knew that Hazel would have noticed it, because she noticed everything. Lines in his forehead and between his eyebrows were deeper. And he was, of course, pale. It would not be a pretty picture that he presented to Hazel. “I’m—fooling around some in the carpentry shop these days.”

“Oh, good.
That’s
nice. What are you making?”

“Just now I’m doing certain jobs on things the whole shop is building. Shelves for the laundry, for instance. I couldn’t do every step of making anything. I can do pretty well on the rotary saw.”

In the last ten minutes, they talked about Timmy as usual. Carter asked about the dress shop, though he knew: it was just pulling its weight, and neither she nor Elsie were making any money. For her part-time work, Hazel got $57 per week take-home pay, plus a commission on what she sold. It was simply something for her to do.

That afternoon, Carter did not go down to see Max. Hazel’s words had disturbed him profoundly. He awaited with a strange anxiety Hazel’s letter which would arrive on Tuesday. She no longer wrote to him on Sundays, as she used to do as soon as she got home after seeing him. But on Tuesday he would get her letter after she had spoken to Magran on Monday.

The letter, when it came, had a calmer tone than Carter had expected. She gave him the names and addresses of four committees and organizations and of two men in Washington to whom he was supposed to write. Two of the committees’ names Carter recognized: he had written to them months ago, and one had not even acknowledged his letter.

He continued to visit Max four or five times a week. Now Carter was writing compositions in French and taking them to Max, who, like a schoolmaster, corrected them overnight and discussed them with Carter in the following session. “My Day” was the title of one, a rather funny account of his day in the hospital ward from the time of rising until lights-out. “A Day I Should Like to Spend If I Could” was another, quite an exercise in subjunctives and a fantasy about home and Hazel and Timmy and eating and driving in the car, fishing in the afternoon, cooking out over a wood fire, and sleeping under a tent; and in that rustic scene a hi-fi machine was also thrown in, with music by Schoenberg and Mozart. Then there was “What I Think of Prisons” and “On the Passage of Time: A Personal Attitude.” Carter took his corrected essays back with him to the ward, and in his spare moments copied them over again, making the corrections that Max had made, so that he had finally a batch of fifteen or twenty “perfect” if rather simple essays of his own in French. It gave him a tremendous sense of pride.

Hazel wrote:

Darling, what is the morphine situation now? You have not mentioned it in ages. The last you said was that it was still necessary and would be for some time. Isn’t there something else you could take? I’ve been reading about morphine—the principal alkaloid of opium (if you don’t think I know what an alkaloid is, I now do!) Please watch it . . .

Her words struck a small pang of guilt in him. He tried cutting down. He could do on three shots a day, and he had been taking four. But he noticed the difference in his spirits: they weren’t quite as good, or as cheerful. He asked Dr. Cassini for some Demerol or anything that deadened pain, and the doctor gave him something—something real this time. It worked, but it did not work as well as morphine, which, Carter very well realized, had a most pleasant way of changing reality into a form much easier to bear. For two weeks, Carter took no morphine, and then he began mixing his anodynes, depending half on morphine and half on the pills.

In July, a letter came from Hazel in which she said she had decided to move to New York with Timmy. She said she had a prospective buyer for the house, someone Sullivan had found.

“It’s easier writing this to you than trying to tell you through that awful glass,” she wrote, “which gives me the feeling I have to shout everything even when I don’t. You know I do not want to leave you, and I won’t be really, but as you have said a hundred times the awful summers here plus the boredom are enough to drive one batty, and here we are in another of them. I thought even two weeks ago I could stick it out in Fremont another summer, but even the shop is about to close for a month . . .”

She said that she and Timmy could stay at Phyllis Millen’s in New York until she found an apartment. Phyllis Millen—the name, her face, were like something dredged up out of the murk of ancient time to Carter—was an advertising copywriter, about thirty-eight and unmarried, whom he and Hazel had known casually since Timmy was a baby.

Well, now it was done, Carter thought. Soon there would be no more Sunday visits from Hazel. She must have been planning it for several days, because it was clear that she had got an answer from Phyllis about staying there. She had known last Sunday that she was going, and hadn’t mentioned it. What was the difficulty of telling him through the glass? Was it that she couldn’t face him when she told him?

Carter added to his letter in progress to her: “So glad to get your letter today saying you are going to New York. I only wish you’d gone months ago. You’ll be happier really and therefore I will be too.”

Lawrence Magran, having been paid his fee for the two efforts with the Supreme Court, was now going to work on a freelance basis, Hazel wrote to Carter. It was slightly annoying to Carter that Magran had made this arrangement with Hazel instead of writing to him about it. It was as if Magran now thought Carter was a dead duck, but he was still going to make certain gestures over the corpse.

Hazel wrote to him every day during the week before she left. It was as if she felt guilty about leaving. His own feelings were utterly mixed: he felt resentful for moments at a time (usually when he was tired or in pain) and he felt glad and happy for her sake at other times. He was careful to write her only when he felt glad.

. . . The fact is, I am in this prison, may have to stay about four more years, at worst. But at least I am better off than 99 per cent of the men who are here in cells half the time. At least think of this when you think of me.

She was looking her prettiest on the last Sunday that he saw her. A new pale pink linen dress, sleeveless, an apple green scarf of thin silk around her neck, fastened with an antique gold pin he had given her on one of their wedding anniversaries—the third, fourth?—of a coiled dragon with a ruby eye. Her hair looked as if she had just washed it, shiny and soft. But she did not smile as much as usual. For the first time, Carter noticed a line in her face, a fine horizontal line across her forehead. It was, somehow, horribly ominous.

Hazel said, “I’ve just had a big scotch.”

Carter smiled. “I wish you could have piped some over to me.”

He didn’t notice any effect of the scotch. Not a tear, not any sentimentality. They both tried very hard to be brisk and cheerful, but they went over things they had already said in letters, they both reassured each other that Magran had not abandoned him by any means, and that he was still one of the best criminal lawyers in the country.

“Maybe the trouble is I’m not a criminal,” Carter said, and they both laughed, a little.

She had received a down payment of $8,000 on the house they were selling for $15,000. This Carter already knew. Someone named Abrahol, a man with a wife and two teenaged children and a collie, were moving in on the first of August.

Their efforts at cheerfulness were rather successful, Carter thought. Both of them were smiling as Hazel got up to leave. She would manage a trip to see him “at least before Thanksgiving.” She looked back before she went out of the door, paused for an instant, and blew him a kiss. Carter was staring at her. Then she was gone—the column of pink topped with the dark brown hair which was Hazel.

He looked down at the stone floor as he walked. There was no threat of tears in his eyes. Was he turning to stone like the prison floor, like the prison? Was Hazel crying now? He stopped and looked back, as if he could have seen her, anyway, if she had been beyond the double bars of the cage. As if she would have lingered. No, Sullivan was probably waiting for her in his car outside.

Hazel’s next letters were very lively, full of descriptions of new buildings that had gone up even since she had been to New York last summer. Finally, there came what Carter had been expecting: David Sullivan was coming the last week in August, on business, and would stay about a month in the apartment of the Knowltons where he had been before. Hazel now had an apartment on East 28th Street, a walk-up with three rooms, kitchen, and bath. Carter had suspected Sullivan was going to go to New York. He was actually relieved and reassured by Hazel’s telling him outright.