The Glass Cell Read online

  There he passed, by his watch, twenty-four hours. The lights were kept on all the time. The inmate guards were changed, there were several of them now at either end of the corridor. A couple of them brought Carter water from somewhere, twice, because the basin in the cell where he was had been broken: water trickled from the broken pipes down the wall, but the pipes had been broken off inches within the wall, and the water was running away somewhere inside. Carter’s arm was swelling. He asked a couple of times to be taken to the hospital, but the guards said they couldn’t leave their posts, they were under orders. They said it with pride, as if they now served in an army they loved and respected. One said he would try to get permission to have a couple of men take him away. Carter’s arm throbbed like his thumbs. He longed for his morphine. He began to throw up the water a few minutes after he had drunk it. The men who took him away were in good spirits. They were also a bit drunk. Carter could smell the liquor on their breaths. One was colored, one was white.

  “Yes, suh,” said the Negro. “We got a real efficient prison now. Stretchers ’n’ hot-water bottles, bamboo and moonshine!” He laughed like a soprano.

  They staggered and jolted him. The elevator, they said, was broken. They took the stairs.

  “You the fellow what killed Whitey?” the Negro asked in a pleasant tone, smiling.

  Carter said nothing. He vaguely remembered one hard fight, remembered kicking a man. He had not the faintest recollection of the man’s face, whether he was short or tall, fat or thin, white or colored.

  The hospital had been wrecked. Dr. Cassini looked like a scared rabbit. He mumbled a hello to Carter as if he barely recognized him. Smashed bed tables were piled in a heap in a corner. There were no more straight chairs. Two inmate guards lounged at the window end of the ward with guns in their pockets, handles sticking out.

  “Every time somebody comes in that door, I think it’s another raid,” Dr. Cassini said. “Jesus! How much dope do they think we keep here? I been raided four times!” He was fumbling with Carter’s arm, feeling it.

  “Is there any morphine?” Carter asked, automatically whispering it.

  Dr. Cassini grinned, and looked around him. He bent low and said, “I keep a private hoard. Just for emergencies like this. Penicillin, too. We’ll be okay, Philip, me boy.”

  Dr. Cassini pulled his arm straight in a traction device, and for this he got an extra shot of morphine. Even so, it was painful, the sharp-edged bone nipping away at the tender flesh around it. Carter pretended that he had promised Max to take it without a murmur, which was the way he took it. There were other minor matters, a cut on the forehead to be washed, cuts on his knuckles, a gash in his shin about two inches long that needed stitches and had so filled his shoe with blood, now dried like glue, that the shoe had to be soaked off. Forty-five minutes after the traction, Carter was strong enough to curse. He cursed to himself at first, then he began to mumble his curses. Sons of bitches, he called the men who had killed Max—Squiff or whoever they were. He cursed the lot of them in prison curses.

  Pete told him that six men had been killed, possibly more. All the ward beds were full, and Carter’s would have gone, too, if they hadn’t saved it. Men were lying in the ward corridor. The inmates were holding six guards in C-block as hostages, and they were asking for steak twice a week instead of once, the transfers of about two hundred fellows, no three men in a cell anymore, and stronger coffee in the mess hall.

  “Ah they’re nuts, they’re nuts,” said Dr. Cassini, listening to Pete. “I thought they were rioting because of that dog they had in the laundry. Half the guys who come in here to get patched up don’t know about the dog. I haven’t slept since it started. I’m afraid to sleep. The militia ought to get here soon. They’re bound to have called the militia. Then there’ll really be some shooting.”

  Carter didn’t care. He didn’t give a damn if the militia came right into the ward and shot him, too. Everything seemed remote and unimportant. He listened as if in a dream to Pete’s rambling monologue. Some of the injured in the ward talked about the letters that the prison censor had stopped, but nobody really knew what had happened, except that it had started in C-block. A couple of fellows had jumped a guard and got his gun.

  “Funny thing is,” Pete said, “I heard the warden was going to make a statement in the mess hall yesterday about letting the dog letters go through. Only he was just a little late. Just about ten minutes late. Funny, isn’t it?”

  A couple of the inmates’ leaders were talking by telephone with the warden, Pete said. Pete got wild reports of what the inmates were asking for, and even he knew some of them were not true: movies every night, furlough for everybody every three months, hot-water showers in the cells—this last sent Pete into paroxysms of laughter.

  There was the sound of gunfire that evening around 8, and soon afterward the ward heard that A-block was in the hands of the militia and the guards again. It was not yet dark, but there would be no more fighting until tomorrow morning, Dr. Cassini predicted.

  “The objective of the militia should be the kitchen,” Dr. Cassini said with disgust. “Starve those bastards for a few hours and they’ll knuckle down. All they think about is their stomachs. That and sex, of course.”

  They wrangled long into the night. Carter had thought he was so full of morphine, he could sleep, but his pains kept him awake. Somehow he did not mind. He thought of Max in a calm but bitter way. He thought of Max nearly all night. At least he had killed a man in return, not the man who had killed Max, probably, but one of the lot, and they were all alike. Carter was sure he had killed that man. And that seemed quite right and proper.

  11

  Within a month, the riot of the State Penitentiary, which had lasted three days and got nationwide coverage, was for Carter a thing of the past. It might have become a thing of the past for him sooner, but it took a month and more for the inmates to clean up the mess they had made, to reinstall the toilets and basins, to repair the smashed locks (locksmiths had to be called in, as locksmithery was not a trade taught in the prison), to repair the broken machinery in the laundry, the carpentry shop and all the shops, and for the inmates to repair their own wounds and broken bones. These last Carter saw all around him. One of the saddest of the casualties was old Mac, who had no wound at all but was in the ward because his brain had snapped, as Dr. Cassini put it. Mac had seen his ship model smashed to bits and trampled under prison shoes and his cell torn up. He had even managed to get his cell door locked by a guard, Carter had heard, but the inmates had broken the lock with a sledgehammer, just to get in and destroy his ship model. Carter wrote to Hazel about Mac. Since the riot had called attention to the conditions in the prison, there was a chance that Mac would soon be admitted to a mental hospital, which would be a good thing for him, because nobody knew how to handle him in the ward. He was not violent, but he did not much know where he was, and even had to have his food spooned into his mouth.

  The riot was simply an “incident” to Carter in an existence, a stream of time, that seemed to him one continuous riot, rebellion and hatred. He tried to explain this to Hazel. He thought he explained it very well and clearly, but she wrote back that his train of thought was so negative, not admitting of any good in human character or in the intentions of any of the officials of the penal system, that he was heading for a terrible depression and misanthropy unless he made an effort to see things differently, “the way things are. Nothing in life is black and white. So sorry to be trite, darling, but as David once said, all true things are trite. They have been said very often, because human experience has shown them to be true . . .” There was some truth in it, Carter admitted to himself and to Hazel, but he commented on the results of the prison riot: people like Max Sampson murdered, Mac driven berserk—and the poor fellow couldn’t even see his wife now, because he could not go down or be taken down to the visiting room and visitors were not allowed up
in the ward—and the toughest of the rioters, a man called Swede (although he was short and dark) had got what he demanded, a cell all to himself. Ostensibly this was because Swede was a “riot suspect,” and as such had his number on a red shingle outside his cell; but that made no sense, because he associated everyday with other inmates in the shop where he worked, and in the corridor of his cell block. He had got the private cell because he had demanded it, and the prison authorities were afraid of more trouble from him if they didn’t give it to him.

  David Sullivan moved to New York in the fourth year of Carter’s sentence, and joined a firm of lawyers with offices in a new building on First Avenue. Hazel had taken her degree at Adelphi, had considered a job overseas and sending Timmy to school in Switzerland, but had given this up in favor of a job at a child welfare agency in Manhattan on the West Side. Carter had no doubt at all that her decision to stay in the United States was based on the fact that Sullivan had moved to New York.

  She came down to see him three or four times a year, and stayed at the only hotel in Bowman, The Southerner. Money was no problem now, but Hazel’s time was, because of her job. Some of her visits were for no more than a weekend. She wrote him two or three times a week. There were often pictures of Timmy in the envelopes, and Carter had a scrapbook of photographs, mostly of Timmy, several of Hazel, and a few of the friends Hazel had met in New York and talked about in her letters: the Elliotts who lived in Locust Valley, Long Island; Jeremy Sutter; a man Hazel had met at Adelphi who had married a girl called Susan; people whom Carter was not interested in but whose pictures he pasted in his book nevertheless. Their old friends, Blanche and Eddie Langauer, for instance, Hazel never mentioned. Eddie and Blanche had written to him twice in the first year of Carter’s imprisonment, and Carter had answered. Later, the Langauers had moved to Dallas, because of Eddie’s work. They had not written for a long while. And so it had gone with other New York friends, a startled, sympathetic letter or two, and then silence.

  Timmy was now eleven. Carter got two letters a month from him on the average, but he felt they were rather squeezed out. Things would be better when he finally saw Timmy, Carter thought. Things would be difficult, of course, but he intended to play it cool, not expect his son to fling his arms around him or expect them to become buddies in a week or a month.

  Carter now had a glass front on his bookcase with a door that locked: too many men had been borrowing his books without his permission. But he lent his books to ward patients, if they asked for them. Among his books Carter now had Swift, Voltaire, Stanley Kunitz, Robbe-Grillet, Balzac, a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that had part of the E’s and part of the F’s that had been mysteriously left by a departing ward patient, an American dictionary, a manual on plumbing. All these books he had read through. He kept a locked, flat wooden kit of draftsmen’s pens and compasses under the mattress of his bed (the springs sagged, and the box filled out the hollow somewhat). His drawings of remembered machinery and machinery that he invented he kept in a cardboard letter holder on top of his books in his bookcase. He had overcome the handicap of weak thumbs, so far as drawing went. He mentioned this to Hazel—it was important in regard to a future job—but Hazel still talked about an operation. She had discussed his thumbs with a hand specialist in New York. Carter knew he had let the matter slide through the years and knew that Hazel knew this, too. He was used to his thumbs now, but he did not say this to Hazel in so many words.

  In the fifth year of his sentence, he tried to stop the morphine entirely. He backslid innumerable times, mainly because he did not think the situation very serious. His withdrawal symptoms were no more than sweats and jitteriness on the second or third day, for about twelve hours, which Carter considered a mild form of suffering. He proved he could go two months or more without morphine, if he took a milder painkiller like Demerol. The pain in his thumbs was less. In the sixth year, he did without morphine for eleven months. He had an important objective in this, because once he got out of prison, morphine would not be so easily obtained. He also wanted to be able to tell Hazel that he could do without it completely.

  The hundred-dollar-a-week payment of Mr. Drexel had stopped when the time that Carter would have been working for Triumph, ten more months, had run out. There had been two more building jobs scheduled after the Fremont school. Mr. Drexel promised to write for Carter a letter of the highest recommendation, but said he would wait until Carter was out of prison so that the letter would be “up to date” when Carter looked for his next job. Carter was rather amused. “Up to date” meant up to date of end of prison stretch. This man can be “highly recommended” as an endurer of prison stretches. Carter was going to be out by December. A “good conduct” grading for his service in the hospital ward had removed three years and several months from the ten years he might have served.

  Dr. Cassini praised Carter effusively in his report, which he showed to Carter. David Sullivan had also written for him. So did Mr. Drexel, at Carter’s request. Carter would be home for Christmas that year, and, unlike so many men who had to start from the bottom up again, he would have a wife, a child, a home, and money. He would be able to give them presents with his own hands, wrapped presents that no one else had opened, whose contents nobody but himself knew. By December 1, in fact, he would be in the apartment in New York with Hazel, a free man with a good conduct record, though he had killed a man in prison. In the months after the riot, Carter had often thought some inmate with an unpleasant face might approach him in the carpentry shop, in a cell block when he was delivering medicine, anywhere, and say, “I hear you’re the guy who killed Whitey,” and then “pop goes the weasel,” as Dr. Cassini would say. But things had not turned out that way.

  12

  On December 1, a Friday, at 8 in the morning, Carter was driven down the unpaved road to the gates of the State Penitentiary and passed through them. Carter wore the brown suit of discharged or furloughed prisoners, and he had in his pocket the ten-dollar bill with which the prison sent its released men into the world.

  Carter was let down at the bus stop in Gurney, a tiny town about two miles from the prison.

  “Don’t forget the parole officer,” the guard said.

  “I won’t.” Carter was to report tomorrow at the parole officer’s in New York.

  The bus came almost immediately. The day was sunny and chill. Carter rode in the bus with his eyes wide open, as he had ridden in the car with the driver. He blinked frequently, and tried to stop staring at everything by looking down at his hands, but after a few seconds he would be gawking out the window again, or staring at a black straw hat with small, red-feathered birds on it just inches in front of him, or at the two boys who were standing, hanging to the luggage rack, laughing and talking in southern accents. They looked about fifteen. In only three years, Timmy would be as nearly a man as these boys were, his voice changing, interested in girls.

  In Fremont, there was a three-hour wait. He sent a telegram to Hazel telling her his time of arrival. Hazel had wanted to come down to the prison to meet him when he got out, but he had begged her not to. Carter spent the three hours wandering in the streets around the air terminal.

  Hazel had sent him a money order for one hundred dollars, and the prison had cashed it for him that morning. He spent fifty-seven dollars and ninety cents for his ticket. They served lunch on the plane, a small, regal tray of brown beef roast so thick it was a chunk, delicately browned potatoes, tomato slices that were perfect circles lying on lettuce, and for this there was a tiny paper cup of cream-colored dressing. Carter opened the cup by pulling the paper tab with his teeth. He was awkward with the knife and fork, would have preferred to eat everything with the spoon, but he felt that the man beside him was watching him, that he might look to the man like what he was, an ex-convict, just sprung.

  They touched down at Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, and then they were at La Guardia, exactly on time. Carter saw
Hazel and Timmy and also Sullivan, standing at the rail of a balcony above him as he walked across a hall with the other passengers. He waved, he smiled. Hazel was waving excitedly. Sullivan waved once, quietly, smiling, and Timmy shyly. All this Carter saw at a glance.

  Hazel kissed him on the cheeks, then on the lips. She was crying. She was also laughing. Carter blinked awkwardly at the lights that seemed so bright, at the dazzling color everywhere.

  “How are you, Timmy?” Carter extended a hand to him.

  Timmy glanced at the hand, then took it firmly. “All right.”

  Timmy’s voice was sweet to Carter. It was strong, a little shrill, a boy’s voice. When he had last heard it, it had been a baby’s voice.

  “I’ve got the car,” Hazel said. “Are you hungry? I’ve got dinner for us at home.”

  “Take my coat,” Sullivan said, unbuttoning his. He pressed it on Carter.

  Carter was trembling from the cold, so he took it. His arms slid easily into the silk-lined sleeves.

  Hazel drove out of the maze of La Guardia, over the Triborough Bridge. The car was a Morris that Hazel had had for a year. The lights of Manhattan were coming on in the dusk, and the city looked as big as an entire world, quite big enough for Carter.

  “I’m not staying for dinner, by the way,” Sullivan said. “I just came along to see you in.”

  “You won’t come up just for a drink, David?” Hazel said. They were approaching 38th Street and Lexington.

  “No, thanks. I’ll see you soon, Phil,” Sullivan said as he got out. “It’s great to have you back.” His overcoat was over one arm. Carter had insisted that he take it back.

  Then they were alone, the three of them. Hazel parked under a tree on East 28th Street, saying she was in luck again about the parking space, that she often got this very spot. Carter touched the tree trunk with his palm. Then he realized that Timmy was struggling to get his suitcase from the car.