by John Cheever
“Oh, my,” said the lawyer. “Why don’t you reform the Department of Correction?”
“The Department of Correction,” said Farragut, “is merely an arm of the judiciary. It is not the warden and the assholes who sentenced us to prison. It is the judiciary.”
“Oh ho ho,” said the lawyer. “I have a terrible backache.” He leaned forward stiffly and massaged his back with his right hand. “I got a backache from eating cheeseburgers. You got any home remedy for backaches contracted while eating cheeseburgers? Just sign the release and I’ll leave you and your opinions alone. You know what they say about opinions?”
“Yes,” said Farragut. “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one and they all smell.”
“Oh ho ho,” said the lawyer. His voice sounded very light and youthful. Farragut hid his pen under the bedclothes. “You know Charlie?” the lawyer asked, softly, softly. “I’ve seen him in chow,” said Farragut. “I know who he is. I know that nobody speaks to him.”
“Charlie’s a great fellow,” said the lawyer. “He used to work for Pennigrino, the top pimp. Charlie used to discipline the chicks.” Now his voice was very low. “When a chick went wrong Charlie used to break her legs backwards. You want to play Scrabble with Charlie—you want to play Scrabble with Charlie or you want to sign this release?”
Farragut, with a swift, geometrical calculation of the possible charges involved, fired the clipboard at the beard. “Oh, my back,” said the lawyer, “oh, God, my back.” He got to his feet. He carried the clipboard. He put his right hand in his pocket. He did not seem to notice the loss of his pen. He did not speak to the orderly or the guards, but went straight out of the ward. Farragut began to insert the pen up his asshole. From what he had been told—from what he had seen of the world—his asshole was singularly small, unreceptive and frigid. He got the pen in only as far as the clip and this was painful, but the pen was concealed. The orderly was called out of the ward and when he returned he went directly to Farragut and asked if he had the lawyer’s pen. “I know I threw the clipboard at him,” said Farragut. “I’m terribly sorry. I lost my temper. I hope I didn’t hurt him.”
“He said he left his pen here,” said the orderly. He looked under the bed, in the drawer of the cabinet, under the pillow, along the window sill and under the mattress. Then a guard joined him in the search, stripped the bed, stripped Farragut naked and made some slighting reference to the size of his cock, but neither of them—through kindness, Farragut thought—went near the pen. “I can’t find it,” said the orderly. “We’ve got to find it,” said the guard. “He says we’ve got to find it.” “Well, tell him to find it himself,” said the orderly. The guard went out and Farragut was afraid that the beard would return, but the guard returned alone and spoke to the orderly. “You’re going up in the world,” said the orderly to Farragut, very sadly. “They’re putting you in a private room.”
He passed Farragut his crutches and helped him into his shift. Farragut, swinging forward clumsily on his crutches and with the pen up his ass, followed the guard out of the ward and down a corridor that smelled sharply of quicklime to a door locked with a bar and a padlock. The guard had some trouble with the key. The door opened onto a very small cell with a window too high to be seen from, a toilet, a Bible and a mattress with a folded sheet and blanket. “How long?” asked Farragut. “The lawyer’s booked you in for a month,” said the guard, “but I seen Tiny give you some tomatoes and if Tiny’s your friend you’ll be out in a week.” He shut and barred the door.
Farragut removed the pen. It was with this precious instrument that he would indict Chisholm, and he clearly saw Chisholm in his third year of prison grays eating franks and rice with a bent tin spoon. He needed paper. There was no toilet paper. If he demanded this he would, he knew, with luck get one sheet a day. He seized on the Bible. This was a small copy, bound in red, but the end pages were a solid, clerical black and the rest of the pages were so heavily printed that he could not write over them. He wanted to write his indictment of Chisholm at once. That the lawyer had been determined to deny him a pen may have exaggerated the importance of his writing the indictment, but the only alternative would be to phrase his accusation and commit this to memory and he doubted if he could accomplish this. He had the pen, but the only surface upon which he could write seemed to be the wall of his cell. He could write his indictment on the wall and then commit it to memory, but some part of his background and its influence on his character restrained him from using the wall for a page. He was a man, he preserved at least some vision of dignity, and to write what might be his last statement on the wall seemed to him an undue exploitation of a bizarre situation. His regard for rectitude was still with him. He could write on his plaster cast, his shift or his sheet. The plaster cast was out since he could reach only half of its surface and the roundness of the cast left him a very limited area. He wrote a few letters on his shift. The instant the felt pen touched the cloth, the ink spread to display the complexity of the thread count, the warp and woof of this very simple garment. The shift was out. His prejudice against the wall was still strong and so he tried the sheet. The prison laundry had, mercifully, used a great deal of starch and he found the surface of the sheet nearly as useful as paper. He and the sheet would be together for at least a week. He could cover the sheet with his remarks, clarify and edit these, and then commit them to memory. When he returned to cellblock F and the shop, he could type his remarks and have them kited to his governor, his bishop and his girl.
“Your Honor,” he began. “I address you in your elective position from my elective position. You have been elected to the office of governor by a slender majority of the population. I have been elected to occupy cellblock F and to bear the number 734–508–32 by a much more ancient, exalted and unanimous force, the force of justice. I had, so to speak, no opponents. However, I am very much a citizen. As a taxpayer in the fifty percent bracket I have made a substantial contribution to the construction and maintenance of the walls that confine me. I have paid for the clothes I wear and the food I eat. I am a much more representative elected member of society than you. There are, in your career, broad traces of expedience, evasion, corruption and improvisation. The elective office that I hold is pure.
“We come, of course, from different classes. If intellectual and social legacies were revered in this country I would not consider addressing you, but we are dealing with a Democracy. I have never had the pleasure of your hospitality although I have twice been a guest at the White House as a delegate to conferences on higher education. I think the White House palatial. My quarters here are bare, seven by ten and dominated by a toilet that flushes capriciously anywhere from ten to forty times a day. It is easy for me to bear the sound of rushing water because I have heard the geysers in Yellowstone National Park, the fountains of Rome, New York City and especially Indianapolis.
“Sometime in April, twelve years ago, I was diagnosed as a chronic drug addict by Drs. Lemuel Brown, Rodney Coburn and Henry Mills. These men were graduates of Cornell, the Albany Medical School and Harvard University, respectively. Their position as healers was established by the state and the federal governments and the organizations of their colleagues. Surely, when they spoke, their expressed medical opinion was the voice of the commonwealth. On Thursday, the eighteenth of July, this unassailable opinion was contravened by Deputy Warden Chisholm. I have checked on Chisholm’s background. Chisholm dropped out of high school in his junior year, bought the answers to a civil service test for correctional employees for twelve dollars and was given a position by the Department of Correction with monarchal dominion over my constitutional rights. At 9 A.M. on the morning of the eighteenth, Chisholm capriciously chose to overthrow the laws of the state, the federal government and the ethics of the medical profession, a profession that is surely a critical part of our social keystone. Chisholm decided to deny me the healing medicine that society had determined was my right. Is this not subversion, treachery, is
this not high treason when the edicts of the Constitution are overthrown at the whim of one, single, uneducated man? Is this not an offense punishable by death—or in some states by life imprisonment? Is this not more far-reaching in its destructive precedents than some miscarried assassination attempt? Does it not strike more murderously at the heart of our hard-earned and ancient philosophy of government than rape or homicide?
“The rightness of the doctors’ diagnoses was, of course, proven. The pain I suffered upon the withdrawal of that medicine granted to me by the highest authority in the land was mortal. When Deputy Warden Chisholm saw me attempt to leave my cell to go to the infirmary he tried to kill me with a chair. There are twenty-two sutures in my skull and I will be crippled for life. Are our institutions of penology, correction and rehabilitation to be excluded from the laws that mankind has considered to be just and urgently necessary to the continuation of life on this continent and indeed this planet? You may wonder what I am doing in prison and I will be very happy to inform you, but I thought it my duty to first inform you of the cancerous criminal treason that eats at the heart of your administration.”
He scarcely paused between his letter to his governor and his letter to his bishop. “Your Grace,” he wrote. “My name is Ezekiel Farragut and I was christened in Christ’s Church at the age of six months. If proof is needed, my wife has a photograph of me taken, not that day, I think, but soon after. I am wearing a long lace gown that must have some history. My head is hairless and protuberant and looks like a darning egg. I am smiling. I was confirmed at the age of eleven by Bishop Evanston in the same church where I was christened. I have continued to take Holy Communion every Sunday of my life, barring those occasions when I was unable to find a church. In the provincial cities and towns of Europe I attend the Roman Mass. I am a croyant—I detest the use of French words in English, but in this case I can think of nothing better—and as croyants I’m sure we share the knowledge that to profess exalted religious experience outside the ecclesiastical paradigm is to make of oneself an outcast; and by that I mean to hear the cruel laughter of those men and women to whom we look for love and mercy; I mean the pain of fire and ice; I mean the desolation of being buried at a crossroads with a stake through one’s heart. I truly believe in One God the Father Almighty but I know that to say so loudly, and at any distance from the chancel—any distance at all—would dangerously jeopardize my ability to ingratiate those men and women with whom I wish to live. I am trying to say—and I’m sure you will agree with me—that while we are available to transcendent experience, we can state this only at the suitable and ordained time and in the suitable and ordained place. I could not live without this knowledge; no more could I live without the thrilling possibility of suddenly encountering the fragrance of skepticism.
“I am a prisoner. My life follows very closely the traditional lives of the saints, but I seem to have been forgotten by the blessed company of all faithful men and women. I have prayed for kings, presidents and bishops, but I have never once said a prayer for a man in prison nor have I ever heard a hymn that mentioned jail. We prisoners, more than any men, have suffered for our sins, we have suffered for the sins of society, and our example should cleanse the thoughts of men’s hearts because of the grief with which we are acquainted. We are in fact the word made flesh; but what I want to do is to call your attention to a great blasphemy.
“As Your Grace well knows, the most universal image of mankind is not love or death; it is Judgment Day. One sees this in the cave paintings in the Dordogne, in the tombs of Egypt, in the temples of Asia and Byzantium, in Renaissance Europe, England, Russia and the Golden Horn. Here the Divinity sifts out the souls of men, granting to the truly pure infinite serenity and sentencing the sinners to fire, ice and sometimes piss and shit. Social custom is never in force where one finds this vision, and one finds it everywhere. Even in Egypt the candidates for immortality include souls who could be bought and sold in the world of the living. The Divinity is the flame, the heart of this vision. A queue approaches the Divinity, always from the right; it doesn’t matter what country, age or century from which the vision is reported. On the left, then, one sees the forfeits and the rewards. Forfeiture and torment are, even in the earliest reports, much more passionately painted than eternal peace. Men thirsted, burned and took it up the ass with much more force and passion than they played their harps and flew. The presence of God binds the world together. His force, His essence, is Judgment.
“Everyone knows that the only sacraments are bread and water. The hymeneal veil and the golden ring came in only yesterday, and as an incarnation of the vision of love, Holy Matrimony is only a taste of the hellish consequences involved in claiming that a vision can be represented by thought, word and deed. Here, in my cell, is what one sees in the caves, the tombs of the kings, the temples and churches all over the planet being performed by men, by any kind of men the last century might have bred. Stars, dumbbells, hacks and boobs—it is they who have constructed these caverns of hell and, with a familiar diminishment of passion, the fields of paradise on the other side of the wall. This is the obscenity, this is the unspeakable obscenity, this stupid pageantry of judgment that, finer than air or gas, fills these cells with the reek of men slaughtering one another for no real reason to speak of. Denounce this cardinal blasphemy, Your Grace, from the back of your broad-winged eagle.”
“Oh, my darling,” he wrote, with no pause at all and to a girl he had lived with for two months when Marcia had abdicated and moved to Carmel. “Last night, watching a comedy on TV, I saw a woman touch a man with familiarity—a light touch on the shoulder—and I lay on my bed and cried. No one saw me. Prisoners, of course, suffer a loss of identity, but this light touch gave me a terrifying insight into the depth of my alienation. Excepting myself there is truly no one here with whom I can speak. Excepting myself there is nothing I can touch that is warm, human and responsive. My reason with its great claims to strength, light and usefulness is totally crippled without the warmth of sentiment. An obscene nothing is forced onto me. I do not love, I am unloved, and I can only remember the raptness of love faintly, faintly. If I close my eyes and try to pray I will fall into the torpor of solitude. I will try to remember.
“In remembering, my darling, I will try to avoid mentioning specific fucks or places or clothes or feats of mutual understanding. I can remember coming back to the Danieli on the Lido after a great day on the beach when we had both been solicited by practically everybody. It was at that hour when the terrible, the uniquely terrible band began to play terrible, terrible tangos and the beauties of the evening, the girls and boys in their handmade clothes, had begun to emerge. I can remember this but I don’t choose to. The landscapes that come to my mind are unpleasantly close to what one finds on greeting cards—the snowbound farmhouse is recurrent—but I would like to settle for something inconclusive. It is late in the day. We have spent the day on a beach. I can tell because we are burned from the sun and there is sand in my shoes. A taxi—some hired livery—has brought us to a provincial railroad station, an isolated place, and left us there. The station is locked and there is no town, no farmhouse, no sign of life around the place excepting a stray dog. When I look at the timetable nailed to the station house I realize that we are in Italy although I don’t know where. I’ve chosen this memory because there are few specifics. We have either missed the train or there is no train or the train is late. I don’t remember. I can’t even remember laughter or a kiss or putting my arm around your shoulder as we sat on a hard bench in an empty provincial railroad station in some country where English was not spoken. The light was going, but going, as it so often does, with a fanfare. All I really remember is a sense of your company and a sense of physical contentment.
“I suppose I am dealing with romantic and erotic things, but I think I am dealing with much more. What I remember, tonight in this cell, is waiting in some living room for you to finish dressing. I hear the sound from the bedroom of you clos
ing a drawer. I hear the sound of your heels—the floor, the carpet, the tile of the bathroom—as you go there to flush the toilet. Then I hear the sound of your heels again—a little swifter now—as you open and close another drawer and then come toward the door of the room where I wait, bringing with you the pleasures of the evening and the night and the life we have together, And I can remember wishing for dinner in an upstairs bedroom while you did the last thing before putting dinner on the table, while I heard you touch a china serving dish with a pot. That is what I remember.
“And I remember when we first met, and I am today and will be forever astonished at the perspicacity with which a man can, in a glimpse, judge the scope and beauty of a woman’s memory, her tastes in color, food, climate and language, the precise clinical dimensions of her visceral, cranial and reproductive tracts, the condition of her teeth, hair, skin, toenails, eyesight and bronchial tree, that he can, in a second, exalted by the diagnostics of love, seize on the fact that she is meant for him or that they are meant for one another. I am speaking of a glimpse and the image seems to be transitory, although this is not so much romantic as it is practical since I am thinking of a stranger, seen by a stranger. There will be stairs, turnings, gangplanks, elevators, seaports, airports, someplace between somewhere and somewhere else and where I first saw you wearing blue and reaching for a passport or a cigarette. Then I pursued you across the street, across the country and around the world, absolutely and rightly informed of the fact that we belonged in one another’s arms as we did.
“You are not the most beautiful woman I have ever known, but four of the great beauties I have known died by their own hand and while this does not mean that all the great beauties I have known have killed themselves, four is a number to consider. I may be trying to explain the fact that while your beauty is not great, it is very practical. You have no nostalgia. I think nostalgia a primary female characteristic and you have it not at all. You have a marked lack of sentimental profoundness, but you have a brightness, a quality of light, that I have never seen equaled. Everyone knows this, everyone sees this, everyone responds. I can’t imagine this being eclipsed. Your physical coordination in athletics can be very depressing. You have to throw me a tennis game and you can even beat me at horseshoes, but what I remember is that you were never aggressive. I remember fishing with you in Ireland. Remember? We stayed in that beautiful manor with an international crowd including several German barons with monocles. Maids with caps served tea. Remember? My gillie was sick that day and we went up the stream alone—it was called the Dillon—to a bend where there was a little sign that said you couldn’t take more than one large salmon a day out of the pool. Above the bend in the stream there was a hill and on the hill there was a ruined castle with a big tree sticking out of the highest tower and in the ruin of the great hall swarms and swarms of bumblebees taking the nectar out of a vine that was covered with white flowers. We didn’t go into the manor hall because we didn’t want to get stung, but I remember walking away from the castle and smelling the heavy scent of the white flowers and the loud, loud noise the bees made—it was like the drone of some old-fashioned engine with a leather traveling belt—and it reached all the way down the hill to the edge of the stream and I remember looking at the greenness of the hills and your brightness and the romantic ruin and hearing the drone of the bees and tying my leader and thanking God that this hadn’t happened to me earlier in life because it would have been the end. I mean I would have become one of those jugheads who sit around cafés with faraway looks in their eyes because they have heard the music of the spheres. So I placed my line, knowing all the time that with your coordination you could place a line much better than I, while you sat on the banks with your hands folded in your lap as if you wished you had brought your embroidery although you can’t, so far as I know, sew on a button. So then I hooked and landed a big salmon and then there was a thunderstorm and we got soaked and then we stripped and swam in the stream, which was warmer than the rain, and then they served the salmon that night at the manor with a lemon in its mouth but what I intended to say is that you weren’t aggressive and as I recall we never quarreled. I remember once looking at you in some hotel room and thinking that if I love her so absolutely we must quarrel and if I didn’t dare to quarrel perhaps I didn’t dare to love. But I loved you and we didn’t quarrel and I can’t ever remember our quarreling, never, never, not even when I was about to shoot all my guns and you took your tongue out of my mouth and said that I still hadn’t told you whether you should wear a long dress or a short dress to the Pinhams’ birthday party. Never.