The Glass Cell

by Patricia Highsmith

  Moony’s voice replied, “He’s out of order all the time . . . He’s out of order. What’re you gonna do with guys like him? . . . You should have my job, mister . . . All right, speak to the warden. I’ll tell him a thing or two myself.”

  The doctor spoke again, lifting Carter’s wrist. “Look at this!”

  “Ah, I’ve seen worse,” said Moony.

  “How long was he hung up?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t string him up.”

  “You didn’t? Who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you mind finding out?— Would you mind finding out?”

  A man with round, horn-rimmed glasses and a white jacket washed Carter’s face with a large wet cloth, and squeezed some drops from it on to his tongue.

  “. . . Morphine, Pete,” said the doctor. “A whole half grain.”

  They rolled his sleeve higher and gave him a needle. Pain began to ebb quickly, like a flood receding, like an ocean drying up. Like heaven. A pleasant, sleepy tingling invaded his head, lightly dancing, like gentle music. They began to work on his hands, and he fell asleep during it.

  2

  When Carter awakened, he was lying in a firm white bed on his back, his head on a pillow. His arms lay outside the covers and his thumbs were huge lumps of gauze as big as the rest of his hands. He looked to right and left. The left bed was empty, the right held a sleeping Negro with a bandaged head. Pain seeped back into his thumbs, and he realized that it was the pain that had awakened him. It was growing worse, and it frightened him.

  He looked at the approaching doctor, wide-eyed with fear, and, realizing that he looked afraid, Carter blinked his eyes. The doctor smiled. He was a small dark man of about forty.

  “How are you feeling?” asked the doctor.

  “My thumbs hurt.”

  The doctor nodded, still faintly smiling. “They took some punishment. You’ll need another shot.” He looked at his wristwatch, frowned slightly, and went away.

  When he came back with the needle, Carter asked, “What time is it?”

  “Six thirty. You had a good sleep.” The needle went in, stayed a few seconds. “How about something to eat—before this puts you to sleep again?”

  Carter did not answer. He knew from the light at the window that it was 6:30 in the evening. “What day is it?”

  “Thursday. Scrambled eggs? Milk toast? I think that’s all you’d better try— Ice cream? Does that appeal to you?”

  Carter’s brain turned tiredly over the fact that this was the kindest voice he had heard since entering the prison. “Scrambled.”

  Carter was in the ward for two days before they removed the bandages, and then his thumbs looked enormous to him and they were bright pink. They did not look as if they belonged to him or to his own hands. The thumbnail was tiny in the mass of flesh. And they still hurt. The morphine shots came every four hours, and Carter wished they were more often. The doctor tried to be reassuring, but Carter could see that he was worried because the pain did not diminish. His name was Dr. Stephen Cassini.

  On Sunday, Carter was allowed no visitors, whatever the state of his demerits, because he was in the ward.

  At 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, when the visiting period began, Carter imagined Hazel in the big gray-green lobby downstairs protesting that she had come to see her husband and that she was not going to leave until she had seen him. Dr. Cassini had written a letter to her which Carter had dictated, saying that he would not be able to see her, and the letter had been smuggled out sometime on Friday, but Carter was not sure Hazel had received it by Saturday. Carter knew that, if she had, she would come anyway, because he had said his hands were “slightly injured,” but he also knew that the double gates of gray bars in the lobby, the officials in uniforms who examined identifications of visitors and checked on inmates’ status would defeat Hazel at last, and he writhed in his bed and pressed his face into his hard pillow.

  He got her last two letters from under his pillow and reread them, holding them with two fingers.

  . . . Darling, Timmy is bearing up pretty well, so don’t worry about him. I lecture him daily, though I try not to make it sound like a lecture. The kids are picking on him at school, of course, and I suppose human nature wouldn’t be human nature if they didn’t . . .

  And in the last letter:

  Darling Phil,

  Have just spent over an hour with Mr. Magran, the lawyer David has recommended all along over Tutting, you know, and I like him very much. He talks sense, is optimistic but not so optimistic (like Tutting) that you start to get suspicious. Anyway, Tutting has now said there is “nothing more” he can do. As if there weren’t the Supreme Court, but I wouldn’t even want Tutting handling that. I have paid Tutting off, that is, the last $500 of his fee, so if you’re quite agreed, Magran can take over. Magran said it will cost $3,000 to have a transcript of the trial typed up for the Supreme Court, but you know we can afford that. He wants to see you as soon as possible, of course. Oh, damnit darling, those idiotic regulations I’m greeted with every Sunday: 37765’s demerits do not permit him to have visitors this week. And for being out of step in a cafeteria line, you said. For goodness’ sake, darling, do your best to conform to their stupid rules.

  Magran is also writing to the Governor direct. He will send you a copy of the letter. You must not worry. Like you, I know this cannot go on forever, or even very long. Six to twelve years! It won’t even be six months. . . .

  Magran’s fee would be at least $3,000, Carter thought, and the $3,000 for the transcript besides would just about clean out their ready cash. Every figure seemed astronomical—$75,000 for his bail, for instance, which of course they hadn’t been able to raise, and Carter had not wanted to ask his Aunt Edna for it. Their $15,000 house was mortgaged, their Olds was worth $1,800, but Hazel needed it for marketing and also for driving the twenty-seven miles on Sundays to see him, or try to.

  And now his thumbs were out of joint. That was the final absurd fact. The doctor called it something else, but essentially that was what it was, and an operation, according to Dr. Cassini, would be of very dubious value. The prison—in which Carter had thought a couple of weeks would not be unbearable, not even a serious episode in his life—had now branded him forever. He would never have much articulation in the second joints, and a sort of hollow would remain below them. He would have funny-looking thumbs and he would not have much strength in them. Imaginative people, seeing them, might guess what had caused the deformation. He wouldn’t be able to deal a hand of bridge so adroitly, or whittle a bow and arrow for Timmy, and, by the time he got out, Timmy might not be interested in bows and arrows, anyway. He had written to Hazel within a couple of hours after the removal of the bandages that day, Sunday, holding the pen in a wobbling fashion between his index and middle fingers, and he had had to tell her what had happened, ghoulish as the story was, to account for his strange writing, but he minimized it and said it had been for several hours instead of nearly forty-eight. His thumbs were permanently deformed because a man called Hanky for some strange reason had it in for him. Why? Because he hadn’t shown Hanky the picture of Hazel? “You got a wife? . . . You got her picture? . . . Let’s see it,” Hanky had said the first afternoon of their acquaintance. Carter had said as amiably as he could, “Oh, some other time.” “You ain’t got her picture.” That had been his opportunity, perhaps, to show it and appease Hanky, but he had muffed it. The picture he carried in his wallet of Hazel was cut out of an enlargement of a color photograph in which she was standing in the snow in front of their New York apartment on East 57th Street, hatless, her dark hair blowing, laughing, a wonderful, typical expression on her face, which was why Carter preferred the picture, and what possible pleasure could a pig like Hanky get from looking at a picture of a woman with the beaver collar of her coat pulled up to her chin?

 
Sunday afternoon around 4, Dr. Cassini came in and made his rounds of the forty-odd patients in the ward. When he came to Carter, he said:

  “Well, Carter, want to try taking a few steps?”

  “Absolutely,” Carter said, sitting up. Pain streaked down his back, but he did not let it show in his face. He staggered at the foot of the bed and had to catch his balance on the doctor’s extended hand.

  Dr. Cassini smiled and shook his head. “You keep worrying about your thumbs. Do you know those knots in your legs were shutting off the circulation and you could have got gangrene? Do you know only yesterday morning you were running a temperature of a hundred and three and I thought you might be in for pneumonia?”

  Carter was glad to sit. He felt faint. “When is this going to go out of my legs?”

  “The knots? With time. And massage. Walk around the foot of the bed, if you like, but don’t try anything more,” Dr. Cassini said, and moved on to the next patient.

  Carter sat there breathing as if he had been running. He remembered what Dr. Cassini had said yesterday, that he was after all thirty and couldn’t recuperate from an experience such as his as quickly as a nineteen-year-old. Dr. Cassini had a cheerful, matter-of-fact way of talking about the Hole, and victims of it whom he had treated, that gave Carter an eerie feeling that he was in a madhouse instead of a prison, a madhouse in which the caretakers were the madmen, as in the old cliché. Dr. Cassini seemed to pass no judgment on what happened in the prison. Or was that quite true? Dr. Cassini had asked him yesterday what he was in for, and Carter had told him. “Most fellows, I don’t bother asking why they’re in,” Dr. Cassini had said. “I know already, breaking and entering, bargaining, car stealing, but you’re not like the most of them.” Dr. Cassini had asked what school he had gone to—Carter had gone to Cornell—and then why he had come south. Carter wished he had asked himself that, eight months ago, when he and Hazel had decided to come. Carter had come because the offer from Triumph Builders had sounded very good, $15,000 a year plus various perquisites. “What did Palmer do with the money, do you think?” Dr. Cassini had asked, and Carter had said, “Well, he had a girlfriend in New York and one in Memphis. He saw one or other of them every weekend. He was always flying off somewhere on Fridays. He bought them cars and things.” And Dr. Cassini had nodded and said, “Oh, I see,” and he did, and he believed it, Carter thought. It was true. But it had not been believed by the Court of Quarter Sessions. Even when the girls were brought down and questioned, it hadn’t been believed that Palmer could spend $250,000 in about a year on two women, and that the two women between them had nothing more to show for it than one mink coat worth about $5,000 and one diamond bracelet worth about $8,000. Nobody seemed to know or care that Palmer could eat and drink about $500 worth a month, and did, or that his airline tickets cost him anything, or that both girls had got rid of expensive automobiles just before they came down for the trial, or that Palmer might have salted some away in Brazil.

  Carter crept back into bed. While he had been sitting on the edge of the bed, the Negro with the bandaged head had stared at him unblinking, as if he watched a boring movie. Carter had tried to talk to him a couple of times, but had got no response, and Dr. Cassini this morning had told him that the Negro had abscesses in both ears, had had a series of them, and that he did not expect to preserve much, if anything, of his hearing.

  He reread Hazel’s last four letters, one that he had had in his pocket when they strung him up and the three that had been delivered since. Carter held them between his fingers while his fat thumbs throbbed in unison like silent drums between his eyes and the pages. Hazel had put a drop of her perfume on her last letter, which was the most cheerful of the four. The male nurse Pete came with the morphine needle and silently prepared it. Pete had only one eye, the other was a sunken hollow, whether the result of disease or injury, Carter could not guess. The needle slid into his arm. In silence, Pete went away, and Carter lifted his letters again. As the morphine stole through his blood, he began to hear Hazel’s voice reading her own words, and he read all the letters as if they were brand new. He heard also Timmy’s voice interrupting her, and Hazel saying, “Just a minute, sweetie, can’t you see I’m writing to Daddy?— Oh, all right, your catcher’s mitt. Why, it’s right there in front of you. On the sofa. That’s a fine place for it, anyway, can’t you take it up to your room?” Timmy socked a small fist into the undersized mitt. “When’s Daddy coming home?” “Just as soon as . . .” “When’s Daddy coming home? . . . When’s Daddy coming home? . . .” Carter changed his position in bed and forced himself away from that vision, lay passive with his eyes on Hazel’s writing until another vision swam into its place. He saw their bedroom. Hazel stood by her dressing table, brushing her hair for the night. He was in his pajamas. As he moved toward her, she smiled at him in the mirror. They kissed, a long kiss. With the morphine to enhance memory, it was almost as if Hazel lay beside him in the hard bed.

  Carter could watch his visions as if they took place on a stage. No one was in the theater but him. He was the sole spectator. No one had ever seen the show before. Nobody ever would, but him. Here the voices of the inmates were shut out. At least for his ruined thumbs he had been granted a few days of quiet, more or less. A groan of pain from someone, the clatter of bedpans were like music compared to the excretory sounds of 6:30 a.m. in the cell block, or the insane titters in the night, like women’s laughter, and the other no less deranging sounds of men who sought relief by themselves. Who was mad? Carter wondered. Which ones of them? Which jurors and which judges out of the thousands who had sent these six thousand men here?

  3

  It was Wednesday before Carter could walk. Dr. Cassini got for him a new suit of prison clothes, which fitted him better than the ones he had been wearing. He was still weak. His weakness shocked him.

  “It’s not unusual,” said Dr. Cassini.

  Carter nodded, his mind baffled and blank as it always was when the doctor spoke in his matter-of-fact way about the Hole. “But you said you’d seen other cases—like mine.”

  “Oh, yes, a few. After all, I’ve been here four years— Look, I’m not saying what they do is right. I’ve sent letters to the warden. He promises to look into it. He fires a guard or has him transferred.” Dr. Cassini’s hands flew out in a hopeless gesture, then he adjusted his rimmed glasses nervously and blinked at Carter. “You try to fight city hall and you go crazy. I’m not going to be here much longer.” He nodded, as if to confirm himself, and Carter immediately became suspicious. “It’s time for another shot for you, isn’t it?”

  Carter wrote a letter to the warden, whose name was Joseph J. Pierson, with regard to Moonan and Cherniver. He had intended to make the letter brief, calm and to the point. The result was such a masterpiece of understatement, Carter was seized briefly by an attack of mirth. It read:

  Dear Warden Pierson,

  I should like to call to your attention that on the afternoon of March 1, I was strung up by the thumbs in one of the basement rooms of the institution for nearly forty-eight hours. I was repeatedly revived with buckets of cold water when I fainted. The result is that my thumbs are permanently damaged, the second joints having been pulled from their sockets. The guards who did this are Mr. Moonan and Mr. Cherniver. I respectfully request that you exercise your authority in regard to this incident.

  Yours faithfully,

  Philip E. Carter

  (37765)

  P.S. I would be grateful if I could have a full list of prison rules and regulations so that I may avoid an accumulation of demerits in future.

  Carter had heard from one of the inmates that Warden Pierson was scrupulous about acknowledging letters of all sorts, but never answered any of them. At any rate, Carter dropped the letter in the slot marked “Intramural,” and that was that. Patience and fortitude, he thought. It was going to be a long, slow fight, whatever Hazel thought. He was
going to see Hazel on Sunday. Dr. Cassini had put in a special request that he might see his wife. In just seventy-two more hours, he would see her for twenty minutes. A cheerful fatalism buoyed him up: they couldn’t very well kill him before Sunday afternoon, so nothing seemed to stand in the way of his seeing Hazel. In the hospital ward it was impossible to acquire demerits, because he was not actually doing anything, walking anywhere, or using any prison tools or facilities other than the toilet.

  He reread Wuthering Heights, and wrote to Hazel:

  My darling,

  Imagine sitting in prison and reading Emily Brontë? Things are not so bad, are they? Please do not worry, above all don’t get angry if you can help it. I was angry the first weeks here and it got me nothing but a lot of demerits and ill will from the guards. Best not even to feel the anger if you can help it. Make like the yogis or the passive-resistance boys. We are up against something a lot bigger than we are.

  Am glad Timmy is doing better with his reading, glad also he is not getting any heckling lately at school. Or are you sure? He would tell you, wouldn’t he? But I’m not so sure. He might frown and be silent. Is he frowning and silent? Tell me. I am writing him a letter next, so you will miss one from me, but meanwhile tell Timmy I think he is great for doing such a good job as man of the house while I am not there. I mean snow shoveling. After all a half inch of snow is a rough job!

  Am helping out in the ward as much as I can—bedpans and other charming chores. Don’t worry about my hands. Am not writing too badly as you see. I love you, darling.

  Phil

  The effort of writing tired him like hard labor, and the writing was pretty bad—wobbly and nearly every letter separate from the next.