The Glass Cell

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Mistuh Carter,” said the Negro urgently. “Mistuh Carter—”

  Carter went to the foot of the Negro’s bed, lifted between his two palms the bedpan from the low table there, and slipped it under the covers.

  “Thank y’, sir.”

  “You’re welcome,” Carter murmured, although the Negro could not hear him.

  On Sunday, Carter took extra care with his shaving. It was another great advantage of the hospital ward that he could shower and shave daily, instead of twice a week being herded with the others to the showers and the barbers. He had a second shower at noon, and he also shined his heavy shoes. He took as much trouble with himself as he had for his wedding, and he considered telling Hazel that and decided not to, because she might not think it very funny. Carter pressed his baggy trousers in a room down the hall from the ward which had an iron and an ironing board and a sink in it. Then he put on the white shirt that inmates were allowed to wear on Sundays, if they had a visitor. It was a short-sleeved shirt with overlong collar tabs—inmates were not allowed ties because they might hang themselves, Carter supposed—but at least the shirt was white, and a change from flesh color was a treat.

  He looked at himself in the mirror by the ward door, and tried to see himself as Hazel would. There were depressions under his eyes, though they were not dark. Certainly his face was thinner. And he looked at least thirty-five, he thought, not thirty. Even his lips seemed thinner and more taut, even his head narrower, but that was due to the prison haircut, of course. His blue eyes looked out at him like the eyes of another person, tired, hard, and vaguely suspicious.

  Dr. Cassini walked up and slapped him on the shoulder. “All dolled up, eh, Philip?”

  Carter nodded, smiling, and suddenly his heart began to beat faster with excitement. He had a feeling of giddy anticipation, as if time had turned back and he were about to call for Hazel on a date, rushing back down to Gramercy Park in a taxi with a box of flowers across his lap, running up her front steps two at a time—and Hazel opening the brown door with the brass knob before he touched the knocker.

  “Want another shot?”

  “No, I’m okay, thanks.” His thumbs were starting to hurt a little, but he didn’t want another shot now, at 12:30. He had had a shot at 10, and he thought it should last until 1:50, when Hazel’s visit would be over. By ten past 1, the jabs from the pulses in his thumbs were growing more acute, and Carter was tempted to get a quick shot from Pete, which he could have had just for the asking, but he decided to stick by his little vow to himself that he wouldn’t, just before he saw Hazel. He had Pete bandage his thumbs so they would not shock her.

  He went down in the elevator with his pass signed by Dr. Cassini and the guard named Clark in the hospital corridor. Carter had to show the pass three times, each time acquiring a new signature or initials, before he reached his old A-block, at the front end of which was the entrance to the visiting room. By then he was beginning to feel weak in the knees.

  Carter saw Hanky’s blobby figure walking ahead of him and along the left side of the corridor, heading for their old cell, probably. Carter slowed his walk so that he would not overtake Hanky or be seen by him. Carter peered through the bars as he walked toward them, but he could not identify Hazel among the figures in the waiting area. The lobby, or waiting room, had benches like church pews with an aisle down the middle. At the back near the outside door was a coffee-vending machine and a candy-and-gum machine. Between the cell block and the waiting room was an area of some twenty feet square enclosed on two sides by walls and on the other two sides by bars that went from floor to ceiling. This enclosure was called the cage. There were always two guards in the cage, and the two doors were never opened at the same time, nor was a visitor ever allowed in the cage while an inmate was in it, even if the inmate was only handing the outgoing mailbag to a guard. In the cage, to the right as one faced the waiting room, was a locked door through which visitors were admitted to the visiting room one floor below the block. Inmates who had visitors were admitted by a door near the cage in the corridor.

  Carter saw Hazel when he was about twenty feet from the cage. She was standing at the tall desk on the right in the waiting room, showing her identification card to the officer there. Carter’s heart floated up in his chest, and he slowly turned around, so that the guard who leaned against the wall on his right would not assume he had come to stare.

  “Santoz!” called the guard by the prisoners’ entrance door.

  “Here!” A man trotted forward.

  “Colligan!”

  Sullen, indifferent, vaguely envious faces watched as men in white shirts detached themselves from the sluggish mass in the corridor and came alive, hurrying to the visiting-room door with their passes.

  “Carter!”

  The guard took his pass, scribbled on it, and motioned him through. Carter went down the dimly lighted stairway. It led to a long room divided by a glass wall with a shallow, table-high shelf and straight chairs on either side of it. Nearly all the chairs were taken. The visitors had their entrance at the other end of the room and on the other side of the barrier. There were four armed guards, one in each corner of the room. Carter kept his eyes on the visitors’ door as he walked, looking for Hazel.

  Then she came in, and he moved forward, still looking at her, toward a free chair which was on the other side of the barrier, pointed to it, and managed to find an empty chair for himself. Hazel wore her blue tweed coat with a bright scarf tucked in at her neck. To Carter, the colors she wore seemed spectacularly brilliant and beautiful, like flowers or birds’ plumage. Her red lips smiled, though her eyes were tense. She looked at his hands.

  Carter pushed his underlip out, smiled and shrugged. “They don’t hurt— You’re looking wonderful.” He tried to speak loudly and distinctly, because of the glass.

  “What do they say is the matter with them? Did they say anything else?” Hazel asked.

  “Nothing else.” Carter swallowed and glanced at the clock. He sat on the edge of the hard chair. Before he knew it, the twenty minutes would be gone, and he was already wasting precious seconds in silence—except that he was seeing her. “How is Timmy?”

  “Timmy’s all right. He’s fine.” Hazel moistened her lips. “You’ve lost some weight.”

  “Not much.”

  “Mr. Magran said he would come today to see you.”

  Her voice reminded him of clear, cool water. He had not heard a woman’s voice in six weeks. “It’s wonderful to see you.” Carter was annoyed by the voice of the man on his left, who was talking to a man in a dark suit on Hazel’s right, perhaps the inmate’s lawyer. The inmate was saying in a loud, annoyed voice: “I dunno, I just dunno. Why d’y’ keep askin’ me that?” The inmate’s voice was louder to Carter than Hazel’s.

  “Did you get a statement yet from the doctor?” she asked.

  His thumbs pulsed more quickly. His forehead was cool with sweat. “He—he has to take more X-rays. He can’t say what’s the matter yet. Not entirely.”

  “Then it’s worse than you told me, isn’t it?”

  “I just don’t know, honey. It’s the joints—” Tell me the names of the guards who did it, Hazel had written in one of her letters. It’s absolutely illegal in this day and age. The word “illegal” was strange, in view of some of the things he had seen in the prison. What about the old man in A-block whose false teeth had broken in half and who couldn’t get them fixed and couldn’t eat anything now but soup? Was that a legal way to treat a man in jail? Carter felt he was choking, as if he might burst into tears. I only want to put my head in her lap, he thought, and he sat up straighter. “I’ll get the statement from Cassini as soon as I can.”

  “David can use it, you know,” Hazel said earnestly.

  “David? I thought Magran wanted it.”

  “David said he’d take it to the Gove
rnor in person. David’s a lawyer, too, you know. He’d take it sooner than Magran. Right away.”

  “Who’s handling my case, Sullivan or Magran?” Carter said quickly. His hands rested on the table like a boxer’s. The thumbs pulsed as if blood were going to come shooting out the tips of the bandage at any moment. “I hear you’re seeing Sullivan a lot,” he said, and saw in her face that he had hurt her.

  “I see him as often as I tell you I see him. I’d really be down in the dumps without him, Phil. All the neighbors calling and dropping in— What can they do? David at least knows something about the law.”

  “That might be—might be something we’d all better forget about.”

  “What?”

  “The law. Where is it? What good is it?”

  Hazel sighed. “Oh, darling. You’re tired and you’re in pain.” She reached nervously into her bag for a cigarette, started to extend the pack to Carter before she remembered the barrier that went all the way to the ceiling. “Haven’t you got a cigarette?”

  “I forgot ’em. I don’t want one. It doesn’t matter.” He did want one, and he watched her closely as she lighted it. Her hands shook slightly. A frown put a line between her brows. Her forehead was very smooth, quite without lines. Her complexion was very clear, and to Carter it seemed now so beautiful it was unreal, like something painted on canvas or on glass. There was a natural pinkness in her cheeks and in her lips. She had a small mouth and the softest lips Carter had ever seen, or kissed. He wondered if Sullivan had kissed them, or if Sullivan ever would.

  “What are the guards’ names?” Hazel asked. “Were you afraid to write them in a letter to me?”

  Carter glanced to right and left automatically. “I wasn’t afraid, I just thought it might get censored. It’s Moonan and Cherniver.”

  “Moonan and what?” Her dark blue eyes looked directly at him.

  “Cherniver. C-h-e-r-n-i-v-e-r.”

  “I’ll remember. But I want you to get that statement immediately from the doctor. The X-rays can wait. We’ll get another statement about those.”

  “Okay, honey.” He racked his brain for something cheerful to say to her, some incident to make her smile. There had been laughter in the ward over a few things, but now he could not think of one. Carter smiled. “Sullivan taking you out to dinner tonight? As usual?”

  “As usual?” Her frown was back.

  “I meant, it’s Sunday. You usually see him Sunday evenings, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say usually. Phil, I tell you every time I see him and what we talk about and even what we eat.”

  That was true, and Carter clamped his teeth together. It was only Gawill who had made a couple of cracks in his last letter, and Gawill was no doubt exaggerating or making things up.

  “You never mention what you eat,” Hazel said.

  Carter could suddenly laugh a little. “I don’t think you’d care for it. Hog jowl—” And other things unidentifiable that had their prison names.

  “You can complain to me. I only wish I could share it with you.”

  The pain in his thumbs made his mind swim. He spoke to keep alert. “I don’t like to think of you here. I don’t want you to know all about it, because it’s too disgusting. Sometimes I don’t even want to look at the picture I have of you here.”

  She looked surprised and also frightened. “Darling—”

  “I don’t mean I don’t want you to visit me here. My God, I don’t mean that.” The sweat rolled down in front of his ears.

  “Two more minutes,” said the guard, strolling behind Carter.

  Carter looked wildly at the clock. It was true.

  “Mr. Magran said he’d already written to the warden about your thumbs,” Hazel said.

  “Well, the warden won’t reply to it,” Carter said quickly.

  “What do you mean? It’s a letter from your lawyer.”

  “I mean,” he said, trying to sound calmer, “he’ll acknowledge the letter, but he probably won’t refer to the stringing up. I know he won’t.”

  Hazel wrung her fingers together. The cigarette trembled. “Well, we’ll see— Oh, darling, how I wish I could cook a few meals for you!”

  Carter laughed, a laugh as if someone had crushed his chest. “There’s an old fellow here named Mac, nearly seventy. All he talks about is his wife’s cooking—apple pies, venison sauerbraten, popovers. Popovers, imagine!” Carter burst out in another laugh, his shoulders shaking, and he saw Hazel laugh, too, almost in her old way, and it transformed her face. “It’s funny because”—Carter wiped tears from his eyes—“because all the other guys talk about how they miss their wives or their girls in bed or something, and he talks about food. He spends all his spare time making ship models or making one ship he’s been on since I got here. It’s four feet long and his cellmate complains because it takes up too much room. He’s just up here.” Carter waved a hand sideways and up to the right, as if Mac’s cell were visible.

  “Time’s up,” said the guard.

  Carter half stood up, his lips apart, staring at Hazel.

  Hazel was already standing up, to leave him. “That’s the first person you’ve told me about here. Tell me more. Write me. See you next Sunday, darling.” She blew him a kiss, turned and went.

  He began the long walk back down the cell block. He had to have another shot before he could sit through twenty minutes with Magran. Near the end of the cell block, he looked left, and at last he came to Mac’s cell. The door was open and Mac sat there on his straight chair, so absorbed in the delicate sanding of his ship’s hull that he did not notice Carter looking at him. The ship was not yet painted, but Mac had made great progress since Carter had last seen it. The rigging looked finished.

  “Hello, Mac,” Carter said. “My name’s Carter.”

  “Oh, hello, hello,” Mac said, cordially but not recognizing him, and turned back to his work. “Got time for a visit?”

  “No. Sorry, I haven’t. Some other time.” Carter walked on. Mac had made some kind of peace with himself, and for that Carter envied him. Mac hadn’t even noticed his bandaged hands, and that was somehow comforting to Carter, too. Mac hadn’t even seen him, Carter thought, only heard his voice.

  4

  Carter got his shot from Pete, then sat on one of the wicker chairs at the end of the ward. He was so tense, he could not keep his heels from jittering on the gray linoleum floor. The visit from Hazel had made him realize something terrible, that he had been enduring the past three months in a deliberate fog, in a kind of mental armor that was not after all strong enough. Among the inmates and with Dr. Cassini, he could keep it up. With Hazel, he had been himself for a few minutes. The pain in his thumbs had been the coup de grâce to his morale. He had whined to her, he had shown bitterness and ingratitude. He had been everything a man should not be with his wife.

  He sat back and let the morphine work its miracle. The morphine was attacking the pain, and as usual the morphine was winning the battle—would win for nearly two hours. Then the pain would rally its forces and counterattack the morphine, and it would be the pain’s turn to win. It was another game, futile and unreal, like the prison game. Carter saw it as a series of shocks and a series of efforts at adjusting. The first shock had been stripping naked with a dozen other men who were being admitted to the prison the same day, one with red sores on his back, another with a head wound, still drunk and belligerent, one a scared-faced kid of nineteen or twenty with a shapely, small mouth like a girl’s, a face Carter had puzzled over for an instant, wondering if that was the kind of innocent face that could mask the worst criminal of the lot of them. Then the first meals, the first dreary lights-out and the broken sleep until it was time to get up before dawn, the first nights of cold in December, the night he had stripped off his clothing and pajamas, wet them in the basin, and, while Hanky held a match
so he could see, stuffed the clothes into the cracks between the stones at the back of the cell. Hanky had thought it very clever of him to wet the clothes so they would freeze tight, but there had been more cracks than clothing. He remembered Christmas with bronchitis in bed in his cell, and the first approach of a homosexual in the shoe factory. All this Carter had more or less got used to or at least learned to tolerate without fury. Even the stringing up he had tolerated, he thought, with some fortitude, but what if that fortitude were to collapse? What if it collapsed very soon because of the nagging pain in his thumbs? Would he run screaming through the corridors, tackling guards, hurling his fists in anybody’s face—until they shot him down or he banged his brains out against some stone wall?

  Clark came and told him that he had a visitor downstairs. Carter made some lumpy instant coffee with water out of the tap, put three teaspoons of sugar into it for energy, and gulped it. Then he took a pass from Clark and went down in the elevator.

  Once more the long walk to the visiting room. If this was Magran, Carter thought, he had no idea what he looked like, but Magran could recognize him by the bandages on his thumbs. Carter pulled his shoulders back. He had to make the best impression he could on Magran, not as to innocence, but as to confidence: Magran would report to Hazel on the interview.

  In the visiting room, a man stood up and beckoned to him with a slight smile.

  “Lawrence Magran. How do you do?” said Magran.

  “How do you do?” Carter sat down as Magran did.

  Magran was a short, round man with thinning black hair, rimless glasses, and hunched shoulders, and he looked as if he spent most of his time at a desk. He asked Carter how he was feeling, if his hands gave him much pain, if his wife had come earlier to see him. Magran’s voice was surprisingly gentle and soft. Carter had to lean forward to hear him.

  “I think your wife’s talked to you about the Supreme Court appeal. It’s a slow business, but it’s our only hope now.”