by Howard Fast
“I don’t smoke, Boyd. You know that.”
“Well, then for candy or whatever.”
“Can you and Harvey come to see me?”
“Of course. We’re your attorneys.”
“Who else?”
“It’s limited to family except by special request. But that’s not too hard to work out. The thing to remember is that you’re not cut off. You may get the feeling that you are, but you’re not. Harvey and I are here, ready to do whatever has to be done. Then there’s your mother and father. Your brother, Joe, lives down there in Los Angeles, so he’s close by.”
“Boyd,” she said a bit impatiently, “stop being so damned Pollyannaish. There are things you do alone. You give birth alone and you die alone and you go to prison alone, and it doesn’t matter who’s standing by. All right, I seem to have it all now. I’ll be waiting for you Wednesday morning at seven o’clock.”
He nodded bleakly and rose to go, departing just as Sam came rocketing into the house. Barbara prepared lunch for the two of them, reading to Sam from A. A. Milne while they ate. After he had stretched out for his nap, she called her mother.
“What do you and daddy have going for this evening?” she asked Jean.
“Nothing very important. We were going out for dinner.”
“Could you stop by afterward? I think we have to talk.”
Later that evening, after Barbara had spelled out the expected course of events, she said to them, “I want you to know that I’m glad you’re the way you are. I couldn’t bear it if you made a fuss about this.”
“If I thought it would do any good,” Jean said.
“Well, you always gave me my head. I appreciate that. And when you come to think of it, I’ve been through just about everything. The main thing is Sam. Make him feel loved and treasured.”
“We’ll manage that,” Dan agreed. “The boat is almost finished.”
“You’re a good sailor, aren’t you, daddy?”
“Just about the best.”
“I don’t want you to bring him down to the prison.”
“It’s six months, Bobby. That’s a long time for a little boy.”
“I know, but I think this way is best. If I change my mind, I’ll let you know. Isn’t it crazy, my going to prison on Terminal Island? The same place,” she said, “where my father built the biggest shipyard in the world.”
“Well, not quite the biggest.”
“Big enough. Big enough for Admiral Land to say you changed the course of the war. I was there once, in forty-one, I think.”
Dan nodded. Jean sat silently, watching the two of them. She didn’t trust herself to speak offhandedly; she had to think of her words and measure them, spacing them properly and unemotionally. Barbara was the one thing she had done right and well, even from the beginning.
“I don’t remember the prison,” Barbara said.
“It was a military compound then, a finger of land that sticks out of the island to the west.”
“Then you can see the ocean?”
Dan nodded.
“And ships?”
“Yes, they pass by when they make port at San Pedro or Long Beach.”
“That will be nice. Well, we can’t sit around and talk all night, can we?”
“What shall we tell Sam?” Jean asked slowly.
“He knows I’ve been a correspondent, that I’ve had to travel all over the world for stories. He knows that I make my living from stories—and incidentally he’s been spoiled by them. You can’t just put him in front of a TV set. He wants stories, so I’m afraid you’ll have to raid the bookstores and read to him. I’ll tell him that I must go away for a while, and you back that up. That’s all. I’ll have all his things packed. It might be a good thing if you could come by on Wednesday as early as possible.”
“We’ll be here before you leave,” Jean agreed.
“Good. Anna will stay here in the house, and Harvey’s office will take care of the bills.”
“For Christ’s sake, if you need money,” Dan began vehemently.
“No, daddy, I don’t need money, and if I do, I’ll ask you. I think Sam will be all right up there on Russian Hill, and it’s only six months.”
On the way home, Jean said nothing. It was not until they were in the house that she began to cry. She sat in a chair, her hands folded, weeping quietly. Watching her, Dan realized that this was the first time in all the years he had known her that he had ever seen her weep.
***
The marshal who drove the government Buick was named Buck Gedding, and he wore a spectacular old-fashioned revolver strapped to his waist. The woman marshal, Sadie Thomas, rode in back with Barbara. “We won’t bother with handcuffs, dearie,” she told Barbara. “I didn’t need Judge Fremont to tell me that handcuffs were out. Good heavens, I never gave it a cotton-picking thought, I did not. We are not barbarians—although I can tell you this. They are not all like you; no, siree, sir, they are not, not by a long mile. I had women in here would claw your eyes out, and there was one little filly had a knife on her. She pulled the knife on me, and I’ll bear the scars to show it until my deathbed day.”
“Sadie, will you can it?” the driver said. “You can talk anyone deaf, dumb, and blind. Furthermore, conversation is not permitted, which is something you know as well as I do.”
“Oh, that is just fine, Buck Gedding, but if you expect me to sit here next to this poor woman for four hundred miles in dead silence, you got another think coming. So I suggest you drive the car and allow me to tend to the prisoner.”
The prisoner was lost in her own thoughts, and in time Sadie Thomas wound down into silence. Barbara was in a muted state of shock. She had allowed herself only the smallest portion of emotion that morning, going through a scene she had rehearsed in her mind a hundred times. It was an instinctive condition of the professional writer to write a scene mentally before it was played. Everything had to be in place; everything had to fit and everything had to function, each sentence and paragraph worked into a specific balance. Barbara could recall a time in Burma when she witnessed an attack of Japanese fighter-bombers on an American installation. They darted in, swooping down one at a time, each dropping its load of small, hundred-pound bombs. She stood covered to her waist in a slit trench, ignoring the pleading of a sergeant who was trying to get her down without actually manhandling her, standing there like an idiot in a forest of unfolding, deadly rosebuds, seeing the whole display in the third person and turning it into words as she watched. It was not a writer’s trick, it was a writer’s sad destiny; and she had done the same thing today, divorcing herself from herself, even cold inside as she held Sam in her arms and kissed him. Dan was not a storyteller; he clutched her with an agony that transmitted itself. She could feel it in the hard muscles of his body, and she felt belittled by the fact that one part of her mind could wonder how it felt for a father to see his daughter go off to prison.
Jean looked at her out of a face suddenly old. Never before had Barbara thought of her mother as an old woman. Sixty-one is not old, but now that fine, aristocratic face had crumbled. Barbara was almost glad to get away.
“Terminal Island,” Sadie Thomas was saying, “is by no means the worst place in the world, dearie. The air is good, and that’s more than you can say of Los Angeles. No smog there. I don’t know how people live in Los Angeles. Well, each to his own.”
They stopped for lunch at a roadside stand. “Government buys you lunch,” Gedding said, dispensing largesse as its present representative. “Two sandwiches and coffee. What would you like? You stay in the car.”
“And suppose she has to use the ladies’ room?”
“You go with her.”
“You got to use the ladies’ room, dearie?”
“Yes,” Barbara said, “but I’m not hungry. I don’t want any lunch.”
“The government buys it.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not hungry. I’ll have coffee.”
“We’re going to the ladies’ room,” Sadie Thomas said, “and then we are going to sit down inside like civilized people.”
Barbara sat at the counter flanked by the two marshals, sipping her coffee and thinking that she was not very good at this. It had barely started, and here she was totally depressed. She could remember no time in all her life, not even when the news of Bernie’s death came, when she had been overtaken by such a feeling of total hopelessness and despair. She had been removed from everything she loved, cherished, and depended on. She was alone and powerless. She realized full well that the world was full of people who lived their lives alone and powerless, but that had never been her case. In the past, no matter what had happened, no matter where she was, she could reach out to people of power and influence who loved or respected her. Even in Nazi Germany her connection with the power circles of the United States had been noted and respected. Now, for the first time, she was totally cut off; the connections with her life, her past, her family, and her friends had been severed. Two people, sitting on either side of her, owned her body and soul. If some lunatic impulse should cause her to bolt out of the roadside stand and run for freedom, this large, heavy man called Buck Gedding would be justified in drawing his gun and shooting her down. Or at least so it appeared to her. All the rights and privileges that any American citizen takes for granted had disappeared. It no longer mattered what her crime had been; all the discussions of whether her crime was in all truth a crime had become academic, rhetorical games. To everyone she would encounter during the next six months, she was a criminal.
Back in the car, driving south again, unable to bear the chatter of the woman marshal, she pretended to be asleep, lying back with her eyes closed. The night before she had slept for only an hour or two; now the pretense became fact. Curled into one corner of the back seat, she slept for the next two hours.
It was almost twilight when they reached San Pedro and rolled slowly onto the little ferry that would take them to Terminal Island. “You stay in the car,” Gedding said to her, and Sadie Thomas nodded her agreement. “It’s the rules, dearie.” They locked the doors.
On the island, they drove past the shipyards, idle now, the old ways empty, the buildings boarded over. They drove past the Customs House to Seaside Avenue, flanked on either side by empty lots and warehouses, and then down Seaside Avenue to the end of the island. Now Barbara could see the harbor waters, a flat, crowded, ugly port, a mass of fishing boats, tugs, rusty freighters, so different from the great, windswept expanse of San Francisco Bay that it brought tears to her eyes.
The car pulled up in front of her place of exile, board buildings like army barracks, a ten-foot fence of heavy linked metal, and guard towers. Sadie Thomas pointed to a quadrangle of brick buildings. “The men’s prison. Yours is better, dearie, believe me. We go in here, so just try to make a good impression right from the beginning. It pays off.”
They entered the building set between the woven wire walls. A matron-officer in a blue prison uniform signed Gedding’s papers and signed a receipt for Barbara’s purse. Then the two marshals left. Barbara never saw them again.
***
The officer behind the admissions desk emptied Barbara’s purse and spread the contents. There was a billfold of money, which she counted carefully. She was a broad, solidly built woman in her middle years, with a thick neck and a small pug nose. “I’m Officer Hurley,” she said. “I’m counting the money in front of you, so pay attention. One hundred dollars. You can seal it for your release or you use it against your purchases in the commissary. Which do you want?”
“I’d like to use it while I’m here,” Barbara said softly.
“Speak up!”
“I’d like to use it while I’m here.”
“That’s better.” She was studying the folder Gedding had left with her. “Barbara Cohen. Contempt of Congress, six months.” Her eyes examined Barbara from head to foot, the pale brown hair caught in a bun behind her head, the gray flannel suit, the white blouse. She fingered the purse. “You’re one of a kind here, Mrs. Cohen. This is not exactly Alcatraz, but neither is it the Fairmont. Just mind your P’s and Q’s.” They were in a long, narrow room, a counter running its length, and behind the counter, cubbyholes in the wall.
“We’ll begin with your fingerprints, Barbara,” Officer Hurley said. “Just step over here, and let’s have your right hand.”
Barbara stepped to the counter. Officer Hurley rolled ink onto a glass plate, took Barbara’s hand, and then, finger by finger, into the ink and onto a card.
“Left hand.”
Again, each finger was rolled in the ink and then rolled with the same motion onto a card. Then she gave Barbara a towel. “Wipe off the ink.”
The outside door opened, and a man in prison garb of shapeless blue entered, carrying a camera on a tripod.
“Set up,” Officer Hurley told him. “Be with you in a minute.” The photographer was staring at Barbara hungrily. He couldn’t take his eyes off her as he set up his camera. Officer Hurley took a slate with a string attached to each corner and on it chalked Barbara’s name and a number. She came around the counter and put the string around Barbara’s neck so that the slate hung in front of her like a breastplate. “Stand right here,” she said, pushing Barbara back against the wall. “Eyes open. Look directly into the camera.” She said to the photographer, “What the devil are you waiting for, Sweeney?”
He squeezed his flash. The light blinded Barbara. “Don’t move,” he said. “I need a second shot.”
Her eyes were clenched tight.
“Please open your eyes, miss.”
The camera flashed again.
“All right. Take it away, Sweeney.”
He departed reluctantly, his hunger and need trailing after him.
Hurley went behind the counter, found a meshwork metal tray, and pushed it toward Barbara.
“Take off your clothes, Barbara, and put them in here. They’ll be cleaned, courtesy of the government, and they’ll be held for you.”
Barbara stared at her.
“I said, take off your clothes.”
“Here?”
“That’s right. Here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What do I have to do, draw you a diagram? Now you listen to me, Barbara. This is just the first step. But learn now. You do what you’re told to do.”
“I’ll be naked.”
“That’s right. You won’t die and you won’t catch cold. You’re in a federal House of Correction. You come in with those clothes and you go out with them, but while you’re here, you wear what we give you. So sit down in that chair and strip down.”
Still Barbara stared at Officer Hurley, who nodded coldly. Barbara took off her jacket and handed it to her. Then her skirt, her blouse and her petticoat. For a long moment, she stood in her brassiere and girdle, feeling humiliated and ridiculous. Then she sighed, kicked off her shoes, pulled off girdle and stockings, unhooked her brassiere and stood naked.
“Pick up your clothes and put them in the tray.”
Barbara did so.
“Now go through that door and sit down in there and wait.”
The door Officer Hurley pointed to led into a small locker room with a single bench down the center. Two other naked women were sitting on the bench, and they looked at Barbara mutely as she entered. Neither of them spoke. One was a tall, well-built black woman. The other was a slight, skinny white girl, twenty-one at the most, who sat huddled over and shivering, trying to cover her pubic hair with one hand and her tiny breasts with the other. Barbara stood uncertainly, looking at them and trying not to look at them, conscious of their nakedness and her own nakedness in a way that she had never been conscious of nakedness before, until finally the bl
ack woman grinned and said, “Sit down, honey. There ain’t no telling how long them motherfuckers will keep us here. And that goddamn stone floor is cold, cold.”
Barbara sat down next to the white girl, who shivered and cringed and whimpered softly.
“Are you sick?” Barbara asked.
“No, she ain’t sick,” the black woman said. “She’s a doper. She just started climbing the shitpile. Two, three hours from now, she be screaming like a lunatic.”
“Oh, God,” Barbara whispered. “Can’t they do anything for her?”
“Here it is cold turkey, honey. You’re not a doper?”
“Thank goodness, no.”
“You think those bastards would give us a little heat here. My name’s Annie Lou Baker.”
“Mine is Barbara Cohen.”
“What brings you here, sister?”
“Something called contempt of Congress.”
“What?”
“Yes, it’s a crime,” Barbara said.
“Shit, in the slammer for having contempt? Honey child, that would put me away two dozen times a week—”
Whatever else she might have said was interrupted by the opening of the door opposite to the one through which Barbara had entered. Past this door, Barbara saw a brightly lit, tiled shower room, and through the door came a woman in a bathing suit, a pail in one hand and a scrubbing brush in the other. “On your feet, girls,” she called out. “I’m Officer Davenport, and this here pail is filled with a solution of soapsuds and DDT. We welcome you, but not whatever bugs, maggots, or lice you bring with you. We run a clean and sanitary house. So get your backsides under those showers, and once you’re wet, I’m going to wash your hair.”
“Ain’t nobody going to wash my hair with DDT,” Annie Lou Baker said.
“No? Well, listen, child, either you get under that shower in ten seconds, or I call in a couple of male guards to hold you while I wash your hair. Now which is it?”