Glass Cell Read Free Page B

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