Free Glass Cell by Patricia Highsmith Page A

breath, looked at Hazel, and saw that she had heard it, or seen it. “Sorry. What I was going to say—the fact that you’re twenty miles or so from where I am isn’t doing anything about getting me out of here any faster, honey.” He glanced at the clock. Six minutes to go.
    “I don’t want to talk about it any more, Phil. I want to see you just as much as you want to see me. That’s all we’ve got—just now.”
    Carter drummed with his fingertips on the table, desperate for something to say. “So you—you had a good time Easter, you said.”
    “I didn’t say a good time. I said it was all right.”
    What was she angry with him about, he wondered, the four-letter word? His proposition that she move to New York? The time was so short to straighten things out! “Darling, don’t be annoyed with me. I can’t stand it!”
    “I’m not annoyed with you. You don’t understand,” she said, and looked at the clock also, as if she were eager to be off when the time was up.
    Carter went to the movie that night. He was going to the prison movies more frequently, though the bill of fare was always, or had been so far, stuff that he would never have wasted time on outside of prison. He realized that he listened with enjoyment now, too, to the mediocre and usually filthy jokes for which Alex, the sweep-up, often buttonholed him. Without some compromise, without the movies, and maybe even without the wild stories that passed for jokes, he’d go mad. Men who tried to buck prison life, rejected the movies, counted off their time, became stir-crazy, like animals pacing cages in a zoo. Carter had heard Dr. Cassini talk about such cases, men brought up to the ward with nothing physically wrong with them, yet completely insane or intractable, so that they had to be sent to the next station on the line, the state mental institution, if there was any room for them there. Carter could see that the men who got along best of all were those in good health with nobody in their lives, not even a sister or a mother or a brother who took any interest in them, the men who could laugh at the whole business of prison with a loud and cyni-cal guffaw. These men never missed a movie or a ballgame. Even the guards seemed to like them. And if they were asked, they said they’d do it again, whatever it was that got them to jail. “Like they say in the sociology books, I’m just here improving my style. Ha! Ha!”
    Do a good deed, find God, learn a trade, pray to be a better man, realize that your time in prison can be a blessing, because it can provide time for meditation on your mistakes, and so forth and so forth, said the prison newspaper. It was a four-page newspaper called The Outlook , written entirely by the inmates, except for the warden’s column, which had just as many grammatical mistakes as the rest. Lots of times Carter flung the rag, with its lousy cartoons, its Bible lesson, its corny jokes, its line-up of baseball or basketball players that looked like teams recruited from Skid Row—flung it to the foot of his bed or the floor and indulged in a quiet, “Oh, Jesus.”

7
    H azel went into partnership with Elsie Martell in the dress shop venture, and in May her letters were full of descriptions of the shop’s decor, the colors of this and that, even the details of certain dresses and suits they had stocked, though she knew Carter was not very interested in women’s clothes. “You only like dresses once I’m in them,” he remembered Hazel saying once.
    The Dress Box was on Main Street, “next to the big drugstore almost,” Hazel said in a letter. Hazel a partner in a dress shop called the Dress Box on Main Street in a town called Fremont. It seemed fantastic and ludicrous. But it seemed quite real when Hazel wrote that David Sullivan came by in his car at 8 in the evening, had come by a couple of times when they were still working on the wallpapering and staining the new dress racks, to take Hazel out to dinner. Once