Free Glass Cell by Patricia Highsmith Page B

he’d taken both Hazel and Elsie out (that was nice of him), but on at least three evenings, he’d taken Hazel out, “. . . a real treat since I didn’t feel like going home and fixing anything. I’m afraid I was pooped and not very good company. Absolutely too tired to dance, so you can imagine.” She had gone home at 6 to give Timmy his dinner on those evenings. Millie, a teenager who lived in their neighborhood, was now baby-sitting quite often. Timmy was all right in the afternoons, dropped by the school bus, letting himself in the house with his own key which was on a string around his neck, and getting the snack from the refrigerator that Hazel always left for him.
    Carter was brushing up his French in his spare time. Hazel had sent him his French dictionary and his complete Verlaine, and from New York she had ordered the last Prix Goncourt novel. He had had five or six years of French in high school and college. Now, in his reading ability, he was certainly better than he had been in college, but the speaking of it was another matter. Unfortunately, there was no one with whom Carter could practice.
    He had also begun to learn judo-karate from Alex. Alex had said out of the blue one day, “Do you want to learn judo? You ought to, because you’re not going to be able to sock anybody very hard with those thumbs.” Carter thought Alex had a point. One never knew when it might be necessary to sock someone. So, partly to pass the time, Carter began to take lessons from Alex. Alex was shorter than Carter, but close to him in weight. He was careful not to grab Carter’s thumbs in their mock battles. They used the hall for their practice, to the amusement of the bored guard on duty there, usually Clark. Alex had got from somewhere a couple of filthy, lumpy mats that they put down on the floor. Carter wrote to Hazel after three practice sessions: “I’m learning judo from Alex. He learned it in the army and seems to know a lot, but can you get me a book on it? You’ll probably have to order it from the bookshop in Fremont.” He wanted to add that he was still not very good at wrist-grabbing and pulling, because of his thumbs, but the slicing blows with the side of his hand he could execute quite well. Then he decided not to write that, because Hazel was squeamish about violence. One of the blows Alex taught him, to the front of the neck, was what Alex called “a blow to kill.” Hazel got the book, but it was not passed by the censor and Carter never saw it. It was returned to Hazel. Yet the judo practice went on under the eyes of the guard. Carter practiced banging the sides of his hands against wood to harden them, but it jarred his thumbs badly, and he did not get very far with this.
    The southern summer was long and hot. Despite the fact that the prison was on rather a height, there was almost never a breeze. When a breeze came, it was hot also, but men in the fields straightened to receive it, took their caps off in defiance of the hellish sun, and let the moving air touch their sweating foreheads. The bricks and stones of the old prison absorbed the sun’s rays week after week, and retained the heat as they had retained the winter’s cold, and by August the cell blocks were like vast ovens, breezeless and suffocating even by night, stinking of urine and the sweat of blacks and whites.
    In August, when, Hazel said, the town of Fremont was nearly empty and what people there were were so dazed by the heat that they never left their houses, she went to New York with David Sullivan. Sullivan had some friends there called the Knowltons, who had an apartment on West 53rd Street, just opposite the Museum of Modern Art, and they offered their apartment, which was air-conditioned, to Sullivan for the month of August while they were in Europe. Carter had at first been aghast at the idea of her going, then angry, then simply stunned, or possibly defeated. He went through these emotions within three days of getting her