Free Falconer by John Cheever Page A

pleasure of your hospitality although I have twice been a guest at the White House as a delegate to conferences on higher education. I think the White House palatial. My quarters here are bare, seven by ten and dominated by a toilet that flushes capriciously anywhere from ten to forty times a day. It is easy for me to bear the sound of rushing water because I have heard the geysers in Yellowstone National Park, the fountains of Rome, New York City and especially Indianapolis.
    “Sometime in April, twelve years ago, I was diagnosed as a chronic drug addict by Drs. Lemuel Brown, Rodney Coburn and Henry Mills. These men were graduates of Cornell, the Albany Medical School and Harvard University, respectively. Their position as healers was established by the state and the federal governments and the organizations of their colleagues. Surely, when they spoke, their expressed medical opinion was the voice of the commonwealth. On Thursday, the eighteenth of July, this unassailable opinion was contravened by Deputy Warden Chisholm. I have checked on Chisholm’s background. Chisholm dropped out of high school in his junior year, bought the answers to a civil service test for correctional employees for twelve dollars and was given a position by the Department of Correction with monarchal dominion over my constitutional rights. At 9 A.M. on the morning of the eighteenth, Chisholm capriciously chose to overthrow the laws of the state, the federal government and the ethics of the medical profession, a profession that is surely a critical part of our social keystone. Chisholmdecided to deny me the healing medicine that society had determined was my right. Is this not subversion, treachery, is this not high treason when the edicts of the Constitution are overthrown at the whim of one, single, uneducated man? Is this not an offense punishable by death—or in some states by life imprisonment? Is this not more far-reaching in its destructive precedents than some miscarried assassination attempt? Does it not strike more murderously at the heart of our hard-earned and ancient philosophy of government than rape or homicide?
    “The rightness of the doctors’ diagnoses was, of course, proven. The pain I suffered upon the withdrawal of that medicine granted to me by the highest authority in the land was mortal. When Deputy Warden Chisholm saw me attempt to leave my cell to go to the infirmary he tried to kill me with a chair. There are twenty-two sutures in my skull and I will be crippled for life. Are our institutions of penology, correction and rehabilitation to be excluded from the laws that mankind has considered to be just and urgently necessary to the continuation of life on this continent and indeed this planet? You may wonder what I am doing in prison and I will be very happy to inform you, but I thought it my duty to first inform you of the cancerous criminal treason that eats at the heart of your administration.”
    He scarcely paused between his letter to his governor and his letter to his bishop. “Your Grace,” he wrote. “My name is Ezekiel Farragut and I was christened in Christ’s Church at the age of six months. If proof is needed, my wife has a photograph of me taken, not thatday, I think, but soon after. I am wearing a long lace gown that must have some history. My head is hairless and protuberant and looks like a darning egg. I am smiling. I was confirmed at the age of eleven by Bishop Evanston in the same church where I was christened. I have continued to take Holy Communion every Sunday of my life, barring those occasions when I was unable to find a church. In the provincial cities and towns of Europe I attend the Roman Mass. I am a croyant—I detest the use of French words in English, but in this case I can think of nothing better—and as croyants I’m sure we share the knowledge that to profess exalted religious experience outside the ecclesiastical paradigm is to make of oneself an outcast; and by that I mean to