Glass Cell by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online

Hazel could be very discreet. She might never tell him, because she knew it would kill him. And they were getting started early, Carter thought, after he’d been only three months in prison. That was the way such things had to start, early or not at all.
    Their time was up. Carter jumped to his feet at the sight of the approaching guard. Gawill got up, too, made a bad joke about bringing him a file the next time he came to see him, waved a hand and was gone. Carter walked stiffly out of the visiting room.
    When he arrived at the ward, supper was being served. Pete was collecting the trays as they came up on the dumbwaiter beside the elevator. The food came from a long way and was always cold.
    Carter ate his dinner sitting sideways on his bed, because there was no table at the end of the ward big enough for the tray plus a book. He put the open book on the bed, and propped himself up on his left elbow. It was a large mediocre historical novel which at first he had not liked, but which he later found passed the time very well, because of its complete difference of scene from his own. Now he stared at the book between bites without seeing a word of it. The meal on his tray consisted of hamburger that gave off a smell of putridity, and some lima beans and mashed potatoes that had swum together in pale gray gravy, now stiffened with cold grease. There was no plate. The food was held in depressions in the tray. The only really edible part of the food was the bread, and there were always two slices and a thin pat of butter. He ate with a spoon. The inmates were not permitted knives or forks. He gulped the weak coffee from the plastic cup, and took the tray to the hall and set it on the floor near the dumbwaiter. Later Pete would chuck trays and cups and spoons down a chute.
    Carter went back to his bed and from his night table got his pen and the letter he had begun to Hazel yesterday. He added below what he had written:
    Sunday 4:25 p.m.
    My darling Hazel,
    Was very impressed by Magran as you said I would be. I am so sorry I was gloomy today. Can you forgive me? You were right my thumbs were hurting (I hadn’t taken any shot for them before I saw you) and it is sort of like a toothache that keeps on and on at you till it gets on your nerves. Things are much better now.
    G. Gawill came bringing good news: Drexel has decided to pay me $100 of weekly salary retroactive and for the duration of contract. G. also said you were going away Easter with David S. A good idea no doubt.
    Bless you, my darling. I love you and miss you. No more room here. P.
    There was so little room, his initial was tiny. He twisted around on the bed and lay down with his face buried in the pillow, exhausted with the effort of writing, exhausted, too, by what he recognized as self-pity. He felt heroic in having said he was glad she was going away with Sullivan, and yet quite obviously he was not heroic. He was quite the opposite of heroic. What was heroic about doing a favor for Hanky, and for the purpose for which he had done it, to be on a slightly more friendly footing with a slob? Mightn’t he have suspected that Hanky had some trick up his sleeve? It was simply stupid of him that he hadn’t suspected. And to go a little farther back, didn’t any idiot know enough not to sign something that he hadn’t read or checked on, such as the receipts for the Triumph Corporation? The prices could as well have been upped when he signed them. He wouldn’t have known the difference. And to go still farther back, to sheer carelessness, he had answered only two questions out of three on his final examination at Cornell, because he had not read the instructions thoroughly, or had not turned the page. He had graduated with quite a good rating, though not what he would have had if he had answered all three questions. One of his professors had written a complimentary statement about him which he said Carter might find of use in getting a job, but Carter had had a job