Glass Cell by Patricia Highsmith Page B

writing which Carter had seen in his notebooks. Max kept a diary sporadically, and occasionally he wrote a poem in French. His handwriting had a curiously innocent look. Forgery. It was an unpleasant shock to Carter, as if someone had snatched off Max’s clothes and Carter saw him in the nude. Well, Carter thought, at least he wasn’t in for murder.
    It had occurred to Carter that, because of knowing Max, a second rejection from the Supreme Court, if it came, would be easier to bear. Thus Carter tried to prepare himself in advance for the worst. The second rejection came in the 5:30 p.m. post one day in April. This time, it shocked him more than the first rejection. His impulse was to run at once to Max’s cell, but it was not possible to see Max at that hour. Carter went into the toilet and lost the supper he had eaten an hour before. He did not want to see anyone or talk to anyone, but he could not achieve that condition either. In the prison, there was no privacy.
    That night he slept very little, and finally out of sheer boredom with his own thoughts, took a Nembutal. The next morning he did his work with a stony face and mind, ate no lunch, and at 3 o’clock fixed himself a cup of coffee on the burner in the washroom. The coffee was from one of the three cans of Nescafé that Max had given him for Christmas. Max had won the bet for prison pallor, and had shared the spoils with Carter.
    When he got to Max’s cell, he sat down on the lower bunk with his hands over his face. He wept shamelessly, not caring that the Negro was standing there beside Max, bewildered, that a screw, an inmate, whoever looked in and saw an inmate sobbing, would stop and stare for a moment.
    “I know,” Max said. “It’s the Supreme Court thing, isn’t it?” he asked in French.
    Carter nodded.
    The Negro heard “Supreme” and understood. “Holy, holy Jesus,” he said mournfully, then lumbered out of the cell so they could be alone.
    Max lighted one of his cigarettes and gave it to Carter.
    Carter told Max about his job with Triumph, about Wallace Palmer, about the trial, about being sent to prison over last September and how unbelievable it had been to him. He told Max about Gawill and about Sullivan, and about Sullivan and his wife.
    “I’ve got to make Hazel go away now, back to New York,” Carter said, banging his fist down on his thigh, heedless of his thumb.
    “Don’t decide anything today,” Max said in a calm, deep voice, like the voice of God himself.
    Carter sat in silence for a while.
    Max began to speak in French, about going to France when he was five, and of his childhood there. When his father died and the alimony stopped, his mother brought him back to Wisconsin, where he had been born. They had a few relatives there on his father’s side. His mother had remarried, but his new stepfather had no intention of putting him through college, so after high school, Max had got a job in a printer’s shop and learned the trade. He had met Annette when he was twenty-one and she nineteen, and they had wanted to marry, but her father had made them wait two years because he did not want his daughter to marry before she was twenty-one. “I waited, but still I was happy because I was in love,” Max said. Then Annette, when they had been married not quite a year, had died. Max’s mother had been visiting them, and Annette had driven a car over a cliff with his mother in the car also. Annette had swerved the car to avoid a deer that suddenly ran across the road, according to a man in another car who had seen the accident. Annette had been pregnant. Then Max had started drinking and had lost his job. He had come south and in Nashville had met a lot of “bad characters,” including ex-jailbirds and forgers. Max had learned how to forge, and the robbers and pickpockets of the gang used to bring him their traveler’s checks and anything else that needed a signature. “Certainly I knew I was a crook,” Max said, “but I was