Authors: John Cheever
Farragut got what he had bargained for: a day of incomparable beauty. Had he been a free man, he would have claimed to be able to walk on the light. It was a holiday; it was the day of the big Rugby game; it was the circus; it was the fourth of July; it was the regatta; and it dawned as it should, clear and cool and beautiful. They had two pieces of bacon for breakfast, through the bounty of the diocese. Farragut went down the tunnel to the methadone line and even this rat tail of humanity seemed to be jumping with high spirits. At eight they stood by their cell doors, shaved, wearing their white shirts and some of them with ointment in their hair, you could tell by the clash of perfumes that floated up and down the cellblock. Tiny inspected them and then there was, as there is for any holiday or ceremony, time to kill.
There was a cartoon show on television. They could hear whistles blowing on other cellblocks and guards with military backgrounds trying to shout their men into sharp formations. It was only a little after eight then and the cardinal wasn’t expected until noon, but men were already being marched out onto the gallows field. The walls checked the force of the late spring
sun, but it would hit the field by noon. Chicken and the Cuckold shot dice. Farragut killed the time easily at the top of his methadone high. Time was new bread, time was a sympathetic element, time was water you swam in, time moved through the cellblock with the grace of light. Farragut tried to read. He sat on the edge of his bunk. He was a man of forty-eight, sitting on the edge of his bunk in a prison to which he had been unjustly confined for the murder of his brother. He was a man in a white shirt sitting on the edge of a bunk. Tiny blew his whistle and diey stood at attention in front of their cells again. They did this four times. At half-past ten they were lined up two by two and marched down the tunnel, where they formed up in a pie-shaped area marked “F” with lime.
The light had begun to come into the field. Oh, it was a great day. Farragut thought about Jody and wondered if he didn’t bring it off would he get cell lock or the hole or maybe seven more years for attempted escape. So far as he knew, he and the chaplain’s dude were the only ones in on the plot. Then Tiny called them to attention. “Now, I got to have your cooperation,” Tiny said. “It ain’t easy for any of us to have two thousand shit-heads out here together. The tower guards today is been replaced with crack shots and, as you know, they got the right to shoot any inmate they got suspicions about. We got crack shots today so they won’t be no spray firing. The leader of the Black Panthers has agreed not to give the salute. When the cardinal comes you stand at parade rest. Any of you ain’t been in the service, ask some friend what parade rest is. It’s like this. Twenty-five men has been picked to
take the Holy Eucharist. The cardinal’s got lots of appointments and he’s going to be here only twenty minutes. First we hear from the warden and then the commissioner, who’s coming down from Albany. After this he gives out the diplomas, celebrates mass, blesses the rest of you assholes and takes off. I guess you can sit down if you want. You can sit down, but when you get the order for attention I want you all straight and neat and clean with your heads up. I want to be proud of you. If you have to piss, piss, but don’t piss where anybody’s going to be sitting.” Cheers for Tiny and then most of them pissed. There was, Farragut thought, some universality to a full bladder. For this length of time they perfectly understood one another. Then they sat down.
Somebody was testing the public address system: “Testing, one, two, three. Testing, one, two, three.” The voice was loud and scratchy. Time passed. God’s advocate was punctual. At a quarter to twelve they got the command for attention. They shaped up nicely. The sound of the chopper could be heard then, bounding off the hills, loud at low altitudes, faintly, faintly in the deep river valley; soft and loud, hills and valleys, the noise evoked the contour of the terrain beyond the walls. The chopper, when it came into view, had no more grace than an airborne washing machine, but this didn’t matter at all. It lofted gently onto the target and out the door came three acolytes, a monsignor in black, and the cardinal himself, a man either graced by God with great dignity and beauty or singled out by the diocese for these distinctions. He raised his hand. His ring flashed with spiritual and political power. “I seen
better rings on hustlers,” Chicken Number Two whispered. “No fence would give you thirty. The last time I hit a jewelry store I fenced the lot for—” Looks shut him up. Everybody turned and put him down.
The crimson of the cardinal’s robes seemed living and pure and his carriage was admirable and would have quelled a riot. He stepped out of the helicopter, lifting his robes not at all like a woman leaving a taxi but like a cardinal leaving his airborne transport. He made a sign of the cross as high and wide as his reach and the great spell of worship fell over that place.
In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti
. Farragut would have liked to pray for the happiness of his son, his wife, the safety of his lover, the soul of his dead brother, would have liked to pray for some enlargement of his wisdom, but the only word he could root out of these massive intentions was his
Amen. Amen
, said a thousand others, and the word, from so many throats, came up from the gallows field as a solemn whisper.
Then the public address system began to work so well that the confusion that followed could be heard by everyone. “Now you go first,” said the commissioner to the warden. “No, you go,” said the warden to the commissioner. “It says here that you go.” “I said you go,” said the commissioner angrily to the warden, and the warden stepped forward, knelt, kissed the cardinal’s ring and, standing, said: “The graciousness of Your Eminence in endangering life and limb in order to come and visit us in the Falconer Rehabilitation Center is greatly appreciated by me and the deputy wardens, the guards and all the inmates. It reminds me of how when I was a little boy and sleepy my father carried me
from the car into the house at the end of a long trip. I was a load to carry, but I knew how kind he was being to me, and that’s the way I feel today.”
There was applause—exactly the noise of water striking stone—but unlike the indecipherable noise of water, its intent was clearly grateful and polite. Farragut remembered applause most vividly when he had heard it outside the theater, hall or church where it sounded. He had heard it most clearly as a bystander waiting in a parking lot pn a summer night, waiting for the show to break. It had always astonished and deeply moved him to realize that so diverse and warlike a people could have agreed on this signal of enthusiasm and assent. The warden passed the public address system to the commissioner. The commissioner had gray hair, wore a gray suit and a gray tie, and reminded Farragut of the grayness and angularity of office filing cabinets in the far, far away. “Your Eminence,” he said, reading his speech from a paper and evidently for the first time. “Ladies and gentlemen.” He frowned, raised his face and his heavy eyebrows at this error of his speech writer. “Gentlemen!” he exclaimed. “I want to express my gratitude and the gratitude of the governor to the cardinal, who for the first time in the history of this diocese and perhaps in the whole history of mankind has visited a rehabilitation center in a helicopter. The governor sends his sincere regrets at not being able to express his gratitude in person, but he is, as you must all know, touring the flood-disaster areas in the northwestern part of the state. We hear these days”—he picked up a head of steam—“a great deal about prison reform. Best sellers are written about prison
reform. Professional so-called penologists travel from coast to coast, speaking on prison reform. But where does prison reform begin? In bookstores? In lecture halls? No. Prison reform, like all sincere endeavors at reform, begins at home, and where is home? Home is prison! We have come here today to commemorate a bold step made possible by the Fiduciary University of Banking, the archdiocese, the Department of Correction and above all the prisoners themselves. All four of us together have accomplished what we might compare—compare only, of course—to a miracle. These eight humble men have passed with honors a most difficult test that many well-known captains of industry have failed. Now, I know that you all have, unwillingly, sacrificed your right to vote upon coming here—a sacrifice that the governor intends to change—and should you, at some later date, find his name on a ballot I’m sure you will remember today.” He shot his cuff to check the time. “As I present these coveted diplomas, please refrain from applause until the presentation is completed. Frank Masullo, Herman Meany, Mike Thomas, Henry Phillips …” When the last of the diplomas had been presented, he lowered his voice in a truly moving shift from secular to spiritual matters and said, “His Eminence will now celebrate mass.” At exactly that moment Jody came out of the boiler room behind the bench, genuflected deeply at the cardinal’s back and took his place at the right of the altar, the consummate figure of a tardy acolyte who has just taken a piss.
Adiutorium nostrum in Nomine Domini
. The raptness of prayer enthralled Farragut as the raptness of
love.
Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus et dismissis pecatis tuis. Misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus et dismissis pecatis vestris perducat vos ad vitam aeternam. Indulgentiam, absolutionem, et remissionem pecatorum nostrorum tribuat nobis omnipotens et misericors Dominus. Deus tu conversus vivificabis nos. Ostende nobis, Domine misericordiam tuam
. On it drummed to the
Benedicat
and the last
Amen
. Then he performed another large cross and returned to the helicopter, followed by his retinue, including Jody.
The props kicked up a cloud of dust and the engine ascended. Someone put a recording of cathedral bells on the public address system and up they went to this glorious clamor. Oh, glory, glory, glory! The exaltation of the bells conquered the scratching of the needle and a slight warp in the record. The sound of the chopper and the bells filled heaven and earth. They all cheered and cheered and cheered and some of them cried. The sound of the bells stopped, but the chopper went on playing its geodetic survey of the surrounding terrain—the shining, lost and beloved world.
The cardinal’s helicopter landed at La Guardia, where two large cars were waiting. Jody had seen cars like this in the movies and nowhere else. His Eminence and the monsignor took one. The acolytes filled the second. Jody’s excitement was violent. He was shaking. He tried to narrow his thinking down to two points. He would get drunk. He would get laid. He held to these two points with some success, but his palms were sweaty, his ribs were running with sweat and sweat ran
down his brows into his eyes. He held his hands together to conceal their shaking. He was afraid that when the car reached its destination he would be unable to walk as a free man. He had forgotten how. He imagined that the paving would fly up and strike him between the eyes. He then convinced himself that he was playing a part in a miracle, that there was some congruence between his escape and the will of God. Play it by ear. “Where are we going?” he asked one of the others. “To the cathedral, I guess,” he said. “That’s where we left our clothes. Where did you come from?” “Saint Anselm’s,” said Jody. “I mean how did you get to the prison?” “I went out early,” Jody said. “I went out on the train.”
The city out of the car windows looked much wilder and stranger than beautiful. He imagined the length of time it would take—he saw time as a length of road, something measured by surveyors’ instruments—before he could move unself-consciously. When the car stopped he opened the door. The cardinal was going up the steps of the cathedral and two of the people on the sidewalk knelt. Jody stepped out of the car. There was no strength at all in his legs. Freedom hit him like a gale wind. He fell to his knees and broke the fall with his hands. “Shit, man, you drunk?” the next acolyte asked. “Fortified wine,” said Jody. “That wine was fortified.” Then his strength returned, all of it, and he got to his feet and followed the others into the cathedral and to a vestry much like any other. He took off his robe and while the other men put on ties and jackets he tried to invest his white shirt, his issue fatigues and his basketball sneakers with respectability. He did this by
bracing his shoulders. He saw himself in a long glass and he saw that he looked emphatically like an escaped convict. There was nothing about him—his haircut, his pallor, his dancy step—that a half-blind drunk wouldn’t have put down as a prison freak. “His Eminence would like to speak to you,” the monsignor said. “Please follow me.”
A door was opened and he went into a room a little like the priest’s front parlor at home. The cardinal stood there, now in a dark suit, and held out his right hand. Jody knelt and kissed the ring. “Where are you from?” the cardinal asked. “Saint Anselm’s, Your Eminence,” said Jody. “There is no Saint Anselm’s in the diocese,” said the cardinal, “but I know where you’re from. I don’t know why I asked. Time must play an important part in your plans. I expect you have about fifteen minutes. It is exciting, isn’t it? Let’s get out of here.” They left the parlor and the cathedral. On the sidewalk a woman knelt and the cardinal gave her his ring to kiss. She was, Jody saw, an actress he had seen on television. Another woman knelt and kissed his ring before they reached the end of the block. They crossed the street and a third woman knelt and kissed his ring. For her he wearily made a sign of the cross; and then they went into a store. The acknowledgment of their arrival was a matter of seconds. Someone of authority approached them and asked if the cardinal wanted a private room. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ll leave it up to you. This young man and I have an important appointment in fifteen minutes. He is not wearing the right clothes.” “We can manage,” the authority said. Jody was measured with a tape. “You’re built like a tailor’s
dummy,” said the man. This went to Jody’s head, but he definitely felt that vanity was out of place in the miracle. Twenty minutes later he walked up Madison Avenue. His walk was springy—the walk of a man going to first on balls, which can, under some circumstances, seem to be a miracle.