Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 117
PETER, HAS ARRANGED FOR INTERESTED INMATES TO BE
PHOTOGRAPHED IN FULL COLOR BESIDE A DECORATED
CHRISTMAS TREE AND TO HAVE SAID PHOTOGRAPHS MAILED
AT NO COST TO THE INMATE’S LOVED ONES. PICTURE-TAKING
WILL BEGIN AT 900/8/27 IN THE ORDER OF RECEIVED
APPLICATIONS. WHITE SHIRTS ALLOWABLE. DON’T BRING
NOTHING BUT A HANDKERCHIEF.
Farragut turned off his light, closed the door and walked down the
tunnel to the open door of Marshack’s office. The room had three
windows and it was the one, as Marshack had said, with the plants.
The windows had vertical bars outside, but Marshack had put
horizontal rods on the inside and many plants hung from these.
There were twenty or thirty hanging plants. Hanging plants,
Farragut thought, were the beloved of the truly lonely—those men
and women who, burning with lust, ambition and nostalgia,
watered their hanging plants. They cultivated their hanging plants
and he guessed that they talked to them since they talked to
everything else—doors, tables and the wind up the chimney. He
recognized very few of the plants. Ferns he knew; ferns and
geraniums. He picked a geranium leaf, broke it in his fingers and
smelled the oil. It smelled like a geranium—the stuffy, complex
perfume of some lived-in and badly ventilated interior. There were
many other kinds with leaves of all shapes, some of them the color
of red cabbage and some of them dull browns and yellows—not
the lambent autumnal spectrum, but the same spectrum of death,
fixed in the nature of the plant. He was pleased and surprised to
see that the killer, narrowly confined by his stupidity, had tried to
change the bleakness of the room where he worked with plants
that lived and grew and died, that depended upon his attention
and his kindness, that had at least the fragrance of moist soil and
that in their greenness and their life stood for the valleys and
pastures of milk and honey. All the plants hung from copper wire.
Farragut had built radios when he was young. He remembered
that a hundred feet of copper wire was the beginning of a radio set.