Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 159
before I’ll be mistaken for you. I’ll do anything before I’ll kiss a
rug.”
“Kiss my ass,” said Eben.
“You’ve got Dad’s great sense of humor,” Farragut said.
“He wanted you to be killed,” screamed Eben. “I bet you didn’t
know that. He loved me, but he wanted you to be killed. Mother
told me. He had an abortionist come out to the house. Your own
father wanted you to be killed.”
Then Farragut struck his brother with a fire iron. The widow
testified that Farragut had struck his brother eighteen to twenty
times, but she was a liar, and Farragut thought the doctor who
corroborated this lie contemptible.
The trial that followed was, he thought, a mediocre display of a
decadent judiciary. He was convicted as a drug addict and a sexual
adventurer and sentenced to jail for the murder of his brother.
“Your sentence would be lighter were you a less fortunate man,”
said the judge, “but society has lavished and wasted her riches
upon you and utterly failed to provoke in you that conscience that
is the stamp of an educated and civilized human being and a
useful member of society.” Marcia had said nothing in his defense,
although she had smiled at him when she was on the stand, smiled
at him sadly while she agreed to their description of the grueling
humiliation of being married to a drug addict who put the
procurement of his fix miles ahead of his love for his wife and his
only son. There were the stalenesses of the courthouse to
remember, the classroom window shades, the sense of an acute
tedium that was like the manipulations of the most pitiless and
accomplished torturer, and if the last he would see of the world
was the courthouse, he claimed he had no regrets, although he
would, in fact, have clung to any floorboard, spittoon or worn
bench if he thought that it might save him.