Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 81
University. He would be assisted by the governor and the
commissioner of correction. Mass would be celebrated.
Attendance at the ceremony would be mandatory and cellblock
officers would have further information.
Toledo mimeographed the ditto but he didn’t overdo it this time
and there was no blizzard of paper. In the beginning the
announcement had almost no impact at all. Only eight men were
going to be graduated. The thought of Christ’s Advocate
descending from heaven onto the gallows field seemed to excite no
one. Farragut, of course, went on listening for the squeak of
basketball sneakers. If Jody came to say goodbye it would probably
be the night before the cardinal’s arrival. That gave Farragut a
month of waiting to see his lover and then for only a moment. He
had to settle for this. Jody, he guessed, was thrashing around with
the chaplain’s dude, but he did not experience any real jealousy.
He could not honestly guess at whether or not Jody’s plans to
escape would succeed since both the cardinal’s and Jody’s plans
were preposterous, although the cardinal’s plans were reported in
the newspaper.
Farragut lay on his cot. He wanted Jody. The longing began in his
speechless genitals, for which his brain cells acted as interpreter.
The longing then moved up from his genitals to his viscera and
from there to his heart, his soul, his mind, until his entire carcass
was filled with longing. He waited for the squeak of basketball
sneakers and then the voice, youthful, calculatedly so perhaps, but
not too light, asking: Move over, Chicken. He waited for the
squeak of basketball sneakers as he had waited for the sound of
Jane’s heels on the cobbles in Boston, waited for the sound of the
elevator that would bring Virginia up to the eleventh floor, waited
for Dodie to open the rusty gate on Thrace Street, waited for
Roberta to get off the C bus in some Roman piazza, waited for
Lucy to install her diaphragm and appear naked in the bathroom
door, waited for telephone bells, doorbells, church bells that told