If Tomorrow Comes

The news of Tracy Whitney’s crime and sentencing appeared on the front page of the New Orleans Courier, accompanied by a police photograph of her. The major wire services picked up the story and flashed it to correspondent newspapers around the country, and when Tracy was taken from the courtroom to await transfer to the state penitentiary, she was confronted by a crew of television reporters. She hid her face in humiliation, but there was no escape from the cameras. Joe Romano was big news, and the attempt on his life by a beautiful female burglar was even bigger news. It seemed to Tracy that she was surrounded by enemies. Charles will get me out, she kept repeating to herself. Oh, please, God, let Charles get me out. I can’t have our baby born in prison.

It was not until the following afternoon that the desk sergeant would permit Tracy to use the telephone. Harriet answered. “Mr. Stanhope’s office.”

“Harriet, this is Tracy Whitney. I’d like to speak to Mr. Stanhope.”

“Just a moment, Miss Whitney.” She heard the hesitation in the secretary’s voice. “I’ll—I’ll see if Mr. Stanhope is in.”

After a long, harrowing wait, Tracy finally heard Charles’s voice. She could have wept with relief. “Charles—”

“Tracy? Is that you, Tracy?”

“Yes, darling. Oh, Charles, I’ve been trying to reach—”

“I’ve been going crazy, Tracy! The newspapers here are full of wild stories about you. I can’t believe what they’re saying.”

“None of it is true, darling. None of it. I—”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I tried. I couldn’t reach you. I—”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m—I’m in a jail in New Orleans. Charles, they’re going to send me to prison for something I didn’t do.” To her horror, she was weeping.

“Hold on. Listen to me. The papers say that you shot a man. That’s not true, is it?”

“I did shoot him, but—”

“Then it is true.”

“It’s not the way it sounds, darling. It’s not like that at all. I can explain everything to you. I—”

“Tracy, did you plead guilty to attempted murder and stealing a painting?”

“Yes, Charles, but only because—”

“My God, if you needed money that badly, you should have discussed it with me…And trying to kill someone…I can’t believe this. Neither can my parents. You’re the headline in this morning’s Philadelphia Daily News. This is the first time a breath of scandal has ever touched the Stanhope family.”

It was the bitter self-control of Charles’s voice that made Tracy aware of the depth of his feelings. She had counted on him so desperately, and he was on their side. She forced herself not to scream. “Darling, I need you. Please come down here. You can straighten all this out.”

There was a long silence. “It doesn’t sound like there’s much to straighten out. Not if you’ve confessed to doing all those things. The family can’t afford to get mixed up in a thing like this. Surely you can see that. This has been a terrible shock for us. Obviously, I never really knew you.”

Each word was a hammerblow. The world was falling in on her. She felt more alone than she had ever felt in her life. There was no one to turn to now, no one. “What—what about the baby?”

“You’ll have to do whatever you think best with your baby,” Charles said. “I’m sorry, Tracy.” And the connection was broken.

She stood there holding the dead receiver in her hand.

A prisoner behind her said, “If you’re through with the phone, honey, I’d like to call my lawyer.”

When Tracy was returned to her cell, the matron had instructions for her. “Be ready to leave in the morning. You’ll be picked up at five o’clock.”

She had a visitor. Otto Schmidt seemed to have aged years during the few hours since Tracy had last seen him. He looked ill.

“I just came to tell you how sorry my wife and I are. We know whatever happened wasn’t your fault.”

If only Charles had said that!

“The wife and I will be at Mrs. Doris’s funeral tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Otto.”

They’re going to bury both of us tomorrow, Tracy thought miserably.

She spent the night wide awake, lying on her narrow prison bunk, staring at the ceiling. In her mind she replayed the conversation with Charles again and again. He had never even given her a chance to explain.

She had to think of the baby. She had read of women having babies in prison, but the stories had been so remote from her own life that it was as though she were reading about people from another planet. Now it was happening to her. You’ll have to do whatever you think best with your baby, Charles had said. She wanted to have her baby. And yet, she thought, they won’t let me keep it. They’ll take it away from me because I’m going to be in prison for the next fifteen years. It’s better that it never knows about its mother.

She wept.

At 5:00 in the morning a male guard, accompanied by a matron, entered Tracy’s cell. “Tracy Whitney?”

“Yes.” She was surprised at how odd her voice sounded.

“By order of the Criminal Court of the State of Louisiana, Orleans Parish, you are forthwith being transferred to the Southern Louisiana Penitentiary for Women. Let’s move it, babe”

She was walked down a long corridor, past cells filled with inmates. There was a series of catcalls.

“Have a good trip, honey…”

“You tell me where you got that paintin’ hidden, Tracy, baby, and I’ll split the money with you…”

“If you’re headin’ for the big house, ask for Ernestine Lit-tlechap. She’ll take real good care of you…”

Tracy passed the telephone where she had made her call to Charles. Good-bye, Charles.

She was outside in a courtyard. A yellow prison bus with barred windows stood there, its engine idling. Half a dozen women already were seated in the bus, watched over by two armed guards. Tracy looked at the faces of her fellow passengers. One was defiant, and another bored; others wore expressions of despair. The lives they had lived were about to come to an end. They were outcasts, headed for cages where they would be locked up like animals. Tracy wondered what crimes they had committed and whether any of them was as innocent as she was, and she wondered what they saw in her face.

The ride on the prison bus was interminable, the bus hot and smelly, but Tracy was unaware of it. She had withdrawn into herself, no longer conscious of the other passengers or of the lush green countryside the bus passed through. She was in another time, in another place.

She was a little girl at the shore with her mother and father, and her father was carrying her into the ocean on his shoulders, and when she cried out her father said, Don’t be a baby, Tracy, and he dropped her into the cold water. When the water closed over her head, she panicked and began to choke, and her father lifted her up and did it again, and from that moment on she had been terrified of the water…

The college auditorium was filled with students and their parents and relatives. She was class valedictorian. She spoke for fifteen minutes, and her speech was filled with soaring idealism, clever references to the past, and shining dreams for the future. The dean had presented her with a Phi Beta Kappa key. I want you to keep it, Tracy told her mother, and the pride on her mother’s face was beautiful…

I’m going to Philadelphia, Mother. I have a job at a bank there.

Annie Mahler, her best friend, was calling her. You’ll love Philadelphia, Tracy. It’s full of all kinds of cultural things. It has beautiful scenery and a shortage of women. I mean, the men here are really hungry! I can get you a job at the bank where I work…

Charles was making love to her. She watched the moving shadows on the ceiling and thought, How many girls would like to be in my place? Charles was a prime catch. And she was instantly ashamed of the thought. She loved him. She could feel him inside her, beginning to thrust harder, faster and faster, on the verge of exploding, and he gasped out, Are you ready? And she lied and said yes. Was it wonderful for you? Yes, Charles. And she thought, Is that all there is? And the guilt again…

“You! I’m talkin’ to you. Are you deaf for Christ’s sake? Let’s go.”

Tracy looked up and she was in the yellow prison bus. It had stopped in an enclosure surrounded by a gloomy pile of masonry. A series of nine fences topped with barbed wire surrounded the five hundred acres of farm pasture and woodlands that made up the prison grounds of the Southern Louisiana Penitentiary for Women.

“Get out,” the guard said. “We’re here.”

Here was hell.