Glass Houses(117)

“Americans can’t face looking at the truth about themselves,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “It’s the most important thing I can do to make you look at your-selves as you really are.”

“Yeah,” Donna said. “Well, you might get on with that a bit better if you’d read a sixth-grade civics textbook. Government-provided old-age pensions have been with us since the Great Depression. They’re called Social Security. Government-provided health care for the elderly and the poor have been with us since the sixties. They’re called Medicare and Medicaid, respectively. We may not have completely solved the race problem, but we managed to go from segregation to anything but in a single generation. I’m not saying we don’t have faults. I could list them by the hour. But, I mean, for heaven’s sake, you make them up.”

“You have the death penalty,” Phillipa said. “No other civilized, First World nation has the death penalty.”

“Japan does.”

Phillipa started pacing again. “You should have met this man I met,” she said. “A black man, with a store, in this horrible neighborhood. I went to talk to him because he’d been arrested awhile ago as the Plate Glass Killer, but in the end they’d let him go. Something happened, I’m not sure what, and they couldn’t keep him. I’d say he was damned lucky. You know what the police in this country are like. They want nothing better than to lock up every black man in the nation. Then they could sleep at night. Do you know that one out of every four black men in this country will spend time in prison?”

Donna sat down again. She had a big tray of cookies this time and a lot of little white plastic squeeze tubes. She put out a long piece of waxed paper and put a cookie in the middle of it. “There,” she said. “You’ve finally got one. That’s something that’s really wrong. Of course, we could solve it tomorrow by legalizing drugs; but Amsterdam legalized most drugs and I’ve seen it, and maybe that isn’t the answer. But the man you’re talking about is Tyrell Moss, isn’t it? He was in the paper. He was never arrested. He was only taken in for questioning.”

“It’s a distinction without a difference,” Phillipa said, watching in fascination as Donna began to decorate the cookie with red, white, and blue icing. “Whatever are you doing?” she asked. “Does everything in this bloody country have to be red, white, and blue?”

“I’m decorating cookies,” Donna explained, “because the party is for the parents of the children in Tommy’s class who are taking the citizenship oath this week. Usually, there’s only one every couple of years or so, but Philadelphia has a big group of people who came from China all together a few years ago, so we’ve got a lot all at once. So we decided to have a party. And it’s quite definitely a distinction with a difference. My husband, Russ, was a police officer before he went to law school. Being brought in for questioning doesn’t usually involve handcuffs, for instance, or getting locked in a cell.”

“He’s been persecuted, that man,” Phillipa said. “He was even in prison when he was younger. And now he’s stuck in that wretched place—”

“Did you bother to read the story in The Inquirer}” Donna asked. “Did you even bother to look it up? Oh, you must have. You had all that stuff Bennis got for you on the computer. But you didn’t really read it, or you’d know that the reason he went to prison was that he and a friend of his robbed a liquor store and put the clerk in the hospital for over eight months. And left the clerk with a damaged leg that will never work right again. And it wasn’t the first time he’d done something like that.”

“If your prisons were about rehabilitation instead of revenge,” Phillipa said, “he wouldn’t have been in and out of prisons like that. He wouldn’t have gone back and committed more crimes as soon as he was released.”

“Oh, that’s what happens in England, is it?” Donna said. “There’s no recidivism?”

“Ever since Margaret Thatcher, there’s been nothing but recidivism.”

“Margaret Thatcher has been out of office for over a decade,” Donna said. “Maybe it’s two decades. Did you come over here for a reason? Because, you know, you always say the same things. It’s not like I don’t get your drift by now.”

“I couldn’t find Bennis,” Phillipa said. “And I couldn’t find your Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t know who else to talk to.”

“About what?”