Because of the echo we were talking over each other. “I can’t hear you, sweet. This is a terrible connection.” She asked again, “Are you all right?”
“Alice has been mistaken for someone else and is in jail.” That was the story. That was what had happened.
“Oh, for goodness sakes. How long will it take them to clear it up?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “They set the bail at—”
“With all due respect, honey, I really think Alice brings troubles down on her own shoulders. I love her dearly, you understand, but she sometimes has such a bad attitude. What did you say they think she did?”
“Sh—she.” I could tell my mother that it was fraud or embezzlement, that the school was missing a few hundred dollars from the petty-cash drawer. “We’ll get through it,” I said. “We’ll be fine.” I would tell her everything after the preliminary hearing, after I heard the charges for myself. I couldn’t very well tell her what I myself didn’t understand.
“You need me to come home! I can hear it in your voice.”
“No, that’s not it. If we can just get her out I’m sure it will blow over.”
“What about the girls? Who are they mistaking Alice for? The world is so chaotic! The mess here is unbelievable. The hospital conditions are primitive, there are so many AIDS babies, not enough medication, not enough food. We’re doing what we can—”
“That’s great, Mom.”
“—But my goodness, the children just break your heart.”
“Do you think you could loan us some money? A few th-th-thou—”
“You’d think with computers they’d be able to straighten out those kinds of mistakes right away.”
I thought that maybe it would hit her, after she’d hung up, that Alice was locked away, and she’d call back wanting, the second time, to listen. She didn’t have much left to give—that much she had recently made clear to me. But it was possible she had an emergency stash she could bust into. I would ask her for the full amount tomorrow, after I’d had some sleep. “Could you call back on Thursday?” I said. “I’ll know more by then.”
“Surely they’ll have the mistake cleared up.”
“You’re probably right, Mom.”
I can’t say I had any better luck with Rafferty, when he called the following morning. When I explained the spurious charge he made a noise like a belch. “—Don’t believe it,” he said. He began to tell me much the same thing Finn had said about how probable cause is established. Alice trusted him implicitly and thought he would save her. She trusted him, not because the charge was false, but because she thought him irresistibly decent. We had met him at a barbecue. Within minutes Alice and Rafferty were dancing around on the Collinses’ patio. He knew a dance she’d learned when she was in high school. She was basing her trust on the fact that they both knew the same Hungarian polka. He had the kind of nasal voice that makes you want to somehow clear his throat for him.
“This can’t be pleasant for you,” he said.
“No,” I agreed.
“Of course not. It’s very upsetting. I just got into town but I’m going to run over to the public defender’s office, check in at the jail, and talk to
Alice.” His voice was all nasal passage. It was hard to believe he wasn’t holding his nose and talking at me for the amusement of his secretary. “Can you come in tomorrow, around ten? I’ll have a better feel after I’ve talked to her. The bail is outrageous for someone like Alice and first thing we’ll petition the court, get the bond in a reasonable range. You must be sure not to discuss any aspect of the case on the telephone, either from your home or in the visiting room. That’s critical.”
He did not continue until I acknowledged his command.
“About tomorrow,” he went on, “—by the way, I know how dreadful this is for you, believe me.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, doubting his knowledge of my state of mind.
“Would another day be better?” he asked.
“Another day?”
“You said you weren’t sure—”
“No,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
I hung up, slammed a pot down on our oak table, as if that could stop the table from watching. I had to have a plan now, a plan, a good plan. All of my knowledge of the law I had learned years ago in the flickering shadow of “Perry Mason.” Still, I knew enough to know that Rafferty, Finn—none of them, had genuine understanding. I told myself that a person didn’t live with someone for nearly seven years without having a pretty good sense of their limits. Lawyers, people in the system, politicians, were so crippled by bureaucracy and jargon they no longer had common sense. As a nation we were losing our collective minds. There were any number of issues to point that up. Any number. Look at anything, any institution, any organization, any system for dealing with problems. Take the AIDS epidemic, for starters. I’d been reading the articles buried in the paper for enough years to figure out that AZT might be killing people instead of the AIDS virus. My old friend Lloyd was sick in New York City. You could follow the whole thing, see the illness becoming so politicized that no one dared to speak about the jarring facts. The dishes were going to break if I threw them much harder into the cupboard. I had to have a plan right now, a sound plan, a way to fight. First of all, I had to find someone who would watch the girls, for my meeting with Rafferty, and for the visiting hour on Sunday. I had to talk to Alice,
really talk to her, to know why this had happened. It wouldn’t take me long to go and come back for the fifteen-minute visit. There had to be someone we knew who would care for Emma and Claire. Someone who would watch over them for a little over an hour on a Sunday afternoon. I could hear the
boyng, boyng
of a jew’s harp. It took me a hell of a long time to figure out that it was coming from me. It must have been my nerves. I was thinking I could hear the damn things.
Cathy Johnson came to mind after I’d put all the clean pots away. She was a nurse who worked with Alice at the immunization clinic. She had told me a while back that she worried occasionally, in the middle of the night. She worried that an infant might be brain damaged from a measles shot.
“Cathy,” I said, when she answered. “This is Howard Goodwin.”
“What is it?” Her voice was not full of concern, the way I remembered.
“I was wondering—ah, you—you’ve probably heard about Alice.” I waited for her to speak. I waited to the steady rhythm of the
boyng, boyng
. I waited and then I said, “I was wondering if Emma and Claire could—if you would be able to watch them tomorrow or Sunday afternoon, for an hour or so. I’m in a slight bind and I—”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Those aren’t good times for me. If you’ll excuse me, I was just on my way out the door.”
“Oh well, thanks anyway,” I said.
The girls were outside running through the sprinkler. I had let Emma hook the hose up to the pump even though we might later regret squandering water. I could see them from the window running back and forth in their matching pink-and-green-striped swimming suits. The phone was still in my hand. I was also hearing the drone of the severed connection. The girls were quietly holding their fingers over the rusty holes of the sprinkler. Each time when they let go and the water came shooting up at them, they screamed and ran. They were playing as if they did not have a care in the world. They were smart girls, and pretty. They were caring, good girls and their neighbors were set against them. They were running, spreading their arms and flapping.
I made the next call to Suzannah Brooks, a neighbor of the Collinses
up in the subdivision. Suzannah home-schools her three children. Every year she brought them down in the evening for a field trip to see the dairy operation. I had let them feed the calves, squirt milk from a cow’s tit, pet the kittens, slide down the hay chute. “Hello, Suzannah?” I said.
“Yes, this is she.”
“Howard Goodwin.”
“I’ve been praying for you. I feel for you, I really do, and I pray for that poor child. I honestly can’t think what the world is coming to. I think of the Scripture: ‘A worthless person, a wicked man, goes about with crooked speech, winks with his eyes, scrapes with his feet, points with his finger, with perverted heart devises evil, continually sowing discord; therefore calamity will come upon him suddenly; in a moment he will be broken beyond healing.’ I pray that your wife is not beyond healing. I don’t know how you’re going to live with her if she ever gets out, how she’ll live with herself. Jesus will save you in the end if you give over your trouble to him.”
“Oh,” I said, and hung up.
On Friday morning, I brought the girls along with me to Rafferty’s office. There are several rejuvenated Victorian houses along the way to the courthouse in Racine. If Alice had been allowed an open window we would have been able to shout at her from Rafferty’s office. His is the green house with yellow and purple trim, right next to the phone company. Downstairs, in Finn’s quarters, there is swirling wallpaper that makes a person dizzy. In the bathroom there are stenciled balances one after the next at waist level. Finn’s wife does the decorating for the downstairs, according to Theresa. Apparently when Dolores Finn appears with her pattern books Rafferty stands guard on the stairs. He tells her she can go no farther with her paintbrushes and dried flower arrangements.
Outside of Rafferty’s office there were stacks of boxes to the ceiling. They obscured whatever decorative motif lay behind. The place didn’t feel like a rich man’s lair or a sanctuary where a learned person plots the triumph of justice. The built-in bookshelves along the far wall were filled with novels, do-it-yourself manuals, Peterson’s guides to the flowers, trees, birds, and shrubs, as well as the thick, drab books of law. I moved the Sears tool catalog off the sofa in the hall and settled the girls there. They
each had her own bag of Starbursts. A whole bag, each, sixteen ounces of individually wrapped candies. They also had new crayons and pads of paper. I had bought the things on the way, at the Target in Racine.
Rafferty is tall and thin, with large protruding eyes behind his thick lenses. He has slightly buck teeth, a graying goatee, and the sallow skin of a prisoner. He made small talk, hunting and fishing talk, while I made sure the girls would stay. He looked as if he had never seen the light of day. I wasn’t certain he had ever had blind rage, or if he had always tolerated, with what to me was a kind of grotesque calmness, the system and those of us who had run amuck. As he shook my hand he said, “Your wife is all right. She wanted me to let you know that she’s going to hold up.” He left the door ajar and motioned for me to sit. “Let me outline my fees first,” he said, “get that out of the way.” Without knowing exactly, or even vaguely, where it was going to come from, I told him I’d have the initial payment for him by September at the latest. “No problem,” he said, writing something down on what looked like the back of a grocery receipt. I was thinking of my mother again, thinking that if she were home by September she could help us. The one hundred thousand that fell from the sky for bail money would be ours eventually, at trial time, and could be used to pay the legal fees. Rafferty reminded me to say nothing to the press, that there had been more than enough damaging publicity already. “I’m sure you know that there’s going to be a meeting at the school tonight? Meetings like those breed germs. It’s best for us, just at the moment, to stay put, to quietly begin to build our case. We’ll see what the other side has to say in a few weeks, at the hearing. I’ve seen it happen before: The temperature goes skyrocketing for a while, but if there’s not really anything there, people get tired of fanning the flame.” He got up and walked to the window. He stood looking out to the street. I wondered if he was thinking about the other kinds of cases, those that start with nothing and then take on a life of their own. There had been plenty of incidents, when in the interest of some lofty virtue the public was more than willing to do away with constitutional rights.
“You don’t know anything about apple trees, do you?” he asked. “I planted a whole line of them along the driveway outside here and they haven’t done a thing in five years.” He turned to look at me. “Dolores Finn tells me it’s all the pollution from the street—” He may have noticed
my expression. He may have realized that it was inappropriate to talk about an apple tree when my wife was sitting in jail down the block for no good reason.
“Dolores is probably right,” he said, clearing his throat and walking back to his desk. “I spoke with Alice yesterday, as you know. Your wife is unique, an individual, Mr. Goodwin, as I’m sure you are aware. She is made of very strong fabric.” He pulled up a large vinyl appointment book and studied it, going forward and backwards through the pages as he spoke. “There’s an uproar about this situation, and it’s going to be complicated if other people come forward, and if Lizzy gets dragged into the mess. I talked with Alice for quite a while. I’m going to be very interested in the preliminary hearing, to see the personalities on the other side, to see what they have to say. Usually these cases are the other way around, the respectable people with roots in the community accusing the barmaids. It’s a lot harder in those cases, to represent the barmaids. Now, at the prelim—”
“Could they let her off?” I asked.
He looked up at me from his book. “No, no, let me explain. Preliminary hearings are held for three purposes: first of all, to ascertain whether there is probable cause to support the charge against the accused. Let me warn you that charges are very rarely dismissed. There was a warrant for this arrest, which means the judge has already evaluated the complaint for probable cause. The second reason we have a prelim is for discovery, if you will, for the defense to get information from the prosecution. And last, at the hearing, the judge decides whether or not to bind a person over for trial. The only way you can get her out at this point, right now, is to pay the bond.” He was still looking through his worn date book. If there was anything to like him for it was the fact that he wasn’t surrounded by leather, oriental rugs, brass, and marble. It was hard to be scornful of a man who stores his papers in orange Golden Guernsey milk crates.