“I don’t want to talk about this right now,” I said, moving Emma into the living room. Theresa was laughing, saying, “And anyway, I just can’t believe that anyone could possibly think that Robbie would make a reliable witness. I’m not sure he hasn’t been abused, judging from the family,
but to think that he’s going to testify and be coherent. I can just see it, Howard! I can see Robbie telling his mother that something dreadful has happened and Carol, all of a sudden, and finally, tuning into that kid. What do you expect? Robbie has at last figured out that he has to get hurt, really hurt—not just fall off his bike and skin his knee—for his mother to give him the time of day, for his mother to be outraged. What did the paper say about three more boys filing charges?”
“Please,” I said, “I don’t like talking about it—” I cocked my head toward Emma in about as exaggerated a way as I could.
“Oh God,” she cried, “I’m out of my mind, Howard. I really am. I’m so sorry. What can I be thinking?” She had Emma’s offending shirt in her hand and she twisted it around and around and then thwacked the wall with it.
“What are you doing to my shirt?” Emma whimpered.
“What, honey?” Theresa asked.
“What are you doing to my shirt?”
“Oh, Emma, oh for goodness sakes. I’m just so darn mad, I don’t know what I’m doing. We’ll get this stain out, you’ll see. Howard, I’ll go, I’ll—”
“Why don’t you run upstairs and get your pajamas on, Emma?” I said. “By the time you’re back down the water will be boiling. We’ll watch Theresa do her heat-and-distance trick.” I was moving toward the porch, hoping that Emma would do as she was told.
“When’s the preliminary hearing?” Theresa whispered at my back as I led the way. “They usually put the hearings off forever.”
“It’s been,” I said, sitting down on a bench I’d made from a slab of walnut. “Monday. Yesterday. Rafferty made an effort not to have it continued indefinitely.”
Emma came to the door and stood watching us. “Please, Emma,” I pleaded. “I need to talk to Theresa and when we’re done we’ll get us some—” We didn’t have anything good to eat. “When we’re done we’ll do the shirt.” She turned slowly and disappeared around the corner.
“What happened? Tell me.” Theresa was sitting on the edge of her chair across from me. She must have sat right there any number of times, asking with the same urgency. She and Alice often had some big secret. They were always cackling in disbelief.
The dark was moving in and the few crickets were striking a note here and there. I peered through the door and I could just make out Claire, curled up in front of the television. She had fallen asleep while women with chops and synthetic cleavages belted out their distress. I went and shooed Emma from behind the wood stove in the kitchen. She dragged along to the stairs, her head hanging down, her arms limp at her side.
Alice would have been able to make a good story from the hearing in spite of the fact that it was supposed to be a low-key affair. Rafferty had told me that the preliminary hearing was not the place to draw out the details. He said that if he brought into focus the slatternly mother, the ill-mannered boy, months later at the trial the D.A. would have had the time to create Mrs. Mackessy as Mother Theresa and Robbie as the all-American choirboy on a PBS special. He had told me that the defense holds everything close to the chest, that it is the prosecutor who must play the hand. At the hearing the judge might be sympathetic to the poor single mom doing her best to raise up her child. At the trial Rafferty would introduce the real Mrs. Mackessy, as well as sing, and dance, if necessary, Alice’s praises: the fine caring professional nurse who is being blamed for Carol’s neglect and Robbie’s failures.
For all my background in history, I had been thinking lately that stories were pretty useless. The first scientists, way back, in pre-Socratic time, figured out that if they were going to understand anything they would have to discard narrative in favor of empirical methods. The Creation myths explained, after a fashion, who and why, but science would tell how and what. I had tried not to see the hearing as a story but as a series of facts which explored these questions: How did this happen? What is Alice? It was an absurd question, I realize, What is Alice? And yet I found myself asking, and not knowing how to answer. I had gone over and over the hearing in my mind and with each passing hour I was more and more bewildered. That night Theresa came over I thought, for about five minutes, that the splintered facts might make sense. I thought I might be able to lay out the pieces for her. With her experience she would amplify and connect where I could not.
“I think a lot about Alice,” I said.
“Oh Howard,” she blew, “if you only knew how I think about her.
My sister asked how I could still be friends with her and I said, ‘If the same thing had happened in your built-in pool, do you think I’d stop speaking to you?’ I feel as if I’ve lost two people, that’s what no one, least of all my husband, understands.”
I couldn’t, of course, ask her what had been nagging at me since the day before.
What is my wife, Theresa?
I mumbled something about how we have air-conditioned squad cars instead of wooden carts but that nothing else had changed much since the Inquisition.
“And you can pay your fines with American Express,” she added. “You’re right! The changes are insignificant.”
On that Monday I had left the girls off at a day-care center in a shopping mall on the outskirts of Racine. It had been the only place I could find that would take them on a drop-in basis. The morning had gone badly at the beginning. The gallon jar of milk had fallen out of the refrigerator and shattered on the floor. The car keys had gotten lost. A cow in her prime was sick with diarrhea for no good reason. When we got to the day-care place, Happy Haven, Emma and Claire screamed about it. I had to shake them off of me and leave them sobbing in the hands of two high-school students. They had badges on their red aprons that said, “Trainee.” Out in the parking lot I could still hear my daughters crying. When I was trying to drive away the engine flooded. I had to sit for fifteen minutes before the car would run. I wasn’t sure by the end if I was hearing their appeals or imagining the worst. The noise continued as I drove. I could still hear them after I was a mile down the road.
There were jackhammers going in front of the courthouse. I was very hot in my suit. There’s an inscription on the north side of the entrance, a quote from Goethe. “In the government of men,” it says, “a great deal may be done by severity. More by love. But most of all by clear discernment and impartial justice. Which pays no respect to persons.” Those jackhammers were going in my ears and the sun was bearing down through my suit coat, my white shirt, my T-shirt. I read the quote several times. There was so much sweat dripping into my eyes and stinging that I couldn’t read very well. The trouble with Goethe, I thought then, is that when it’s you on trial you want to be particular, an individual. You don’t want to be one of the indiscriminate masses.
Even though it’s only a dowdy provincial courthouse it’s enough of a
hulking edifice to remind the passerby that inside some men are ruined while others make their fortunes. Around the entrance there are crude bas-reliefs of the common man plowing and forging chains, trying to stand up straight under their burdens. “You know that thing Goethe said about justice that’s carved on the courthouse wall?” I asked Theresa.
“Oh God,” she said, grimacing. “Justice! That place could stand to have a few window boxes, some happy-face decals on the revolving doors.”
I was aware that I was shaking as I made my way to Branch Six. As I said, I had always thought that Racine was a good place, where farm implements are made, where the folks at Johnson Wax decide how best to make the world clean. I’d always imagined Racine at the top of the globe, along with that eagle on my J. I. Case cap. Even in the stairwell, up the six flights, I could hear the clamor. When I reached the sixth floor I stood on the cement landing. I could see through the small window out to the hall. I could see a swarm of mothers, their big heads bubbling up and down as they called to one another.
“They’re not going to let us in!”
“They can’t keep us out!”
“The judge can lock the door if he wants too!”
Suburban rebels, storming the citadel. They were armed with their long, sharp earrings, their heavy necklaces and bracelets, their clean, white canine teeth, their steel-colored helmet hair. I wasn’t sure about Goethe. “In the government of men a great deal may be done by severity. More by love.” So far so good. “But most of all by clear discernment and impartial justice.” Fine. “Which pays no respect to persons.” I wasn’t aware of anything in heaven or earth that more simply determined the outcome of any conflict than the force of personality. Gorbachev dismantled Russia on the strength of his personality. It didn’t hurt him, having the glamorous Risa in tow, a woman who carried a credit card in her pocketbook. Take the personality away from Mrs. Thatcher and you’d have nothing but a woman with a hairdo who went to the shops to buy her husband his dinner. In Branch Six, if Mrs. Mackessy looked like a sleazy broad to the judge, he wasn’t supposed to hold it against her. If Alice came in, gray and battered in her orange suit, he couldn’t allow himself to feel sympathy. If she told her most amusing story he would not laugh. If he asked her what
had become of her life she could quote Shakespeare. She would say the line she used when she was looking for something: “I feel it gone but know not how it went.” An elected official, he wasn’t supposed to be moved by the battalions that were presently laying siege at the threshold of Branch Six.
I studied history in college to pay respect to persons. I had always been drawn to generals and their battle plans. I was interested to know what motivated the likes of Bonaparte, Patton, Hannibal, Pickett, Lee, Grant, and Custer. In high school I had learned only dates and battles and treaties. I had a vague idea what the notable characters left in their wakes. I’d known by the age of five that some of us wield power, that the likes of Rickie Kroeger could wheedle cookies out of my mother where Nick O’Brien could not. My mother had informed me that in God’s plan some were weak and others strong.
On that Monday morning in Racine I opened the door and stood facing the backs of the perfumed women. People were jostling into the crowd from the elevator, much as if they were getting on a crowded train. No one registered my presence right away. It was as the shudder of recognition began to move through the crowd, as a hush began to descend, that the door to Branch Six opened. I’m still not sure how Rafferty managed to hook me in, to reach me from the door and pull me through to the inside. “You can’t do that!” The women were shouting. “Stop him! Get to the door. This is against the law.”
The judge in his black robes stood before the rabble, his arms up. From behind he was a dark mass filling the entry. Each person out in the hall was found wanting and could not come farther. He told them they’d need an injunction if they wanted to be present. He shut the double doors and locked them. Inside there were the usual trappings: the blond veneer panels, the half-moon lamps along the wall, the green leather-bound volumes in shelves built into the judge’s bench. I guess the furnishings were to make us feel that we are in the hands of men who have had the time and silence to become wise. I moved along the back, toward the windows. “You’ll want to sit closer,” Rafferty called from his table. “You won’t be able to hear.”
“Being in court feels like going to church to me,” Theresa murmured that night on the porch. “Everyone’s getting ready—lighting candles,
pouring coffee—what’s the difference? There’s that same quiet, an almost fearful silence. I’m still sometimes afraid in church, and I’m always afraid in court. As a kid I thought if I didn’t genuflect the right way I’d go straight to hell. There’s all that drama and ritual in both, and the mystique of the priest or the judge. I think court has become like church for a lot of people, don’t you think so? Of course there’s all that infernal waiting. In church at least the priests are on time for mass.”
I don’t know how long I waited. Rafferty had gone out one of the side doors. Judge Peterson went behind his screen, holding his insulated coffeepot. The court reporter and the bailiff were whispering, trying to laugh without making noise. I sat, thinking about Goethe. I hoped that Horace Peterson, over the course of his career, had become an expert judge of character. A connoisseur. I hoped that he had gone beyond Goethe and was so knowledgeable about persons that therein lay the clear discernment. He looked like a tired fifty-five. I held out the hope that he would not need to see Alice more than once to understand the error. She was a beautiful woman with a braid down her back. She carried herself well. She was educated. Yes, she was temperamental; she herself said so. But she was definitely upstanding, of course she was, and principled. At the same time, for good measure, I also held out the hope that he had gone soft over the years, that a beautiful woman could sway him. It didn’t matter to me how she got away.
There must have been a cue because all at once Judge Peterson came back to his bench, coffeepot in hand. The bailiff opened the door to the holding room and Alice shuffled in, just as she said she would, the manacles around her feet clattering as she moved. She didn’t search me out. She looked straight to the windows, to the white sky. Her orange clothes hung on her. The pants puddled down around her ankles. The crotch came to her knees. Rafferty was holding a file and talking to her. It was midsummer and he was wearing a heavy suit coat. Susan Dirks, the prosecutor, and Mrs. Mackessy and Robbie, appeared from behind the screen and came to their table.
“How did Alice seem in court?” Theresa asked. “How was she?”
I heard myself say, “They made her look like a mental patient.”
“How could they do that, Howard?” she asked softly. “What do you mean?”
“Like someone who shouldn’t be allowed to dress herself. Because she’ll put on something too big.”
Theresa crossed the room and came to my side. She put her arm around my shoulders and turned her head to look up at me.