“She says she’s fine,” I muttered, trying to move out from under her little hand.
“Rafferty once told me something funny,” Theresa said, without moving. “When he can’t stand the prosecution he says he imagines the attorneys and the witnesses floating down a tranquil river. They float on down without knowing about the unexpected drop off, with its protruding sharp rocks. He says he sees them—in his mind’s eye—getting dashed to pieces at the bottom of the falls. He’s able to stay calm that way.”
“That’s helpful,” I said. I managed to get up, on the pretense of needing to pull my handkerchief out of my pocket. I blew my nose away from the direction of her sympathetic gaze. I hadn’t had much of a chance to talk with Rafferty about Susan Dirks, the assistant D.A. She was a slim woman, elegant. She had the kind of hair I think of as endemic to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Iowa. Maybe Indiana, for that matter. It’s ruffled hair, like corrugated metal, with short stuff in the front that looks as if it’s been blasted out of an aerosol can. She was wearing a glittery black jacket and a short, black skirt. By choice she had a lot of cumbersome gold jewelry around her arms and neck. When everyone was assembled, Alice, in contrast, in her oversized orange pants, looked all the more like she’d been the stupid one, to come to the party wearing the wrong clothes.
As I sat back down next to Theresa, telling her that neither one of the lawyers gave much in the way of opening statements, she said, “What was that about the admission, the ‘I hurt everybody’ line? Suzannah Brooks kept saying that in my face, just about gloating.”
I winked a few times, involuntarily, thinking I hadn’t heard her. The admission had cost me a night’s sleep. I hadn’t been planning on mentioning it to Theresa. I guess I still didn’t know if I was primarily worried, or baffled, or angry. To get anywhere, I knew I had to choose from the three possibilities. I had tossed for hours trying not to give way to anxiety. The investigating officer had testified at the end of the hearing. Under oath he stated that Alice had shouted at him, shouted, “I hurt everybody.” I had
wanted Theresa to tell me what Alice was without my having to supply some of the crucial information. I hadn’t known how I would tell her some of the more damning assertions. Without repeating the incriminating evidence, I wanted to ask, Did she do it? Theresa would say no. She’d say no a second time. Her look would change then. She’d show a side I had never seen before. She’d frown, disbelieving at first. And then somehow contempt would mar her pretty face.
She didn’t give me a chance to wonder how Suzannah Brooks had heard something that was said behind locked doors. She turned and put her hands on my arm again. “I can imagine why Alice would say that, can’t you? I mean, with what happened to Lizzy, it makes sense to me that she’d feel generally culpable. I know I would. Rafferty will make sure the confession is excluded from the trial. He’ll find a loophole, you know how lawyers operate. Probably she hadn’t had Miranda read to her yet, so anything she said will be inadmissible. That was Alice expressing what was a feeling, not a fact. If you know her the way we do, it makes sense. She doesn’t very often let down her guard, but it’s obvious she’s got a lot to work through. I don’t think she’s resolved half of her family issues. That’s one of the reasons she can seem so funny, because she’s really so raw. She’s turned a lot of her pain into humor, but we all know that deep down it’s just plain hurt.”
I couldn’t help turning to look at her, at her unwavering gaze. I saw that she was certain she was right. She wasn’t making up something to soothe me. I suppose the qualities she described were what had drawn me to Alice in the first place: She could alternately seem self-possessed with her hair in a bun, and then she’d untwist her braid and dance with abandon. I was grateful to Theresa, grateful she could account for Alice’s remark. For about three seconds I’d say I felt practically euphoric.
“That’s what I love about Alice, don’t you?” Theresa went on. “She blurts out these things that are refreshing, these searing one-liners, only sometimes she doesn’t have brakes working, and you wish you could gag her.”
If a person could gag her. If only a person could gag her! She should not have said those things! It was wrong of her to have aired her dirty laundry to a police officer. It had been impolitic. It had been idiotic. Why would anyone say to a police officer, “I hurt everybody”? Theresa shook
my arm gently. I suppose she could just about see me thinking. If Alice had been in the room I would have had to leave so as not to show my temper. “So what happened?” she said. “Tell me about it. Did Robbie testify? Please, tell me.”
Alice would say that I’m not usually sensitive to people’s clothing, but it was clear that clothing was itself central to the hearing. Robbie was dressed in a beige three-piece suit, as if the proceeding was a display for future lawyers of America. We were supposed to pay no respect to persons. Mrs. Mackessy was the image of ideal suburban motherhood, up in the witness box with her boy on her lap. She was wearing one of those denim dresses that look like a feed bag. We were supposed to picture her tooling around in her paneled station wagon to the vet, the scout meetings, the parish bake sale. In fact, she drives a 1979 Impala. You can tell she’s babied the thing because the body’s in pretty good shape. Her long ratty hair was pulled back with a pink ribbon. Alice said later that that’s what unhinged her, the pink satin ribbon.
When Susan Dirks directed Mrs. Mackessy into the witness box, Rafferty jumped up from his chair and walked quickly to the judge’s bench to object. There was no reason, he said, for the boy to sit on his mother’s lap. Alice remarked that there was something in the quality of Rafferty’s voice, and his composure, that made his requests and his conclusions sound reasonable and true. She probably had a point. He was quiet and forceful at the same time. He suggested to the judge that the D.A. knew she had a shaky witness and a weak case and that she was bolstering it in any way she could.
The judge overruled, on the grounds that the hearing was stressful, that Robbie had the right to feel secure, and that a child could testify more reliably if he was not frightened.
The bailiff told Robbie to hold up his hand and promise to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth.
“Okay,” he answered. He leaned back into his mother. When he grabbed the armrests he was surprised and pleased to find that the chair swiveled.
“How you doin’, Robbie?” Susan Dirks asked. “You comfy?”
“Yeah.”
The building was air conditioned, well regulated. We were all comfy.
“This won’t take too long,” she told Robbie. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and then the gentleman, Mr. Rafferty, over there,” she pointed, “in the—plaid suit, will ask you a few things, and then you can get back home.”
Robbie nodded. Alice used to say he looked as if he might evaporate if it wasn’t for his big mouth. He had pale eyes. He had pale hair. Everything about him, even his suit, was pale. She had said, months before the summer, that he had the most impassive face she had ever seen in anyone, young or old, that he had a habit of staring, that it unnerved her. At the hearing he sat on his mother’s lap looking at the floor by Mrs. Dirk’s feet.
“How old are you, Robbie?” Susan asked.
“Six.” As far as I could tell the kid hadn’t blinked yet.
“That’s wonderful, Robbie. I’m sure you’re old enough to know the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said.
Alice bent her head then. She kept it bowed, as if she was praying.
“If I told you that your jacket is purple is that the truth or a lie?”
“That’s a lie.”
“What’s a lie, Robbie?”
“It’s bad,” he said, looking again at Mrs. Dirks’s shoes. “It’s when you make it up.”
“Yes, that’s right. It’s a lie when you make something up. What does it mean to tell the truth?”
“It’s important to. When it—it’s when something really happened, like you don’t make it up or nothin’.”
“Exactly. And in this court it is a law that we all must tell the truth. We are under oath to tell the truth. That means we have promised. You just promised to be truthful when you answered Mr. Malone’s questions a few minutes ago. It is your job to tell us what you know is true. Do you understand?”
At that point the judge allowed Rafferty the opportunity to ask Robbie questions only on the subject of his ability to understand the oath and answer the questions truthfully. Rafferty leaned against his desk and briefly fired away at the boy. I think even a six-year-old child would have sensed Rafferty’s need to display his superior intelligence. Rafferty spoke coolly, in no way attempting to soften his revulsion.
When Susan Dirks resumed her questioning she stood a few feet from the Mackessys. Her arms were folded over her flat chest. She had one foot out in front of her, her toe pointing up, her spike heel dug into the short nap of the carpet. “Can you tell us some of the things that you like to do best, your favorite things?”
“Nintendo. I ride my bike. My dad got me a G.I. Joe.” He listed his pleasures flatly, as if they didn’t really matter to him.
“Do you pretend with your G.I. Joe, Robbie?”
He sank down into Carol Mackessy for a minute. She held him around his middle and rested her chin on top of his head. “Yeah,” he said.
“Does your G.I. Joe, say, fight battles?”
He sat up straight all of a sudden, under his mother’s chin, making her head snap back. “I pretend that he’s fighting bad guys, like niggers and them and—” He was coming alive, looking past Mrs. Dirks for the first time. He pointed his finger and began moving it in an arc, spraying the benches, emptying his full magazine.
“Ba bam, ba bam, ba bam
, he wipes ’em out, blows up buildings—guts splatter, ugh, he got me—”
To the court reporter Rafferty said, “For the record, the witness is holding his hands in front of him, pointing his finger as if it were a gun, and moving it from his left to the right.”
Both Mrs. Dirks and Mrs. Mackessy had not been prepared for Robbie’s display. Mrs. Dirks had unfolded her arms and was holding her hands out in front of her like a choral director. Rafferty objected that the D.A. was signaling the witness. In any case it was not a gesture that Robbie understood. Mrs. Mackessy was trying to cope with her unexpected whiplash. She had had to quell her flash of anger. With her forearm and a balled fist she had pulled him hard into her belly.
“I see,” Susan said to Robbie. “You imagine all of that.”
“Yeah, but it ain’t real, no way. It ain’t even real on TV. It’s like they made up these pictures at a TV station and beam ’em into your house. It’s just pictures somebody drew.”
“When people get shot on television are they really dead, Robbie?”
“It’s people on there falling over. They get rich to do it.”
“So you pretend sometimes, and you watch TV, and then there are real-life times—”
“It’s real when you’re alive.”
“Did you ever tell a lie, a little lie to your mom or dad?”
“I try not to,” he said.
She must have smiled at him. You could hear a warmth in her response. “We all try not to tell lies. It’s hard sometimes though, isn’t it?”
“Uh huh,” he said, without moving his eyes from her feet.
“How do you feel if you tell your mom a little lie?”
“I took some candy once and she found out.”
“Did you lie at first about the candy?”
His nod was like an old man’s, an almost imperceptible downward movement of his jaw.
“How did you feel when you told the lie?”
“Real bad. After she—afterward I said I was sorry.”
“How do you know that you’re not to lie, Robbie? Who teaches you that sort of thing?”
“My mom. You can tell when someone’s telling you a true story and when it’s a lie. I learned that.”
“How can you tell?”
“A lie is real strange, like you can’t believe it, like you’d say, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”
It was hard to imagine Emma, in another year, being so forthcoming. Alice made the comment at one of our visits that Robbie was clearly a remarkable child, someone who understood, even at six, that being in the public eye made his life a story, that there was value in the story.
“What happens to you when you lie, Robbie?”
He moved his eyes from her foot to the floor of the witness box. “She gets mad.”
“People who lie get punished, don’t they?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“You understand that people who lie in court get punished too?”
“I know.”
“Of course you do. You are a smart six-year-old. I need you to concentrate very hard now, to do your best to remember, and always to tell the truth.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Do you know the lady in the orange outfit, sitting at the table there?”
Outfit was a generous term to describe Alice’s garment. One of the strange things about Robbie was his gaze, and the fact that throughout the proceedings he didn’t alter his position more than two or three inches. He turned his head away from Alice, and then looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah,” he said.
“How do you know her, Robbie?”
He resumed looking at the floor by his own feet. “She’s the nurse.”
“Where is she the nurse?”
“At my school.”
“What was your teacher’s name last year, Robbie, in kindergarten at Blackwell Elementary?”
“Mrs. Ritter.”
“Mrs. Ritter. Did you like going to kindergarten?”
Rafferty was tipping back in his chair. His hands were stretched out in front of him, folded on his clear desk top. He seemed preternaturally calm sitting like that next to Alice. She had not once raised her head since Robbie had first answered Mrs. Dirks with a “Yes, Ma’am.” I wished she would lift herself up and watch. It didn’t look good. The judge wouldn’t think well of her, unable to face her accuser.
“Why was Mrs. Ritter your friend?” Susan asked.
“She was nice to me. She said I didn’t have to finish my work sheet sometimes.”
“I see. And was there any other reason you thought she was nice?”
“She gave me snacks.”