“She gave you snacks, or everyone in the class snacks?”
“Everyday we had cookies and popcorn and crackers. You had to go in the hall to get the milk.”
“So Mrs. Ritter was a friendly, pleasant person to be around?”
“She had a gerbil in a cage. You could take it home on weekends.”
“At your school, Robbie, you remember that you get to the nurse’s office by walking down the corridor, past the second-grade classrooms.”
“Uh huh.”
“Then there’s another narrow little hallway.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a set of rooms in that area, isn’t there, for the principal and the secretary and the guidance counselor and the nurse?”
“I think so.”
“The nurse’s office is the first one.”
“Yeah, the first one.”
“You visited the nurse’s office many times last year.”
Although Robbie was looking at the floor he lowered his eyes still further. It was an eerie change. It was like something coming down, a curtain coming down and hiding him. “She was bad to me,” he said.
“Who was bad to you?”
“She was. The nurse.”
“How was she bad to you?”
“She hollered at me.”
“Where did she holler?”
“In the nurse’s office.”
“Why did she shout at you? Do you know why she would need to holler?”
As I said, I had had plenty of experience watching Perry Mason as a youth. It seemed to me that Rafferty should have been objecting to some of Mrs. Dirks’s questions.
“To get me to do stuff that I didn’t want to.”
“What did she want you to do, Robbie?”
Mechanically, as if he’d been told to do this, he stuck his fist into his own stomach. “It hurts,” he said dully, “like
uuuuuugh.”
His mother kissed his ear and then wiped her eyes with her palm.
Rafferty moved right to the judge’s bench. He pointed to Mrs. Mackessy as he spoke. He rarely shouted, but there was a thickness in his voice when he meant to object strenuously. “Objection, Your Honor. Dirks is bolstering the case by having Mom up in the box. Is the court paying for her tissues? I’d like my client’s friends and relations to be allowed up in the box at trial time for her moral support after she’s been in jail for months.”
“Simmer down,” the judge snapped. “I’ll ask you to please remember the age of the witness.”
“I know it hurts,” Mrs. Dirks said to Robbie after Rafferty was seated. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.” Her term of endearment sounded as if it had
been generated by a computer for the phone company. “But your being here will help us find out the truth so that it won’t hurt again, so that other children won’t be hurt.”
There was disgust in Rafferty’s tone when he objected. The judge overruled. Dirks walked briskly to her table and removed a doll from her shopping bag. They are now called anatomically detailed dolls, instead of anatomically correct dolls. She held it to her chest as if she were protecting it. “You’ve seen this before Robbie, in Miss Flint’s office, haven’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you rather use the doll to show us what happened in the nurse’s office? Would that be easier than telling us in words?”
His nod was imperceptible.
“All right then, sweetheart.”
Robbie accepted the doll, awkwardly holding it at first with his shoulders hunched up. He held it as if it were fragile, like a real infant. It was dressed in blue shorts and a red-and-blue-striped T-shirt. It had brown yarn for hair. Robbie turned the doll to face him. He seemed to melt, to finally have an expression. He was squinting at it. His thin mouth trembled and turned down at the corners. I’m sure I will never forget how he looked at that doll. He was shrinking back, in its stead. He whimpered, studying its face. He was squeaking. It was then that Alice sat up. She turned around to see if I was there, I suppose because she knew how I would look. I felt her eyes on me and it was with reluctance that I jerked away from the boy, to acknowledge her. I thought, even as she stirred in her seat, that she was trying to scramble the message. Robbie was going to have to do something hateful to the doll. She was distracting me. He didn’t want to go ahead; he didn’t want to recall what had been done to him.
Mrs. Dirks was providing a tray of tools a nurse might have in her office. She was offering him a stethoscope, cotton balls, tongue depressors, tweezers, scissors, Band-Aids, and a roll of surgical gauze. She was holding the tray as if it was a platter of hors d’oeuvres. Alice had caught me. She had looked expressly to see if I was uncertain. She had seen something in me that I would have preferred to keep to myself. I was not going to watch the boy give cruel and unusual punishment to the doll. I wasn’t going to be part of the bizarre play. “It’s a lie when it’s strange,” Robbie
had said. It followed by his logic, that that room, the building, the unfathomable story, everything there was a lie.
“Do you know what that is for?” Mrs. Dirks asked, when Robbie selected a tongue depressor.
“You say
Ahhhh,”
Robbie said.
It had gotten dark on our porch as I tried to tell Theresa the salient details of Robbie’s testimony. I explained that he seemed to understand the difference between the truth and a lie, that he knew it was wrong to lie. At the very least, I said, his visits to Alice had apparently upset him. I got up to light an old kerosene lamp that had come with the house. Except for small exclamations along the way, Theresa had been quiet. I was thankful for her presence, and even her sympathy, but I was tired now. I couldn’t go any further. I looked around the corner to see if Emma was hiding again, and listening. She was in the living room, lying next to Claire in front of the television. “You know the Woodland Indians, who lived here about 500
B.C
.?” I said, shaking the match out. “The fathers taught their sons, at puberty, to experience the dream life. They believed, they knew, in fact, that there were divine spirits in the forest and in the prairie. By fasting and through dreams they made intense contact with the spirits. And they believed, when they died, that a god guided their soul to paradise, to a large village where there was peace, perfection. You’d play lacrosse forever. I remember reading in college about the fathers passing down this dream life to their sons. Nothing like that is given to us. I don’t think there’s anything that can be compared to it in our life. Sometimes I feel an association with the people who used to live here in this house. Not ghosts or spirits. It’s only a tie to the past, a kinship of ideas, maybe.”
“Oh, Howard,” Theresa said in alarm, “this is so awful for you.”
I looked across at her. I hadn’t actually realized that I was speaking out loud. I didn’t often talk to anyone about the Indian’s dream life, or my own dream life for that matter. I sat back down on my walnut bench. I mumbled that it was a lot worse for Alice than it was for me. We didn’t say anything for a while.
At the hearing I had waited with my head down while Robbie poked his doll. While he displayed his adult knowledge of sexual matters. I couldn’t concern myself with the impression I was making on the judge. A child couldn’t look the way Robbie had unless someone had taken
advantage of him. You couldn’t act traumatized at age six. He’d looked scared at first, and pained at the remembrance, and then when it came to him perhaps more vividly his eyes had widened, as if he couldn’t pull away from the scene. “Four score and seven years ago,” I had said to myself, my head between my knees, “our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure.” Was it worth killing forty thousand men at Gettysburg for that one flawless speech? Sometimes it almost seemed that it was. I used to say the Address to myself when I was doing chores. It felt like a mantra from my short TM days, only fuller, something that was in my veins as well as my head. “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” With my head down I wondered what good would come out of the summer. I wondered what hope we could possibly take home that would endure beyond the present horror of sitting quietly in Branch Six while Robbie Mackessy tortured his doll.
“What did he do?” Theresa was asking in her gentle, insistent way. “What did he do to the doll, Howard?”
I hadn’t looked up during the rest of Mrs. Dirks’s questions. I had said the Gettysburg Address over and over to myself. I also remembered how it was that I’d wanted to farm since I was a boy. I’d wanted to farm ever since the time I planted a wheat field with my Uncle Erwin, sitting on his lap, on the tractor. Later in the summer I visited his farm again, in Zombrota, Minnesota. I got to see the wheat, the sea of green wheat we’d planted. I never forgot how beautiful that field was, the wheat moving in the wind like waves. Years later, in college, I read that in one hundred years there was going to be no topsoil left, that we have been going through topsoil faster than we are squandering any other natural resource. That was as much information as I needed, to follow the path Uncle Erwin had begun for me.
“I don’t know exactly what Robbie did to the doll,” I said to Theresa.
“He didn’t perform?” she asked, in all seriousness.
I hadn’t sat up until Mrs. Dirks was saying, “Okay, Robbie. Thank you. You are a real trooper. You are a very brave six-year-old and we
thank you.” I had hoped that Alice would turn her head to look again. She would see that I was unaffected. She would see that nothing Robbie had done had made an impression.
With the kind of acumen that even Alice does not have, Theresa said, “I wouldn’t have been able to watch the whole thing, if I’d been you, Howard. With Alice sitting right there, I would have just shut my eyes and blocked my ears.”
She made my head swim. I had to put my hands to my jaw before I could speak. “Rafferty got up for the cross-examination then,” I said hoarsely. “He was wearing a battered plaid suit coat that made me think of a great old cheap store in Chicago. Goldblatt’s. My Aunt Penny used to send me toys that lasted for about ten minutes from Goldblatt’s. To work there you had to wear suit coats that matched the sofas in the furniture department.”
We both knew I hadn’t answered the question. “God,” she heaved. “And he earns more than a decent salary. He could afford to go to Saks, or Brooks Brothers.”
Rafferty had leaned against the railing which fenced off the empty jury box. “Hi, Robbie,” he said, as if they had never previously met. “My name is Paul, by the way. There’s not many people, even Judge Peterson here, who calls me Mr. Rafferty.” I had thought at first that Rafferty was trying to put the boy at ease, out of decency. He had told me that the judge would not throw out the case, that the burden of proof in a preliminary hearing is low. I had known from the start, seeing the cumbersome machinery of the court, the gears creaking and turning slowly, that even if Robbie fell apart, it was going to take a lot of time and money to wipe Alice’s slate clean. I didn’t understand until later that Rafferty’s every calculated gesture and word was designed to make Robbie disrespectful and sour.
“Say, Your Honor,” Rafferty said, “may I advance to the witness box?” The judge nodded his head. Rafferty carried a wooden chair from his desk and went right close to Robbie. He hiked one foot on the seat of the chair and then leaned his elbow on his knee. “Let me explain something to you, pal, before we begin.” Pal. He’d pounced on the word, said it sarcastically. He passed his hand lightly over the top of his head. Alice said that his well-greased, wavy hair always looked as if it had come out of a
mold. “When I ask you a question, if you know the answer, you can tell me Yes. If you don’t know, you may tell me No, or I don’t know, or I forget. As Mrs. Dirks said, the important thing is to tell the truth. I want you to understand that it’s fine to tell me that you don’t remember, if in fact you don’t remember. All right?”
Robbie was staring down and to his right, about as far from Rafferty as he could look. He made no indication that he’d heard Rafferty.
“Who was the first person you told about Mrs. Goodwin?”
“My mom.”
“Your mom. You knew she would understand because she does that sort of thing you described with her boyfriends, right?”
Susan Dirks of course blasted up from her seat. “That is hearsay, Your Honor, it is irrelevant and it is beyond the scope of direct.”
“Question withdrawn,” Rafferty said calmly.
Mrs. Mackessy had tightened her hold around her boy. She was trying, without much success, to bury her face in his short hair.
“Did your mom hug you when you told her?”
Robbie hesitated. He was still. “Yeah,” he said finally.
“Would you say she gives you a hug once a day?”
“Objection, Your Honor,” Susan Dirks said, with marked restraint. “This line of questioning has no bearing on—”
“Sustained,” the judge muttered.
“Sometimes they can’t stand my questions,” Rafferty explained to Robbie, “and then I get into trouble. You ever get into trouble?”
“Sort of,” Robbie said.
“Sort of. So you told your mom and then she called the police and they got you an appointment with Miss Flint. I’d like you to try to remember that first time you saw Miss Flint. Think for a minute, what it was like that day you visited her at the office.”
Mrs. Mackessy shifted her weight and Robbie went up and down with her, as if he was on a mechanical horse.
“Did you tell Miss Flint about Mrs. Goodwin right away?”
“She has games and stuff.”
“Did you play with her for a while?”
“Yeah.”
“Did she ask you about Mrs. Goodwin?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did you tell her about the things that you thought happened at school?”
He shrugged.
“This woman,” Rafferty said, pointing his pen at the court reporter, “is taking down everything we say. So you have to give me an answer.”
Robbie didn’t blink or make the slightest movement.
“Who tells you that Mrs. Goodwin is bad?”
He remained motionless. His eyes were cast down. He was pale and his face didn’t seem to have any contour.