“Give it time, Alice.”
“I feel—”
“You don’t have to ever visit them. You don’t have any obligations to those people.”
“Obligation,” I said. “I don’t understand the first thing about obligation. Howard’s mother called the other night. ‘Alice, dear,’ she says so sweetly, ‘how are you?’ ‘Fine,’ I say. Bear in mind that I haven’t talked to her in almost three months. Three tumultuous months. She says, ‘Could I speak to Howard?’ He’s been in a sweat for weeks because he hasn’t heard from her since he wrote her about the farm. We owe her so much money. The failure to pay your mother back is one of those primal failures. I listened while they talked and he kept saying things like, ‘That’s great, Mom. It sounds like you did a good job over there, Mom. We’re fine, yep, the girls are terrific.’ When he hung up he looked as if he’d been run over, back and forth; I was sure he’d pull up his shirt and there’d be these great tire marks going every which way.” I used my arms to demonstrate the random course of the four-wheel drive that had flattened my husband.
She covered her mouth in that delicious familiar way of hers and laughed in spite of herself.
“Nellie is relieved that our ‘farm adventure,’—that’s what she calls it—she’s relieved that our farm adventure is over, and that now Howard can get a real job. Isn’t it fantastic how little she knows him? She knows
nothing about him! Maybe I’m the only one who can really know that he’ll never be as happy again as he was with his barn, his barn with the beautiful, clean, four-paned windows up in the dusty haymow, and down below the Golden Guernseys chewing away on their cuds.”
Theresa turned her head and I went on quickly to spare her the embarrassment of her tears. She had always been one to cry easily, an ability I had at times envied. “But back to obligation,” I said. “I would have thought that Howard was obligated to tell me that our children were being interviewed by the police. He mentioned it recently—as if it was nothing. He told me after dinner, ‘Ah by the way …’ I was incensed. I couldn’t get him to say more than a few monosyllables about it. ‘No big deal.’ The girls could have been put into foster care! ‘No sweat.’ I asked him if he was trying to punish me, by not talking about it. He looked at me uncomprehendingly. ‘It was short,’ he said. ‘The girls were fine. It lasted five minutes. It turned out to be nothing.’ ”
“I think he was wanting to keep you from worry,” Theresa said.
“I suppose. But it feels like, well, like something on the order of betrayal.”
We didn’t talk too much longer after that. She said we should get together more often. I said I was pretty busy, with the trial coming up. I didn’t have transportation either, so it was hard to plan for anything more than five blocks from home.
“I’m so busy too,” she said. “It’s just terrible.” When she was buckling Audrey into her car seat she asked—maybe to prove that we actually did have more to talk about, that we hadn’t exhausted our subject matter—
“How is your place? Is it all right?”
“It’s—incredible,” I said.
“That’s great.”
We made the obligatory embrace and she leaped into the van, turned it on, and promptly backed into the dumpster. She smacked her palm to her forehead and laughed. I watched her go, wondering why she had called in the first place, if she needed to see me because she had been well brought up, because she felt it was the nice thing, the proper thing to do. We had survived the breakfast, and we had found, after the slow start, that there was enough to say. But standing on the curb, watching her fly off, I felt the oddness of it. The compulsory meeting had taken place. It
had felt stylized, like a Kabuki version of a women’s breakfast. There wouldn’t, in the future, be much reason to see each other.
I bought tubes of paint with money from the change pot, and to Howard’s horror, I painted flowers at waist level all around the living room. Perhaps the Pheasant Glade life was what I was secretly yearning for back in the old days when I used to get mad at Howard for dragging us into the dairy business. He didn’t look like himself in his dark blue dress pants, his light blue shirt, his crimson and blue tie, and his dark blue jacket, the official uniform of the Motor Vehicle Registration Worker. Sometimes it seemed that he could hardly stand to ask me for the smallest thing, that it was difficult for him to get out the words, “Please pass the salt.”
I bought Emma some clothes at the Goodwill store, and with Vaseline I polished up a pair of patent leather Mary Janes that I’d found at a rummage sale. She is a very particular child, and I was grateful to her, another for our list, for not turning up her nose at most of the things I put in her closet. She had grown up over the summer, grown up and gone into her own world. She spent a lot of time lying on her bed, listening to books on tape from the library. She couldn’t yet read herself, but she listened to
Heidi, The Little Princess
, and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, over and over again. She didn’t want me to read to her anymore. In the evening I’d lie on the floor or on the bed and listen with her. Sometimes I’d fall asleep and stay there all through the night. When I was small, I used to listen to my tape in the dark, to my dead mother reading
Little House in the Big Woods
. I used to try to believe that she was sleeping right beside me.
Chapter Twenty
——
T
HE LEAVES IN THE
park turned color and fell and we walked through them, scooped them up, pressed them flat in the dictionary. Emma found a kitten and I agreed to take her in, which overnight changed the smell of our unit. We had long since forgotten what it was to have a weekend and we were taken by surprise by the sheer fact of Friday, by the prospect of liberation. Even Howard’s heart finally temporarily eased at five o’clock every Friday evening, at the thought of two blank days. We had the habit of getting take out fish fry from the bar down the street. Howard usually managed to jam a log in the fireplace and we’d sit on the hearth with our dinners on our laps watching the flames. Over the course of the fall we went to Old World Wisconsin and watched women make butter and spin wool. We went to the science museum, the art museum, the lake front, the movies, the botanical gardens, the children’s museum, the state capitol, the train museum, the circus, and the wax museum. Howard was a working man and I spent his money without thought of tomorrow. What we were experiencing, I believe, is called Motion. I watched us in the reflection of the store windows in downtown Milwaukee, Howard pushing Claire in a stroller, Emma and I, hand in hand. We looked fine. We looked like perfectly regular people who were having a weekend. At the end of the
day, we always came home exhausted, hungry, the four of us snapping at each other. I warmed up the brand-name supper the girls insisted upon: Kraft macaroni and cheese, and hot dogs to go along with it. They ate noisily with their faces right down in their bowls. Howard read the paper over his peanut butter and jelly and carrot sticks. Because of his job we not only had major medical insurance, but we also had dental insurance and ocular insurance. We had never before been so secure, so prepared for failure.
The trial was set for December second. At the end of October the three boys, Anthony Jenkins, Norman Frazer, and Tommy Giddings, dropped their charges. The whole story was like a carefully wrought pile of sticks, and it was Norman who began pulling out the supports at the bottom. He made half the structure cave in. He apparently started naming everyone at school, saying that the gym teacher had put a gun to his head, the art teacher made them drink paint, the classroom teachers put aside numbers and letters in favor of what sounded like Satanic rituals. When the investigators tried to pull him back to the original perpetrator, he remembered nothing that he had said before. Anthony Jenkins had also been giving inconsistent statements, and it was determined that his story would not hold up in court. The Giddingses decided that it was going to be more damaging to Tommy to have to testify than the already substantial harm that had come to him, and they reluctantly withdrew the charge. The older children who had been assessed were said to have grievances which would have required disciplinary measures by the school, and termination of my contract, if they’d come to light while I was still an employee. They were not serious enough to warrant criminal charges. My case then, was a small one, contained after all. It had been front-page news for a few weeks at the beginning, and later was occasionally found near the back of the paper, a short paragraph about the trial again being postponed.
If I had a meeting with Rafferty, I’d take Howard to work and in the same shopping center I’d drop Claire off at Happy Haven, a day care that had previously been a Fashion Bug store. Claire didn’t mind the atmosphere of commerce, the fluorescent lights, the shiny linoleum. She had a friend named Brianna and she loved the applesauce that was white and came from a jar. She was the family member who had been serene before
and had remained so, who seemed to have come through unscathed. I waited, watching for signs of disturbance, for sleeping or toileting problems. I wondered if there was something wrong with her, to have been untouched by our troubles.
It seemed strange at first, to walk, on my own power, to Rafferty & Finn, to climb the stairs to what had once been a bedroom, and sit with Paul in his mess. He was good about explaining what he meant to do in the trial. “Think of it this way,” he said. “The prosecutor’s case is a dot-to-dot puzzle. If she connects all the dots she has a beautiful picture of a guilty defendant and she gets her conviction. My job is to mix up the dots so that no clear picture emerges, so that there is a jumble. My job,” he said, making mock diabolical hand-washing motions, “is to sow seeds of doubt.” We sat on the sofa and he scrawled on his paper, showing me some of the things he expected to get out of the witnesses in his cross-examinations. Under Robbie’s name he wrote, “Provoke him, by my mere presence, to be disrespectful and rude. Show the jury he’s a temperamental, unreliable, violent kid. Ideally, get him to admit he’s seen Mom in compromising situations.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“We have Mrs. Sheridan. Wait until you see her. You are going to love Mrs. Sheridan. If Judge Peterson denies me Mrs. Sheridan I’m going to lie down on the carpet and bang my head. I’m going to file appeals until we get Mrs. Sheridan. Mrs. Sheridan is going to be our star witness, with higher billing than even you. I’ll never forget that day I knocked on her door and she looked up at me with her runny eyes as if I was the Angel of the Lord.”
I said, “I think you’re having fun.” The Paul Rafferty I had known when I was in jail, the fatherly, concerned man who would restore my life, occasionally let down his guard in the privacy of his boudoir, to reveal a slightly effeminate character, an eccentric who was in no way embarrassed by the pleasure his job afforded him, who was concerned, but not preoccupied, with the players’ pain and suffering.
“Of course I’m having fun. I wouldn’t be any good if I didn’t have fun, you know, the kind of fun a person has on Outward Bound, killing yourself so that afterward you feel great. That’s what we’re talking about here, the kind of travail that brings reward. However, a work such as
Mrs. Sheridan is more than fun: It’s downright exhilarating, like hauling in the prize fish. You don’t get a witness like Mrs. Sheridan hand delivered more than once in a lifetime.” He adjusted his tie, put his hand on my shoulder, affected his sober Father expression. “I’m not having fun at your expense, Alice. Is that how it seems? You can be sure I’m enjoying the prospect of getting the real story out. Susan Dirks is going to be doing a lot more homework on the next sex-abuse case she takes, and so are the investigators, I can tell you that much. We’re shedding light into dark corners, into places most people don’t go. I am always respectful of serendipity in my cases, and if I am having fun it is only in isolated moments, getting my kicks where I can. I’ve had my share of disappointments in this case—you know the score. I’ve had a hell of a time getting a hold of the boyfriends and the one we needed, the primo beau, doesn’t want to cooperate. So, we do the best we can. You have to realize that it is the judge who will shape the outcome of this, depending on how he sees it. I could be brilliant. Susan Dirks could be the genius prosecutor of the century. If Peterson isn’t on our side it doesn’t really matter how good we are.”
He told me that often in cases like mine his hardest decision was whether or not to have the accused testify. “There’s no doubt here,” he said. “We’ll put you on last. We’ll leave the jury with your honest, forthright, and indignant denial.”
I had several sessions with Rafferty in which we rehearsed his direct examination, and then a friend of his, a lawyer named Ross Gryle, cross-examined me, firing dirty, abusive questions, one after the next. Rafferty had filed a motion asking the judge to prohibit any cross-examination on the subject of Lizzy’s death, because it was not relevant to the case. The accident would serve, he said, only to inflame the passions of the jurors. Judge Peterson had written a stern letter to both Rafferty and Susan Dirks, granting the motion, and instructing both of them to keep their witnesses from including Elizabeth Collins in the testimony.
When I answered Ross Gryle’s questions, Rafferty would say things like “Yes, Yes! Beautiful!” and “Deliver it with more punch, Alice,” or “You have talent, my dear!” Once he said, “You look like Audrey Hepburn in that movie where she plays the blind girl. You know the one I mean?
Wait Until Dark
. Helpless, so pure and unsuspecting. The audience
knows the killer is in the room and she is saying so sweetly, ‘Is anyone there?’ ”
When I thought I might lash out at him, or cry; when I protested that I did in fact feel that I was on location, Rafferty said, grand in his humility, “I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I’m getting carried away because I know you, because you’re my friend, because we share certain sympathies. I’m very sorry. You have to understand that this is where it comes together. We’re getting down to the last few pieces of the puzzle. It’s intense, I know. You’ll do fine. You’re doing just great. You’re wonderful. Say, Ross, do you remember the time you tried that guy for rape, and the girlfriend had the monkey, no, it was a parrot, wasn’t it?”