I’d leave them to remember their early glory days. Sometimes I’d walk over near the jail and I’d look up to the fourth floor, wondering if they were all still there. I’d go so far as to slip inside the courthouse and study the trial lineups, the arraignments, the motions, the hearings, to see if any of them were on the schedules. Afterward I always made myself go outside and sit on the steps. I had a ritual: I had to stay put for so many minutes and think of them, think of what TV shows were on, how many card games they’d been through. I had to put my time in, sitting, as if it was church. It was silly, I knew, to think I was doing them good by having a moment of silence in their honor. When I’d done my small penance I turned around and drove away from the city. I picked up Claire, and if there was time we went in the Motor Vehicle Registration Office, to watch Howard guide illiterate customers and old ladies through the paperwork of title transfers.
For the first time in their lives the girls had an old-fashioned Halloween. They got to walk through the town streets in their disguises, trick or treating. They opened their bags and strangers dumped candy in, telling them they looked precious in their St. Vincent de Paul kitty costumes. No one ever used to come to the farm for either pranks or sweets, and we had managed to keep Emma and Claire in the dark about the treat aspect of the holiday. In Spring Grove you could take the candy to the hospital to have it X rayed, but we chose instead to rely on blind faith. When we got home the girls poured their stash onto the floor, drew a circle on the carpet beyond which no others could come, and began to eat and trade and eat. Howard and I did not have the heart to stop them, and they
neither turned green nor got sick. They seemed healthy, peaceful, happy, drowning in sugar.
Nearly a month later we solved the dilemma of what to do for Thanksgiving by all of us, one by one, coming down with the stomach flu. Nellie had invited us to Minnesota for the long weekend. I don’t think she really understood that I was going to be standing trial days later for something that could put me away for years. I don’t know that Howard had ever fully explained the fact that I wasn’t allowed to leave the state.
“Could you tell her we need family time right now?” I asked him. “Could you say it’s been a confusing season and we need to have a day alone?”
“Would it be possible for you to come to us?” I heard Howard say to her on the next call. “We’ve got the sofa bed in the living room.” That alternative was not what I had had in mind. They phoned back and forth and she finally settled on driving to Spring Grove early Thursday morning, bringing her homemade cranberry sauce, and making stuffing when she arrived. Emma got sick on Monday, Claire went down on Tuesday night. It was only a matter of time before Howard and I capitulated. He was stricken on Wednesday and I held out all the way to Thanksgiving morning. “It’s your fault,” Emma said to me as I squatted by the toilet. “It’s your fault that Grammie can’t come for dinner.”
When I came downstairs midafternoon the girls were on the floor putting together a puzzle that Theresa had sent them, and Howard was sitting on the sofa staring out the window. There were a few saltines in a package on the kitchen counter, a six-pack of Seven-Up, and in the refrigerator the thawing turkey and the makings for coleslaw. I shut the door quickly, plunging the big, dimpled bird back into darkness.
As the trial got closer, Rafferty predicted that it wouldn’t last more than a week, two at the outside. When I sat through the jury selection and then the trial itself, I tried to hear a melody, to find a sense of music in that mournful room. The story was so old I was quite sure there had to be music running along somewhere, through the benches, up through the heating ducts, out of the worn woodwork. I once tried to explain my feeling to Rafferty; I tried to say that despite all of his careful tactical maneuvering, in spite of his knowledge of the rules, the new rules, the
newest rules, there had to be something lyrical in the game, had to be something on the order of music.
“I don’t quite follow,” he said, looking mystified. “Music?”
My head was hurting quite a bit back then and I could only put my hands to my crown and wonder if something had in fact come loose.
“No, I like that,” he said after a minute. “I’ll have to listen. I like that. Music.”
The day of the trial I closed my eyes at the sight of the jurors filing in. There was already a feeling of weariness in the courtroom, and if, as I had hoped, there was music to be heard, it was the slow occasional twang of a music box winding down. Rafferty had said that there were conflicting strategies for choosing jurors for child-abuse cases. Some lawyers believed that women were more sympathetic to children; some believed, as he did, that senior citizens didn’t generally believe that adults were capable of abusing children, that a child’s testimony often seemed preposterous to them. Rafferty also thought that men were more tolerant of abusers. Although I had sat in a pretty dress watching the interminable selection process the day before, it was quite different to have to watch them move in together. They seemed connected, something on the order of a centipede in the school play, minus the blanket thrown over them. At first glance, they all seemed to be aged, overweight, stone-faced. They wanted to be in their beds, in front of their televisions, crocheting, fishing, anything but this at the end of their lives. They slumped down miserably in their chairs as if they thought they were going to have to do something unpleasant in a few moments, something that required exertion. When the testimony began I was able to observe them, sneaking looks periodically, and they soon came to be individuals, to have definite personalities. But as they settled themselves that Tuesday morning I found myself turning to Rafferty, grabbing his forearm.
“What?” He cocked his head so he could hear my complaint.
“They don’t look equal to the job,” I whispered.
“You’d be surprised what people can do,” he said. “Eight times out of ten they rise to the occasion.” I swallowed, believing.
Judge Peterson sat up at his desk reading and biting his nails. He had the thick, dark hair of a youngster, but his face was deeply lined. He looked as if he’d grown old prematurely, as if he’d prefer not to hear
another cross word, as if his job no longer taxed him, but instead, only irritated him. My future was in his crabbed hands and I tried to look as if I trusted in goodness, the way Theresa would have if she’d been in my position. Howard was taking unpaid personal days to sit behind me in his handsome suit. That suit, which had proved so useful, was another thing for which I was grateful. Nellie had been right: It was important to have one garment you could count on for certain occasions.
I had dressed according to Rafferty’s specifications. I had taken the last hundred and sixty dollars in my checking account and at the Laura Ashley store in the mall I had purchased, on sale, a light pink angora mock turtle sweater and a Viyella skirt with small pink and blue flowers. My hair had grown out to a point where it could have looked corporate chic, but Rafferty didn’t approve that style for me. “As vulnerable, as feminine, as soft as you can get that butch cut to look,” he said. I combed what there was back from my face and secured it with a pink velvet headband.
I had thought there might be a crowd at the proceedings, but when we came into the courtroom there were only a handful of Blackwell women. Rafferty reminded me that Christmas was coming and that people were busy.
“They’ve gone on to consume other things,” I said.
“Yes, that’s about the size of it.”
Although Howard insisted that the case was over the second day of testimony, that Susan Dirks’s primary witnesses cut their own throats, I knew he was only trying to be helpful, that there was not sound basis for relief. What I had been worrying over in particular was the fact that earlier in the summer Rafferty had lost his motion to suppress the admission I’d made to the investigators. He had argued that I should have been read my rights that night of the school-board meeting, that I was actually a suspect, that I was being interrogated rather than questioned. Mrs. Dirks maintained that I had been free to leave, as in fact I did, that I had not been forcibly detained, and that therefore there had been no legal requirement to read me my rights. When Mrs. Dirks, in her impassioned opening statement at the trial, made reference to my confession, Rafferty objected with his finger, the way a seasoned bidder makes himself known
at an auction. “Objection, your honor. Will the word ‘confession’ please be struck from the record?”
In her mauve linen jacket and white wool skirt, black high heels, and a smoky gray silk shirt, she was far more beguiling than Rafferty could ever hope to be, even if he replaced his cheap plaid suit coat with something more fashionable. At the very start she advised the jurors that where there is sexual abuse there is often no physical evidence. “When we are listening to a child testify,” she instructed, “we must listen very carefully. It is not necessary to believe everything a child says. We must take into consideration the details, but in abuse cases we must also listen for the emotional truth in the child’s telling.”
Rafferty objected, and the judge slowly rubbed his mouth from side to side before he declared that Mrs. Dirks should continue. When it was his turn to speak, Rafferty explained to the jury that Mrs. Dirks had as good as advised them to forget certain democratic values, values such as the critical importance of the evidence in a criminal trial. He asked them if they could suspend their belief in the Constitution. He said that historically we were a society that seemed to go through a self-cleansing exercise every fifty years, and that the jurors were witnessing just such an exercise, that similar cases were going on all over the United States. Dirks objected, and the judge informed Rafferty that he was out of line, using closing-argument material.
It was all such a far cry from my office at Blackwell Elementary, so far from the day I slapped Robbie and he stared back at me, seemingly unaffected. “Mrs. Dirks told you,” Rafferty said, “that my client made an admission, but what she hasn’t told you is the circumstance and the context. Fortunately I am here to tell you more about my client’s statements, to draw a complete picture. Thank goodness I will be able to give you the all-important context, ladies and gentleman, the context.”
I took in the jury with sidelong glances. There was a pair that intrigued me: one, a stout woman with jowls and a mouth that had petrified into a scowl, and the other, a gray-green, tall, thin lady with penciled eyebrows, arched in perpetual wonder. Both of them had identical blond beehives, nominal hair teased up into the magnificent fluff of what looked like cotton candy. They sat next to each other, the one surly, the other
astonished, thinking—what? I longed to be ridiculous, to sing to them, “Beau—ootful Soo—op! Beau—ootful Soo—op! Soo—oop of the e-e-evening, Beautiful, beautiful Soup!” Next to them sat a young man who stocked dairy products in a grocery store, perhaps a soulmate of ours, in love with yogurt, cheese, butter, cream, eggnog. There was an aging hippie with white hair flowing down his back, the face of a Greek god, and eyes that looked from a distance as if they were golden. He climbed telephone poles for a living, and I imagined him with a houseful of colored-glass insulators, his wife in despair at the collection that was growing beyond their storage capacity.
Robbie was the first to take the stand. Again, he sat on his mother’s lap. He’d lost a front tooth so that in some ways he looked more childlike than he had before. I wondered how he’d spent the last several months, how it felt going to first grade as the little boy who’d nearly been done in by the school nurse. His mother was exquisitely sad, her luster slightly faded, though nothing that couldn’t be polished up at a moment’s notice, brought back to its former gloss and shine. It was my fate being decided, and yet the words of the hallowed court fell away as I watched the darling gestures mother made, the tilt of her head, her little caresses, the smallest kiss at his ear after they were excused. She herself seemed to me like some golden, steaming, delectable, irresistible potion that is held out, that one is urged to Drink, Drink! And only when the liquid has irretrievably slipped down the throat does one know what one has drunk. I couldn’t help thinking of her in immoderate terms. Rafferty’s protestations did not in any way move the judge to order Mrs. Mackessy down from the witness box.
Robbie had grown up enough so that he no longer required the doll to demonstrate my torture. His long, serious face and the baby language he used for his private parts did not match. The words were those that Miss Flint had perhaps suggested. Against his glimmering mother he was nearly invisible. But what I saw was a tired boy, someone who looked as if he didn’t want to play anymore. He was going through the motions but it was as if he could hardly muster the energy to do much damage. When Mrs. Dirks requested a recess until the following morning, due to the witness’s apparent fatigue, the judge, to our amazement, rumbled that we were all tired, that we’d all been waiting, that the thing had been postponed
twice, and that we had to move along. He granted her thirty minutes for rest.
Out at the far end of the hall, during the break, Rafferty hugged his appointment book and simpered, “He likes me! Judge Peterson really likes me!”
Howard was standing by the water cooler and when he heard Rafferty he turned and gave him a withering look, the sort that makes a person feel that it might have been better not to be born. I hadn’t realized before just how very capable Howard was of conveying disdain. “The judge is on our side this time,” Rafferty said, taking fast sips of hot coffee, oblivious to my husband’s disgust. “He’s going to let it go wide open for us, that’s my sense.”
Robbie more than fulfilled Rafferty’s hopes during the cross-examination. Rafferty stood with his arms bent, his hands clasped at his chest. He asked Robbie ever so gently the most probing, and occasionally indelicate questions. More than once he said, with a lush softness, “You didn’t say that at the preliminary hearing, Rob.” Rafferty only grew more kind as the boy glowered and shouted. My first-rate criminal lawyer displayed the paternal care that had drawn me to him in the first place. For an hour he questioned the boy, repeatedly asking him about the material of his pants, who unbuttoned them, did he have a belt, was there a snap at the waist, and a zipper. Robbie became so irritated part way through that the judge ordered another short break.