Blessed Are the Wholly Broken (13 page)

Court Clerk:  Dr. Williams, would you state your full name for the record, please?

Dr. Williams:  Robert Lee Williams.

The Court:  You may proceed, Mr. Young.

Prosecutor:  Thank you, Your Honor. What is your profession, Dr. Williams?

Dr. Williams:  I teach a Tennessee history course at Dyersburg State Community College.

Prosecutor: Do you know the defendant?

Dr. Williams:  I know him socially, from events he would attend with his wife.

Prosecutor:  So you knew Anna Lewinsky.

Dr. Williams:  I did. We were colleagues at Dyersburg State. She started out as an adjunct professor years ago, back in ’96 or ’97, I believe. At that time, I’d been with the college for several years. I started there in ’91. She taught philosophy. She eventually worked her way up, first as full time faculty, and later as Dean of Students.

Prosecutor:  Would you categorize Mrs. Lewinsky as a happy person, doctor?

Defense Attorney:  Objection. Speculative.

The Court:  Sustained. Rephrase the question, Counselor.

Prosecutor:  Did Mrs. Lewinsky ever speak to you about her marriage?

Dr. Williams:  She did. She spoke often of her husband. Until recently, she seemed very happy in her marriage.

Prosecutor:  When did you notice a change, Dr. Williams?

Dr. Williams:  Over the last couple of years she was alive. In 2011, 2012 something changed.

Prosecutor:  In what way did something change?

Dr. Williams:  Before then, she had mentioned her husband the way we all mention our spouses. She might tell us what they’d done the weekend before, or mention he’d gotten a raise or a bonus. You know, just the typical things. Or she’d tell us something funny or endearing he’d said. They seemed like any ordinary couple who’d been married some length of time. Maybe even happier, because they had had so many years to focus on their marriage. I don’t mean to offend.

Prosecutor:  It’s okay, Dr. Williams. Continue please.

Dr. Williams:  Well, I mean because they didn’t have children, they traveled a great deal. They spent a lot of time together, more than they could have if they’d had children. Anna seemed to enjoy it.

Prosecutor:  But in the last couple of years that changed?

Dr. Williams:  It did. Anna just didn’t seem as happy. She complained about things, which she’d never done before. She mentioned more than once that her husband, Mr. Lewinsky, was stuck in the past. She didn’t think he’d ever made peace with the fact they wouldn’t have children. She said she felt as if, at some level, he held her responsible.

Prosecutor:  Was this something they fought about?

Dr. Williams:  I don’t know if “fought” is the right word. She would get frustrated. I think it hurt her, feeling as if she weren’t enough for her husband.

Defense Attorney:  Objection. Witness is speculating.

The Court:  Sustained.

Prosecutor:  Dr. Williams, what, specifically, did Anna say to you to indicate she felt she wasn’t “enough,” as you put it, for her husband?

Dr. Williams:  She sometimes worried that her husband would rather be with someone younger, someone able to have children.

Prosecutor:  I have no further questions for this witness, Your Honor.

The Court:  Defense, it’s your witness.

Defense Attorney:  Thank you, Your Honor. Dr. Williams, you were more than friends with Mrs. Lewinsky, weren’t you?

Dr. Williams:  I’m not sure what you mean.

Defense Attorney:  Didn’t you, in fact, engage in an affair with Mrs. Lewinsky during the summer of 2011?

Dr. Williams:  No. It wasn’t like that.

Defense Attorney:  Okay, let me rephrase that. Did you ever have sex with Mrs. Lewinsky?

Dr. Williams:  Yes. One time. It was a mistake; we were both vulnerable, my wife had just left me, Anna was unhappy, we comforted—

Defense Attorney:  Did you love Mrs. Lewinsky?

Dr. Williams:  Well, yes, but—

Defense Attorney:  Do you like Mr. Lewinsky, Dr. Williams?

Dr. Williams: Why, I….Not particularly, no.

Defense Attorney:  Why is that, Dr. Williams?

Dr. Williams:  I’m not sure there is a particular reason, really. I suppose because he seemed to be so out of touch with what Anna needed from him, and I cared for her.

Defense Attorney:  Do you have children, Dr. Williams?

Dr. Williams:  No. My ex-wife and I were never blessed with children.

Defense Attorney:  Were you aware that Mr. Lewinsky had a vasectomy some years ago?

Dr. Williams:  Yes. Anna had mentioned it.

Defense Attorney:  Curious, isn’t it, that Mrs. Lewinsky became pregnant.

Prosecutor:  Objection!

The Court:  Sustained. Counselor, if you have a question, ask it.

Defense Attorney: Let the record state I’m showing the witness what’s been marked as State’s Exhibit ‘N’ for Identification. Dr. Williams, do you recognize this document?

Dr. Williams:  Yes.

Defense Attorney:  It arrived in my office just this morning. Could you tell the court what it is, exactly?

Dr. Williams:  It’s a summons.

Defense Attorney:  What sort of summons, Dr. Williams?

Dr. Williams:  To let….To let Phillip know I’ve filed a Petition to Establish Paternity of…of Peter. Look, I’m sorry, Mr. Young, Your Honor. I should have said something, I know, but I just….I just need to know.

Defense Attorney:  Should Mr. Lewinsky be found guilty of murder and lose custody of his son, that would make this process much easier for you, wouldn’t it, Dr. Williams?

Dr. Williams:  Well, I suppose, but that’s not—

Defense Attorney:  I’d ask that State’s Exhibit ‘N’ for Identification be introduced into evidence as State’s #18.

The Court:  Any objections?

Prosecutor:  We would ask for a short recess, Your Honor, and a brief consultation, if possible.

The Court:  We will have order in this courtroom! Let’s take a fifteen minute recess. Counselors, meet me in my chambers. 

“I’m sorry, Phil. But you know I had to do it.”

I’d been surprised, upon my return from the courthouse, to be taken from my cell. I hadn’t expected Brian. It had been a harrowing day in court, and I’d looked forward to the dark stillness of my cell.

“Phil?”

I didn’t answer him. I was barely capable of holding myself upright in the chair. All I wanted was sleep, that delicious escape.

“You did know, right?”

Knowing and accepting are two very different things, but I didn’t have the strength to explain that to Brian. Had I known?  Of course. Anna had even tried to confess at one point, but I’d stopped her. Why?  Because as I said, knowing and accepting are two very different things.

It is an indisputable fact of life that sometimes the brain knows things the heart chooses not to accept. Signs, nuances, subtleties; the brain picks up on these things, organizing and cataloguing information with astounding efficiency. Given free reign, the information the brain gathers is often enough to break a heart, so we set up firewalls and boundaries to protect it.

“How could they not have known?” we ask of the parents whose child took a gun to school. “She must have known,” we say of the wife whose husband has bedded half the women in town. “He can’t be that stupid,” we say of the grown son whose father extorted millions. “They can’t be that blind; they must have known.”

What we fail to consider is that sometimes, in the dark of life, denial seems the only route to survival. It’s a mirage, of course; the truth will always win in the end. But in the moment, faced with what seems to be insurmountable pain, our heart sometimes decides for us. Had I known on a cognitive level? Yes. Did I accept it on an emotional level? No. And that’s what allowed me to live my life uninterrupted. I’d had too many interruptions by that point; I didn’t want to face another.

It’s easy to sit in judgment from the smug satisfaction of an unchallenged life, but what of those of us whose life experiences have been more complicated? 

“She changed,” Brian was saying. “For whatever reasons, she changed, didn’t she? She wasn’t our little Socrates anymore, was she? I had picked up on a certain cynicism, I suppose you could call it, but I guess I just chalked it up to growing older and wiser. Hell, we’re all more cynical. But I hadn’t realized, until that damned summons arrived and we started digging….I’m so sorry, Phil. As your attorney, I did what I had to do. As your friend, I ask your forgiveness. As both your attorney and your friend,” he hesitated, “I need to ask you about Peter—”

“No!” At last I found my voice, and my strength, too. I stood, knocking over my chair, and rushed to the door, pounding on it, frantic to leave that room, and Brian’s questions, behind.

Brian and the guard reached me at the same time, Brian placing a hand on my shoulder and squeezing, the guard yanking my arms behind my back and cuffing me. Of the two touches, I most appreciated the guard’s.

Anna had been distant. I had first begun to notice it back in the spring. Over the years, at Anna’s urging, we’d made a ritual of spending her spring break planning our summer flower garden. It was different every year, both in content and design, and Anna had become somewhat of a local celebrity because of it. Her job was to design and maintain; mine was to build.

Some years, she designed cobbled walkways and tiny goldfish ponds among the flowers. Other years, she fancied tiered designs of exploding colors and textures. One memorable year she planted our initials in flowers of white, surrounding them in a heart-shaped landscape of red. I think she enjoyed challenging herself as much as she enjoyed the compliments from friends and neighbors. For my part I enjoyed the physical labor, the sun hot on my back, the tiller unwieldy in my hands, nearly as much as I anticipated Anna’s creative designs.

But that spring, as the date of her break from school arrived, Anna said nothing of our garden. When I mentioned it to her, she shrugged. “I don’t know, Phil. Maybe it’s time to do something different. It seems silly after a while, doesn’t it?  All that time and energy spent on something that lasts such a short amount of time.”

I was puzzled by her attitude, which seemed very unlike Anna. But then again, Anna had seemed very unlike Anna for quite some time. She had always been a quiet person, reserved, self-contained. But for the past few months, her inherently quiet nature had become something else. Something darker.

Anna had sunk into a deep depression after losing Jeffrey; she came through that experience changed. No doubt we both did. But though Anna would never have admitted it, I knew she had flirted with depression more than once since that time. There were periods, thankfully few and far between, during which I could see she struggled. She grew quiet, withdrawn, even somewhat detached. From the outside looking in, those later bouts of depression paled in comparison to what she had experienced when Jeffrey died; still, it was enough to cause me concern throughout the latter part of our marriage.

For years I had assumed the residual sadness lurking underneath the surface of Anna’s outward presentation was directly related to Jeffrey’s death. When asked, however, Anna had made it clear she had emotionally moved on, putting our painful past behind her. She’d even expressed anger towards me for having thought otherwise, and she’d resented the assumptions I had made.

I was careful after that, never mentioning her darker moods but taking care to be gentle with her when I sensed she might be struggling. Her periodic bouts of sadness might not have been the direct result of Jeffrey’s death, but I did believe his passing had been a catalyst of sorts, a triggering mechanism that uncovered a part of Anna neither of us had previously known existed, perhaps a part connected to the colorful ancestors she’d tentatively mentioned to me years before.

And maybe a part of me, no stranger to melancholy, found comfort in Anna’s forays into my familiar land. Not consciously, of course—never consciously. Still…was I too quick to accept her quieter moments? Did I derive some sense of purpose in bravely shoring her up? Was I relieved, on some level, that I wasn’t the only one who could at times seem moody?  A man has plenty of time to ponder things when he sits for hours alone in a cell. The questions and self-recriminations come easily; the answers are more elusive.

At any rate, I wondered that spring if Anna was again sinking into another depression. As spring passed into summer and summer to autumn, I watched her pull further into herself and further away from me. There were long silences between us, silences I didn’t know how to breach. She spent a great deal of time at school those months, complaining of paperwork and meetings while at the same time seeming eager to leave our home, which had suddenly become an uncomfortable place for her to be.

We were rarely intimate, a fact I chalked up to our age, our history, and the comfortable knowledge that we were together for the long haul. We had all the time in the world, or so I’d believed. Anna’s thoughts, I later learned, were somewhat different.

I remember it not as if it were yesterday, but as if it were mere seconds ago. We were getting ready for work, jockeying for space in the bathroom as we’d always done, I brushing my teeth and Anna wrapped in a towel, smoothing moisturizer into her arms.

Her towel slipped and she grabbed for it, but not quickly enough. It landed at her feet and I reached to retrieve it, thinking nothing of it, until I straightened to see her, naked. I realized then how long it had been since I’d seen Anna in the light, unclothed. I also realized—and I saw by her expression that she knew I had—that Anna was pregnant.