Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (49 page)

Amy and I sat on the porch watching the leaves fall from the maple trees. She had turned thirteen the week before, and I had sent her a set of Dutch oil paints and Russian sable brushes and a few books by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud that I thought she’d enjoy, and some tapes in Beginning French.

“Do you know yet where you’re going?” I asked.

“Looks like upstate. Somewhere in the country. I’d rather be in a city.”

“I’m so sorry it didn’t work with my family, Amy.”

“Don’t be sad, Billy. It’s probably for the best. Your mom never really liked me. I told you that.”

“Amy…”

“You know I’m right. We would never have got along.”

She sounded suddenly much older than I was, and wiser.

“I don’t want to lose touch with you, Amy,” I said.

“And you won’t, Billy.”

“We could visit each other on holidays.”

“Maybe we’ll do that.”

“If you do some paintings, will you take photographs of them and send them to me?”

“Sure.”

“And tell me if you like those books. I can send you more.”

“Absolutely.”

“I can’t keep Inez waiting in the car. I have to say goodbye.
A bientôt
. That means, until soon.”

“Okay, Billy.” She smiled at me. “Thanks for everything.”

“And thank you, too, Amy. We had fun, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” she said. “We had a real adventure.”

She stood up, and I kissed her on the cheek, and then I hugged her. For a moment her breasts pressed into my chest. They were growing.

“Amy, I’ll never forget you.”

“And I won’t forget you, Billy.”

I walked down the porch steps and got into the Honda next to Inez. Amy waved at me from the porch, looking thin and a little frightened of the future. I wanted to run back to her. But it wouldn’t have done any good. I kept waving the whole time that Inez drove down the block, until we turned a corner and Amy vanished from my sight.

Chapter 43

I’m writing these words exactly five years later. It’s a warm August evening and I’m at my desk in a dormitory room at the end of freshmen orientation week at Harvard.

I had a short letter today from Judge Walsh — handwritten, as usual, because the judge disliked what he called “the facile coldness of electronic communication,” wishing me luck. In his gruff but always grandfatherly way, the judge has taken me under his wing the past four years, ever since the successful end of my probation period when I contacted him and, as diplomatically as I could, thanked him for his kindness in not condemning me to a term at Spofford. From the bench he had said, “You might possibly achieve great things in life,” and that vision, I believe, was what governed the life-saving generosity of his judicial decision. He had known well enough that although I may not have been guilty as charged
in re
the death of Carter Bedford, I was still a country mile away from being innocent. Of course that was one subject that the judge and I could never discuss, but everything else under the sun was fair game at lunch in Riverhead, or at Georgica Beach, or even at Shea Stadium. As I’d said to my mom long ago on the summer day she’d first asked me if I was lonely, I was one of the luckiest kids I knew.

I replied to the judge right away, also by hand. Among other things, I said: “No, I don’t yet know what I’ll focus on here, but the law is definitely a possibility. I still love to cook and climb, but those are not subjects taught at Harvard.”

*

Inez cried when I left Oak Lane; she doesn’t think I’ll eat well in Cambridge. So far she’s right.

I’ve been on my own most of the time, because I’m still not quick to make friends. But I’m not lonely. Iphigenia is with me, asleep on my lap as I type these words into my notebook. Pygmy Green Rhesus monkeys have a life expectancy of about two years in the jungle and six years in captivity. So Iphigenia is past her time. She’s as smart as ever, but not quite as lively, and I have to face the probability that she won’t make it through to graduation, even if I do.

From the minute I got here and felt the dominion of these ivied walls, I made up my mind to get all these past events down into memory, because I know that once I got involved in this new life, my memories would change. I’ll learn fashionable new words for things, and wonderful trendy new ideas, but they won’t be the words or the ideas to describe what happened to me with Amy. As best I can, I want to remember things the way they were, the way I truly felt about them, and not the way it will suit me to remember them as I march toward manhood.

Now I’ve told the whole story…

And yet, somehow, there’s a little bit more that needs telling.

Amy was placed in foster care with a family who lived in a small town in upstate New York. I won’t give you their name, or the name of the town, because Amy deserves privacy. I don’t think it will interfere with her privacy, though, to reveal that her foster parents raise hogs, turkeys, range-fed chickens, and dairy cattle. Amy told me that she learned to operate a John Deere tractor. The farm couple were hard-working dedicated Christians and wanted to do some good in the world. They already had two boys, aged nine and eleven. They had always wanted a daughter and felt it was too late to start from scratch.

That first Christmas I ordered a Dell desktop computer and had it shipped to her. It caused quite a commotion on the farm, and she wound up having to share its use with her foster brothers. She claimed she didn’t mind.

We kept in touch by e-mail. I asked Amy a lot of questions — it was my nature. It always took a while to get answers from her. That was her nature.

Her foster parents, she said, were kind to her. “They don’t bug me,” she said.. She had a room of her own and could put up any pictures and posters she liked. She had to go to church with them on Sunday mornings. That was a yawn, she said, but not too big a price to pay.

I asked her if she used the oil paints I gave her, and she said what with school, and her new friends, and work on the farm, she hardly had any time.

I asked her what had happened to the Princess, and Amy said it was too cold in upstate New York for her. She’d gone to live in Hawaii.

A few times I asked her if she ever heard from Ginette in Florida. She never answered that question, so I didn’t keep bothering her with it. I always assumed the unspoken answer was in the negative.

I asked for photographs. That took time, but finally Amy snailmailed me a couple of snapshots taken at a Thanksgiving dinner. And then, a year later, a picture taken at the local 4-H dairy show.

They were remarkable photographs. It was as if I’d peered through dust and haze into an improbable future.

By the age of fourteen, Amy was chubby. At fifteen you would have called her plump. She had developed good-sized breasts, and her cheeks had filled out, so that she seemed headed toward a category at least one up from plump. I compared those photographs to the one that the saleslady had taken of us with the disposable camera during our shopping tour of Macy’s — I kept it in a silver frame on my desk next to my computer. In that photograph Amy looked slender, and lovely, and happy. Well, she was shopping.

The same year when she sent me the 4-H dairy show photo, she told me that she’d started working after school at a Burger King. She wanted more spending money.

At Christmas-time she wrote that she had a boyfriend, that they’d been dating for almost a year. I wasn’t quite sure what “dating” meant — I knew it had become a term that covered a lot of territory.

The boyfriend was the son of another farmer, two years ahead of her in high school. “His name is Pete,” she wrote. “He’s middle linebacker on our football team. He’s got a great sense of humor.”

She asked me in that same e-mail if I had a girlfriend yet. I thought about a lot of things I could have said, but finally I settled for “No girlfriend yet.”

She also asked me, for the first time, how my parents were.

I wrote back: “My dad’s still working on his book about the injustice of the death penalty, but he’s so busy defending CEO’s these days that I don’t know if he’ll ever finish writing it. I didn’t tell you this before, but he and my mom split up about three months ago. I’m living with my mom here in Amagansett, and my dad’s in the city with an Englishwoman named Doreen. They were having an affair for a long time, which I should have figured out, but you don’t see what you don’t want to see, right? When my mom found out, she became really upset, and she kicked my dad out, which I suspect is what he wanted her to do because it made things easier for him.

“I’ve gotten to know Doreen, and I can’t say that I dislike her, but she strikes me as seriously high-maintenance. My dad has bags under his eyes that were never there before. It’s hard for me to see why he prefers Doreen to my mom… but you never know why other people like what they like or do what they do, do you?”

I telephoned Amy maybe once every six months, and we had chirpy conversations in which she told me about Pete and how he’d intercepted a pass the previous Friday night to help the team beat its arch-rival from the next town, and how she got promoted at Burger King from slapper-of-frozen-hamburger-patties-on-the-conveyor-belt to cashier; and what they were harvesting on the farm that time of year. You don’t slaughter hogs, I found out; you harvest them.

In one of our last conversations she said, “You know, I’m getting interested in Christianity. A lot of it is pretty cool.”

So after we said goodbye I logged onto amazon.com and sent her George Bernard Shaw’s
Androcles and the Lion
, where he writes in the preface, “Jesus has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his way.”

In matters more mundane: after I withdrew my money from Modern Age so that Amy and I could run away in style, most of it got put back into the money market fund. So the new millennium market meltdown didn’t ruin my finances, and a small chunk of the nest egg was used to send Simon to Southampton College. He lasted two semesters and then quit to play drums in a rock band and work as a waiter in the East Village. We keep in touch by e-mail: I’m on his list for new jokes. I took him and Judge Walsh and my dad to Shea Stadium to meet Tom Egan, who had been traded to the San Francisco Giants. Tom beat the Mets that night, lasting six and a third innings, and Simon got autographs from him and from Barry Bonds.

When it came time for me to apply to Harvard and a couple of other universities, I wrote to Amy and offered to send her to college as well. I said, “I’ll pay for tuition, housing, food, the works. I don’t know what you want to make of your life, but if you go to college you’ll have a bigger choice. No strings attached to this offer. You can study art or rocket science or animal husbandry, you can go to Cornell, SUNY, or Southeast Podunk State Teachers College. Let me know.”

She thanked me, and said I was “a real good person,” but she didn’t believe she was cut out for college. After she graduated she thought she might be able to get a managerial job at Burger King. That would suit both her and Pete, she said.

If someone is on a path toward what I can only call destiny, you can’t stop them. You can put up detour signs and road blocks, but they’ll still figure out a way to get where they want to go rather than where you want them to get to. If I know anything, I know that.

So I backed off.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, after she turned eighteen, she wrote:

“Billy, I’ve decided it would be better if we stopped writing to each other. Pete and I are engaged and we’re living together in an apartment in town. We have no secrets so he reads my e-mail and he’s got this jealous streak. He knows that you and I had a thing together way back when, and that bugs him. I mean, not so much the thing — which, you must admit, wasn’t a really big sex type deal — but that you write to me so often. He thinks you’ve still got the hots for me. So I’d appreciate if you didn’t write or call. You can send me a Christmas card so that I know you’re okay, and I’ll do the same.”

I bowed to destiny. I am dumbfounded by destiny. I think it was destiny that made me climb Crab Rock that perfect Saturday and then bike down Red Dirt Road to find Amy in the bushes after she’d been stabbed by her mother. Did I save her life? Probably. Did I change it for the better? I hope so, even if she’s become a member of the fast-food nation and has a jealous twenty-year-old fiancé. Will she be crippled, the way Carter was, by what happened in childhood? We’ll only know that in the future, which at the moment is fantasy, and as soon as it changes into the past it will become fiction.

Amy had never accused her father under oath. She really cared for Carter. She knew he’d had a bad time himself when he was a kid and that it had made him a bitter man, angry at the universe. At some level that she found difficult to articulate, she must have believed he couldn’t help what he did to her and that he did it because he loved her and needed her. If so, her forgiveness was a brilliant step forward on the human path, but not one I truly understood — except that maybe it was her way of refusing to be crippled in the same way.

And she had even forgiven me for what I’d done to him. Not many people could do that. It put her in a special category.