The Burden of Proof (15 page)

The doorbell rang. Glancing through the panes beside the front door, he saw Nate Cawley. Stern seemed to have caught him in a moment of reflection. On the slate stoop, he had turned to look into the wind. He was a smallish man, narrow. His hair was gray and most of it was gone; a few longer hairs stood up straight now in the breeze. Rain was in the offing; late April here was always wet. Nate had mn out without a coat and he jiggled a bit to keep himself warm. He wore a golf cardigan and a pair of blue plaid slacks.

"Welcome, Nate." Helen had stood up from the table in the breakfast nook, and peered down the hall toward Stern and Nate in the foyer. In spite of the distance, Stern attempted the introduction. "Do you know Helen Dudak?" asked Stern.

"Certainly." A moment of decided awkwardness occurred. Nate did not move. Clearly, he thought he had interrupted, and Stern had an instant aversire response, old-fashioned but strong, that he was not happy to be seen alone with a woman in his home. This was not the message he wanted Nate to take back to Fiona, who would put it out promptly over the neighborhood wire. Stern swung out a hand magisterially, a hammy bit, to gather some forward momentum "We are in the midst of a splendid repast Helen has provided, Nate. Do you care for some wonderful Chicken Vesuvio, or may I get you a drink?"

"No, Sandy. I just ran over for a second. Fiona said you were looking for me." Nate apologized for being hard to reach. Much, he said, was going on. Yes, indeed, thought Stern. The Lord only knew what Fiona said they had discussed, but clearly she had offered an edited version.

Preoccupied as he seemed, Nate did not wear the predictable air of a man who knew you and his wife had spent a moment commenting on videos of his erection.

Stern showed him to his study, where he had filed the lab's bill.

"Have you any idea what that might have been for?"

"Huh," said Nate. "Westlab." He studied the invoice at length before handing it back. "I don't use them much."

"Apparently, Clara had visited a physician in the last month."

Nate took a second to absorb that. "Where do you get that idea?"

Stern explained the notations on Clara's calendar.

"Frankly, Nate, I assumed it was you. I found no doctor's bills." Nate, a physician and neighbor in the old tradition, often worked on the cuff, billing Clara episodicall, if at all. After the meeting in Cal's office, Stern had been through Clara's checkbook carefully. And, necessarily, he had also sifted through the mail. It had occurred to him, he offered, that Clara might have been ill. "Something grave," said Stern, then added, more quietly, "Unendurable."

Nate, mercifully, picked up the thread. A softer look came over him, the gentle eye of a practiced bedside manner.

"No, no, Sandy, there was nothing like that, nothing I know of."

"I see." They faced one another in the study, under a strangely burdened air. Perhaps Nate found Stern's rummaging through his wife's papers unseemly; or he may have been discomforted by Helen's presence. "I was misled, I suppose, by Fiona's mention that you had brought Clara medication from time to time."

"Fiona," said Nate, and a distinct expression of distaste passed by swiftly. It was an error, Stern saw, to have repeated any of her intoxicated blather. "Clara's knee gave her some trouble this winter, Sandy. I dropped Off an antiinflammatory."

"Ah," said Stern. The two men continued to look at one another.

"Sandy, why don't I give Westlab a call for you? I'll find out what's cookin'."

"I can do that, Nate."

"Neh," said Cawley. "Let me. They'd be happier to talk to me than you.

Assuming they'll talk to anybody. If it wasn't for you guys--" Nate, in his gentle, familiar way, was about to assail Stern with a doctor's typical complaints about the legal profession and its recent impact on medical practice, but he cut himself off. "You know," he said, "could be just a mistake. I've seen billings. get awful bol-lixed up. Maybe they crossed one Stern with another."

The idea struck Stern as farfetched. Then, just as quickly, it was all entirely clear.

"Oh, my." Stern covered his mouth with one hand. "I have a thought."

Clara had received the bill--but not the test.

That would havebeen, as Nate's point suggested, for someone else--for Kate. Pre-pregnancy. Pre-something. Kate had said that there had been problems along the way. She had probably shared them with her mother, Who, as she often did, would have insisted on helping with the expenses.

That was another reason that Kate was so sabered that Clara had died not knowing there had been a medical success--and why no doctor's bill had arrived here. Something rose, something sank, but it all settled in him with the solidity of a correct answer. "I suspect, Nate, this may have had something to do with Katy's pregnancy."

"Oh, sure," said Nate. He brightened considerably. "That must be it."

He headed at once for the door, happy to have the matter resolved.

"Perhaps, Nate, if I have further questions, I might ask you to call the lab nonetheless."

"Sure thing," said Nate. "No problem. Just give me a buzz."

On his way out, Nate turned back to wave briefly to Helen.

She still had one hand raised, with a sad look of her own, as Stern approached. She had sat alone, not eating. She seemed to know that whatever spell had loomed was broken.

The conspicuous presence of Clara's mystery, the many complications were obvious about him. He was a fish in a net. Nothing now would change that.

"I apologize," said Stern. "Questions I was required to ask. He was Clara's doctor."

"Mine, too," said Helen.

"Ah," said Stern, "so that is your acquaintance." Helen began to eat.

There was music from the radio, Brahms. He sat in the caned chair with a full sense of his weight, his earthly substance. As so often, grief was here in its essential character.

"Had Clara been sick, Sandy? I didn't know that."

"Apparently not." He explained briefly. The bill. His thoughts. Helen, who had known them both so long, nodded with each word, eyes quick, intent.

"I see," she said. They were both silent.

"I have no idea why this occurred, you know," Stern told her abruptly.

To the thousands of other inquiries, tacit and overt, he had maintained a dignified silence which implied, not falsely, that he found the subject too painful for discussion. Helen Dudak, however, was too trustworthy a soul, too familiar, to be dealt with so briefly. "I take it people talk about this?" He had wanted to ask someone that question for some time.

"Would you believe me if I told you they didn't?" He smiled warmly. "And they say what?"

"Dumb things. Nice things. Who knows about anybody's life, Sandy?

Really. At the core. People are baffled, naturally.

No one is quite certain they knew Clara. She was very contained."

"Just so," said Stern softly. He allowed himself the traces of a wry expression.

Helen, wisely, took her time with the remark.

"You must be very angry," she said at last.

To the wheel of seething emotion, the bristling anxiety, the dense miserable sensations, Stern had not heretofore put that name. But of course she was correct. Buried deep in his bones, like a dose of radiation, he could feel the burning away of intense high-level emotion, and anger was the right word for it. It was not a feeling with which he had taken much conscious comfort throughout his life. Being the son of his mother, the brother of Jacobo, he had grown up believing that anger was an emotion allotted to others by prior arrangement. He was the steady one. Now a certain decorousness made him reluctant to fully agree.

"I suppose," he said.

"It would be understandable," Helen continued. Chewing slightly, he shook his head.

"That, however, is not what predominates," he said. "No?"

He shook his head again. The powerful volatility of his emotions, the way they were always at hand, made it impossible to observe his usual reserve.

"I doubt myself," he told her. "I failed," he said and, with the words, and their deadlye accuracy, felt as if he had shot himself through with an arrow. "Quite obviously."

"And what about her?" asked Helen. She looked up adroitly, over her fork, but he could see that she was measuring her questions, testing the regions of tenderness to see how far she might probe. It was, Stern decided, an impressive performance.

"Did Clara fall?"

Helen did not answer. She looked on while he considered the question.

He understood her suggestion, but he was unable to say aloud the word somehow hanging here like smoke: betrayal. The mystery of it was deeper than that to him, and more complicated. He realized then, for the first time, how much he had dedicated himself to making no judgments in this matter for the present. Again, wordlessly, he wobbled his head: something not to know or to say. Helen waited'an instant.

"You can't let everything rest on the end, Sandy." Stern nodded: That was a thought, too.

"I speak from experience. You accomplished a great deal with one another. And you made a marvelous couple."

"Oh, yes," said Stern. "I loved to speak, and she did not."

Helen smiled, but leaned back to regard him from a distance.

"You're too harsh with yourself." She took his wrist and he reacted, even in this mood, to the sensations of a female touch. "How good a friend am I? May I make a suggestion?"

Her hands were tan and strong, the nails unpolished. "Are you seeing someone, Sandy?"

Lord, again! What was contemporary morality? "Helen, certainly not."

Looking into her plate, Helen Dudak suppressed a smile. "I meant a therapist."

"Ah," he said. His initial impulse was categ'orical, but he answered simply, "Not for now."

"It might help," she said.

"Is that an informed opinion?"

"Of course. A middleaged divorce is harder than a hockey match."

Her delivery was lighthearted and Stern smiled. He could see that Helen was from the self-improvement school of life. Very much a citizen of the late century. She believed in the power of Will, or, as it was thought of in contemporary terms, self-determination. Existentialists one and all, we could be whomever we chose, with proper instruction.

Something about yourself that bugs you? Chuck it out. Let the shrink refurnish. A deeply conserX, ative strain in Stern distrusted these conclusions. It was all a good deal harder to bear than that. He could see that Helen and he subscribed to different philosophical services. He chose a joke as a diplomatic exit.

"I shall talk to you, instead."

"Sold," said Helen.

They smiled, celebrating the survival of a difficult instant, but then lingered a few seconds in the gloom.

Helen at last asked about Kate. For the remainder of the meal, they trod reliable ground, speaking of theft children.

At nine, promptly, she stood. She was late for her meeting.

Stern saw her to the door, thanking her lavishly for the meal.

"You are a friend, Helen."

"I mean to be," she answered.

"This was the most pleasant evening I have had in some time." He found, upon saying this, that it was a considerable truth and, out of a sudden swell of gratitude, he added, "We must do it again."

"Let's," responded Helen. They stood looking at one another. He was too new to this business to have realized before he spoke what he had gotten himself into, and now, otherwise at a loss, he took her hand and in the briefest, politest way kissed it.

Helen rolled her eyes as she opened the door, "Oh, my God," she said. "Charming, charming!" She shook her head and, with her large purse and fawn-colored coat, went off laughing down the walk.

O the distant subdivision where Kate and John had bought a compact suburban home, newly constructed and as weakly made as a child's toy, Stern ventured on occasion for a meal.

This house was so far from the urban center that there were still cornfields about, and the clods ran clear to the front door, as Kate and John had not yet been able to afford sod. In the front lawn, near the parkway, a single skinny sapling stood, its tiny leaves riffling like a fringe whenever there was wind.

Kate scurried about her father, attempting to comfort him, but as ever, the best of her attention went to her husband.

Every now. and then, the newspapers reported on twins so preoccupied with one another that they developed a language of their own. So, too, Kate and John. They were forever lost in their small sounds: whispers, murmurs, Katy's wispy laugh. A universe of two. Stern had known other couples like this, tuned in to each other's peculiarities like some strange music, and high on it like Opium smoke.

They had been together since high school and, so far as Stern could tell, were the only man or woman the other had ever really known. This na'ivete had its own beauty. To one another they were the entire realm of otherness: Adam and Eve. Yin and Yang.

It was difficult to imagine the entry of a child into this world of two dimensions, but Kate's pregnancy, if anything, seemed to have intensified the thrill of love. John raced behind his wife's chair to help her up, kissed her with abandon as they slid into the kitchen, clearing plates.