The Burden of Proof (16 page)

Watching his daughter's dark eyes fast upon her husband, Stern felt strangely affected by her love for him. Poor John was a schlepper of the first order. His most important achievement to the world at large would probably remain having been the best tight end in a decade at a high school that traditionally fielded mediocre teams. The higherpowered jocks, with greedy visions of agents, bonuses, and the NFL, had literally run over him at the University of Wisconsin. John, the coaches said, had the size and talent, but not the drive. This was hardly news to Stern, who had come back with his own scouting report years before. But here was an important late addendum: he treated his wife with unfailing kindness. In a hard world, where decency seldom thrived, a realm full of the brutish, the harsh--or even those well-meaning but emotionally landlocked, like Stern himself--John was a standout, a man of gentle disposition and great tenderness. If he had failed to find in himself a killer's ruthlessness, he had discovered something else, which he nurtured with Kate. Who among us might not be willing to trade?

As John trekked through the yard with the evening trash, Stern stood with his daughter in the kitchen. She and John had just finished washing up the dinner dishes and she sopped a cloth.

"Cara, I have been meaning to ask," said Stern. "An item came through in the mail the other day which made me wonder if there was any recent occasion when' your mother went with you to the doctor?"

Kate looked at him uncomprehendingly. Even in sandals, she was an inch or two taller than he, dark and beautiful, with her straight hair and perfect features.

"Recently?"

"Within the last few months."

"No. Of course not. I told you, she had no idea."

"But perhaps--is there no way your mother might have received the bill for one of your tests, some procedure?"

"Daddy, what in the world?" Kate had stepped back from the sink. She remained tense and emotional at any mention of Clara, and he suddenly thought better of going on. She had provided a sufficient answer.

He touched her on the shoulder to soothe her and stepped into the family room, still furnished with boxes and card chairs, and joined John, who had gone straight to the TV set upon reentering the house. At these instants Stern found himself full of almost religious ratitude for the invention of television sports, which could occupy the few moments he felt obliged to pass with his son-in-law.

Tonight, the Trappers, the tri-cities' traditionally woeful big-league baseball team, were on the air, and Stern and John swapped thoughts about the prospects for the season just under way. The story with the Trappers was always the same: young stars traded away when their salaries increased, pitchers who hit it big as soon as they escaped the Trappers' pocket-sized park. Stern, who had made baseball one of his most passionate studies in learning the American way of life, enjoyed his son-in-law's insights.

John had an athlete's eye for the nuances of physical performance: the shortstop threw off-balance. Tenack, the magnificent right fielder, was trying, as he did each April, to upper-cut the ball. Wearing glasses for his TV viewing, John poked his frames back up on his nose from time to time as the images of the green field floated on his lenses. He appeared transfixed, childlike, still bound heart and soul by the grace and glory of the fields of play; when John watched, you could almost hear the hot roar of the stadium crowd in his ears.

Long moments passed while Stern awaited John's occasional observations, to which he could add some knowing comment of his own. Stern rarely asked John about work; it had become clear long ago that he would never answer honestly, fearing that his responses, which were likely to verge on complaint, would find their way to Dixon. John had had a slow start at MD, passing bewilderedly through the accounting and compliance departments before finding a home on the order desk, where, Stern took it, his performance was still not stellar. They sat on either side of the glowing screen, John's zombie-like attention to the game undoubtedly increased due to the presence of his father-inlaw, while Stern recalled similar dumbstruck reactions, at the same period in his life, to his own imposing father-inlaw, Henry Mittler. In these reflections, he felt for John, especially since at heart Stern always remained half ready to revile him for not being better, smarter, more adept, more able to rouse in Kate something laudable, rather than, as it seemed, allowing her to drift to rest on the soft seabed of the commonplace.

A sufficient time passed to suit all proprieties, he bade John good night and, ready to be on his way, found Kate in the kitchen. Seeing her, though, it occurred to him once more how vexed his last exchange with her had left him. If the bill from Westlab was not for Kate, then what? He was back to point zero.

"Katy," he said, releasing her from his parting embrace, "are you quite sure there was no bill for you that might have come to your mother?"

"Daddy, there is no way. What's wrong with you?" She looked at him, incredulous, and he shrugged, somewhat defensively.

It had seemed so obvious, so characteristic of Clara that the children were involved.

With the next thought, Stern, halfway across the kitchen, stood absolutely still.

He knew now.

He had blundered past it. But he knew now why Clara had received no doctor's bill; why Peter had been so orerwrought that day about the prospect of an autopsy.

Because it was he, Stern's son, who was the physician, Peter who had ordered the lab test, and Peter who remained, even now, resolved to honor some prior commitment of confidence he had made to his mother.

Stern understood the need to maintain professional secrets, but he could not help suspecting that his son would enjoy this advantage over his father, having exclusive hold, in the end, of one last scrap of her life. Might the others know as well?

"Katy." She was facing him, her attention evidently drawn by her father's abstracted look. "Do you know anything of your mother receiving medical care from Peter?"

"What?" Her mouth had fallen open a bit and her face was rigid with alarm. She obviously took the suggestion as baroque. The question that rose in her eyes was easily discemed: Was her father derailed, off his trolley, losing hold? She looked gravely concerned that these ideas, wildand improbable, were coming from him, one after another.

Was he wrong? The kitchen light seemed suddenly intense.

For the first time in his life, he felt a sensation of dislocation, which he knes way, found Kate in the kitchen. Seeing her, though, it occurred to him once more how vexed his last exchange with her had left him. If the bill from Westlab was not for Kate, then what? He was back to point zero.

"Katy," he said, releasing her from his parting embrace, "are you quite sure there was no bill for you that might have come to your mother?"

"Daddy, there is no way. What's wrong with you?" She looked at him, incredulous, and he shrugged, somewhat defensively.

It had seemed so obvious, so characteristic of Clara that the children were involved.

With the next thought, Stern, halfway across the kitchen, stood absolutely still.

He knew now.

He had blundered past it. But he knew now why Clara had received no doctor's bill; why Peter had been so orerwrought that day about the prospect of an autopsy.

Because it was he, Stern's son, who was the physician, Peter who had ordered the lab test, and Peter who remained, even now, resolved to honor some prior commitment of confidence he had made to his mother.

Stern understood the need to maintain professional secrets, but he could not help suspecting that his son would enjoy this advantage over his father, having exclusive hold, in the end, of one last scrap of her life. Might the others know as well?

"Katy." She was facing him, her attention evidently drawn by her father's abstracted look. "Do you know anything of your mother receiving medical care from Peter?"

"What?" Her mouth had fallen open a bit and her face was rigid with alarm. She obviously took the suggestion as baroque. The question that rose in her eyes was easily discemed: Was her father derailed, off his trolley, losing hold? She looked gravely concerned that these ideas, wildand improbable, were coming from him, one after another.

Was he wrong? The kitchen light seemed suddenly intense.

For the first time in his life, he felt a sensation of dislocation, which he knew, instinctively, was typical of the elderly. Kate was correct. Given over to his preoccupations, he had lost his bearings.

What had happened to his lifelong habits of caution, tact, discretion?

He could not simply mn with this knuckleheaded notion and confront his son. If Peter was wrongly accused by his father of even the most wellzintenfioned manipulations, his predictable response would be outrage; the reverberations would shake what little family structure remained. He would have to hunt down Nate Cawley once again and ask him to make inquiries at the lab. That was the best and most discreet alternative.

"An idle thought," he said to Kate. "Allow it to pass." He took his daughter's hand and kissed her on the temple. He thanked her for dinner and waved off her inquiries about whether he was all right. But he found himself increasingly irritated as he walked into the mild night.

Driving along the highway in his Cadillac--this was his car, a Sedan de Ville;

Clara's had been towed away by the dealer in part of that procession of changing scenes and backdrops at the time of her death which he recalled now like a cinema montage--he felt the same rise of difficult emotion.

He was tiring of Clara's gruesome surprises, her hidden world, with enormous sums expended and secret illnesses. In his confusion, he had now even begun to suspect his children. This was her fault, Stern thought suddenly, her fault! The declaration almost rang in him.

Still in this mood, he stopped near home at a convenience store. Certain household tasks remained beyond him. Claudia called in his grocery list from the office and the store obligingly delivered the bags to the back door. But there were always items missing: cream cheese, milk. He never had enough orange juice. Waiting in line, he observed with admiration two young black women who were ahead of him, in halter tops despite the chill of spring, talking high-speed bebop slang, disarmingly casual With their obvious sexuality. He felt again the high-voltage transmissions of sensual energy. What was all this? he wondered. Signs of life, he told himself; natural, he thought, but there was something wild and unpredictable in this urgency. He was so deeply stimulated by virtually any female. Was it some racist conceit to think that he would be as strange as some Martian to these women? He imagined, nonetheless.

What really was the look and feel of those heavy brown breasts, smooth-skinned, heavy-nippled? His imagination rushed on to these thoughts. He stood unmoving in the store, his mouth slightly agape, aroused.

Back in the parking lot, he sat in the car, a bit shocked at himself.

How could he really? You would think, observing his adolescent eagerness, that he'd had no passionate life with Clara, which was not true. As a young man he had craved her more, in fact, after they were married than before, when so much else seemed to be involvedi and even as age and time had tempered the pulse of things, that hunger had never been wholly lost. A man and a woman in the end were always that to each other, opposites and mysterious, and in the act, with its joining and exploring, things more magical and solemn than the most ancient ritual forever resided. Certain other couples, his age and older, made allusions to the extinction of these impulses. Dick Harrison, a neighbor, remarked to Stern one night, 'I hold it up, the sunlight passes through." But three or four times a month Clara and he struck this fundamental compact-creaky, lumpy old bodies as she said, moving toward each other across the bed and, as ten thousand times before, melting together. Lately, he had tried to recall the last occasion and found, almost certainly, that it had been more than a month 'before her death. One more sign of what he should have noticed. But he was on trial, fraught and distracted, and who after the years does not know better than to foment small crises? They move apart and then rejoin.

The image is of some X-ray shadow, a form in negative space; opening and breathing, closing, clinging, like the wings of a moth in the dark, the walls of the heart.

Now that same woman had turned him loose in late-century America, where standards for sexual performance were touted on the covers of the magazines sold at the checkout stand right there behind the broad store window. Was he prepared for this? The uncomfortable truth was that he had no past to brag about, no comforting memory of the wild oats sown by young Alejandro Stern. Geography, as he thought of it, had been against him. Argentin. a, with its gauchos and machos and so forth, probably would have been a more propitious place to pass his adolescence. Male , lust was better accepted there, a legacy of the nation's Italian and Spanish forebears. His brother, even at the age of fifteen and sixteen, was an impressive roue. He had many women, or at least claimed to: whores, Indian girls, older women lusting for youthful energy. Stern could still clearly recollect listening awestruck to Jacobo's account of his initiation, at the age of thirteen, with a very thin young woman attired in a black strapless evening gown, who had met him in the lobby of the Roma, a seedy downtown hotel in B. A. Months later, Jacobo contended he recognized her on the sweet in a habit, walking with her sunken eyes, amid a row of novices leaving the Convent of Santa Margarita.