The Burden of Proof (3 page)

"I was asking a few questions, Lieutenant."

"Think you've asked enough?" Nogalski took a beat on that.

They did not get along, the detective and the lieutenant-you could see that. "Maybe you could lend a hand outside.

There's a real bunch of gawkers."

When the other officers were gone, the lieutenant gestured for Stern. He knocked at the door with the back of his hand so that it closed part way.

"Well, you got.a shitpot of troubles here, don't you, Sandy? I'm sorry to see you again, under the circumstances." The lieutenant's name was Radczyk, Stern remembered suddenly. Ray, he thought. "You holdin' up?" he asked.

"For the time being. My son is having some difficulty, The prospect of an autopsy for some reason upsets him." The cop, shifting around the room, seemed to shrug. "We find a note someplace, we could do without it, I guess. I could probably fix it up with Russell's office." He was referring to the coroner. "They can always measure the C. O. in the blood." The old policeman looked at Stern directly then, aware probably that he was being too graphic. "I owe, you know," he said.

Stern nodded. He had no idea what Radczyk was talking about.

The policeman sat down.

"The fellas go over all the usual with you?" He nodded again. Whatever that was. "They were very thorough," said Stern. The lieutenant understood at once.

"Nogalski's okay. He pushes, he's okay. Rough around the edges." The lieutenant looked out the door. He was the type someone must have called a big oaf when he was younger, Before he had a badge and a gun.

"It's a tough thing. I feel terrible for you. Just come home and found her, right?"

The lieutenant was doing it all again. He was just much better at it than Nogalski.

"She sick?" the lieutenant asked.

"Her health was excellent. The usual middle-age complaints.

One of her knees was quite arthritic. She could not garden as much as she liked. Nothing else." From the study window, Stern could see the neighbors parting to let the ambulance pass. It rolled slowly through the crowd. The beacon, Stern noticed, was not turning. No point to that. He watched until the vehicle carrying Clara had disappeared in the fullness of the apple tree, just coming to leaf, at the far corner of the lot, then he brought himself back to the conversation. The left knee, Stern thought.

"You don't know of any reason?"

"Lieutenant, it should be evident that I failed to observe something I should have." He expected to get through this, but he did not. His voice quaked and he closed his eyes.

The thought of actually breaking down before this policeman revolted him, but something in him was bleeding away. He was going to say that he had much to regret right now. But he was sure he could not muster that with any dignity. He said, "I am sorry, I cannot help you."

Radczyk was studying him, trying to decide, in all likelihood, if Stern was telling the truth.

A policeman leaned into the room through the half-open door.

"Lieutenant, Nogalski asked me to tell you they found something. Up in the bedroom. He didn't want to touch it till you seen it."

"What is that?" asked Stern.

The cop looked at Stern, unsure if he should answer. "The note," the officer said at last.

It was them on Stern's highboy, jotted on. a single sheet of her stationery, laid out beside a pile of handkerchiefs which the housekeeper had ironed. Like the grocery list or a reminder to get the cleaning. Unassuming. Harmless. Stern picked up the sheet, overcome by this evidence of her' presence. The lieutenant stood at his shoulder. But them was very little to see. Just one line. No date. No salutation. Only four words.

"Can you forgive me?"

ON the dark early morning the day of the funeral, a dream seized Stern from sleep. He was wandering in a large house.

Clara was there, but she was in a Closet and 8, would not come out. She clung shyly to one Of the hanging garments, a woman in her riffles whose knees knocked in a pose of childish bashfulness. His mother called him, and his older brother, Jacobo, voices from other rooms. When he moved to answer them, Clara told him they were dead, and his body rushed with panic.

From the bed, he contemplated the illuminated digits on the clock radio.

4:58. He would not sleep again, too frightened by the thronging images of his dream. There had been such a peculiar look on Clara's face when she told him Jacobo was dead, such a sly, calculating gleam."

About him the house, fully occupied, seemed to have taken on an inert, slumbering weight. His older daughter, Marta-twenty-eight, a Legal Aid lawyer in New York--had flown back the first night and slept now down the hall, in the room which had been hers as a child. His younger daughter, Kate, and her husband, John, 'who lived in a distant suburb, had also spent the night, rather than fight the unpredictable morning traffic over the river bridges. Silvia, Stern's sister, was in the guest room, come from her country house to minister to her brother and to organize the house of grief. Only the two men, Peter and, of course, Dixon--forever the lone wolf were missing.

Last night, the task of mourning in its grimmest ceremonial aspects had begun. The formal period of visitation' would follow the funeral, but Stern, always ambivalent about religious formalities, had opened the house to various heartsore friends who seemed to need to comfort him-neighbors, two young lawyers from Stern's office, his circle from the courthouse and the synagogue; Clara was an only child, but two separate pairs of her cousins had arrived from Cleveland. Stern received them all with as much grace as he could manage. At these times, one responded according to the most deeply trained impulses. To Stern's mother, gone for decades but still in his dreams, matters of social form had been sacred.

But after the house had emptied and the family had trailed off to sleep, Stern had closed himself up in the bathroom off the bedroom he had shared with Clara, racked for the second time that evening by a wrenching, breathless bout of tears. He sat on the toilet, from which the filled skirting that Clara had placed there decades before still hung, with a towel forced to his mouth, howling actually, uncontrolled, hoping no one would hear him. 'What did I do?" he asked repeatedly in a tiny stillborn voice as a rising storm of grief blew through him. Oh, Clara, Clara, what did I do?

Now, examining himself in the bathroom mirrors, he found his face puffy, his eyes bloodshot and sore. For the moment he had regained some humbled remoteness, but he knew the limits of his strength. What a terrible day this would become. Terrible. He dressed fully, except for his suit coat, and made himself a single boiled egg, then sat alone, watching the glint of the sunrise enlarge on the glossy surface of the mahogany dining table, until he felt some new incision of grief beginning to knife through him.

Desperately--futilely--he tried to calm himself.

'How, he thought again, how could he have failed to notice in the bed beside him a woman who in every figurative sense was screaming in pain?

How could he be so dull, his inner ear so deafened? The signs were such, Stern knew, that even in his usual state of feverish distraction he could have taken note. Clam was normally a person of intense privacy. For years, she had made a completely personal study of Japan; he knew nothing about it except the rifles of the books that occasionally showed up on her desk. At other moments, she would read a musical score; the entire symphony would rage along inside her. Barely perceptible, her chin might drop; but not a bar, a note was so much as whispered aloud.

But this was something more. Two or three nights recently he had returned home late, preoccupied with the case he was trying--a messy racketeering conspiracy in to find Clara sitting in the dark; there was no book or magazine, not even 'the TV's vapid flickering. It was her expression that frightened him most. Not vacant. Absent. Removed. Her mouth a solemn line, her eyes hard as agates. It seemed a contemplation beyond words. There had been such spells before.

Between them, they were referred to as moods and allowed to pass. For years, he prided himself on his discretion.

Driven now, he moved restlessly about the house, holding the items she had held, examining them as if for clues. In the powder room, he touched a tortoiseshell comb, a Lilac dish, the dozen cylinders of lipstick that were lined up like shotgun shells beside the sink. My God! He squeezed one of the gold tubes in his hands as if it were an amulet.

On a narrow wig stand in the foyer, three days' mail was piled. Stern fingered the envelopes, neatly stacked. Bills, bills--they were painful to behold. These prosaic acts, visiting the cleaner or department store, humbly bespoke her hopes. On the sixth of March, Clara expected life to continue. What had intervened?

"Westlab Medical Center." Stern considered the envelope. It was directed to Clara Stern at their address. Inside, he found an invoice.

The services, identified by a computer code, had been rendered six weeks ago and were described simply as "Test." Stern was still. Then he moved directly to the kitchen, already counseling himself to reason, exerting his will powerfully to contain the.shameful outbreak of grateful feelings. But he was certain, positive, she had made no mention of doctors or of tests. Clara recorded her appointments in a leather. book beside the telephone. Luncheons. The inevitable musical occasions. The dinner dates and synagogue and bar affairs of their social life. He had brought the.bill and matched its date against the book.

"9:45 Test." He paged back and forth. On the thirteenth there was another entry. "3:30 Dr." He searched further. On the twenty-first, the same. "Dr."

"Test."

"Dr."

Cancer. Was that it? Something advanced. Had she resolved to make her departure without allowing the family to beg her, for their sake as much as hers, to undergo the oncologist's life-prolonging tortures? That would be like Clara. To declare that zone of ultima sovereignty. Her mark of dignity, decorum, intense belief was here.

Pacing, he had arrived once more in the dining room, and he heard movement on the second floor, above him. With even an instant's distraction, he felt suddenly that, for all the blind willingness with which his heart ran to this solution, he had been caught up in fantasy.

There was some explanation of these medical events more mundane, less heroic. Somehow he found the suspicion chilling. Last night, blundering about in their bathroom, searching for tissue, he had come across a bottle of hair coloring hidden in the dark corner of a drawer.

He had no idea how long she had concealed this harmless vanity. Months.

Or years? It made no difference. But mortification shuddered through him. He had the same thought now: so much he had not noticed, did not know about that person, this woman, his wife.

":Daddy?" Stern's daughter Kate, his youngest Child, was at the foot of the stairs. She was in her nightgown, a tall stalk of a young woman, slender and heartbreakingly beautiful.

"Cara," he answered. He had always used this endearment with the girls at times. Stern was still holding the lab bill, and he pressed the envelope into the back pocket of his trousers. This was not a matter to discuss with the children, not today, at any event, when the thought would foment even greater anguish, and certainly not with Kate.

Beauty, Stern suspected, had made the world too simple for Kate. She seemed to drift along, buffered by her uncommon good looks and a kindly disposition. Perhaps that apportioned blame unfairly. Much must have happened here, at home. Clara had concentrated so on Peter; Stern in turn shared a natural intensity with his older daughter, Marta.

Kate had never been irradiated by the most intense energies of the mysterious family dynamic.

As a youngster, she had .displayed the same intellectual talents as her brother and sister; and she had Clara's musical talent. But all of that had withered. In high school she had met John, a sweet, Gentile lunk, an almost laughable prototype, a football player and a paragon of blond male beauty with his apple-pie face and hapless manner. A year after college, in spite of her parents' gentle discouragement, she had married him. John started out in his father's printshop, but it was soon clear the business could not sustain two families, and so Dixon had put him to work at MD, where, after some false starts, John seemed to be making do, one more ex-jock jostling about on the playing field of the markets.

Kate herself taught school. She loved her husband with a pitiable tender innocence, but Stern at moments could feel his heart rub itself raw with worry at the prospect of the moment Kate finally learned about the wallops the world could deliver.

Now she touched his hand.

"Daddy, I want you to know something. We weren't going to say anything for another month, but everyone is so sad--" Kate's mouth trembled slightly.

Dear God, thought Stern, she is pregnant.

She lifted her face proudly. Kate said, "We're going to have a baby."

"Oh my," said Stern. He grasped her hand. "My," he said again, smiling bravely and trying to recall exactly how he would be expected to reflect his delight. He kissed her first on the temple, then took her in his arms. He did so only rarely, and here in her thin nightgown he was amazed by the feel of his daughter, her narrowness, the loose movement of her breasts against him. Kate wept with sudden abandon, then drew back.