Sandrine's Case Page 27

  April nodded softly.

  “Are you okay?” Morty asked sweetly. “We can wait a minute, if you’re not.”

  “No,” April said softly. “Please . . . let’s go on.”

  “All right,” Morty said gently, then began.

  “Mrs. Blankenship, when you were approached by the police you made no attempt to deny having had a brief relationship with the defendant, is that correct?”

  “No, I didn’t deny it,” April said softly. Her watery, red eyes drifted over to me. “I made a mistake.”

  With that answer she seemed to admit two mistakes at once, that she’d betrayed her husband and that I’d been the arid soul she’d mistakenly chosen as her lover, a man she saw through now, one who’d cared nothing for her, who’d halfway mocked her even as he’d used her . . . a sociopath.

  “When was the last time you saw Mr. Madison . . . in that way?” Morty asked. “It was three months before Mrs. Madison was diagnosed, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “At that time, you and Mr. Madison were unaware of Mrs. Madison’s condition?”

  “We didn’t know about it, no.”

  “Now this story Mr. Madison wrote, you said that was a parody?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, since we’ve had a few definitions offered here today, what is a parody?”

  April stared at Morty blankly.

  “A parody is a humorous representation, isn’t it?” Morty asked.

  “I guess.”

  “A parody is not meant to be taken seriously, is it, Mrs. Blankenship?”

  “It wasn’t serious, no,” April answered.

  “So nothing in that story had anything to do with a real wife or a real husband or a real plot to kill anybody, did it?”

  “No,” April said.

  Morty moved closer to April. “Mrs. Blankenship, within your hearing, did Mr. Madison ever once criticize his wife?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever say she didn’t understand him or any of the other things that men sometimes say in these situations?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Did he ever indicate any displeasure of any kind with his wife?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever give any indication that he might wish her any harm?”

  “No.”

  “Even jokingly?”

  “No, he never said anything bad about Mrs. Madison or that he would do anything to hurt her.”

  Morty leaned forward slightly. “Mrs. Blankenship, you don’t have any reason to protect Mr. Madison, do you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not in love with him, are you?”

  April’s eyes suddenly bore into me, and in their stricken candor I saw the hardness I had added to her life.

  “No,” she said.

  “Do you know of anything—something Mr. Madison said or anything at all—that might cause you to believe that he would ever harm his wife?”

  Here was the moment, as I knew, when April could hurt me if she wished to hurt me, truly and deeply and fatally get even with me for having broken the only promise I’d made to her, the breaking of which had brought her to this public whipping post.

  “No,” she said, and on that word she hung her head and began to cry.

  Morty let her remain in that a pose long enough for the jury to gain some sympathy for her, then he stepped back, like a man would from a good friend’s coffin.

  “No more questions,” he said.

  The Saga of Shady Arms

  I watched as April struggled to compose herself, slowly and mechanically smoothing wrinkles from her skirt before she rose, still trembling, and made her way down from the witness stand. Clayton had already risen and taken a few steps toward her. When she reached him, he offered her his arm, as if escorting an elegant lady from the ballroom floor, and together they decorously made their way down the aisle, watched by a throng of locals before whom, after so public an evisceration, they must surely have felt naked.

  “What’s next?” I asked wearily.

  “More of the same but not as dramatic,” Morty answered.

  By more of the same he meant various forms of corroborating evidence for my affair with April. And so Bart Lowell was next to take the stand, the owner of the squalid motel in whose bleak rooms April and I had met on those few occasions, and by whose answers to Mr. Singleton’s questions the dreary saga of Shady Arms continued.

  Yes, he had seen us often, seven times, as a matter of record, a number whose accuracy was demonstrated by the coffee-stained registration book he’d provided to Mr. Singleton.

  Yes, we had used false names to sign that book.

  In one question after another, the substance of the answers was the same. I was a liar and an adulterer and a fool. I laughed at convention and scorned all life’s sacred values. I was unfaithful in love and arrogant in life and I had recklessly, wantonly, even laughingly torn to shreds the sacred fabric of the social order.

  Under cross-examination, Morty made the witness admit that he had a record, two convictions for selling marijuana, and a third for postal fraud. He’d served light sentences in two cases, been put on probation for one. None of this did anything to impugn his earlier testimony, however, as Morty must have known. As he’d told me earlier, his intent here was to show that Singleton had scraped the bottom of the human barrel with regard to witnesses. There was no refuting their testimony, but they themselves could be made to look like pots calling kettles black. If jurors don’t like a witness they tend not to believe him, was Morty’s rule.

  Willy Myers came next. He’d delivered pizza to our room at Shady Arms, during the course of which delivery he’d seen an uncorked bottle of wine on a bedside table, along with two glasses, one of which had lipstick stains. He’d also noticed a woman’s slip hanging from the knob of a bathroom door and two sets of car keys in a glass ashtray. All of these Mr. Singleton shrewdly presented as visual metaphors for just the sort of back alley adultery I’d always referred to as Butterfield 8, and which I’d somehow distinguished from the high-toned infidelity of, say, Anna Karenina, though now it struck me that, in essence, adulteries, like Tolstoy’s happy families, were all the same.

  Morty’s cross-examination attempted to paint Willy as a snoop and a gossip and, mercifully, he’d been arrested once as a Peeping Tom, though it appeared he’d been peeping into the window of the boys’ shower room at his former high school rather than the hotel room of an adulterous couple.

  After Willy, there were other witnesses whose testimony offered yet more seamy evidence for my crime. Phone records were presented to show a slew of calls from my cell phone to April’s. There’d been e-mails, too, copies of which were waved before the jury like used condoms despite the fact that they sounded more like grocery orders than the hot-breathed exchanges of a couple carrying on a backstreet love affair.

  It ended at around four in the afternoon, and after a brief conference with Morty, during which we discussed the fact that Mr. Singleton would likely rest his case the next day, I walked to the parking lot, where Alexandria was waiting for me, already behind the wheel.

  “Morty says the prosecution’s case is almost over,” I told her as I settled into the passenger seat.

  “Good,” Alexandria said drily, then hit the accelerator and eased the car backward out of its place, then forward and out into Coburn’s leisurely traffic.

  She was silent for a long time, but I knew some dark bird was circling in her head.

  “What is it?” I asked finally.

  By then she’d pulled into the driveway of 237 Crescent Road.

  “What?” I asked again when she didn’t answer the first time.

  She turned off the car and looked at me. “It’s just another
one of those dark thoughts,” she said.

  “Care to share it?”

  “Not really.”

  “I think you should.”

  “Why?”

  “It might give you peace.”

  An arid laugh burst from her. “You sound like a priest, Dad.”

  “A little bit, maybe,” I admitted. “What’s the dark thought?”

  She hesitated, then came out with it. “That Mom had to have been some kind of saint . . .” She hesitated again, then added, “. . . to have lived with you.”

  I said nothing in response to this, but Alexandria saw how deeply she had sunk the knife.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” she told me, “but you asked.”

  I nodded but said nothing, and in that lack of response I felt a numbness settle in, the sense that I had lost any capacity to offer anything to anyone, nothing left for my students, should I ever have any again, nothing to offer friends, should I ever have any at all, and at last nothing to offer Alexandria, not a single word of counsel nor so much as a pithy remark on how she should live.

  “Dad?” Alexandria whispered, and then, when there was still no response, she reached over and touched my hand. “Let’s go inside.”

  I got out of the car but had no desire whatsoever to go into a house that no longer held the slightest charm for me. And so, like a man looking for an avenue of escape, I glanced at the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

  “I’ll check the mail,” I said to Alexandria, then headed for the box.

  Once there, I opened it, expecting to see the usual stack of bills and junk mail, which was exactly what I found. It was the ordinary correspondence of an ordinary life, but among them was a catalog for the French chocolates Sandrine had called “original sin,” and which had been her one gift to herself each month. They’d come in a beautiful red box, tied with a black ribbon, and with each month’s delivery Sandrine’s face became a sunburst of delight.

  I’d canceled the order not long after her death and so no small red boxes had arrived after that. But with this lovely, elegant catalog they had made a final appearance, one last reminder of Sandrine.

  Until then, my most vivid memory had been of our last dreadful encounter, the night she’d thrown that cup at me and in one furious statement after another delivered her smoldering j’accuse.

  But now that moment seemed far way, like an ember cooling in the distance, which, in its dying, allowed room for a sweeter recollection than any I’d had since that wrenching night. It was only a few years after our arrival in Coburn. I’d come home to find Sandrine on the back porch, working with one of her students, as she often did, and so I walked into the kitchen where I found a book wrapped in a red ribbon, with a card attached, inscribed simply, For you from me. The book was a volume of Yeats’s poetry, the favored poet of my youth, whose single-volume collection I’d taken with me on that fabled trip around the Mediterranean and which had grown tattered over the years and at last simply fallen apart. Sandrine had located the exact edition, and here it was, tied with red ribbon, and offered for no particular occasion, since it wasn’t my birthday or our anniversary or any date of similar note. When I opened the card, I found Sandrine’s message.

  With hope that you can be aroused again.

  (No double entendre intended.)

  Suddenly, on the wave of that memory, I felt a laugh that was half a sob break from me.

  (No double entendre intended.)

  That little parenthetical wink of humor was pure Sandrine, and because of it I’d have known that the note came from her even if she hadn’t signed it in that tiny script of hers.

  (No double entendre intended.)

  In the throes of that memory I suddenly felt a terrible wave of longing for Sandrine. Never in my life had I missed her more than now, as I stood, quaking, at the mailbox. Never had I mourned her more or, in the profound weakness of that moment, needed her more.

  I might have collapsed, assumed a fetal position in the shadow of the mailbox and bawled like a baby or wailed like an animal, if I hadn’t suddenly glimpsed Alexandria standing in the doorway.

  “Are you going to stand out there all night, Dad?” she asked. She glanced at the elegant catalog that still dangled from my fingers and saw clearly that I was in distress.

  “Are you coming in?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, then shoved the catalog into my pocket.

  At dinner, Alexandria talked about everything but my trial. She talked a little about her work, its many dissatisfactions, although, as she said, at least she had a job.

  During all of this I remained for the most part silent, a vague, enclosed figure at the end of the table, often gazing out into the backyard, where Sandrine’s gazebo rested in the half-light that came from the interior of the house.

  At some point I became aware that Alexandria had stopped talking, and when I looked back toward her I saw that she was staring silently at me.

  “What are you thinking, Dad?” she asked.

  I’d hardly been aware of what I’d been thinking until I was asked. Then it seemed quite a vivid thought.

  “About your mother,” I answered quietly.

  “What about her?” Alexandria asked cautiously, as if afraid she might set off rather than defuse a bomb.

  “She loved Terence, the Roman playwright,” I said. “The one she mentioned to the travel agent. There was a line of his she often quoted.”

  “What’s the line?” Alexandria asked.

  “Terence said that he, himself, was cracked,” I answered. “As a man, he was cracked and leaking from many holes.”

  There was a long silence after that, Alexandria watching me with an expression I found hard to decipher, save that it wasn’t hostile.

  “You’ve changed,” she said finally and quite softly, like an ornithologist trying to decide if this was a new species of bird or one well known but oddly marked.

  A few minutes later we walked into the living room and polished off the wine, just half a glass each but enough to sip at a leisurely pace.

  “Where do you think you’d like to live if you could live anywhere?” she said after a moment.

  I thought of her question and then of my answer for a long time.

  “Here,” I said finally. “In Coburn.”

  “But I thought you never liked it,” Alexandria said.

  “I never gave it a chance,” I told her softly. “Everything deserves a chance.”

  Alexandria watched me silently, and a little fearfully, so that I knew I was cracking, leaking.

  “You should go to bed now,” she said, a clear sign that my daughter had no idea how she might mend the breach or plug the holes in what remained of the badly damaged vessel I’d become.

  “Yes, I suppose I should,” I told her.

  A few minutes later I was in my room, the lights out, thinking of Sandrine, of the book she’d given me so long ago, the message inside it, and from those thoughts, moving on to others, and at last wondering what it was I’d possessed at Albi that had made her say, in that lovely, intense, come to judgment way of hers, “It’s you.”

  We’d arrived in the town late in the afternoon, that much I remembered. We walked around for a while before going into the cathedral, where, once inside, we separated. Sandrine strolled along the right side of the church, toward where the figure of doomed Saint Cecilia lay, the three bloody cuts by which her murder had been attempted clearly visible, red and raw, on the back of her neck.

  I moved down the opposite aisle toward the altar, where I stood and looked at the mural that covered the wall at the front of the church. Sandrine joined me there a few minutes later, then we turned and exited the church. By then the sun was setting and we walked along a terrace and peered out over the valley, the river below us a vein of gold, like
the light around us, as softly radiant as any I’d ever seen. It was then Sandrine had said, “You’re the one,” with that look of surprise in her eyes. “It’s you.”

  Such had been our single day in Albi, or at least all that I could still recall of it. We left for Toulouse the following morning and from there by train to Paris, and from Paris home, to where Coburn College’s job offers awaited us and which we’d finally accepted and after which I’d lost whatever Sandrine had seen in Albi, but which I still couldn’t define or locate no matter how many times I went back over my few memories of the place. And how many times was that? Fifty times during the course of the evening? Perhaps a hundred? Perhaps even more than that as night first deepened, then lightened into morning, so that I was still awake and staring at the ceiling when Alexandria tapped at my door.

  “Dad,” she said softly. “Time to get up.”

  “Do I really have to?” I asked, and truly and profoundly I meant it.

  My daughter’s answer was like herself, practical, matter-of-fact, deeply connected to the bottom line.

  “Life goes on,” she said.

  DAY TEN

  Call Malcolm Esterman

  He gave me only the most peremptory glance as he made his way to the witness stand, a look that was hard to read, partly Malcolm being Malcolm, which meant his being somewhat shy, partly a vague dread, like a reluctant bearer of bad news.

  I nodded to him casually, as I might have greeted him on the street, a friendly gesture toward the man to whom Sandrine had gone in her hour of need, and with whom she had no doubt shared quite painful intimacies.

  On the stand, Malcolm raised his hand at the same slow pace that his short legs had taken him to it. He was perhaps five-foot-three, with small, rounded shoulders, and he wore thick glasses that gave him just the sort of owlish look the students of Coburn College had surely mocked. I had little doubt that he’d endured his share of such mockery, both as a boy and later. The world is rarely kind to the bookish, especially if there’s nothing of the warrior-athlete-poet in the bookish boy’s physique. A pipe with a gnawed stem would have completed the image but, mercifully, Malcolm had never smoked.