Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (15 page)

“There is an obvious question, Elliott,” I said with a self-conscious smile. “Forget what Jeffries said about me. Why go through all this deception? Why didn’t your wife just simply file for the divorce? Why make you think I was involved?”

He answered without the slightest hesitation, as if there could not possibly be any doubt about what the truth really was. “They couldn’t afford the scandal. Judges weren’t supposed to be sleeping with the wives of the lawyers who practiced in front of them.

It would have made it more difficult to get the other thing they wanted. Jeffries did not just want my wife, he wanted my children. He’d never had any of his own.”

Elliott reported this as if it was not only a self-evident fact, but one that had nothing directly to do with him. It was the way he described nearly everything that had happened before his breakdown. I had of course heard people talk about themselves with a certain detachment, passing judgment on their own behavior, but never anything like this. There was a break in time for Elliott, as definite as the way we divide all of history into what came before and what came after Christ. When he talked about things that happened before his commitment, there was no connection between what he was now and what he had been then. The old Elliott was dead, and, as near as I could tell, the new Elliott did not miss him at all.

Elliott’s eyes glistened with laughter. “If all this sounds a little paranoid—well, I am, a little paranoid, that is. That’s what they tell me, anyway. Of course, that’s what they tell everyone here.

Paranoid schizophrenia. They always try to give it a little twist, something that makes it sound like they really know what they’re talking about. Type I or Type II, delusions of this or delusions of that, acute or not so acute. And they always say it with such gravity, such enormous seriousness, and with the same somber, slow-moving gestures, the head bent forward, the hands behind the back, the stooped shoulder. You would think they were in church, getting ready to take communion. Paranoid schizophrenia.” His eyes turned hard and his voice was filled with contempt.

“They cover their ignorance with that phrase. It gives them a sense of power. They’re the ones who are really sick.”

At the end of the room, the orderly got to his feet and stretched his arms. All around, the patients began to stir.

“Time for class,” Elliott explained. The contempt had vanished.

His manner was almost playful. “Staff call it group therapy; we call it class. There are several different classes. My personal favorite is ‘medication management.’ We learn about the symptoms of our illness and how to manage them.” His eyes filled with mirth and he shut them partway to keep from laughing out loud.

“Think of it,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “You explain to someone that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic. Then, as if this was all news to him, you explain the symptoms to look for. You tell him that these symptoms can be kept under control by medication, and that the trick is to take the medication in the prescribed dosage at the precise moment that you first detect the symptom.

In other words, you explain to him that he’s crazy, and then you tell him all the perfectly reasonable things he can do not to show it.”

There seemed never to be any gradual transition between his moods. It was one thing, then it was another. He had been cheerful and ironic; now he seemed completely serious.

“The strange part is that it seems to work. Some people become quite good at it. They learn to deal with their disease, to control it, and even perhaps to use it. Some of them, I think, even learn how to hide behind it.”

I did not know what he meant by this last remark. “Hide behind it?”

The cheerful glint came back to his eye. “Everyone learns how to tell people what they want to hear—or to see what they want to see—don’t they?”

I started to ask him something else, but his glance suddenly darted away and his face lost all expression. Before I could turn around to see what had brought this about, he was on his feet, standing still. The wire gate was rattling as Dr. Friedman opened the lock with his key.

There was something I had to know, though I could not have said then why I needed to know it. Perhaps it was just a feeling, or perhaps it was something more than that, a sense that there was more to this story than what he had told me.

“Elliott,” I said, taking him by the arm, “who represented you when you went to court? Who was the lawyer that handled your case?”

Dr. Friedman had come through the gate and was waiting a few feet away. Elliott looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t remember. Someone Jeffries found.”

We said goodbye and I turned to go. “Joseph,” he called out.

It was the only time he had used my first name. “Would you do me a favor?”

“Of course,” I replied.

He reached inside his suit coat, and when he did I realized it was probably the same suit he had worn the last time he had been in court, the day he was sent to the state hospital. He handed me an envelope and asked if I would deliver it to his children. It seemed an odd request.

“You don’t want to just put it in the mail?”

“I can’t. I don’t know where they live. I don’t even know their names.”

I was not certain I had heard him right. “You don’t know their names?” It was too late. He had already started to walk away.

“Do you know what he meant by that?” I asked Dr. Friedman as we made our way out. I glanced at the envelope. The word

“Children” was written on the front, and nothing else, not a name, not an address, nothing but that one word.

“I think so,” Friedman explained. “Quite some time ago—before I was here—his children were apparently adopted by his wife’s new husband.”

“But that’s impossible,” I protested. “That can only be done with the parents’ consent.” Then it hit me. “Oh, my God. Of course! How stupid of me not to think of it.”

“What?”

“They went to court—his wife and her new husband—and the court took away his parental rights. In the eyes of the law, he doesn’t have any children. That’s what he meant when he said he doesn’t know their names. He doesn’t know them—or rather he doesn’t want to know them—by their new last name: Jeffries.”

Friedman nodded politely. “Yes, I suppose that’s possible,” he said in a neutral voice. “It’s hard to know with Elliott. He’s a difficult case—interesting, but difficult.”

We had reached the glass door at the entrance. Friedman started to push it open then, with his hand still on it, hunched his shoulders forward, bent his head, and stared down at the linoleum floor. “Elliott is a paranoid schizophrenic,” he said in a somber tone, as he raised his eyes. “Why are you smiling?” he asked, baffled at my reaction.

I had not been aware of it. “Sorry,” I said, a little embarrassed.

“It was something Elliott said.”

He took my explanation at face value. He was used to people who had a number of things going on in their mind at the same time.

“As I was saying, he’s a paranoid schizophrenic, and unlike some patients with this illness who exhibit only a few symptoms, Elliott seems to experience a great many of them.”

“Is one of them getting caught in a word and then repeating words that rhyme?”

“Yes. ‘Clanging.’ Something happens in the brain, the wrong message gets sent, and instead of the sequence of words to complete the thought, it sort of reverses itself, and it is the word that in some sense has to be completed. That is a fairly common symptom, and, quite frankly, not a very serious one. Elliott has much more serious problems. Sometimes he does not talk for days. He withdraws into himself and when that happens there is no reaching him. You saw the way he looked when you first arrived, that trancelike stare. But then, other times, he’ll start talking, fast, furious, and half the time it doesn’t make any sense at all, or the words are run so close together you can’t tell if it does or not.

Then, at other times, he’s completely rational and remarkably intelligent.”

Friedman paused and searched my eyes. “Is he anything like the way you remembered him?”

I had to think about it. He was not the same at all, but now that I had seen him, a dozen years older, an inmate in a hospital for the criminally insane; now that I had a better idea of what had happened to him, I wondered if what I had remembered about him had not been more the work of my own imagination than anything that had ever been real.

Nine

_______

The rain had stopped, but the clouds were still so dark that though it was only three o’clock in the afternoon day had already turned to night. On the street below the hospital the headlights of the cars that passed cast an eerie yellow glow in the gloomy mist. At the end of the lane that led from the parking lot, someone darted out of the shadows. I slammed on the brakes. His face twisted into angry contortions, he waved his fist at me and shouted a silent curse. I wondered if he was a patient, or just someone normal giving vent to his rage.

I thought about Elliott Winston while I drove back to Portland, and I thought about him during the next several days, every time something I heard or something I read ignited in my head a burst of similar-sounding words. Once, at lunch with another lawyer, I did it out loud. I said the word “eating,” and then heard myself say, “greeting … meeting … beating.”

“Don’t you ever do that?” I asked, rather amused at what I had just done. “Listen to the sound of words, rhyme them together?”

He said he did not, and I wondered whether to believe him. One thought led to another. “It’s the basic principle of poetry, isn’t it?

The sound, the rhyme?” I thought of something else. “Before things were written down, it was a way to help people remember what had been said.”

He did not disagree, but he also did not really care. We were there to discuss a question of law, and there was very little room for poetry in that.

For the next several weeks there was not much room for much of anything. I was in one trial after another, and I might not have thought about Elliott at all, had the search for the killer of Calvin Jeffries not remained front-page news. Whenever I was reminded of that murder, something about Elliott, a remark, a gesture, his astonishing piercing stare, flashed in front of me. The two of them, one dead, the other alive but living in a world of his own, had become permanently linked in my mind, a Janus-faced image of good and evil, reason and madness, with my own sympathies fully engaged on the side of insanity.

Perhaps not with all forms of insanity, I told myself as I dressed for a dinner I had no desire to attend. I had gone to his funeral out of a sense of obligation. The murder of a judge, even a judge like Jeffries, was an attack on the law, and the law, despite all my disappointments and disillusions, was the only thing in which I still believed. I was like a priest who had lost faith in the Church but who, perhaps for that reason, clung closer to God.

I had to go to the funeral, but I did not have to go to this. It was a mystery to me why I had ever agreed. Probably it was nothing more than a vague desire to watch one of the ways in which we try to improve the future by telling lies about the past. A picture of Calvin Jeffries had already been hung in the courthouse; his bust would now occupy a niche somewhere in the wall of the law school library. He would become the latest in a long line of supposedly brilliant and honorable jurists to have a professorship, a chair, endowed in his name. He had left the money for it, three quarters of a million, in his will, and no one, especially not the law school, was inclined to look too closely into where it might have come from. Some of it, of course, had come from the money which with the assistance of Elliott Winston he had stolen from his first wife. It did not matter. No one cared about the past. The important thing was this truly wonderful act of public-spirited generosity. Nor did anyone seem to think it at all extraordinary that he had required as a condition of the gift that it be called the Calvin Jeffries Chair of Criminal Procedure. Vanity is not always the last thing to die: Sometimes it does not die at all.

His large pink face beaming, Harper Bryce waved to me from a table in the second row below the dais. Apologizing as I bumped my way through the clogged passageways between tables, I found my place at the last empty chair, right next to Harper. He was standing up, surveying the crowd.

“Full house,” he said. “Must be seven, eight hundred people.”

A jaundiced grin cut across his face. “First the funeral, now this.

Jeffries can really turn them out.”

I followed his eyes out across the ballroom, filled with well-dressed men and expensively dressed women, women with glittering smiles and bright-colored jewels. There was noise everywhere, glasses tinkling, shoes shuffling, chairs moving, and voices, hundreds of them, all talking at once, a deafening, unintelligible din, roaring in your ears like a thousand thoughts clam-oring for your undivided attention. Then, above it all, a sound at first like a flight of Canadian geese, then like a single blast from a fat schoolboy’s tuba. I turned around. Harper Bryce, his face buried in a white linen handkerchief, was blowing his nose.

“Every damn April,” he groused, a look of disgust on his face.

He folded the handkerchief and put it back in the breast pocket of his dark blue suit.

We were sitting at a table paid for by Harper’s newspaper. The publisher, Otto Rothstein, and his wife, Samantha, were seated on Harper’s left. Rothstein was short, stocky, with a thick neck, and hard, relentless eyes. He looked right at you when he talked, as if he were always trying to size you up. His wife was all legs and arms, with a concave chest and nothing at all where her hips should have been. She had large, mocking eyes, and the bored smile of a woman who could always think of a place she would rather be. When you were with her it was hard not to share her feeling.

The new editor of the paper, Archie Bailey, cheerful, unas-suming, and, according to Harper, one of the smartest newspa-permen he had ever met, was there with his wife, Rhoda, seven months pregnant with their first child. After I said hello to them both, I was introduced to an older, gray-haired man with a craggy forehead, heavy eyebrows, and a long, straight nose. Dark olive-colored skin stretched tight from his round cheekbones to his narrow, dimpled chin.