Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (31 page)

I began to tell her again how I had decided to take the case as soon as I discovered how little the public defender was going to do. She was not listening.

“I used to think that would happen to me,” Jennifer said. She was looking right at me, but she had turned in on herself. “I thought I was going to become like the people who walk around with vacant eyes pushing their shopping carts with all their belongings stacked on top, the people who sleep under blankets made out of cardboard boxes.” Gradually, her eyes came back into focus. “How long has he been like that: homeless?” she asked.

“You really thought that could happen to you?” I asked, a trace of skepticism in my voice.

“You think people are born homeless?”

“I’m beginning to think John Smith may have been,” I said almost as an aside. “No, I don’t think people are born homeless.

But I don’t think many of them started out as members of the upper middle class, either. Most of them are alcoholics, addicts, people suffering serious mental disease, people who should be in hospitals.”

“Like John Smith?”

I shook my head. “He isn’t delusional; he doesn’t hear voices …”

“I heard voices,” she said matter-of-factly. “Perhaps not in quite the way you mean. I thought things that were said by people I didn’t know—things said by people on television, for example—

had a special meaning meant only for me.”

I started to explain what I thought was the difference. “Don’t,”

she said, laying her left hand on my wrist. “You can make all the distinctions you want—but what it really comes down to is you don’t want to believe I was ever that sick …” Raising her head she turned first one way, then the other. “Look around,” she said when her eyes came back to mine. “Tell me what you see.”

The restaurant was filled to capacity, with dozens of people crowded around the bar. Men wore ties and women sparkled.

“Everything depends on how you look, how you dress, what kind of car you drive, what kind of house you own. That’s how we decide about people, that’s how we decide about ourselves: whether we’re successful or not, whether we know what’s going on or not, whether we’re crazy or not.”

She stared at me a moment longer, challenging me to disagree.

Then, suddenly aware of her own intensity, she became embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she said, laughing quietly at herself. “I didn’t mean to go on like that.”

“It’s my fault,” I replied. “I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss what you were saying. But it’s hard for me to think of you like that …”

“Mentally ill,” she added for me.

The waiter began to serve dinner, and for a while we talked only of inconsequential things. It did not really matter what we talked about. The sound of her voice was all I cared about. It was the sound of home, the place you wanted to come back to, the place where no matter how long you had been away, you were always welcome, and always wanted.

“You still haven’t told me,” she said halfway through dinner. I didn’t know what she meant. “About the boy: John Smith. What’s he like?”

It made me smile. Most of the people who appeared as defendants in the criminal courts were men in their twenties, but for Jennifer, anyone that age was still a boy.

“Remember how we used to feel when someone older—someone our parents’ age—called us boys or girls? One of the things I’ve learned is that each generation thinks the one it follows must have been born ancient and incompetent, and the one that comes behind it will die young and inexperienced.”

Jennifer bent forward, a birdlike look of astonishment on her face. “And one of the things I’ve learned is that each generation thinks it invented sex.” She paused, an impish glow in her large bronze-colored eyes. “I happen to know, however, that sex was actually invented late one August night in the back seat of somebody’s old Chevy while Johnny Mathis was singing ‘Chances Are’

on the car radio.” She paused again and broke into a dazzling white smile. “And I have a witness—unless he’s forgotten.”

“I remember the car,” I said vaguely.

She raised her eyes and opened her mouth and taunted me with her smile. “I can understand if you’ve forgotten. It was over almost before it started.”

I turned up my hands. “Before that night, it always had ended before it started—in a manner of speaking.”

“I knew I was the first,” she said with a show of triumph. Then, as we looked at each other, surrounded by strangers but somehow alone, the bright, glittering grin slowly dissolved into a sad-eyed bittersweet smile.

“I wish you had been the last,” I whispered with a sigh.

“Me, too,” she said, a lost look in her eyes. “We would have had a good life, I think. I know I would have been happy married to you. Do you think … ?”

She was the only thing in my life that had ever made sense.

I could almost feel what it would have been like sitting here with her, in one of the most expensive restaurants in town, on her birthday, or our anniversary, or just because, no matter how long we had been married she would always be the best-looking woman I knew.

I looked at her a moment longer before I said anything. “You know the answer to that better than I do,” I said finally.

She stared down at her hands and then forced herself to smile.

“Now,” she insisted as she sat straight up and pretended everything was all right, “tell me about John Smith.”

I hesitated. I did not really want to talk about John Smith. I wanted to talk about us. She shook her head. “Tell me.”

I hesitated again, this time because I was not quite sure how to begin.

“He makes you want to believe in the essential goodness of human beings.”

She tilted her head. “Don’t you?”

“Believe we’re born innocent and only become corrupted by civilization? No. I think there are a lot of people born evil. I think Calvin Jeffries was like that. Jeffries had a brilliant mind and was perhaps the worst human being I ever knew. John Smith suffers from some kind of retardation and he wouldn’t hurt a soul.

His parents—whoever they were—didn’t want him, and whoever had him as a child tortured him—deliberate, unspeakable acts—

that had to have caused incredible physical pain.”

I started to describe what had been done to him—what from the scars left on his body we could tell had been done to him—

but I caught myself in time. “He was treated like an animal,” I instead remarked. “Have you ever known anyone who did that: mistreated an animal? Sometimes the animal becomes vicious; other times they become scared, quick to shy. Hard to know why there’s that difference: Maybe it’s just their nature. John Smith is like that: frightened of everyone, scared of his own shadow, and yet, at the same time, just dying for an act of kindness. He looks at you with orphan eyes, the eager look of an innocent boy—you’re right about that: He is a boy—a boy who wants someone to take him home. It hurts even more when you think about what they did to him. You have to know that they made him think it was his fault, made him believe that it was because he had not done what he was supposed to do. How hard he must have tried to understand what he was supposed to do; how difficult it must have been to comprehend the meaning of the names they must have called him.”

“Then you’ve decided for sure,” Jennifer said. “You’re going to defend him?”

At first I thought I was hearing the unfamiliar voice of my own conscience; then I remembered that the words echoing in my mind were simply a variation on what Howard Flynn had told me to my face. “If I don’t help him, what good am I?”

It was the kind of sentiment Jennifer was certain to approve, and among the other things that seemed not to have changed through all the years of her absence was how much I wanted her approval. When I was eighteen, or nineteen, or twenty-one, or twenty-two, I would have said those words, words that someone had said to me first, and, in her presence, believed they told the truth about myself. I would have been Clarence Darrow or Don Quixote or both of them together, anything I thought she might want me to be.

“Howard Flynn told me that,” I admitted. “He tries to be my conscience.”

She put her coffee cup down and touched her mouth with a white linen napkin. “You’re not taking this case because someone else thinks you should. You’re taking it because you think you should.”

I handed the waiter a credit card and when he had gone I looked back into Jennifer’s waiting eyes. “I’m taking it because that kid in the public defender’s office was an embarrassment.” I was trying to sound tough and cynical and I failed so miserably I started to laugh. “I’m taking the damn case because of you.”

“Because of me?”

“Yes. I knew what you’d think of me if I didn’t.”

For a long time she looked at me without saying anything. “Did you really?” she asked finally.

I tried to be completely truthful. “I think I might have,” I admitted, as I helped her out of her chair.

Outside, in the misty night air, she held my arm with both hands as we walked down the street. Her high heel shoes tapped lightly on the sidewalk, and our breath blew like white transparent clouds into the darkness. Our foreheads bent close together, we turned the corner to the street where we had parked the car, and then, suddenly, without any warning, a metal shopping cart appeared out of nowhere and nearly ran us down. My hand shot out in front just in time to grab it. Pulling Jennifer behind me, I swung around to the side while the cart passed in front of us. An old woman—or what looked like an old woman—

was shoving it along as if nothing had happened, as if she had not seen us at all.

The old woman was wearing a torn overcoat and a green wool scarf. Her face was fat and red, with tiny slits for eyes and a pudgy, off-center nose. A red wool knit cap was pulled down below her ears and what looked like dirty cloth bandages were wrapped around her hands in a way that covered her palms and left her fingers free. Her mouth hung open and as she passed by you could hear a harsh rasping noise with every breath she took. A tooth was missing in front, and just above her lip three long white hairs grew out of a mole. The cart was loaded with bulging black plastic garbage bags, but whether they were the sum total of her earthly possessions, or debris she had found to trade or sell, there was no way to know. The back wheels were broken and wobbled sideways as the cart rattled into the night.

I took Jennifer by the hand and turned to go, but she was frozen to the spot. Then, before I could do anything, she let go of my hand and started running. When I caught up to her, she was standing next to the homeless woman who had almost run us over. Jennifer dug in her purse and handed the woman a fist-ful of money. There was no sign of recognition in the woman’s eyes; her expression remained dull, blank, without comprehen-sion. Jennifer reached down and put the money inside the overcoat pocket and stood aside and watched her go.

“You have a good heart,” I said as we walked to the car.

She looked up at me. “No. Just bad memories.”

The engine was running by the time I got around to the passenger side, and the Porsche was moving away from the curb before I had the door shut.

“What do you think they talk about?” she asked, her eyes fixed on the road. “They move along the streets like they’re in a trance.

Have you ever watched them?” she asked, darting a glance at me.

“They seem to stick together, don’t they? You’d see them sitting on the sidewalks, or in an alleyway, or in a park, all huddled together. It’s like a community of their own—maybe a country of their own. What do you suppose they tell each other?”

Both hands were on the wheel, her head was up, her eyes vibrant, excited, with almost too much life in them, as if what had made them that way was itself not quite normal.

“Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a whole civilization all around us, right in front of our eyes, and we didn’t even know it—like a kind of parallel universe that is there and yet isn’t there?”

She cranked down the window and lifted her face to the rush of cool night air. It seemed to sweep away all the feverish excitement, all the anxious care. A dreamlike smile floated across the long curve of her sad gentle mouth.

“Want some music?” she asked as she turned on the radio. As soon as she heard it, the smile on her face started to dance and her eyes began to come alive again. Then she was laughing, the way she had laughed when she was still a girl and did not yet know what it was like to be unhappy. She was laughing, and I knew why.

“You just happened to turn on the radio to Johnny Mathis singing ‘Chances Are’?”

She reached down between the seats. “I cheated a little,” she admitted as she pulled out a plastic CD holder. The laughter faded into the night and the sparkle in her eyes became a warm, luminous glow.

“It’s Saturday night,” I said, as she turned onto the street that ran along the river at the edge of the city. “What would you like to do?”

“Nothing,” she said, a wistful look in her eyes. “Be with you.

What would you like to do?”

“Marry you.”

She did not look around to see me and there was no change in her expression, nothing, except a slight quiver at the corner of her mouth.

“I love you, Joey. I always have. I always will.”

That was all she said. She did not say yes, and she did not say no, and when she reached for my hand it did not seem to matter.

She lived in a condominium on the edge of the river less than half a mile from town. As soon as we shut the door behind us, she was in my arms. She kissed me on the mouth and then, keeping hold of my hand, led me into the living room. She turned on some music and kicked off her shoes. We went onto the balcony and watched the lights of the city reflected in the black water of the river and listened to the thousand sounds drumming in the glass and steel darkness. Closing the sliding glass door, we went back into the living room and with both her arms around my neck we began to dance. We moved slowly to the rhythm of the music and then more slowly still.

“It’s like the first time,” she said in a muffled voice as she lifted her face to mine.

I slept late into the morning and for a few minutes after I woke up thought I was still asleep. At first I did not know where I was, and then, when I remembered, wondered if I had been left there alone. I found my clothes draped neatly over the arm of an up-holstered chair in the corner of the bedroom and put on my pants.