Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (37 page)

he said as he got to his feet.

I followed him down a short, narrow hallway to the smaller of the two bedrooms, the room which as long as I had known him had served as both a study and a guest room. A desk, a chair, a television set, and a beige sofa that made into a bed were the only furnishings. Turning off the television, Flynn sat down at the desk and thumbed through a stack of manila folders.

Flynn had loosened the cotton belt that held his robe together.

Sitting on the wooden chair behind the desk that was really nothing more than a plain wooden door resting on cement blocks, the tattered ends of the robe lay in a heap on the rose-colored carpet. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of blue and white striped boxer shorts underneath. The folds of skin around his eyes were thick and puffy, the way they are on the face of a fighter years after he has left the ring. His mouth moved silently as he read the names of the files through which he searched.

“I just had it here,” he mumbled to himself. “Here it is,” he said, as he pulled out a thin report, the pages of which were fastened together with a blue plastic paper clip, and handed it to me. “A lot of it is guesswork, but I don’t think it’s too far from right. The kid never went to school, never had a friend, never had anyone to talk to. He’s not retarded, not in the clinical sense.

There’s nothing wrong with his mind. He’s socially retarded; he’s what you would expect to get if you locked a baby in a room and didn’t let him out except to be mistreated for the first fourteen or fifteen years of his life. Except for one thing,” Flynn said, shaking his head with a kind of wonder. “There’s nothing vicious about him. He’s an innocent. He’s like a dog people keep kicking and he still comes back, hoping that maybe this time someone will treat him with a little kindness,” he said, using the same analogy I had used when I tried to explain to Jennifer what the boy was like.

Flynn took a deep breath and, wearily, let it out. At the sound of it, I felt again my own fatigue. Sinking against the corner of the sofa, I let my feet slide out across the carpet until I caught sight of my own filthy, mud-encrusted shoes. “Sorry,” I began to apologize as I sat up.

Lost in thought, Flynn did not hear me. My eye moved behind him to a photograph barely visible on the shelf behind his chair. Like the bowl of artificial fruit in the kitchen, the tarnished silver frame was always in the same spot.

“How old would he be now?” I asked in a voice that was more like a whisper.

He did not turn around, and I wondered if he ever looked at it anymore: that picture of the bright-eyed little boy held in the powerful arms of his young father.

A clumsy smile came and went and came again. “Twenty-nine last month. Hard to believe, isn’t it: where all the time has gone?”

His eyes looked past me into the distance. Then he got to his feet, tied the belt around his waist, and opened the closet door.

“I’ve got some clothes you can wear. Why don’t you take a shower, get cleaned up, and I’ll drive you home. You don’t want to show up looking like that,” he said with a gentle laugh.

Halfway up the drive the porch light came on and Jennifer, wearing a knee-length cotton nightgown, dashed out and began to wave. The headlights swept past her as Flynn pulled up in front. Darting barefoot down the darkened steps, she threw herself into my arms as I got out of the car.

“I didn’t think you’d be home for days.” Standing on her tiptoes, her arms around my neck, she ran her hand over the side of my face. “You shaved.”

“Say hello to Howard Flynn,” I said, as I opened the back door of the car.

Her arms behind her back, Jennifer looked across the passenger seat. “Hello, Howard Flynn. Thank you for bringing my derelict home.”

Reaching inside, I gathered up the thick bundle of clothing I had worn during my brief sojourn as one of the homeless. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Flynn’s face color slightly as he became formal and awkward, trying to be polite.

Dragging the bundle behind me, my arm around her waist, we walked up the steps to the porch and watched the lights of the car recede into the distance as Flynn drove down the drive and out the gate. Inside, Jennifer took the bundle from my hand, dropped it to the floor, and kissed me on the mouth. I gathered her up in my arms and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. She slid under the sheets and started teasing me about my borrowed oversize clothes, and then, after I had taken them off, she turned off the lamp.

We made love with a new intensity, and when it was over, and we lay together in the moonlight that splashed through the bedroom window, she put her hand in mine and touched my soul.

“The only thing I want is to live with you and to die with you, live together, die together, just us, the way we said it would be.

Remember?”

I remembered when we first said it, and I said it again, the same words, the same promises, but it was not the same. We had lived separate lives, and we knew that what we had promised before—that we could never survive apart—had been, not a lie, but something that had not been true. In the innocence of our youth we had believed love and death the only real alternatives, and had come to learn that life was neither so simple nor so kind.

Curling her arm around my neck, she held me as tight as she could. “Just love me, love me forever … please.”

I put my arm around her and spread my fingers on the small of her back, and tried to relieve the tension that was running rigid through her. Her hard, sobbing breath began to slow down, and after a while I could barely feel her heart beating against me; and then, a little later, her hand let go of my neck and her arm slid down onto my shoulder. For a long time I watched her sleep, wondering about the way the most important things seem to come about by chance, and whether chance might be nothing more than a word we hide behind when we don’t want to believe that everything has been decided by fate.

The next morning I found Jennifer dancing around the kitchen, humming to herself as she put dishes away with one hand and rinsed off a pot with the other. Both hands moving at once, she kissed me lightly on the cheek and ordered me to sit down at the table. I squinted at her through eyes still filled with sleep, staggered to the coffeemaker, and poured myself a cup. She watched with amused indulgence as I dragged myself over to the table and collapsed into a chair. Jennifer slid into the chair opposite, and with a pensive expression drank coffee from her cup.

“Tell me about Howard Flynn,” she said presently.

“Flynn? He’s a private investigator. A long time ago he was a lawyer,” I said, my gaze drifting across the kitchen to the windows that let in the yellow morning light.

“You told me once that he was disbarred because he came to court drunk and said some things he shouldn’t have.”

My eyes came back to her. She never seemed to forget anything, no matter what it was and no matter how long ago it might have been said.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

My gaze went back to the window, and I shook my head. “It’s a terrible story,” I said, reluctant to say more.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“It isn’t that,” I said, as I began to stir the cup with a spoon.

“It really is a terrible story, the kind that doesn’t have an end.”

“Does any story have an end?” Her voice was like a long slow breath that made you want to stay right where you were, listening to her talk. “Our story didn’t.”

I thought about what she said. “No,” I remarked presently, “our story didn’t end—it got better—but what happened to Flynn …

“Howard Flynn was a great athlete, one of the best high school football players anyone had ever seen. He was six foot three, two hundred sixty-five pounds, with a thick neck and a head like a barrel keg, and quick as a cat. Every college wanted him; everyone told him he’d be an all-American. He was, too, third-string all-American his sophomore year. But Flynn didn’t play football because he loved it; he played it because he was good at it and because it paid his way through college. If he had come from a wealthy family, I don’t think he would have played at all. Flynn wanted to be a lawyer—from the time he was a kid, that’s what he wanted to do.

“He studied all the time, and almost never went out. Howard was a one-man wrecking crew on a football field, but around other people he was quiet, shy, always a gentleman. I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if he’d ever had a date in high school. But now he was an all-American, and girls who would not have looked at him twice wanted to be with someone famous. There was one in particular: tiny, not more than five foot two, with flashing black eyes and a cute little smile. Her name was Yvonne Montero and they started going out. Everyone liked Flynn, and everyone thought it was great that he finally had a girl. It didn’t matter that she had made it with half the guys in school. Flynn didn’t know anything about that, and besides, they were just going out.

No one thought it was serious, but of course it was serious. For the first and only time in his life, Howard was in love—the way I was in love with you.

“They got married the day after he graduated, and she probably started fooling around the day after that.” I caught myself getting angry and took a deep breath. “To be fair, she worked while he went through law school. Three years later, he passed the bar and got a good job with a pretty good firm. A few months later, she had their baby, a boy, Howard Flynn, Jr. That was the hap-piest day of Howard Flynn’s life—maybe the last really happy day he ever had—the day he first saw his son.”

Locking my fingers together on top of my head, I stared out the window, rocking back and forth on the chair.

“What happened?” Jennifer asked, breaking my reverie.

“One day, about two years later, while Flynn was in court arguing a case, his wife was home in bed with another man, someone she had been sleeping with for more than a year. The boy, Howard’s son, was asleep in his own room. He woke up and wandered into the living room, looking for his mother. The sliding glass door to the backyard had been left open. She was in the bedroom, making love, when it happened. She never heard her son fall into the pool, never heard him cry for help, never heard anything except the sounds she was making while she cheated on her husband.

“The boy drowned, and Howard died that day as well. He blamed himself. Odd, isn’t it, that after what his wife had been doing, Howard would think it was his fault? He thought he should have known that it was too good to last. His wife was having sex with another man in their bed; their son drowns because of it; and Howard thinks that he should have known what she was going to do, and that he could have saved his only child if he had!”

“What about the mother, Howard’s wife? Didn’t she blame herself?”

“I don’t think she was capable of blaming herself. She moved out right away. The last time Flynn saw her was at the funeral.

Howard had made all the arrangements himself. He did everything himself. For a while—a few months—he kept to his old routine. He went to work every day and he did his job; he kept his grief to himself. Then something happened, some kind of delayed reaction, I guess. He started to drink and he didn’t stop.

And then Jeffries started in on him, ridiculing him, humiliating him in open court. Finally, he just said the hell with it and told Jeffries exactly what he thought. He did it drunk, but I think he would have done it sober, there was so much rage and hurt bottled up inside him. It wasn’t a question whether he was going to explode, but when, and Jeffries was so incredibly easy to hate.”

Jennifer pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around them. “Is that why he has such strong feelings about this Danny? Because of what happened to his own boy?”

I did not understand at first, but then, searching her eyes, I began to grasp her meaning. “I hadn’t thought of it,” I admitted,

“but I suppose you must be right. I’m sure he still blames himself; maybe he thinks he can make up for it a little if he can help someone else.”

Turned down at the corners, her wide mouth looked like the smile of a brokenhearted child. “Maybe, in a strange way, he thinks this boy is his son. You told me he’s a three-year-old in a grown-up’s body. He’s what Howard’s son would be if he hadn’t drowned, if he had just disappeared, and then, after all these years, been discovered.” She looked at me through half-closed eyes. “We do that, don’t we: imagine that someone we haven’t seen in a long time hasn’t really changed, not deep down inside, no matter how much older we both are?”

I wondered if she was talking about us, and as I watched a bittersweet expression form on her gentle face I felt a knot in my stomach, afraid I had done something to disappoint her, afraid that I had changed more than she had thought. Her gaze grew more distant and she pulled her knees tighter under her chin.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

At first I did not think she had heard me, but then, a moment later, like someone clearing away the cobwebs, she batted her lashes twice and sat up. With a cheerful look in her eyes, she came around the table and sat in my lap, her arms wrapped around my neck. “I love you Joseph Antonelli, and I’ll marry you whenever you want. Tomorrow, if you like.”

She let go of my neck, and for a long time, the bare presence of a smile flickering across her fragile, vulnerable mouth, looked at me like someone peering at their own half-forgotten reflection. Without a word, without a sound, she gently rose and, taking me in her soft, naked hand, led me back upstairs.

Twenty-two

_______

Dr. Friedman was waiting for me. A nervous smile started on his mouth, failed, and then was just about to start again, when he let go of my hand and, glancing away, gestured toward the armless chair in front of the metal institutional desk.

“I was beginning to think you didn’t want to see me,” I said.

His ankle was crossed over his knee and his hands were clasped together in his lap. Repeatedly he clenched his teeth while his lashes beat rapidly over his eyes. I wondered if he had heard what I had said.