The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “I believe so. We accept the fact the way animals accept the air they breathe, and with no more thought.”

  “Yes,” said Judge Mann, his gaze leaving her, maybe reluctantly, as he scribbled something on his note-pad, “life was breathing air a good many million years before a fairly advanced science noticed that air was a mixture of different gases, had weight and mass, other properties. Well, go on, Mr. Hunter.”

  Edith thought: Maybe that’ll larn him. And over there beside her friend, the Old Man’s dark eyes were watching, saying as plainly as eyes could say it that he was pleased with her, and that he was profoundly frightened.

  “I’ve enjoyed this little excursion into philosophy, Miss Nolan, and I’m glad his Honor lent us a hand with it—’way over my depth, I’m afraid—but now I suppose we’d better get back to the facts. Well, one thing first: am I right in supposing that in your view, this—this act of acceptance, I think you called it, has to happen first before one is even allowed to believe in a Supreme Being?”

  She could not help glancing toward the Judge, who was watching the prosecutor, coldly intent and unjudicially angry. The corner of her eye gave her the solemn approving nod of the juror Emma Beales, the sudden relaxation—everything’s all right, boys—in the foreman Peter Anson. She understood that Judge Mann was waiting for her. “Mr. Hunter, I also enjoyed that excursion into philosophy, but unless the Court rules it’s relevant, I will not discuss my views on religion with you.”

  “They are not relevant to the case,” said Judge Mann, “and the witness is not required to answer.”

  Hunter nodded politely. “I’ve certainly no wish to press the point. But may I ask—and by the way, I won’t urge you to respond to this question either if you’d rather not—may I ask, Miss Nolan, whether you’re willing to state the reasons for your refusal to answer?”

  “Quite willing. Religion is a topic that too easily stirs up a lot of emotion if there’s any serious discussion or conflict of opinion. I assume the members of the jury belong to more than one religious faith. Some of them might share my views, others might be offended by them—I can’t tell. But since religion, so far as I can see, has absolutely nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of my friend, I think it would make no sense anyhow for me to get into the subject.”

  The Old Man over there nodded slightly, maybe a kind of cheering, a way of saying his gal Red could take care of herself. But can I?

  “That’s reasonable,” said T. J. Hunter almost affectionately. “You’re right it’s a touchy topic, right also that it has no direct bearing on the question of guilt or innocence; and I’m as anxious as you are to avoid stirring up needless emotions or side issues. The only thing I do wish I could get at along this line—my only reason for speaking of it at all—well, Miss Nolan, if you have no unqualified belief in absolute ethical principles, and if a question about belief in God is merely distasteful to you, don’t you think that might have some slight bearing on your credibility as a witness in a murder trial?”

  The Old Man was standing up, his voice slow in coming, slow-moving when it came as if each word must force its way past an obstacle in his throat: “Mr. Hunter, that is vicious and contemptible.”

  And before stage anger took control of the handsome mask with the shovel chin, Edith glimpsed the fact that T. J. Hunter was at last genuinely pleased about something. “I must ask you to watch your choice of language, Counselor.”

  “No more of this,” said Judge Mann. “The attention of both counsel, please. Your question, Mr. Hunter, was entirely out of order, because it implied that a person with independent views on religion has a lower regard for the truth than others—an implication with no slightest basis in fact or logic. From her answers, her manner, her educational background, there is every reason to suppose that Miss Nolan has quite as high a regard for the truth as anyone else who has testified in this case. You will withdraw your question. Mr. Warner, your remark to the prosecutor was ill-chosen and unparliamentary. It calls for an apology to him, I think.”

  Hunter spoke gently: “I withdraw my question.”

  “Mr. Hunter,” said the Old Man wearily, “I was influenced by personal feeling as I should not have been, and my words were ill-chosen. My apology, sir, if you can find it acceptable.”

  Very gently, Hunter said: “Why, of course, Cecil.” And more gently still: “I will ask no further questions of this witness.”

  She stood up, dizzy. Some passage of words between Cecil and the Judge. Redirect examination—there would be none. She heard the Judge say after an impatient throat-clearing that she was excused, and through a sudden maddening colorless blur she saw or imagined that Cecil was achieving a sort of smile for her. She stepped down carefully, concentrated on preventing her fingers from reaching after a handkerchief or rising toward her face. If she could keep her head turned away from the jury, they might not see. Her seat was over there somewhere, beyond the bald skull of the fattest reporter at the press tables. Cecil was still smiling, more or less.

  But I lost. I lost.

  Callista, what have I done to you?

  III

  Callista thought: I am stronger than she is, and never knew it before. Why is she crying, after she was so wonderful?

  It was no trick of vision; no mistaking the intrusive brilliant glitter on her cheeks as Edith stepped down and walked rather clumsily—but head high—toward her seat. She would not retire in any sniffling droop: rather, Callista knew, she would be furious at the weakness, and maybe not reach for a handkerchief even when she was clear of the arena but keep her head high and angrily observant, let the sparkle dry on her face and stay there, the hell with it. But I am much stronger. I can hold up too, even better. I won’t let hunter-Hunter trick me into saying anything he can use. I’ll play the act to the limit. For Cecil. For Edith. For myself. And isn’t it time now?

  Yes, it was time. Cecil was whispering to her. Watching Edith still, ready with a smile if Edith would only look her way, Callista lost his words and had to ask him to repeat. “I’m putting you on now. Feeling all right, Cal? Steady?”

  “I’m fine, Bud. Steady. Let ’em all come.” It occurred to her that she really did feel in excellent condition. This was the end of the long affliction of waiting, mute listening, anticipation: now at least she could attempt to do something. Cecil rose and moved away; he was up there near the witness stand, calling her name, smiling a little—Himself, not like my father. It is time. First to Mr.-Delehanty-which-is-the-Clerk.

  At close range Mr. Delehanty’s eyes appeared curiously vacant. She found a moment’s fantastic pleasure in proposing to herself that the poor guy might actually have died long ago, leaving a fruity voice, a magnificent suit of clothes, and some structure (partly plastic?) designed to hold the two together world without end. The arm mechanism must be especially clever, to carry on that Bible routine. She held her hands at her sides, and before the melodious rumble (a concealed recording?) could start, she spoke quickly as she had rehearsed herself last night while Matron Kowalski was playing the usual games with that light bulb in the corridor: “I affirm that I will tell the truth, the whole truth so far as I know it, and nothing but the truth.”

  At the corner of her eye she glimpsed Cecil’s stricken look, and thought: Oh yes yes, I should have warned him. Her thought continued with an irritation which love somehow magnified instead of diminishing: What’s the matter anyhow? Must we be so timid? They’re not going to condemn me for such a thing as that. Are they?

  Mr. Delehanty made an indeterminate fogbound noise.

  Judge Mann said evenly: “The oath is binding in that form—should there be a question in anyone’s mind. The witness is exercising a constitutional privilege which ought to be familiar to everyone.” She felt he would have liked to speak to her directly, humanly. Instead he turned to the still faintly resonating Delehanty and rem
arked in a casual undertone too low for the jury’s hearing but not for hers: “You might be interested to know, Mr. Delehanty, that I chose to affirm when I took the oath as a justice.” You were not actually speaking to that-which-is-the-Clerk—I heard and I’m grateful. “You may take the stand now, Miss Blake.”

  They were trying to help her. Cecil, Edith, now Judge Mann who, as Cecil said, had tried all along to give her every break—tried too much for his own good, maybe, and hers too. She understood that he not only desired to help her: he saw her.

  Her mind grew dizzy, shifted, retreated, sought to steady itself, reason and unreason quarreling within. Were they, the three of them, treating her as they might treat a difficult child? She fought down the illogical resentment, despising it, conquering it—almost. She was seated, the ungainly witness chair still warm from Edith’s body. How different the courtroom looked from up here! A whole new orientation. Just look, for instance, at that big slob in the back row smuggling a candy bar up to the pink slot in his shiny face. Had that operation been going on since Monday morning? Look, Daddy! Is he s’posed to eat in here, Daddy, is he s’posed to, huh, Daddy?

  The jury too. (Where’s Jimmy?) The jury was closer, much closer. She could smell them. One of the females gave off a powerful tuberose reek, variable as drafts in the large room stirred it about. (Where’s Jimmy, if it matters?) Callista decided the smell was generated by the Lagovski, probably in heat. Any minute now—well, Emerson Lake was the biggest, but pretty old; maybe one of the more vigorous younger males—

  “Callista—” Please stand near me always!—“you’re a resident of Winchester, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. 21 Covent Street.”

  “You’ve kept that apartment?”

  “Oh yes. Edith Nolan is taking care of it for me.”

  “Ought to be back there in a few days.” How do you do it, Cecil, that casualness? You’re hurting inside worse than I am. I feel fine. “You were attentive to all of Miss Nolan’s testimony, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was, Mr. Warner.”

  “Before we go on to other things, is there anything in that testimony that you want to comment on, or add to, maybe?”

  You told me, give them modesty. “Every one of them knows, Cal, that you’re in their power. Think what that does to twelve human egos, and show them the respect they believe they deserve. In fact don’t just show it: try to make yourself feel it.” I will give them modesty, Cecil. “I think she overrated me as an artist, Mr. Warner. It’s her honest view, I know, but I’m not that good.” Who knows for sure? Maybe I am.

  “Well, as you know, I set a very high value on your work myself.” His quick relaxed smile was including the jury somehow. Wish I could do that. Or some of the jury: his glance had been directed, she thought, toward the crinkle-faced middle-aged lady. Name?—Butler, Miss Helen Butler. Callista ventured to meet the woman’s eyes, did so, and was frightened to realize that for the instant’s duration she was not certain what her own facial muscles were doing. What did I actually do?—make a face? Surely there had been a gleam like friendliness in Helen Butler; just as surely, the woman was now looking down at her hands, and away across the room, troubled but otherwise communicating nothing at all. “However, Callista, I was thinking chiefly of other things Miss Nolan said—for instance her belief that you might have been experiencing a serious depression, perhaps suicidal, last July and part of August. Was she right, Callista? Were you at that time, or any part of that time, actually contemplating doing away with yourself?”

  “Yes, I—yes, I was.”

  “It was a definite intention, my dear?”

  “For a while, yes. It wasn’t so until I happened to see those plants in my mother’s garden. Maybe not too definite even then. I only thought: this would be one way. Then I was thinking, why not take a few, have them on hand if things got worse? Then I was actually taking them, breaking off the tops and shoving them away in the tall grass, keeping the roots.”

  “But I presume you must have been working up to that state of mind for quite a while?”

  “Yes, I had been. It was like a progressive illness—well, I suppose that’s what it really is. Each day a little emptier than the one before, a little harder to care about anything.”

  “You made that infusion of the roots in brandy?”

  “Yes, the next day.”

  “Do you recall the circumstances—what part of the day it was, say?”

  “It was evening, after I’d stopped trying to write that letter—the one I didn’t finish, didn’t mail.”

  “You gave up entirely on that letter, didn’t you?—I mean, you decided it couldn’t do any good?”

  “Oh, that’s true. I was imagining communication when—when in the nature of things there just couldn’t be any. Jimmy—Jim Doherty and I never really—never saw each other, never heard—”

  “Callista, I’m not sure the jury—it’s a difficult thing to express.”

  “I know, Mr. Warner, and I’m doing it badly. Well—sometimes a person can get rid of the self-preoccupation long enough to really know someone else, without illusion or pretense. It’s like that with Edith Nolan and me. We—communicate. But with Jimmy—with Jim Doherty and me it was all illusion. On both sides. And I gave up on that letter because I realized rather suddenly that I was—talking to someone who wasn’t there.” (And he isn’t here in the courtroom—he is—it doesn’t matter.) “You asked something else—oh, about the monkshood. Yes, I made the infusion that night, and then pushed it away to the back of the shelf. I don’t know how to tell this either, Mr. Warner. There’s a fascination about an ugly and foolish thing like that. I don’t understand it: it takes hold of you in spite of yourself. I remember I almost poured out a drink from it, that night, simply from a sort of curiosity, and then I thought—this is going to sound idiotic—”

  “Never mind, just tell it as it comes to you.”

  “Well, I thought: Look, Callista, if you can be interested and curious about a miserable thing like this, maybe you could be interested in better things. After a while if not now. So don’t drink it. And I didn’t of course—I just pushed it to the back of the shelf and—oh, I read that evening, I think. Some book or other. It didn’t hold me, I wasn’t quite alive, but it was something to do. That Saturday evening after the picnic was probably the time I came nearest to actually drinking the stuff.”

  “I see. A week later, Callista—I mean Sunday, August 16th—did you telephone to Ann Doherty?”

  “Yes, early in the afternoon.”

  “You wanted to reach her and not Jim, is that right?”

  “Yes. If Jimmy had answered the phone, I don’t know—I suppose everything would be different, wouldn’t it? I wasn’t prepared to talk to him then. Maybe I’d’ve hung up without speaking. Anyway Ann did answer, and I—asked her over.”

  “Did you say why you wanted to see her?”

  “No, I—hadn’t quite braced myself up to telling her the situation. I kept it to small talk, on the phone. She sounded very friendly—well, she always did. She happened to mention that Jimmy had gone to New York for overnight, and that’s when I asked if she’d come over—said I wanted to talk to her about something. I don’t suppose I made it sound important—as I say, I hadn’t fully made up my mind about telling her anything.”

  “Were you in a different mood that day, Callista?”

  “Very different. Some other things—nothing to do with Jimmy, or with Ann—had been sort of cleaned up for me, the night before.” As she spoke, Callista was meeting her mother’s gaze across the courtroom for the first time that day. Her words had no visible effect on the fixed pose of sad quiet, the dignity of the rejected Mother deeply wronged. Callista deduced that the Face of The Mother was saying: “You see how it is: I her Mother am not even allowed to testify.” “I’m not sure, Mr. Warner,
if it’s what you call relevant.”

  “Well, Callista, your mood, your state of mind at that time, is certainly relevant in the ordinary sense. Legally, the question of relevance gets difficult when we’re dealing with subjective matters. If I correctly understand the rulings during previous testimony, the Court is taking a generous and realistic attitude on this question. The nature of the case demands it, since, as I said in my opening words, we are not contesting most of the circumstantial evidence. Subject to correction by the Court, Callista, I’ll leave it to you whether you think that a mention of what happened the night before would help the jury understand your situation. If you feel it would, go ahead and tell it, and we can check you if it seems to be going too far afield.”

  “I think it might help to explain things. But I’ll leave out the details—they don’t matter.” By the way, Mrs. Chalmers, I’m your daughter—remember? They tell me I’m on trial for murder. “It had to do with my relation to my mother, Mr. Warner. There had been some—tensions between us for quite a while, and that Saturday evening—it was the 15th, wasn’t it?—yes—we sort of cleared it up. In a way.” Mrs. Chalmers, Mrs. Herbert Chalmers, I am about to smile at you, toward you anyway. Will it make any difference? “You remember, sir—Miss Welsh testified about my going out to Shanesville that Saturday evening, and how bad-mannered I was—and I don’t doubt I was too, I can be pretty stupid—call it a one-track mind. Though it’s a fact I just didn’t know Ann Doherty was there on the porch, until Miss Welsh testified to it. She must have been back in the shadows, I suppose, and I was thinking so hard about what I wanted to talk over with my mother that I didn’t hear her speak.” Callista felt her lips curve. It was surely a smile; she meant it for a smile. “I guess I was in a fog.” Yes, fog—as inexorably as deepening fog, the realization came over Callista that Mrs. Victoria Johnson Blake Chalmers was quite simply not listening. Present in the courtroom, knowing at least as well as most of the other spectators the general story of what was going on down here in the arena; but not listening. Mrs. Chalmers was maintaining a Face; a very necessary thing to do. She would have been perfectly willing to smile back, Callista guessed, if she could have divided her attention, listened just enough to understand that it might be appropriate, right now, for the Face to smile. “So I went indoors to—see my mother, and we—talked.” Fog—words pushed into fog move sluggishly, as if through pain.