The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “I did experience it. I haven’t denied it.”

  “No? Now I thought that in direct testimony you said something to the effect that you had nothing against her. I think that—in direct testimony under oath—you called her a ‘sweet and harmless girl’—something like that.”

  “I think I said—apart from Jimmy—meaning—apart from the fact that she was his wife—oh, it’s perfectly clear what I meant.”

  “That is, you had nothing against her except that she was in the way?”

  “I never said that—never put it that way, even to myself.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Blake, I think you did.” He turned pages slowly. “Not in those exact words perhaps. ‘Granted also that Ann is good and sweet and conventionally right. Does that give her the right—’ and then the crossed-out words that I think you remember, and then—‘to keep you and me apart and prevent my child from having a father?’ Miss Blake, how much nearer could you come to saying that she was in the way without actually using the words?”

  “The marriage—the fact of their marriage was in the way. I never thought of her as a—a person to be removed—oh, I’m not saying it clearly—I never wanted to—do away with her. My letter says—my letter simply asks him to do something about a separation. And that’s the letter I never even mailed.”

  “All right—it sounds a little involved—the letter doesn’t sound to me as if you were writing about the ‘fact of their marriage,’ but let that go for the present. This is from the first one, a letter you did mail: ‘I fit no pattern. No one can own me, no one can make me over. I was born a heretic and so live. No one can catch me except if I will.’ This time I am frankly puzzled, Miss Blake. It is by chance a quotation from something?”

  “No.”

  “You had been writing affectionately—and poetically, I must say—and then all of a sudden you throw this at him: ‘No one can own me—born a heretic and so live.’ I’m simply puzzled, Miss Blake. Why in the world were you moved to say to James Doherty: ‘No one can catch me except if I will’—why?”

  Warner saw the violent tension and forced relaxation of her folded hands. She said: “It must be—it must be it never occurred to me the letter would be examined by a district attorney.”

  “What?—you mean it’s a form of doubletalk? Hidden significance, something that might be damaging if it came to the eyes of that lowest form of life, a district attorney?”

  “No—no—no hidden significance.” She was turning her head from side to side as if in search of physical escape. “I don’t know how you dissect a love-letter. Do it yourself—do it yourself—”

  “‘No one can catch me except if I will.’ And then you were caught, weren’t you?”

  “Objection!”

  “Sustained—sustained. You know better than that, Mr. Hunter. And step back from the stand a little. I will not have the witness abused.”

  “My regrets, your Honor. I had no such intention.” Throws it like a bone to a dog—Terry’s no dog—but—“Miss Blake, I will read to you from the second letter. You had been asking about Doherty’s religious views, and then you wrote: ‘I wasn’t asking about Ann’s views, blast you—I know she’d condemn the whole thing without a moment’s pause for thought.’ Miss Blake, by what reasoning it is possible to reconcile that remark with your alleged intention of asking Mrs. Doherty to agree to a separation? How could you write that about her, and then in the very same letter talk about her meekly agreeing to a separation?”

  “I suppose—I suppose the remark about her condemning us—I suppose I wrote that in a moment of exasperation, and was calmer later on. I don’t know—must a love-letter be consistent like a dictionary?”

  “All right, I see what you mean, but on that point the inconsistency is really glaring, isn’t it? You knew—elsewhere in the letters you even grudgingly admit—that Mrs. Doherty loved her husband. You knew, and you specifically said, that she would regard your adulterous relation with him as sinful—of course, how could you doubt it, what wife in her right mind wouldn’t regard it so? Yet in almost the same breath you’re talking about a separation, as if you expected Ann Doherty to throw away her marriage, violate her deepest religious convictions, humbly agree to letting her husband go live in sin with his…with you. Consistent?”

  “I suppose it’s inconsistent, if you make no allowance for the other things I said.”

  “Oh—there is something else in the letter that makes it consistent?”

  “I don’t know—I don’t know.”

  “Miss Blake, on the basis of these letters, and your testimony, I will ask you: weren’t you, in all this talk of a sepa ration, simply proposing an impossibility, knowing it was one, to—well, what? See what Jimmy would do? To feel him out maybe, find out if he’d go along with you on some much more direct method of—eliminating the woman who was in the way?”

  “That’s idiotic.”

  “Well, if I’m an idiot you should have no trouble defending yourself.”

  “Witness and counsel will both confine themselves to the issues. No more of that sort of thing.”

  “My apologies, your Honor. All right, Miss Blake, we’ll let that stand. But in my—simple way, I keep trying to understand. Now for example in the rest of this second letter, where you attack Doherty’s religious faith—”

  “I never attacked it! In that letter I was asking about his beliefs, and stating some of my own ideas, nothing more.”

  “Oh? I must have misunderstood. Let’s see—you wrote here, speaking of his religion: ‘Isn’t it mostly a matter of being brought up in a certain way that automatically shuts out other views without seriously examining them? I’m trying to suggest that unlike Ann, you’re really not embedded in religion like a fly in amber.’ That’s not an attack?”

  “No, it is not.”

  “I see—the fault’s with my understanding. And further on you wrote: ‘just where is the mercy, the rationale, the loving-kindness in an ethical-religious system that makes me a whore bound for hell because I love you and welcome intercourse with you and want to live with you?’ But you’re telling me seriously now that this isn’t to be called an attack on the man’s most vital and deeply cherished religious convictions?”

  Callista said: “Mr. Hunter, I think your A is a little bit flat.”

  One giggle sounded, in the back row, probably the same adenoidal snigger that had punctuated the trial from the start. There was no other laughter. Only a hush. The same kind of hush, Warner thought, that might have held the crowd in shock and incredulity, hundreds of years ago, if some candidate for an Inquisition bonfire had ventured to poke a little fun at the officiating priest. And T.J. was in fact performing certain priestly functions. So what am I then? Advocatus diaboli? He saw Terence Mann’s hand clench spasmodically and fall in a droop.

  Hunter said somberly, when the moment was right: “I have no objection to your odd sense of humor, Miss Blake, if you are enjoying it. But I would like a responsive answer.”

  “Mr. Hunter, I did not think of James Doherty as a child. At any rate I tried not to. Apparently I rated his intelligence more highly than you do. I did not think that his religious beliefs had to be coddled and protected, or avoided the way you might avoid too much comment on a child’s make-believe. Therefore in that letter to him I asked him about his beliefs, as one might ask any adult, and I wrote a little about my own ideas. It can’t be called an attack unless you feel that the mere mention of an unreligious idea is an attack on religion. I’m aware that a lot of people do feel that way. They take all dissent as if it were an unkind criticism of themselves. Maybe Doherty did too, but I didn’t think so at the time.”

  Could she have won that round, or partly won it? It seemed to Cecil Warner that her voice had recovered some steadiness and coolness. Fielding looked somewhat impressed, as well as Helen Bu
tler, LaSalle, and maybe Miss Wainwright. But the others were annoyed, or puzzled, or not listening. And about Fielding it was never possible to be sure.

  “He’s ‘Doherty’ to you now? Not ‘Jimmy’ any more, just ‘Doherty’?”

  She turned her face to the Judge with a look of blindness. “Must I answer that?”

  “You need not,” said Judge Mann. “I think you might withdraw the question, Mr. Hunter.”

  But even at that moment—the Judge manifestly friendly, Hunter showing up badly as his antagonism became too obviously personal and overdramatized—even at that more or less favorable moment Warner felt a change in Callista, a retreat or a weakening, as though before his eyes she had slipped further away from him, almost out of sight and hearing. He might, he supposed, be exaggerating her look of increased exhaustion, a fault in his own powers of observation. The pain slid down his arm again, compelling some part of his mind to mumble: Heart?—and irrelevant? Callista was not necessarily in flight, not necessarily losing her desire to live. A better part of his mind recalled a better voice, speaking with a nearly incomprehensible sweetness: “Living is journeying, and love’s a region we can enter for a while.”

  “I withdraw my question. Miss Blake, as the author of these letters, I take it you are the one person best qualified to explain this sentence: ‘You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free.’”

  “Oh—oh—explain it by what follows, can’t you? I think when I wrote that I wasn’t referring to Ann.”

  “Well, not exactly, Miss Blake. The words I see on this page are: ‘No, I don’t hate Ann, I was not thinking only of Ann when I wrote that.’ Only, Miss Blake—that seems to say pretty plainly that you’re at least including Ann Doherty in what you wrote about your Jimmy being a prisoner. Doesn’t it?”

  “All right—if you wish.”

  “It’s no question of what I wish, Miss Blake.”

  “I think it is—I think you—no, never mind, I don’t mean that. Go ahead and ask your question—what do you want to know?”

  “I am asking for your interpretation of that sentence: ‘You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free’—insofar as it does refer to Ann Doherty.”

  Her voice had gone dull and flat, hard to hear from Warner’s place: “No interpretation except the obvious one. His marriage trapped him, confined him.” Warner’s ears had begun a faint ringing; he undid the top button of his shirt—a little better. “I suppose marriage does that for anyone, man or woman, and usually the restrictions are voluntarily accepted, welcomed, or so people like to think. I suppose that’s all I meant.”

  “But the rest of the sentence, Miss Blake—‘I wish I might set you free’—what did you mean by that?”

  “Why, the—the separation—what I’ve said repeatedly—I think I wrote about that in the very next paragraph, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did,” said Hunter in a dull and abstracted voice that curiously echoed her own. “So you did. ‘You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free.’” He came out of his abstraction briskly. “Well—no more about that? Nothing you wish to add?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I see. ‘Are we savages to be held in line by magic words mumbled in the mouth of a priest?’—do you want to comment on that sentence from your letter, Miss Blake? Explain, perhaps, why it’s not to be taken as an attack on James Doherty’s religion?”

  “Genuine faith can’t be attacked, Mr. Hunter, because it hasn’t anything to do with reason. Religious people sometimes admit that themselves, if they’ve done any thinking about it. I remember hoping rather foolishly that he would be able to see my side of the question. As for what I wrote there, it’s a—a comment on superstition. If you heard it in ordinary conversation it wouldn’t trouble you much. It’s important now only because you’ve decided to try me for irreligion as well as murder.”

  “No, Miss Blake, I am still concerned with your attitude toward law, as it bears on your credibility and on the issues of this trial. Now I hear that the marriage sacrament to you is a superstition proper to savages—that’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

  “Marriage is a legal status. A marriage certificate is a legal document. When you talk about the sacrament of marriage you’re expressing a religious view that has no legal meaning.”

  “Oh, well—”

  “Ask any lawyer.”

  “Why, as an amateur lawyer, Miss Blake, you happen to be perfectly right. But that isn’t quite the point, is it? It seems to me that in tossing off a comment like that to James Doherty on the subject of his marriage to Ann Doherty you were placing yourself pretty far above the law as well as above religion. Heard now, under these circumstances, doesn’t it sound pretty arrogant even to you?”

  “Not nearly as arrogant as the first premises of a true believer or a prosecuting attorney—”

  The break in her voice had been unmistakable. Warner knew that if he stood up then and spoke, he would only be compounding disaster by drawing more attention to it. When did I lose her? When did she go away? A little while ago she still desired to live. He tried to recast the outline of his closing speech—more emphasis here, less there. And perhaps in redirect some of the damage could be repaired. The defense never rests.

  “I suppose I must leave it at that,” Hunter said. “But maybe I ought to remind you, Miss Blake, that I could have no interest in making any personal attack against you, as you seem to feel I’m doing. I am simply a servant of the State, with a duty to perform.”

  “No,” she said emptily, “that’s not quite true. Impartiality isn’t any part of the system. You hate and fear me because—”

  “Miss Blake,” said Judge Mann sharply, “for your own sake there must be no such expressions of personal feeling. It’s perfectly true that impartiality is hard to achieve, be cause we’re all human. But in a law court we do try to achieve it. This procedure, this sometimes clumsy mechanism of a trial—it’s an attempt at fairness, objectivity, the best we can do under the present conditions of society. Now I must warn you, and very urgently: simply answer the prosecutor’s questions as plainly as you can, unless the Court rules you need not answer, and don’t try to go beyond those questions. That rule—in fact the whole procedure—is for your own protection.”

  Directly to the Judge, and quietly, but also as though she had not really taken in his words at all, Callista said: “I never wanted her to die.”

  Warner saw Judge Mann turn to him, distress momentarily plain to read, as though the Judge and not the defense were most in need of help. “Mr. Warner, if you wish a recess—”

  “No!” said Callista, and that was a cry. “I want this to be finished. I’m perfectly able to answer the questions, but I can’t go away and come back to it, I can’t do that. No recess now, please!”

  “Your Honor, I think—so long as my client feels able to continue and wishes to—but—reserving the privilege of asking for a recess later if—”

  “Yes, certainly, Mr. Warner. Whenever you want to request it.”

  Hunter said, gently and mildly, no longer half-crouched like a man readying himself to rape, but standing some distance from the witness stand, almost careless in his quiet—“You never wanted her to die, Callista?”

  “No, I—yes, when—nobody ever answered Pilate.”

  “Yes some of the time, no some of the time—that would be natural, perfectly human, wouldn’t it, Callista?”

  “I suppose.…”

  “Does it mean, Callista, that you’ve remembered what happened in that lapse of memory—the thing you couldn’t tell Mr. Lamson?”

  “Yes.”

  Warner understood he had risen. But there were no words. She must know that he would come to her if he could; but she would not look at him now—only at Hunter, and without hostility, but with somber recog
nition, as if suddenly after much bewilderment she understood why he was there and what purposes he might serve.

  “What happened, Callista?”

  “I heard her take the bottle from the shelf, and the sound of a glass. I heard her come to my door, and knock, and say that she’d poured a drink for me. I lay still. I deceived myself a little, I think—I tried to imagine it was not the poison, then I tried to tell myself she would not drink it. But for a few seconds or minutes the strongest part of me was the part that held me there, willing that she should drink it. When she was gone, and I knew what had happened, that self, that part of me, was no longer in command. Then I became—whatever else I am, and have been since then. Now I’ll answer no more questions, even from those I love.”

  II

  The courtroom had gone into a silence where voices were remembered with uncertainty, like the dead. The judge’s chair was empty. Three reporters talked in small murmurs at the press table, waiting it out, and a few spectators remained. Edith watched Mr. Delehanty appear from the small side door at her left, take up with quiet importance a manila folder from his idle desk, mutter inaudibly to one of the bailiffs, glance first at an old-fashioned gold watch from his pocket and then toward the door on the right through which the jury had disappeared three hours ago; then he tiptoed in dignity away. It was nine o’clock in the evening of Friday, December 11th. Closing speeches, the judge’s summing up and charge to the jury—done, and anticlimactic all of them, for it seemed to Edith that it was Callista her self who had closed the trial, yesterday. “I’ll answer no more questions—” standing up then, even before she was dismissed, but waiting with the politeness of a tired guest until Hunter murmured something that Edith did not hear; and she stepped down, took hold of Cecil Warner’s hand, and walked with him drowsily to the defense table, and sat leaning her head back against his arm, eyes closed, until the Judge announced adjournment for the day. No part of the courtroom ritual now remained—except one. The long finger of the electric wall clock jerked, and was still a while.