The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  After today’s ordeal of listening—anticlimactic, yes, the Judge’s voice roughened at the end of his summing-up, at moments not plainly audible, running down like a mechanism with a used-up spring—after the jury had retired, Edith had seen Victoria Chalmers press her hand to her broad pale forehead, rise, accept with sad patience the Associate Professor’s fumbling courtesy with her coat, and move away. She would be having one of her headaches. No nod for Edith—Herb Chalmers gave her one—and no backward look at the arena; but as Victoria turned her head the light washed coldly across her face, and Edith saw plainly that even Victoria was a little changed. A sag of the mouth, a droop of shoulders and sturdy frame, a slowness and uncertainty in the hands adjusting her coat that suggested old age, although she was still in the early forties. She seemed doubtful of her steps, an unsteady hand undecided whether to grasp her handbag or tuck it under her arm. At the exit she did look backward once, with vagueness, as though there might be something she wished to say; or even someone she wished to find. Then like an old lady she rested her arm on Herb’s clumsy hand, and was gone.

  Edith found it was now natural, inevitable, to pity Victoria Chalmers—whatever pity might be worth. Earlier, until the jury went out through that doorway, there had somehow not been time. There was time now for every sort of thought, regret and fear and wonder, time for a swarm of thoughts crowding for attention, pity the least of them—time for anything the mind could do except for the discoveries of happiness and peace. Pity, maybe, was no more than a private vice, with varied by-products, some good, some bad.

  Herb Chalmers had come back an hour later, alone. He made as though to sit down by himself, but seeing her look his way, he shambled to her, side-stepping along a row of vacant seats, and let himself down by her in a long-legged sprawl. “I suppose nothing’s happened yet?”

  “Nothing. Is Mrs. Chalmers all right?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his weariness lending the force of truth to the absent reply. He yawned convulsively, apologizing for it in a mumble. “She’s pretty used up of course. Felt she couldn’t stay, and I thought that was sensible. I took her home, and maybe she can sleep. It’s not as if we could do anything now. For a while. You see, I feel sure that they—” he rubbed large hands over his face and shook his head—“no, God knows I don’t feel sure of anything any more. Anything at all.”

  Herb also had aged. More deeply sunken lines, more gray in the thinning hair. He had evidently cut himself shaving that morning; the scab at the edge of his gaunt jawbone was overlaid by the day’s growth of silvery bristle, making a sort of Skid Row shadow across his wan, weak, intelligent face.

  “They can’t find first degree,” Edith said. “It’s not possible.” Yet she might be only trying to convince herself; she heard no strength in her own voice. “The Judge’s summing-up—oh, he had to define all the possible verdicts, but the way he did it, the stress he laid on reasonable doubt—and then even the very fact that she said what she did, at the end—they can’t do that.”

  He mumbled what might have been agreement, then turned to her suddenly, large-eyed, wounded, ineffectual. “They could though, Miss Nolan. Juries…we have to face the fact, anything’s possible from acquittal to—first degree. Law tries to go by logic, but never quite succeeds.” More than one way, she thought inconsequently, of facing facts: walk up to a fact and spit in its eye, Callista’s way; or, like Herb Chalmers, just stand there. And you could make out a pretty good case for Herb’s way, sometimes. My way—my way… “Why didn’t he call me, Miss Nolan?”

  “Well, he—I think he felt that character witnesses—and that’s all I amounted to—couldn’t help much. Any more of that would have pointed up the lack of any other kind of evidence. I suppose juries discount the word of friends and relatives; it’s natural.”

  He wasn’t listening much. “I would have done anything. I failed her somehow, somewhere along the line. From the start, I guess.” He sighed and fidgeted. “But maybe she’d have resented anyone situated in her father’s place. I remember when I first met her, a kid of eleven, I said: ‘Look, Callie, I’m not your father and couldn’t try to be anything like him. I’m just me, a person, and I’d like us to be friends.’ Eleven—it never got across, you know? Infantile glowering, and then a kind of frozen politeness that I never could break through.” He sat quiet, perhaps aware of her as a listener, gazing aimlessly at the broad knuckles of his bony hands. He said with curious humility and no resentment: “She’s always had a good deal of contempt for me, I think. Children grow up so fast, and we grow old so fast. You know, Miss Nolan, a while ago I started something, a piece of writing—nothing very much, but it might prove interesting. A study of the Cavalier and Courtier Lyrists. I want to relate them to certain trends in modern poetry. You know, it’s never been done. Oh, I suppose it’ll turn out to be just another trifle of academic stuff. But the curious thing—look, I’m afraid I’m boring you or getting on your nerves at a bad time—”

  “No, you’re not, not in the least.” Her impulse toward callous and hopeless laughter ceased of itself, no need to fight it down. Abruptly, there was nothing funny at all about stringy Herb Chalmers having an affair with the saucy music and tenderness of the Lyrists. He was a scholar; he knew his subject; he might even have something to say.

  “Well, the curious thing—” he blushed briefly like a schoolboy, and blew his nose, and sighed—“curious thing, when I was getting together some of my notes for it the other day, I kept thinking—imagining Callista reading it. Escape psychology, I suppose.”

  “Why call it that? ‘Escape’ is just another one of those two-for-a-nickel derogatory noises that people use in place of thinking. Why not escape from ugliness toward something better? Escaping doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten the ugliness is there.”

  “Something in that. Is Warner with her, do you know?”

  “I think so. He wouldn’t leave her unless she asked to be alone.”

  “He surprised me this morning, that closing speech. Two and a half hours. I never thought he’d take all morning, and repeat himself so much. It was—effective, maybe, but it scared me too. I couldn’t help thinking it was effective only for people who already know Callista. I tried to think myself into the position of a juryman, a mind totally alien to Callista’s. Everything he said was good, but he said too much. Trying to ram it through a stone wall.… I suppose you saw how once or twice he lost the thread of what he was saying and just stood there. Looking lost.”

  “Yes. He’s not just a defense lawyer in this thing. He loves her.”

  “I’ve felt that, yes. And so did the jury, I’m afraid—more than he should have let them feel it. It even gave Hunter his cue, I think. After all that thunder and pleading, he could afford to be quiet and cold, and make the mere contrast seem like a virtue. Taking it off now and then to abstract principles the way Warner did—that was good, for us. I can’t believe more than two or three of the jury went along with it. ‘The defense never rests’—yes, but what can that plumber foreman make out of it? Ah, I don’t know.…” The intelligent professor faded, leaving a collapsed and tired old man. He shrugged, looked at his watch, gathered his legs under him. “I’m going out for a smoke. Want to?”

  “No, I’d better stay, Dr. Chalmers. She’ll be coming back when the jury returns, if it does return tonight. She’s always looked for me when she first comes in. I’ve got to be here.”

  “Yes, I—of course.” He blundered away a few steps and turned back to her. “Miss Nolan, I thought you were quite wonderful on the stand—said a number of things I would have liked to say.”

  Edith winced inwardly, wishing he would go. “In the jury’s view I wasn’t good. Another maverick.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He rubbed his sagging face. “Shouldn’t underestimate their intelligence, I suppose. It’s—democracy in action, you might say—something like that.�
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  “Democracy be God-damned,” Edith said. “It’s a human life.”

  “Well, I—see what you mean of course.” He stood tall and drooping near her, so that she must bend her neck awkwardly to see his face as he went on, driven by some compulsion to talk when perhaps he had no real wish to do so: “Strange thing—had a dream a while ago, possibly an echo of my reading—Huck Finn likely. Lost in a fog, on a raft, watching the river stream past me—sometimes the water’d slop up between chinks in the logs. All under a milky fog, no landmarks, but I could see the river all the time, the dark flow of it, now and then trash and broken things sliding past. It went on, you know, years, a hundred years, who could say? And I thought I was motionless, nothing more than a pair of eyes, brain somewhere back of them. Well, but—here was the nightmare, you see—I suddenly understood that I was drifting too, had been all the time. Doesn’t sound like anything in the telling, but it was horrible—I can’t tell you. Drifting all the time when I thought only the river was in motion. The sleeping brain’s comment on myself, you see?—myself as summing up all human stupidity. Or blindness—much kinder word, isn’t it? ‘So may you, when the music’s done, awake and see the rising sun’—that’s from Thomas Carew, I think, died 1639 or around there. My head is an attic, you know, full of little facts with dust on them. They were so concerned, those poets, with treating love itself as a work of art, you’d think to read them superficially they had nothing else on their minds. But there was a depth, Miss Nolan, something you don’t discover right away. All that polish, glitter, gracefulness, word-play, that was something they produced after accepting the squalor and danger and confusion of seventeenth-century living. They knew what they were doing. Reading the avant-garde stuff of nowadays, usually the contrast is merely grotesque, still I keep finding parallels. Here and there. It keeps an old man interested. Well, I’m babbling like second childhood. Telling dreams, at my age! Look, can I get you anything? I think I’ll take a walk around the block, can’t sit still. Coke? Sandwich?”

  “I guess not, thanks all the same. Jumpy stomach.”

  “Mm, I know.” Her neck ached. Please go! He was leaning down, a remote, remotely friendly ghost, a friend of Thomas Carew, also a human being in distress. “A thing like this—you know, Miss Nolan, I believe the very worst of it is that we forget. Because we have to, maybe. We’re beaten down somehow, used up, licked in the end by the daily littleness—head colds, weakening eyesight, the brush-your-teeth-and-put-out-the-milk-bottles sort of thing, and there’s no defense.” At any other time, Edith thought, she would have enjoyed listening to this particular Herb Chalmers. “My God, littleness steals everything, including the last breath. And before then, you see, no matter what we resolve, what we hope for—we forget.”

  “I sha’n’t forget.”

  “I’m fifty, Miss Nolan. You’re still very young. Thirty years from now, d’you think you’ll know just as clearly what’s been happening here, what will happen when those people come back through that door? Ah, I don’t know, I’m talking like a fool—who’s going to see thirty years ahead? Jim Doherty’s already forgetting. In a bar.”

  “What? Did you see him?”

  “Last night he was anyway, and it looked as if he was laying the foundation for a long one. After I took Vic home last night I came back to town, to the college—had to make some kind of pass at the week’s work that’s piled up on me—they’ve been very nice, leave of absence and so on, but I notice things pile up anyway, letters, term papers, what not. On the way home I stopped at Judson’s—that’s uptown, bar where I used to go sometimes with Jim and—Ann, before all this. He was there, tight as a tick, must have been working on it all afternoon. Not here today, I notice. Last night I tried to get him to go home with me, but he’d made friends with some character who looked respectable, capable of putting him to bed right side up.”

  Edith said absently: “Someone will always be around to put him to bed.”

  “Know what you mean. Democracy in action.” I can’t smile, Herb. “Well—go for a walk, I guess. Can’t sit still. ’Bye.” He stumbled off, a weary progress with a slow grab at every chair-back along the awkward route…

  Cecil Warner came through the doorway at the left, alone, his broad face sallow, all ruddiness washed away. He passed the press table with a shake of the head and no other answer to some tactless and poorly timed question. He came up the aisle, and sank with slow motion into the seat beside Edith, relaxing his bulk all at once with the suddenness of an old man’s muscles letting go. “Tell me,” she said.

  “A message. She wanted me to come to you with a message. ‘Tell my friend Edith I’ll sleep well tonight, and ask her whether she’d like me to try Doris Wayne in oil or watercolor.’” He would not quite look at her. “She was smiling, Edith. It seemed to be a little flash of happiness, like a breeze on a still day.”

  “It’s good if she can think ahead. I’ve been trying to, but I can’t. Herb Chalmers was here, wandered off—good Lord, half an hour ago! I’ve just been sitting like a vegetable.” She saw his eyes were held by the clock, against his will. “Cecil, does it necessarily mean anything at all, when they stay out this long?”

  He looked at her then, studying her face as if from a distance, deeply aware of her and certainly no less aware of the girl in the detention cell. He said: “It’s not good.”

  “It’s what would happen if there was a disagreement, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. A disagreement would not be good. A new trial very likely wouldn’t come before Terence Mann. And I wouldn’t be competent, physically competent, to go through it again. I’m getting pains down the left arm, other things—” he waved his hand quickly and irritably to dismiss the concern in her face. “Couldn’t risk conking out in the middle of a trial. That would make a mistrial, then another wait, a third trial with some other attorney, quite likely some other judge—Hangman Cleever for instance. No good, no good. Oh, I shouldn’t have taken it on this time. Or I should have got someone younger to work in court with me. That’s only one mistake I made. I’ve made hundreds. Vanity, vanity, thinking myself better able to defend her than anyone else, and blundering all the time—”

  “No.”

  “Don’t waste your breath comforting me now. I can see it, Edith, I can see it. My last mistake was talking too long this morning. I couldn’t let go, even when I knew I wasn’t getting through to them. Some kind of idiot compulsion to hold off the moment when T.J. would start—as if that could make any difference. A cub fresh out of law school wouldn’t make such an error—I’ve been at it forty years.”

  “Cecil, stop whipping yourself. You did everything possible.”

  “Everything I could, yes. But everything I could do wasn’t enough, and a lot of it was done wrong. A stronger man could have done more, done it better. Why, there’s the big evil of the adversary system, Edith, right under our noses. Should the life or freedom of a human being depend on the perfectly irrelevant strength or weakness of opposing counsel? What in hell do my skill and brains, or T.J.’s, have to do with Callista’s innocence or any of the other facts? What could be more medieval? But we accept it, have accepted it for hundreds of years, meekly, stupidly, as if no other method were possible or worth a thought. I’ve spent my life inside the propositions of a vicious fallacy, and discovered it at sixty-eight.”

  “One man couldn’t do away with the fallacy. It’s too heavily established, and maybe there isn’t enough wisdom in the world yet to develop a better way. You had to work inside of what you found, and it’s not wasted effort. Within the system, you’ve saved a good many lives from public vengeance—and never mind whether they’ve been good lives like Callista’s, or the lives of crooks and psychopaths, that’s not the point. Each time you’ve set your face against public vengeance, you’ve brought some minds that much nearer to learning that the whole notion of vengeance and punishment is wro
ng. You’ve done your share. You’ve been on the side of mercy. How many can say that?”

  “Well, my dear, you’re good for me. Maybe I should have been a doctor. I remember thinking of it for a while, when I was in college—but I felt that the wish wasn’t enough, that I didn’t have the other qualities it needs.”

  “I think a defense lawyer—your kind of defense lawyer, Cecil—is in something like a doctor’s position, but without any adequate sciences to support him. A doctor can draw on chemistry, physiology, pharmacology, a dozen other disci plines, and rely pretty solidly on what he gets from them. A lawyer trying to be useful according to rational ethics—what is there to help him? An infant science of human behavior, full of errors and contradictions and blank spots, hardly more advanced than physiology was in the eighteenth century; and haunted by the crackpots and manipulators too, so that it’s sometimes hell’s own job to separate the science from the special pleading. So I think, Cecil, that anyone who defends a life against the crowd’s desire for a victim, who shows up the flaws in the system by bucking it—he’s pioneering, he’s taking a part in bringing law nearer to reality. I’ll set Clarence Darrow in the same company with Semmelweiss and Pasteur, any time, no strain. And you.”

  He covered his face quickly with his hands; said after a while: “I wish I were a younger man, to hear that.”

  Edith looked away at the clock. Her mind was caught in a brief paralysis of waiting for the next twitch of the minute hand. “I drew something the other night, Cecil, a memory sketch of that jury. It’s curiously good.” She heard his breathing slow and become quiet. “My own style, but the kind of thing I was never able to do before. I want you to see it. Come over soon anyway—I need my friends too, you know. We try, Cecil, oddballs like you and Callista and me, others here and there. Herb Chalmers told me he’s having a thing with the Cavalier and Courtier Lyrists. I started laughing inside—just started because it seemed so damn far away from everything—and then stopped laughing. It’s Herb’s way of trying, using his brains in his own style on what’s nearest to his reach.”