One True Thing

by Anna Quindlen

  But still there were complaints about the old building, although those who had lived in Langhorne all their lives held out against change, even when Ed Best was elected district attorney and made the construction of a new, more modern facility the linchpin of his campaign, along with more DWI crackdowns. His chief opponent was the assignment judge, a forty-year veteran of the bench named James P. Hallorhan who lived two blocks from the courthouse and had the biggest office in the building, a corner one with mahogany paneling and a small ornamental fireplace.

  After he died his fight was carried on by his widow, a deceptively fragile-looking woman named Alice who took her exercise each day by walking to the courthouse, roving the halls greeting old acquaintances, some of them judges in the middle of hearing a case, and then walking home. But Ed Best, dim as he sometimes seemed, dreamed up a way to get Alice Hallorhan on his side, and that was how the county came to break ground, the year before my mother died, for the James P. Hallorhan County Justice Building on a cul de sac off the highway, a cube of glass and stone that would hold prosecutors, police, and all court functions.

  It was only half done, having run into all manner of construction troubles, from the ventilation to the substructure, and so on the day I testified before the grand jury charged with deciding whether I had killed my mother, I did it in the old courthouse, which was as easy and familiar as almost any building in Langhorne to me. In tenth grade we had had a kind of rudimentary moot court competition on the death penalty, and I had been the judge. I had sentenced the defendant to life without parole after usurping the privilege of the Supreme Court from the bench and ruling the death penalty unconstitutional. I liked the view from up there. I liked the power.

  Thank God no one had remembered, or, remembering, told the newspaper and television people. The day I testified before the grand jury the Tribune ran a profile of me which began on page one and was spread over a full page inside. They used my high school graduation picture, a photograph taken in the statehouse the day I won the essay contest in which I held my certificate to my chest in much the same manner I had held the ID board when my mug shots were taken, and, of course, the picture taken as I left the courthouse after I’d been bailed out. GOLDEN GIRL, said the headline, and below it in smaller type A LIFE OF STELLAR ACCOMPLISHMENT ENDS IN A MURDER CHARGE.

  “Ends?” I said to Jeff that morning on the phone. “Ends? I’m not dead. I’m not even indicted yet.”

  “Count your blessings,” he said. “There’s not a single Angel of Death reference in the whole thing.”

  The truth was that it wasn’t a bad piece. It was accurate as far as that went, except that it said that my mother’s parents had emigrated from Germany and that my father’s had operated a resort in the mountains, an error that made me conjure up my grandfather Gulden in a sun visor and plaid Bermudas instead of overalls. It quoted from the same sections of my mercy killing essay that Bob Greenstein had picked out in his office, and from my graduation speech: “Authority must earn the right to lead, and we owe ourselves the right to refuse to follow if they do not.” “Oh, shit,” I said, but even though I could remember standing at the podium on the lawn of Langhorne High School pontificating in a high voice, more frightened than I would ever have admitted, my mother’s eyes hidden by her sunglasses, my father’s eyebrows raised so slightly only someone who knew him as well as I did could have seen it, I could not remember speaking those words. But they sounded like me.

  They’d talked to Jonathan’s father, who said that he was confident that the jury would understand what I’d done and take into account how worn down I’d been by caring for my mother—“insanity defense” I said aloud—and to several of the Minnies, who talked of how tired I’d looked the day we decorated the tree. They’d talked to Halley McPherson, who showed them the crib with tears in her eyes and recounted my words “It’ll all be over soon” when she visited before my mother’s death. They talked to several anonymous nurses at the hospital, who said that I seemed unusually well-versed in medical techniques. They talked to high school classmates who did not like me, and high school classmates who said they liked me but could understand if others did not. There was a sophomoric poem I had submitted to the literary magazine, which had held up publication for several weeks while it was decided at the highest levels whether the word “fuck” could be rendered as F### or whether the poem would have to be removed. “We all knew Ellen would have made a fuss about that,” said my P.E. teacher Mrs. Schultz, who for some reason had been on the faculty board of the student publications.

  God, it was a bad poem. And the Tribune rendered it as (expletive deleted).

  Julie Heinlein, she of the soft-voiced phone messages, had written the story in a workmanlike fashion. But she had not talked to Jeff or my father, to Jules or Teresa, to Mrs. Forburg or Ed Best. When I read the profile all I could think of was what I had told Bob Greenstein about people wanting their little stories neat, tied up with a ribbon. The newspaper article was accurate, as far as it went; it just wasn’t exactly true, from the air of lugubriousness that seemed to hang over recollections of our family life to its rendering of me as a woman of steel, with neither qualms nor conscience.

  “She didn’t do it,” said Bob Greenstein, in the third paragraph of the story. “That’s all you need to know.”

  “I’ve known Ellen since she was reading the Nancy Drew mysteries,” said Isabel Duane, if Julie Heinlein’s description was to be believed, with some asperity, “and it has never for a minute occurred to me that she would have hurt Kate in any way. She loved her so much. If you could have seen her pushing her wheelchair when they came in here—nobody who saw them could believe it.”

  It was a lovely thing for Mrs. Duane to do, except that I’d always hated the Nancy Drew books.

  Bob was furious about it when he came to pick me up that morning in the low-slung red sports car that he drove, I was convinced, only to prove he was capable of getting out of it. “Why do you think it’s in there this morning?” he said. “Best leaked them the date of your appearance. It’s bad enough you insist on doing this, without a whole mess of reporters and photographers there when you do it.”

  “But I thought the grand jury proceedings were all secret,” I said.

  “In theory they are, my friend, but in practice I would not put it past that shit to up his public profile with a well-placed word to someone from the Tribune at the Kiwanis.” He shot a glance at me sideways. “Do us both a favor,” he said. “Don’t smile this time.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said.

  When we got to the courthouse—BE JUST, AND FEAR NOT, I read aloud, and Bob just sighed—he swung around to a back entrance and tapped on a steel door, tried the knob, tapped again. A guard opened the door a crack, spoke to him, looked from him to me, and shook his head.

  “We’ve got to go in the front,” Bob said. “Don’t answer any questions.”

  As we came up the steps I shivered. I was wearing the blue suit I’d worn for the funeral; Jeff had brought it from the house. My hair hung long and loose around my face, and for the first time since Thanksgiving I was wearing makeup.

  The reporters were in the lobby, in the circular rotunda with its mosaic floor laid in the pattern of an enormous bronze and gold sun. One of them, a radio reporter with a tape recorder tucked under his arm, saw us first, and a kind of muted cry went up, and then like some grotesque animal they all moved together, cameras, notebooks, pens, and microphones held high like weapons. I could not pick out one question from another: Why have you decided to testify? What are your plans? What do you want them to know about what happened?

  We pushed through but they moved with us to a bank of elevators at the back of the building, the elevators Bob had hoped to catch in the basement instead of on the lobby floor when he knocked at the door outside. Some of the questions were for him: Why did you decide to have her testify? Will she testify at the trial? I looked down at the toes of my pumps, which my mother had bought for me. We�
�d worn the same size shoes. I thought there was a little mud around the edge of the soles from the last time I’d worn them.

  Bob guided me into the elevator and then stood in the doorway so no one else could get in. He held the door and leaned forward, his square bulk blocking me from their sight. “You tell Ed Best he could lose his license for a stunt like this,” he hissed, and there was an infinitesimal moment of complete silence, and in it I heard the voice of someone, faintly, as though from far away, asking plaintively, “Well, who is it?” And the doors closed.

  “That was smart,” I said, “the way you did that.”

  “Yeah? Tell me why it was smart.”

  “Because now instead of focusing on me testifying, they’ll focus on you threatening Ed Best,” I said.

  “You’re smart, too,” he said. “Just remember that smart helped get you into this mess and smart isn’t going to get you out. You’ve reached the limits of smart.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I remembered from the day of the moot court competition in high school that the courtrooms had long narrow windows and burnished paneling like fine furniture around the bench, the jury box, along the walls. The courtroom ceilings had been high, and the symmetry of justice had been written in the seating arrangements, the judge above it all, the jury to one side, looking on, passing judgment.

  The grand-jury room was nothing at all like that. It was less than half the size of one of those courtrooms, with two small windows along one wall that let in so little light that someone had put on the overhead fixture, a rectangular fluorescent light that flickered every now and then. Bob had told me that there were twenty-three jurors, but he had not told me that we would all sit in such close quarters that I only recognized the prosecutor, an assistant in Mr. Best’s office, because he was the one wearing the suit and tie. The others were in less formal dress, ranged on hard chairs in a loose semicircle around a small table. In the beginning I tried not to look at them, as though eye contact would put them on the spot. I was sworn and I found something soothing about it, as though I had said a prayer for my own soul. I intended to tell the truth, although perhaps not all of it, depending on the questions.

  But as the prosecutor began to ask me how I came to nurse my mother and how she had deteriorated and who had been alone with her the last day of her life I began to look, not at him, a man perhaps ten years older than I with a shaggy haircut and a shirt collar at least a half-size too small, as though he was finding it difficult to move past the person he’d been at twenty-five. I began to look at the people ranged around me.

  Part of it was that I wanted them to understand what had happened, but part was simply curiosity. It was difficult for me to believe that there were nearly two dozen people in Montgomery County I didn’t know by name, hadn’t been served by at the five-and-ten or the luncheonette, hadn’t seen in the parking lot of the supermarket with one of my classmates in the car.

  The truth was that several of them looked familiar, not familiar enough to put a name to but familiar enough to know that I’d looked across the pumps at the gas station, perhaps, and seen him pumping gas into his truck, or walked by the beauty parlor that stood across the street from Sammy’s and seen her under the dryer, bought tomatoes at a roadside stand from this one or seen that one shoveling a walk in front of some house across town from my own.

  But there was one woman I thought I knew from the moment I first looked at her, although the longer I stayed in that room—and it was a long time, almost two hours, if you counted those times when I was sent out and invited back in again, the prosecutor with his lips pressed together over slightly protruding teeth—the more I realized I didn’t know her so much as apprehend her, perhaps understand her. She was in that middle ground between aging and elderly, a thin woman with silver hair worn handsomely in a short bob swept to one side, eschewing the fuzzy permanents of her kind. She wore a medium-blue knit suit with a skirt that just covered her knees, and she held her hands clasped in her lap, narrow white hands dappled with the dark spots of age. From time to time she turned the two rings atop each other on her left hand. I could imagine her living in one of the pretty small houses just to the south of ours, the widow of a middle manager or even a Langhorne administrator.

  But it was her posture that made me tell everything, after a while, to her and her alone, the face in the audience an actor chooses to emote to. She sat very straight but she seemed to yearn forward just a little bit, her shoulders ahead of her hips, and she looked into my face with a searching look in her blue eyes, as though she was waiting for me to solve the puzzle she’d been working slowly these many weeks, to tell her what really happened.

  “Miss Gulden,” said the prosecutor, whose name was Peters, “I’d like you to read something.” He handed me a copy of the essay I’d written for the essay contest—the original copy, it appeared, for it was stamped with a date six years before and the e in the words was slightly lifted, something my electric typewriter had always done after I’d knocked it off my desk one day.

  “You wrote this?” he said after I’d read it aloud.

  “I did,” I said.

  “And won first prize in the annual state Young Writers’ Competition?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still agree with the sentiments in that essay?”

  “Yes,” I said, “as far as they go.”

  “What do you mean by ‘as far as they go’?”

  “I still believe that people are kept alive long past the time when life is of any use to them. But when I wrote that essay, I knew nothing about the subject firsthand.”

  They were all looking at me now, except for a young man, almost a boy, really, who was staring conspicuously out one of the windows.

  “And now you do.”

  “Yes.”

  “From your mother’s illness and death.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did your mother agree with the sentiments expressed here?”

  “We never discussed it,” I said.

  “Not when you won the contest?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Not when you were caring for her, doing the things you’ve described, watching her deteriorate, in your opinion.”

  “No.”

  “Miss Gulden,” he said, tapping the palm of his hand with a pencil in a gesture so reminiscent of a movie gesture that I almost smiled, except that I heard Bob Greenstein’s voice saying, “Don’t smile, don’t smile.”

  “Miss Gulden,” he said, “did you believe that your mother’s life in her final days was worth living?”

  “That’s not how I would put it.”

  “In your words?”

  “I think my mother had lost her dignity, her place, all the things that made her life happy. She was wearing diapers. She was sleeping almost constantly. And for a woman like her, who’d always been so capable, so full of life, so lively—it was a terrible thing. It was terrible for her and it was terrible for me.”

  “Miss Gulden, did you tell police officers Brown and Patterson that if they had seen your mother they would have thought she was better off dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell Jonathan Beltzer that if you were a good daughter you would put a pillow over her face and suffocate her?”

  “I don’t remember if those were my exact words. I said something like that.”

  “Had you been drinking?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know what constituted an overdose of your mother’s morphine tablets?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know that if you crushed or broke those tablets they would become even more toxic than they already were?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman in the blue suit was leaning toward me, as though she wanted to say something, to ask me her own questions, perhaps to stop me.

  “Do you recall what your mother’s last meal was?”

  It was the first time I had stopped during my testimony. I frowned and
looked down at my hands in my lap and saw again his hand, elegant, graceful, with the silver spoon held in its fingers, up, down, and over, up, down, and over.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “No idea?”

  “I hadn’t had any sleep for several days. It was probably one of several things, either some cream soup, some applesauce, some pudding, maybe some yogurt. She couldn’t eat anything that wasn’t the consistency of baby food.”

  “You would have fed her.”

  “Sometimes she fed herself. It didn’t go very well. I had to change the top sheet.”

  “Did that annoy you?”

  “I was well past being annoyed, Mr. Peters.”

  That was a mistake. “How far past, Miss Gulden?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question.

  “At the risk of repeating myself,” he continued, “I want to go back. You believe that there are times when someone’s quality of life is so compromised that death, whether natural or assisted, would be preferable.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You believe that your mother’s quality of life was horribly impaired at the end of her life?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you give her a fatal overdose of morphine?”

  “No.”

  “Given what else you’ve said, I’ve got to ask—why not?”

  “Why not what?”

  “If you believe in what you wrote and you believe in what you’ve said, it would be logical for you to have given your mother an overdose. You even told the police that that’s what they would have done.”

  “Let me try to explain,” I began, trying not to let my voice rise or harden, and I looked right at the woman in the blue suit, who was sitting perfectly still. “Maybe it’s the difference between saying you’re for capital punishment and being willing to sit there and pull the switch on the electric chair. In theory, I meant these things. But when it’s real, when it’s a real person—it’s different. I was so busy keeping her clean and making her food and making sure she had her medicine, I never stopped to think about anything bigger than how we were going to get through the next hour. Maybe it was like having a baby in that respect. Everyone talks about how wonderful it is, how fulfilling, but I’ve always thought it seems like one little piece of drudgery after another, a feeding, a changing, a bath, and maybe it’s only afterward that it seems wonderful. I didn’t have time to think about anything more than all those little things, taking care of my mother. It’s so much easier to know just how you feel about things, what you believe, when you’re writing it on paper than when you really have to do anything about it or live with it.”