Choosing Sophie

by Leslie Carroll

  “Mrs. Ashe, the court is anxious for your answer,” urged Sherman Weinstock.

  “Jealous,” she said finally. “I have to say I was just a teensy bit jealous.” She glanced nervously at Glenn, seated on the bench behind the petitioners’ counsel.

  “Only a teensy bit?” said Mr. Weinstock, raising an eyebrow.

  “Well…maybe a little bit more than that—but I didn’t discourage Sophie from trying to find her biological mother.”

  “I didn’t ask you that, Mrs. Ashe. Please confine your responses to the questions I pose. I would like to strike the rest of Mrs. Ashe’s reply—after she admitted that she was more than a teensy bit jealous—from the record.”

  Judge Randazzo turned to the court reporter. “So ordered.”

  “And how did you feel when you learned that your daughter, Sophie, was successful in locating Ms. deMarley?”

  “Jealous,” admitted Joy with evident discomfort.

  “I have no further questions for this witness,” Weinstock said.

  “So, you were jealous,” Cap Gaines said, picking up the thread on his cross-examination.

  “I was afraid it would mean that Sophie would love Glenn and me less, somehow.”

  “But did that happen?”

  “No, Mr. Gaines. It didn’t. She’s still the same Sophie. Only now she doesn’t leave things lying around anymore for other people to pick up. I don’t know how Olivia—Livy—did it, because she said she had the same problem with Sophie after Sophie moved in with her. But somehow she managed to make a difference in a way that Glenn and I never could. I mean, it’s probably a silly little thing, but still…”

  “And does that make you jealous, too?”

  A little laugh escaped Joy’s lips. “Oh no—I’m thrilled!”

  Cap Gaines smiled. “That’s all, Your Honor.”

  Glenn Ashe was then called to the stand and sworn in.

  “Would you characterize your daughter Sophie as a ‘daddy’s girl’?” questioned Sherman Weinstock.

  Glenn grinned. “Oh, absolutely!”

  “And why is that?”

  “Well…we have so many of the same interests…especially baseball and softball. Her mother—Joy—isn’t interested in sports.”

  “Is Olivia deMarley interested in sports, would you say—beyond the outcome of the lawsuit?”

  Cap Gaines rose from his chair. “Objection! Speculation. Counsel is calling for the witness to speculate on the respondent’s interests.”

  “Sustained,” said the judge.

  “I’ll rephrase the question, Your Honor. Mr. Ashe, given your contact with Ms. deMarley, would you say that she shares the same passion for baseball and softball that you and Sophie do?”

  “She shares the same passion for Sophie that Joy and I do,” said Glenn. “That much is very clear to me. You could give me a stack of Bibles and I wouldn’t say any different.”

  “Move to strike as nonresponsive. Please answer the question I posed, Mr. Ashe.”

  “I think Livy has a lot to learn about the game of baseball, from a professional standpoint. But I know she enjoys watching her daughter on the field. Livy didn’t miss a single game the Clarendon Kumquats played all year. And I know she’s watched all of Sophie’s game tapes, going back to her days in Little League.”

  Glenn’s testimony frustrated Mr. Weinstock no end; he was clearly intent on letting the judge know what he felt in his heart, even if he strayed from the attorney’s questions, which he knew were designed to box him in, in a way that would help the petitioners.

  On cross-examination, Cap Gaines asked him, “What do you think is the reason we’re all here in court today?”

  “To give evidence as to whether Sophie and Livy have ‘closed the circle,’ according to August deMarley’s last will and testament.”

  “And in your view, Mr. Ashe, does this closing of the circle, specifically, actually have anything to do with the game of baseball itself?”

  Glenn thought about it. “Uhh…not really,” he replied. “No. Closing the circle, in my view, and, well, in the letter, too, means demonstrating that there is a genuine mother-daughter connection between Livy and Sophie.”

  “And in your view, do you believe that connection has been established?”

  “I do, sir. And I believe it will only get stronger.”

  “And why do you believe that?”

  Glenn scratched his head. The judge had made him remove his Clarendon Kumquats hat in the courtroom. “Baseball has a way of bringing people closer together. ‘There’s no I in team,’ you know—and all that. And fans that may have nothing else in common share a passion for their favorite team, and an unregenerate antipathy to the team’s biggest rival. In our case, if Livy gets the controlling interest in the Cheers, it would be a dream come true for our daughter. All her life, she’s loved that team like it was the Little Engine That Could, even before she discovered she was related to the owner. Sophie’d talk about August deMarley and his decisions the way Yankee fans discuss George Steinbrenner. Already, Livy has made Sophie ecstatic by respecting her analysis of the players’ abilities during tryouts. You should see the two of them with their heads together poring over statistics. Do any of you realize how important it is to a kid’s self esteem to have a parent come to her for advice? And mean it?”

  My lawyer turned to the judge and smiled. “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Judge Randazzo looked at his watch. “It’s looking like lunch, folks.”

  “Your Honor, with all due respect, I’m as hungry as anyone in this room, but I’m afraid that if we begin with the last witness after we’ve all digested, that we’ll have to continue the case for at least another day. Judicial delay is justice denied,” argued Cap Gaines. “And spring training is about to get under way. The players need to know who their biggest Cheerleader is going to be.”

  The judge cracked a smile. “Stick to law, Mr. Gaines. Punning isn’t your forte.” He summoned his court clerk with a wave. “Can we get an order from Katz’s Deli, do you think?” he whispered to the clerk.

  “I don’t think they deliver, sir,” murmured the clerk.

  “Ahh.” Judge Randazzo leaned back in his chair. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, his accent marking him as a son of Queens. “We’re going to take a brief recess so that my clerk, Mr. Higginbottom here, can take everyone’s order. And while he grabs a taxi for Katz’s Deli, we’ll hear the testimony of Mr. deMarley. When the sandwiches arrive, we’ll take a break, and then resume after everyone has eaten. Does that satisfy you, counselors?”

  The attorneys nodded.

  “Fine.” The judge beckoned to Marty. “Mr. deMarley, would you please take the stand.”

  Marty wiped his sweaty palms on his Cheers 0 jersey. He, too, was hatless, as the judge had banned any nonreligious headgear in his courtroom. Otherwise Marty would have been wearing a Cheers baseball cap.

  “Put your right hand on the Bible and raise your left hand, sir,” said the bailiff. “Now repeat after me: ‘I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’”

  Cousin Marty repeated the oath and sat down. I could tell he thought the wooden swivel chair was uncomfortable. Not surprising, since his skinny butt had no padding.

  “Mr. deMarley, how long have you held shares in the Cheers organization?” Sherman Weinstock asked him.

  “Objection. Irrelevant,” said Cap Gaines, rising.

  “Sustained. Mr. Weinstock, stick to business.”

  “I am, Your Honor. I am establishing a pattern here.”

  “All right,” Judge Randazzo sighed. “I’ll allow it. But you’ve been warned, counselor. The witness may answer the question.”

  “Ever since I was eighteen years old. But Uncle Augie never allowed me to have enough of them to make a difference. I love the Cheers more than Cousin Livy does. And certainly more than Sophie does. I’ve had stock options since before she was even born! Livy
always got whatever she wanted,” Marty fretted glumly. “And she never thought about anyone else’s feelings,” he added accusatorily. When we were growing up, she always got everything and I never got anything.”

  Funny how I don’t remember it that way. Did Cousin Marty reside in an alternate universe? In my galaxy I recall Marty’s dad, my uncle Alan, being a pretty nice guy who used to take us to places like the natural history museum and the circus. My dad was a cold fish who never took me anywhere and disapproved of everything I did.

  “I don’t understand what any of this has to do with the matter at hand,” said the judge.

  “Livy’s been a thorn in my side since I was nine years old,” Marty went on.

  Judge Randazzo leaned forward. “The court is not in the mood to hear your life story, Mr. deMarley. And Mr. Weinstock, this had better be going somewhere relevant or I’m going to hold you both in contempt. My stomach’s rumbling, and I’m not in the mood to digest anything right now that isn’t a hot pastrami on rye.”

  “I’m establishing that the witness and the respondent have a long history,” Sherman Weinstock replied. “And that this long-standing relationship gives Mr. deMarley his bona fides when it comes to his opinion on whether his cousin has closed the circle.”

  “I’ve hated her since we were kids, too,” Marty muttered.

  “You’re still under oath,” the judge reminded him.

  “Well, it’s the truth.”

  Marty seemed to have dug in his heels and refused to budge. On cross-examination Cap Gaines asked him what he had against me.

  “Yeah—you’ve told the court that you’ve hated your cousin since you were both little kids. If you were nine years old when the seeds of this long-standing antipathy were sown, that would have made Ms. deMarley about…what? Seven?”

  “Uh-huh. If I was nine, Livy would have been seven.”

  “Do you remember what it was that ticked you off so much? So much that you still bear a rather heavy grudge against Olivia deMarley? Was there a single, seminal event, or did your dislike of her arise from an accumulation of events?”

  “Oh, I remember it like it was yesterday!” Marty said. He started to get fidgety, restless. I couldn’t see his hands, but I would have bet that he was clenching and unclenching them in his lap the way he used to do when something or someone made him really mad. Like he was itching to deck them, but lacked the heft—and the courage—to actually throw a punch.

  “I had a hobby when I was a kid. And you’d be surprised to learn, maybe, that it wasn’t baseball.”

  “It wasn’t baseball. Hmmm.” Cap Gaines stroked his chin like a tribal elder. “So you haven’t really been a fan of the Cheers—or of any baseball team—from early childhood. What was this hobby of yours? This was when you were nine years old, right?” Marty nodded. “Mr. deMarley, the court reporter can’t make an official record of body language. Let the record reflect that the witness nodded his head in agreement with my last question. So, sir, can you tell the court what happened that was so terrible—that was so traumatic—that you’ve despised your cousin with a burning hatred in your heart for all these years?”

  I thought about the time when we were teens and Marty tried to feel me up. I guess all bets are off when it comes to the free will of adolescent male hormones; so a teenage guy can hate someone and still want to cop a feel.

  “Why? You have to ask me why?” demanded Marty. “Because she ate my dinosaurs!”

  There was a stunned silence in the courtroom, followed by myriad exclamations of confusion and disbelief.

  The judge pounded his gavel and called for order. “W-would you like to tell the court what the hell you’re referring to, Mr. deMarley?” He leaned forward and stared at Marty. “I have a feeling this is going to be good.”

  “Okay. It’s not funny, people. This is serious!” His face reddened with ire. “I was really into dinosaurs when I was a kid. I’d built up a really cool collection, and a lot of it came from the 1964 World’s Fair we had in Queens.”

  The judge smiled wistfully. “Ah, yes, I remember it well. My high school buddies and I lived nearby and we used to sneak in after dark.”

  And you still got to be a judge? I marveled.

  “The dinosaur stuff was my dad’s, originally, because I wasn’t born at the time, but he passed it along to me when he found out what a dino-fanatic I was turning into. My bedroom looked like a dino-shrine with posters and toy dinosaurs—and some real specialty items that my dad had saved from the World’s Fair. And one of those things was a box of cookies—you know, like animal crackers, only with different dinosaurs instead of lions and tigers and bears.”

  Oh my.

  “It was the only box I had. And you couldn’t get another one. They didn’t make them anymore after the World’s Fair closed. That was it. And I never opened it because I wanted it to be pristine. I didn’t think of it as food. To me, it was a collector’s item.”

  “And what happened to this box?” Cap Gaines asked Marty.

  “It was on one of my bookshelves. And one day we went to the natural history museum, and afterward Olivia came over to my house to play before her mom picked her up to take her back to Riverdale. And I was going to show her my dinosaur scrapbooks, which I kept in a suitcase under my bed. She was sitting on my bed, kicking her feet, and then she said to me, ‘Eww. These cookies are stale.’” Marty imitated a little girl voice.

  “‘Where’d you get cookies?’ I asked her. ‘These,’ she said.

  “I crawled out from under my bed so fast that I bumped my head on the bed frame. And then I looked up and she was munching away on my dinosaurs! She ate my dinosaurs! She fucking ate my dinosaurs! A completely one-of-a-kind item. She compromised my whole collection!”

  I jumped up from my chair. “I was seven years old and I was hungry—how the hell did I know that box of cookies was sacred?!”

  “Ms. deMarley, the court shares your shock and awe, but please take your seat and contain your outbursts.”

  Cap Gaines approached Cousin Marty. “So let me get this straight—you have held a grudge against Ms. deMarley for all this time because she ate a box of your cookies when she was seven years old?”

  “Not just any cookies! She ate my dinosaurs!”

  “Marty—I didn’t do it on purpose—not maliciously, I mean. I didn’t know. How could I have known it was such a big deal? And I didn’t even remember the incident until you brought it up just now! I’m not kidding—I don’t even remember eating the cookies.”

  Judge Randazzo’s gavel hit the bench with a crack. “Ms. deMarley, please be seated. I won’t warn you again.”

  Mr. Higginbottom returned, and suddenly the entire courtroom smelled like Deli.

  “All right, everyone. This is lunch!” the judge announced, and the gavel descended again.

  I had no appetite. I sipped a diet cream soda because I hoped the bubbles would calm the butterflies in my stomach. Marty had been the last witness, and his testimony wasn’t over yet. “Mind if we step outside for a minute?” I asked my lawyer.

  Outside the courtroom I asked Gaines, “So what does Marty’s meltdown mean? Can you ask for a mistrial?”

  “Why would I? He’s the petitioner. If the judge thinks he’s a nut job who instigated a lawsuit because he still harbors a boyhood grudge, who are we to argue? Dinosaurs.” He shook his head in disbelief.

  Back inside the courtroom, the lunch detritus was being cleared away. Five minutes later, there was no trace of the meal, except for the rather pronounced aroma of pastrami that hung in the air and clung to the pewlike benches. Marty was called back to the stand, and the judge asked Cap if he had any further questions for the witness. My counsel declined, and my cousin stepped down.

  “All right, I know you all have shpilkis and you can’t wait for me to issue a ruling,” said the judge. “And given what I’ve heard today, I see no reason to prolong the suspense by retiring to my chamber and mulling it over for hours when I already kn
ow what I’m going to say. The written decision will be available at the court clerk’s office in about two weeks. And the Law Journal may want to publish this one, too—if only for the comic relief,” he muttered.

  “I feel like I’ve spent the past few months on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride with you people. Counsel for the petitioner offered into evidence a prior will that left everything to his client, but with no evidence that the will was ever filed in court. The will that forms the gravamen of the action at bar was most certainly filed, but contained a clause so vague it called into question the decedent’s competence at the time the will was signed. Then we had the mysterious letter, which felt more Edgar Allan Poe than Lewis Carroll, and finally, once the phrase was decoded, we had to hash out whether or not it had been fulfilled.

  “Mr. Weinstock, you should have known better than to waste the court’s time with this fakakta action. Ms. deMarley, Ms. Ashe: as far as this court is concerned, and as far as those who know you long and well are concerned, dinosaur cookies notwithstanding, the two of you are doing at least as well as mothers and daughters who did not part ways at the birth of the latter. It is therefore the opinion of this court that you have ‘closed the circle.’ Ms. deMarley now has the controlling interest in the Bronx Cheers. Go forth and prosper, Ms. deMarley—and for God’s sake, bring home a pennant! Case closed.”

  More than three cheers were in order. I was now ready, willing, and about to be legally and legitimately able to take on a team of them!

  I received two envelopes from Tom; one contained a cute “Congratulations!” card, wishing me all the best, saying he knew I could do it. Inside the other envelope was a handwritten letter, penned in his usual mélange of printing and cursive, capital and lowercase letters inserted into the words at whim.

  “I thought I should tell you I’ve met someone,” the note said, and I felt my throat constrict. “Her name is MaryAnne, she’s a vet, and we’ll see where it goes.”

  A vet? Given Tom’s unique penmanship, this MaryAnne could have been a horse doctor, or had seen combat in Iraq. Or both, for all I knew. I pictured MaryAnne as tall and horsey-looking, with big horse teeth and a horse laugh. Big hoofy feet, and a hefty rump all out of proportion with her spindly legs. But maybe she’s Tom’s type, after all. Maybe he just goes for a long mane of hair. Or maybe he just wants to meet a woman to maybe marry him, who didn’t inherit a baseball team, and doesn’t need to take time to be reunited with the daughter she never knew.