The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Naomi had not been to a trial since her own, years before, on charges of disturbing the peace in Ithaca—a lie-in at Day Hall over CIA recruitment on campus had gotten nasty. She walked up the granite steps of the Peytonville courthouse with a set jaw and a staunch refusal to acknowledge any grandeur in her surroundings. The shoddy behavior of shoddy men must not be in any way elevated by the presence of polished stone, or massive plaques of the names of local boys gone to soldiers, or fierce patriarchs chiseled out of boulders. This thing stank, irredeemably, and it galled her that she was obligated to dress for such a sham of truth seeking and justice, and to respect its rituals. She saw Judith at the top of the wide staircase, just inside the lobby, immaculate in a severe gray suit. She looked beautiful, Naomi thought, and she kissed Judith and told her so.

  “Opening statements are important,” Judith said. “Juries remember you this way.”

  “Nice pearls,” said Naomi.

  “Thanks. Nice stockings.” She smiled. “Hey, it’s for a good cause.”

  There was press around, Naomi saw, the local writers looking cowed by their national counterparts, and there were faces from Goddard, some of which acknowledged her. Then Charter came through, trailing staff and reporters, signaling his stature with the intense cadence of his gait. He stopped before Judith and Naomi and nodded. “Mrs. Friedman.”

  She gave him a cool look. “I prefer Ms., Mr. Charter.”

  “Well”—he smiled disingenuously—“I’ll do my best. Old habits are sometimes difficult to break.” He turned to Naomi. “Ms. Roth.”

  “Hello,” Naomi said. She was embarrassed to hear the smallness of her own voice.

  “Ordinarily, as I’m sure Ms. Friedman has explained to you, you would not be permitted to enter the courtroom until you were called to testify.” He waited for her reaction: the flash of alarm, the glance at Judith. “But because I am going to call you as the state’s first witness, I’m going to let the formality pass. You are welcome to hear opening arguments.”

  He was extending himself, she realized. He wanted her to feel grateful to him when she testified. Naomi smiled. “Well, thank you.”

  “I will be asking you simple, specific questions,” he went on, his goal evidently attained. “If you could direct yourself to them, I would appreciate it. There is no reason to bring your personal feelings about either Miss Pratt or myself into your answers. We all want the same thing here.”

  She started at this extraordinary statement. “Mr. Charter—”

  “It’s not for you to decide. It’s not for me to decide. We’ll give them the information”—he dipped his head to the side, as if the jury were arrayed before them in this crowded hallway—“and they’ll do the deciding. Please do not contaminate this process with your opinions or your ideology. If you can assure me that you will do that, then I will make the same assurance to you.”

  “Naomi will answer your questions to the extent of her abilities,” Judith broke in. “She will make no unsolicited comments. And I thank you for your sensitivity to her situation.” She placed a hand on Naomi’s arm. “Let’s go inside.”

  They walked past him. Naomi was dazed. “What was that—”

  “Damage control,” Judith whispered. “It’s all right. We talked about what might happen when you’re up there. It’s going to be fine.”

  They moved forward, through a courtroom already dense with people. It was not a large room, but it was made to seem so by its two large windows, which gave it a lofty air, and by its ceiling, which was also high, though dangling a symmetry of silver vents and pipes. Naomi took an empty seat behind the defense table to the left of the judge’s bench, and the wood joints of her chair gave an ominous creak. Judith unpacked her briefcase. Charter appeared not to have a briefcase of his own, though his aides were unpacking the ones they had carried. There was so much paper, Naomi thought, looking at the piles and stacks of files, and the protruding bits of black-and-white photographs. So much from so little, and all of it brought into being by her. How she wished she could take it back now. She wished that she had pushed them back into the water, those babies, weighting them down so that they would never surface and be known, or be photographed and fought over and used to wreck the lives of living people. If only she had left them there, and the water had taken them away downstream or buried them too deeply for her to touch. If only, she thought grimly, they’d been just a little farther out of reach, or she’d been a little less intent on reaching out; but then she was always sticking her fingers in, wasn’t that the point? And her nose, where it wasn’t welcome. The point of a hairpin pricked her scalp, and she reached back to adjust it.

  Then Heather was with them. She wore a tan dress Judith had bought for her, high-buttoned and with blue embroidery around the neck, and her cropped hair had filled in a bit, softening the shock of her small head with its defined bones. She was thin now, Naomi saw, and for the first time it occurred to her to berate herself over not having recognized Heather’s pregnancy the previous summer. The extra flesh of her torso, the aftermath of Polly which the second baby had inherited, was gone now, leaving a figure not so much lean as downright feeble. She reached for Heather’s shoulder. “Hi,” Heather said, turning.

  “Hi, Heather.” Her voice sounded unnaturally jolly.

  “How is Polly?”

  “She’s doing great,” Naomi said heartily. “She calls me ‘Neema.’” It was meant as a reassurance that Polly knew her own mother and Heather needn’t worry about being usurped, but Heather looked as if she might cry, anyway.

  “Oh, don’t,” Judith broke in, putting her arm around Heather’s shoulder. “Just sit down, yes?”

  Heather turned and sat. The judge was announced, and Naomi, seeing him for the first time, thought him effortlessly authoritative, broad and physically dense in his black robe, and sporting a natural scowl. Born to judge, she thought grimly, as Hayes exchanged the kind of studiously impersonal nod with Charter that could only imply the closeness of their friendship beyond this room. He welcomed the audience and preemptively castigated them for the variety of bad behaviors they would henceforth refrain from. Judith was writing on her legal pad, her head down. When the door opened, she sat up, shifted in her chair, and placed her hand over Heather’s. Naomi could not see Heather’s face, but she did see the small jerk of her shoulders as those two hands met, and the discomfort that lingered after it. Perhaps this, too, was part of Judith’s intention, that they should see Heather first like this: the woman whose sensuality had supposedly overbrimmed to murder, unwilling even to be touched.

  The jury was welcomed, then thanked, then charged with the solemnity their task required. The gavel was raised and brought down sharply in a theatrical gesture for their benefit, because they all expected it. Charter got up, and ritually shot his cuffs. This was to be a habitual gesture, the first note of frailty she had ever seen in him, but it did not make her like him better.

  Charter walked to the jury and placed a hand on the bar before the first row of their chairs. A finger tapped the wood. He seemed to be considering.

  “Ladies and gentlemen”—his voice was uncharacteristically soft—“I think you’ll understand what I mean when I say that I am sorry to see you here today. I’m sorry”—he waved his hand behind him at the spectators, but kept his eyes forward—“that any of us are here. Indeed, in my many years of prosecuting men and women accused of crimes in this state, I have never been involved with a case that filled me with so much regret, that made me so heartbroken. And I sincerely apologize to you for subjecting you to the sad and terrible things I am going to have to tell you about.”

  He sighed, and touched the ridge of his curious hair. “Now, some of you are parents. Some of you aren’t. I’m not a parent myself, but that does not protect me from the horror of a dead child. I feel that horror, ladies and gentlemen, and I know you will, too. But your job is harder than mine, or indeed anyone else’s. Because you cannot let yourselves stop at the horror at the hear
t of this case. You have to go forward, to go through it. And you have to do it professionally, and intellectually. You have to consider the testimony that will be given here, both by our witnesses and by my opponent’s witnesses, and not give in to grief or recriminations. Because your job is to tell us how we should confront these terrible events. This terrible crime.” He sighed, then turned slightly. He was looking at Heather. “Please understand that I am not asking you to explain this crime to us. The murder of two infant girls is an incomprehensible act, and I don’t expect you to be able to comprehend it any more than I will ever be able to comprehend it myself. We must be very clear about the distinction between understanding what happened and understanding why. Put why right out of your minds, ladies and gentlemen. Why is between Heather Pratt and God.”

  Naomi saw the stiff, minuscule shake of Judith’s head. Her own hands twisted together in her lap.

  “Heather Pratt is on trial today for the murders of two infant girls. The girls were twin daughters, born in secret. Heather was their mother, and you will be hearing soon about their paternity. But first you’ll hear about what was done to these little babies, how they were heartlessly killed, then left for someone else to find. What kind of woman would do this? Well, I don’t know that I’m able to answer that question, but I can answer the question of what kind of person Heather Pratt is. She is a woman who was brought to the attention of the police for disrobing in plain sight, in a public place. She is a woman who thought nothing of having an affair with a man who was married to someone else, and nothing about having his baby. She is a woman who wantonly continued the affair, even after the married man made it clear to her that he would never leave his wife. She is a woman who hid her pregnancy, who didn’t seek prenatal care for her child, who had her babies in secret and disposed of them in secret. And if they had not been found—at different times and in different places, but ironically by the same person—none of us would be here today.”

  He shook his head distastefully, as if that irony were Heather’s fault, too.

  “But more than anything else, ladies and gentlemen, Heather Pratt is a woman who confessed to this crime. Who gave details. Who showed us the weapon with which she murdered one of her daughters. Who knew it was wrong to do as she did!” He let this sink in, making sure each of them got a long look at his anger. “You’re going to want me to explain that to you, and I can’t. You’re also going to want me to explain why Heather Pratt, who is by all accounts a good mother to the daughter she had eighteen months ago, should turn against the twin daughters she had last September. And that I think I can explain. I think Heather loved her first child because, at the time of her first pregnancy she thought her lover, her married lover, would leave his wife and marry her. But by the time of her second pregnancy, she knew better. She knew because her lover had made it clear to her that he would never leave his wife for her, and so she hated the child, or children, she was carrying. She told no one that she was expecting these children. She didn’t notify the midwife who had delivered her daughter Polly, and when the twins were born, she did what was necessary so that no one would ever find out they existed.” He waited for this to sink in. A few of the jurors, Naomi saw, could not look at Charter now, or at Heather either. Charter sighed, milking the moment. “I cannot know her state of mind at this time, but I’ll tell you what I honestly believe. Heather’s state of mind is secondary to the brutality of her acts. This woman”—he turned from the railing. He pointed, a jab in the air—“gave birth to two beautiful, healthy baby girls and immediately put them to death. Now, some of you may feel she deserves our compassion, and I don’t say that’s untrue. What I do say, ladies and gentlemen, is that those babies have the first claim on our compassion. We are here for them, because they are not here. It is not our job to succor their mother, who is still here among us, healthy and strong. Let us leave Heather to her conscience, and to God.”

  He turned back to them now, the preacher to the captive converted. “Now, as if this story weren’t amazing enough, there is a further twist. The evidence will show, ladies and gentlemen, that these two little girls, twins born to the same mother, were in fact only half sisters to each other. Yes.” He nodded sagely as they looked at him, incredulous. “It’s true. No, you don’t hear about it all the time, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It happened here. There is a doctor who will tell you about this process, which has a funny-sounding name: superfecundation.” He kept, Naomi noted, a very straight face. A poker face. If she didn’t know better, she thought, she might believe him herself. In the jury box, however, it was a different matter. Their eyes widened. One or two looked stunned, another grinned. “Now, for this to take place, a woman must have sexual relations with two men in a given time period, which is precisely what Heather Pratt did. She had sex with her married lover, and then she had sex with a second man. We know the name of this man, and you will learn it soon.”

  Naomi, despite herself, looked at Heather. A second man? It was not possible. How could that be possible? Then, furious at herself for even entertaining the notion, she gave an exaggerated sigh, shook her head, and earned a glare from Judge Hayes himself.

  “Hard to believe? Of yourself, maybe. Of your friends, your wives, or your daughters, absolutely. But hard to believe of a woman who was quite comfortable with her promiscuity? Who saw nothing wrong with pursuing her affairs? I think you will understand, once you learn of Heather Pratt’s history, why I am confident that superfecundation took place, and that she gave birth to twin half sisters.

  “Now”—Charter folded his arms in an uncomfortable approximation of a casual posture—“before we begin, there’s something I want to say to you about what might happen here.” He eyed them, looking grim. “All of us say that we’re here to find the truth, that’s what a trial is for —finding the truth. It’s a nice thought, but I’ve got to warn you that, for a process devoted to truth, there’s a fair amount of—well, let’s call it ‘distortion,’ involved. I’m not saying my opponent is going to lie to you.” He stepped back and put up his hands. “Not at all. But what she might well do is try to get you to forget who the victim is in this case. Except I know that you’re stronger than that. I know you won’t forget,” he said approvingly. “I know that you won’t forget, as my opponent speaks to you, and tries to create sympathy in you, for her client”—he lifted a warning finger—“as I can assure you she will try to do, that Heather Pratt is not the victim in this case. The victims in this case are not in the courtroom with us today, but they aren’t far from where we are sitting, either. They are in a freezer in the basement of this building!” Naomi surveyed the faces in the jury box. To her dismay, they were riveted, grim, and a few were visibly stifling tears. “Two little girls!” Charter thundered. “Two little girls who will never grow up to play with a doll, or have a sweet-sixteen party, or be brides, or indeed have babies of their own. Beautiful newborn infants, healthy in every way. One stabbed through the heart and thrown into the river that runs behind Heather Pratt’s house. One drowned in a little pond in Heather Pratt’s back field. They came from the same womb, ladies and gentlemen, and they were murdered by the same hand.”

  One juror, a woman Naomi’s age, with hair already gone gray, had lost the fight. She wiped at her tears with the back of her hand, but kept her eyes on the D.A. Naomi groaned inwardly.

  “It isn’t easy to judge someone’s guilt or innocence, no matter how clear a case seems. I want you to know that I’m mindful of that, and I don’t belittle the difficulty of what your job is here. I appreciate the work you’re going to have to do, and I know it’ll be hard. I’m not saying you have to feel nothing at all for this young lady who’s on trial, but it’s far more important that you keep your mind on what you know is true, what you know she did, and more than anything else, on who she did it to. That is truth, ladies and gentlemen. And that is what I know you will affirm to us once this case is over. I thank you for all the hard work you’re going to do.”
/>   And he turned and walked back to his seat and sat down.

  Judith looked over at him, her disdain evident to Naomi, even in profile. She gave Heather’s arm a comforting squeeze and performed a small, disbelieving shake of the head for the jury’s benefit before getting to her feet. Then she stood, looming over Heather. Her height made Heather seem small, and though Naomi couldn’t see Heather’s face, she was able to discern the dejected sag of her shoulders. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Judith began, “I share Mr. Charter’s skepticism about finding truth in this trial, but for a different reason. It’s a reason that has nothing to do with you. You are a fine jury—intelligent, and capable of the difficult task that’s required of you here. But we begin with a terrible story, with a terrible fact at its center: two little babies, dead. And that’s about the only thing District Attorney Charter and I can agree about.” She paused. “You see, usually, when a case comes to trial, a jury gets to hear two sides of the same story. Two variations, I guess you’d call it. Like, variation one: Dick shot Jane because he hated her for having an affair with another man. Or, variation two: Dick didn’t mean to shoot Jane; it was an accident, because he thought there was an intruder in the house, and he made a tragic mistake.”

  She shook her head. “Not in this case. In this case we can’t even agree on what the story is. You’re not going to hear two possible ways of telling what happened. You’re going to hear two completely different versions of the events that have brought us all to this courtroom today. And you’re going to have to decide what makes sense to you. What feels like a rational account and what feels like a fairy tale.

  “Now, before I get into that,” Judith said, her voice dropping from the strident to the mournful, “I want you to understand that we’re all affected by those two poor little girls. We all want to understand what happened to them, and yes, we want to blame the people who harmed them. But that’s not why we’re here.”