by Marge Piercy
“Andrea. But I took it out on her, believe me.” He shook his head with a sour grin. “Now they aren’t really mine any longer.”
“They adore you.”
“But I don’t make the big decisions or the little daily ones. I’m a major myth but a minor factor.”
He’s young, she thought, and he lost his children. He will want another family. Even if I weren’t sterilized, I couldn’t go through it all again. Eventually, no matter how well we communicate and how much we have together and how usefully we work in the neighborhood and how beautifully we make love, he will want children again and he will turn from me. She sighed. When he asked her what was wrong, she said only, “I’m tired. Let’s turn out the light and go to sleep.”
But she wasn’t tired and she didn’t sleep.
The trial had been going on for two weeks before what she imagined to be the trial actually got under way. There had been days of motions to dismiss and to discover and to change venue, followed by days and days of jury selection. Not until the morning of October 21 was Daria called to the stand. She had not been attending every day, as none of them could in fact. Always at least one observer from SON was present and reported to everyone else in the evening.
The night before her testimony, she lay awake. In the morning, she put on the simple blue jersey okayed by Bloomberg, who had coached her, rehearsed her and, playing defense attorney, had insulted and brow-beaten her until she felt as if any actual scene today must be anticlimactic. Her stomach did not agree. As she rose to take the stand, she found herself dry-mouthed.
As she was sworn in, she remembered the first cooking demonstration she had given in a department store. Her hands had shaken so, as she looked into that ring of staring faces, she had poured gazpacho all over her new dress. After that she had learned to fake confidence and calm, a couple of years before she actually ever attained that state in public. Standing in the net of sharp gazes, hanging there in the crowded courtroom, she remembered too how her first time on television to push a cookbook, she had sautéed mushrooms to add to a beef dish and never in fact added them. She had almost passed out when she walked off the set and realized her error, but no one else noticed.
All that morning she testified. What the prosecutor was most interested in were the notes from Lou; how much she had known and how much she had been ignorant about in Ross’s real estate dealings; her meeting with and gradual involvement in SON. She felt as if she had memorized a long recipe—a filled puff pastry, say—and was being quizzed on its minor points over and over. After Bloomberg had run her thoroughly and repetitiously through her paces, she was turned over to Ross’s lawyer. Bloomberg had warned her she would be attacked as a lying and vengeful discarded woman.
She felt shy of looking at Ross. When she finally forced her gaze on him, she felt vertigo. But he was not looking at her. From that time on whenever she stole a glance a him, she saw him doing the same thing: leaning over the table busy with a pencil as if making notes. What she suspected he was really doing was what he used to do during boring phone calls or the very occasional PTA meetings he attended. He was probably drawing complex geometric shapes.
She had met the defense attorney Samuel Potter once and had actually danced with him at some tony function at the Union Club that Ross had managed to be invited to. She doubted if he remembered, for she might not have, except that he had such unpleasant cold dry hands and such a bloodless air, she had decided he was a vampire and had thought of him the rest of the night as Count Dracula, although he had none of the dark saturnine charm with which that character was often played. He was a New England vampire, grey-eyed, balding and tight-lipped with a voice just high of middle range and carrying, a sort of dry redolent amontillado sherry.
“Is it true as you stated you began reading your husband’s mail and steaming open his letters secretly because you were interested in uncovering his relationship with another woman?”
“That’s correct. I had accidentally seen the first note from Louis Ledoux when I was emptying wastebaskets, and I thought Lou was a woman’s name.”
“Mrs. Walker, isn’t that still what interests you? Exposure of your former husband? Isn’t it true that since you’ve lost Ross Walker, your sole interest is in discrediting him, punishing him?”
The prosecutor objected, but the judge said it was a permissible line of inquiry.
As if replaying a tape, the lawyer repeated the question. Daria’s gaze kept straying to Gail in a beige dress, far more pregnant looking than she was supposed to be. “No, I wouldn’t say that at all.”
“I didn’t ask you if you’d say it. I asked you if it’s true.”
“No. Anybody from SON will tell you I infuriated them by refusing to believe Ross Walker capable of arson until my own house burned and I barely escaped.”
The attorney questioned her again and again on her testimony, trying to shake her version, trying to prove her wild in accusation and bent on revenge, a monster of jealousy. Daria had been coached by Bloomberg, but the attack was still hard to endure without reacting visibly. You must stay calm, he had ordered. Any sign of emotion and you’ll seem hysterical. You must sound gentle and rational, he had warned her, and she did her best, although she knew her eyes must be sparking anger.
Too bad the glib attorney before her was dealing with a cookbook writer. Anybody who could describe accurately the process of deboning a leg of lamb or a turkey, or who could describe making a Saint Honoré cake or a terrine in crust from four kinds of meat and fowl, could with ease remember exactly what she had said in previous testimony and repeat accurately the third, the fourth, the fifth time.
“Revenge? But I was left in the lurch financially. My husband was not even paying our younger daughter’s tuition at college, as he had promised. What he was offering as a divorce settlement, to give you some perspective, was less than twenty percent of what we finally agreed was my share of our mutual property.”
“Do you want us to believe you spent what you admit were days and days trying to prove your husband a criminal, simply out of curiosity? You want us to believe you never sought revenge on your husband, whom you believed to be unfaithful, and who certainly wanted to marry another woman, but you just carried on weeks of research about him for the pure love of knowledge? Is that how you’d describe your activities?” Potter turned to the jury with a world-weary sigh. He invited them to share his skepticism and amusement.
“I wasn’t trying to prove him a criminal, since I didn’t believe him to be one. I was trying to find out exactly what we owned as husband and wife, in whosoever name it was listed.”
“Who told you to play detective, Mrs. Walker? Who told you what to look for and where to look? Who were you reporting to, Mrs. Walker?”
“I was doing what all the books written for women undergoing divorce advise you to do. I was doing what my lawyer told me would be necessary to achieve a just settlement for myself and my minor daughter. Sandra María Roa Vargas taught me how to do the research, but I only went to her after my lawyer Dorothy Keough and my accountant found discrepancies in my husband’s statements of financial worth.”
“Are you telling us you were very rational as you sat there compiling this documentation? You’re swearing you had no motive but financial gain?” Potter’s face expressed astonished incredulity.
“I had no motive but financial justice. Our fair share.” Daria knew she was lying, because she had cared even more for understanding Ross. Which would finally come with his testimony, when her ordeal was over.
“Yet you persisted, week after week, pursuing the history of buildings he had owned or partially owned?”
“Until I had what my lawyer said was necessary documentation. Then I stopped.” She was staring at Gail again, because Gail’s glare kept catching her eye. Gail fixed upon her with an aghast fascination, her lips pursed. Daria made herself look at Bloomberg instead.
“What did you think of your husband Ross Walker as you worked day after day
to undermine him and to prove what you thought was information useful to the machinations of his tenants?”
“I felt distant from him. More and more distant. I came to understand how little I had known about what he did for money and what he was willing to do for money.”
“And what were you willing to do for money, Mrs. Walker?”
“Objection.”
“I withdraw that question,” Potter said as if doing her an immense favor. He smiled tightly in the direction of the jury.
She felt as if she had been on the stand for ten hours. Yet when she was allowed to step down at last, it was only lunchtime. She felt clammy with sweat under her dress. When they filed from the courtroom, she hastened to the women’s room and threw up. As she was washing her face, Gail came running in. Gail froze, her mouth opening and shutting. Daria wondered from the younger woman’s expression if she thought Daria might be about to attack her. Daria nodded in awkward salutation. Seeing Gail up close, her spare body swollen in what had to be at least the eighth month of pregnancy, Daria had a sad vision of what she could only call the remorselessness of events. Gail had probably done little evil, if less good, in her life; now both her future and that of the child to be born would be stained by what Ross had done and what she in turn had done—and others, living and dead. Gail turned away pointedly and hurried into a booth, where she stayed locked in during the rest of the time Daria was repairing herself.
She could not eat lunch. She drank orange juice and tea. “On a diet,” Bloomberg chided. “You women are always dieting.” He was attacking a steak.
She kept thinking what she should have said. She had much more to tell the jury. Neither Bloomberg nor the defense attorney Potter had wanted her to talk about the Lexington arson, nor was it listed on the bill of indictment. Bloomberg viewed it as a red herring, an accusation that would distract the jury and never prove prosecutable. Yet Daria was sure if that fire had never occurred, she would not have been present today in the courtroom to testify against Ross. She wanted him brought to justice, but justice seemed more elusive the closer she came to the process supposed to deliver it.
For two weeks she had rehearsed her testimony. She had typed it out, studied it, gone over it aloud, practiced with Tom, practiced with Sandra María and finally with Bloomberg himself. Sitting in the restaurant with sounds of cutlery and crockery clattering around her, with the sweat cold on her and a dull pain in her stomach, she could not accept that her part was over. She had not been asked the right questions, not allowed to say what she desired, thrust into an arcane and rigid formula of questions and responses that had nothing to do with her experience. She wondered if she had seemed hysterical with the thirst for revenge, or if she had seemed contrariwise cold and unfeeling, hungry only for money.
“You did a fine job,” Bloomberg roared. “You came across as a calm mature witness. Highly credible. At one point,” he waggled his finger at her, “I thought you were going to lose it. Got mad, didn’t you?”
“I got mad several times.”
“No reason to show it. Gives them points.”
“Will I get another chance to testify? There’s so much I never got a chance to talk about.”
“It went fine,” Bloomberg said dismissively. “We’re painting a picture of a man living a double life, financing his divorce through arson. You’ve done your part. We’re building up to the big guns.”
Tom found them in the restaurant. Bloomberg had asked him to appear by one o’clock, as first Sandra María and then Tom would take the stand next. Daria stirred herself from her self-absorption enough to notice that Sandra María was also too nervous to eat.
After lunch Sandra María presented her charts and graphs. Her voice was higher pitched than usual and she looked clumsy in a corduroy suit Daria had never seen before and doubted she would see again on her friend.
As Tom was testifying, she felt almost as nervous as she had when she was on. Since Daria had warned Bloomberg about Ross’s attempt to smear Tom as a dangerous radical, his testimony was confined to reporting on his discovery of Lou and Jay Jay on the roof. Although Potter attempted to use Tom’s background against him in cross-examination, Daria did not feel it carried much weight against the identification, also affirmed in her testimony. Potter did not question Tom about his relationship with Daria, as Bloomberg had thought he might. Perhaps Potter did not want any shading of his picture of Daria as a revenge-obsessed discard.
Mr. Schulman was next, to identify Lou and Jay Jay as perpetrators of attempted arson. Daria could plainly remember that Mr. Schulman had not in fact seen Jay Jay well enough to identify him, but by this time, Jay Jay and Mr. Schulman and Lou were all convinced that Mr. Schulman had recognized both of them as they fled. Although Potter attempted to cast doubt on Schulman’s ability to catch sight of the men running in the middle of the night, Mr. Schulman was unshakable because he was totally certain by now of what he had seen. Daria was partly amused and partly disturbed. How often did that sort of false conviction overcome witnesses? Neither Jay Jay nor Lou wanted to challenge Mr. Schulman, for they were as persuaded as he was that he had identified them. Sometimes Daria suspected she was the only person who still remembered that Mr. Schulman had not gotten a good view. When she had said that to Tom, he had assured her that when Mr. Schulman saw Lou and Jay Jay again, of course he had recognized them.
At the very end of the court’s day, Lou was sworn in. Somewhere he had acquired or been lent an Ivy League herringbone suit. The idea was no doubt to try to make him look as respectable as possible, to suggest that if someone this upright admitted to arson, then the jury could find it possible that Ross Walker was also guilty. He had only begun to testify about how he had met the defendant when court adjourned. Daria was sorry she would miss the next day, but she had to work. It would be Fay’s turn.
Friday evening the day in court was retold over supper at Daria’s in as much detail as Fay could muster. All day Lou had testified for the prosecution from his first meeting with Ross through his recent attempts to fulfill a contract to burn two of Ross’s buildings. Monday Potter would have at him.
Daria was surprised to notice how glad she felt that a whole weekend would pass before she or any of her friends must return to the courtroom. She felt as if she should attempt to go as often as possible, but she felt relieved to escape from the strict and peculiar formulae of the courtroom. She felt glad to escape Gail’s prominent belly and baleful stare. She felt glad too to escape Ross’s chilling presence, that man who had so recently been her own husband and who now felt as strange to her as if he spoke a Martian tongue and worshipped a Crab God.
She had finally invited Gretta to supper, but before the evening was well launched, she realized her timing was poor. Everybody really wanted to sit inertly around the living room staring at the television and drinking their way through a big bottle of Valpolicella. She had felt guilty for seeing little of Gretta since her move.
Gretta looked closely at Sandra María and launched into, “Oh, I adore Puerto Rico. It’s my old stomping grounds. My husband and I used to fly down in February and stay at the Americana. Or the El San Juan.”
“That isn’t Puerto Rico any more than Disneyland is the U.S.,” Sandra María said, her brows drawing into a furrow and her eyes narrowing.
The evening bumped along from there. The living room emptied. Ángel and Sandra María found a pressing need to go out. Mariela was put to bed. As Tom tried to make conversation with Gretta, Daria remembered his stories about people at faculty parties asking him what department he was in and then telling him they’d built a fence or a shed themselves. Gretta, once she learned Tom was a carpenter, seemed only able to talk about renovations or cabinets. Everything about him was defined for Gretta by his job. He could not possibly have anything to say to her about politics or art or relationships.
After Tom retreated upstairs, Daria sat on with Gretta. By now Daria was yawning occasionally hoping that Gretta would go home soon. “I th
ink it’s marvelous really, Daria, your being able to take my advice and have an affair. It doesn’t matter if you can’t share your interests. It’s still fun. But why on earth did you allow him to move in? That will cramp your style. I mean, you don’t want to end up supporting him and eventually we all want to remarry.…”
Saturday Daria felt mildly depressed all day. Finally in the evening when they were alone in her room she began. “It worried me when you said you don’t have enough influence over your daughters—”
“When did I say that?” He loomed up, dark eyes enormous with query.
“When we got back from Vermont.”
“Two months ago?”
“Tom, you’re younger than me. You’ll want more children.”
“I don’t feel younger. Sometimes I feel older. Sometimes you mother me, sometimes I mother you.”
“But I can’t give you children.”
“You think I want more? A whole second family?” He lay on his side facing her, hand on propped elbow. “I have one, thank you.”
“You say you don’t feel the girls are really yours.”
“Of course they’re mine. I just feel let down after they leave.” He ruffled her hair with the flat of his hand. “What’s this about? That in a couple of years, you think I’ll sneakily turn into Walker?”
“Well, men change.”
“Women don’t? You’ve been changing yourself. What you’re worrying about is stupid, peaches, made up. I never had this kind of intimacy with Andrea.”
“You had some reason for marrying her.” Gail’s pregnant form lurked in her mind. Gretta was so sure Daria’s relationship was temporary. Daria felt as if she were counting too much on Tom.
“Andy admired me because I was a big honcho in our little circle. I wanted her because she was the princess type, the kind who never looked at me in high school. Because she was pretty. Because at first, whatever I wanted, she wanted too. I deserved what I got.”
