by Marge Piercy
“Divorce, you mean?”
“Divorce was hard, but that marriage was harder. The last years it was so bad I got used to being sore all the time—sore mad and sore hurt. Used to a high level of pain, like somebody living with a bad toothache.”
“Why would having a bad marriage with Andrea mean you won’t want children again with somebody else?”
“Because I want what I have. Our intimacy. I want more of that, not something else.”
“You think without children sex is better?” She was thinking that for herself, sex with Ross had improved after children and then again after sterilization.
“It’s a matter of being able to be truly alone. And I want your attention. I want us to go on talking the way we do. We’re both people who’ve been deeply lonely without ever realizing it, in the middle of lives that seemed half overrun with people.”
“But now that you have the kind of relationship you want, wouldn’t it be natural for you to start wanting children?”
“Daria, if I get nuts for a kid we can adopt. As long as you don’t insist on a white baby, you can find a kid. Okay?” He flopped onto his back.
“Do you ever think of moving out there to be near your girls?”
“What the hell is this, Fear Night? No. My visitation rights are specific. And I can’t adjust to California. Strikes me like somebody who smiles constantly. I don’t know what it all means out there.”
“I have been scared. The trial doesn’t help.” In the curve of his arm, she curled against him, a slow relaxation flooding her muscles.
“Peaches, what you had with Walker, he went his way and you went yours. Don’t you think if I started getting weird ideas, you’d be the first to know?”
“I had a letter from Tracy this morning. She’s broken up with Scott.”
“You ought to be pleased. He had the personality of a goldfish.”
“I didn’t think she really liked him.”
“What’s going on is that Tracy’s trying to live less on a roller coaster. She wanted something calm, maybe even a little boring with Scott.”
“You mean she’s a born enthusiast and she’s trying to fight that?” It was a quiet joy to talk about her children with him. She wondered how she had ever managed to bring them through adolescence with none of this kind of insight and involvement from Ross. Tom was a much better father to Tracy than Ross had been in years, even if Tracy cast him in an older brother role. “She tried so hard to be strong for me, I know it.”
“She got a little scared.” Tom settled her against him, her buttocks pressing into his belly, his arm against her breasts. “If you haven’t noticed, Daria, we have rather a lot of children to worry about already.”
33
Frost had blackened the tomato vines and the peppers. The kitchen surfaces were covered with green tomatoes, washed, sorted and halfway to their fate of storage in the basement or being pickled.
Daria had taken out her woolens and packed away her light cottons. Tracy was dating a young poet who talked much of death and destruction. “He’s much more real than Scott,” she told Daria. “No, nobody up here pays attention to the trial. Walker is such a common name. You can tell me about it when I come home … or do you need me now?”
Daria assured Tracy she was doing fine. The experts droned on, Donald among them, talking about char factors and accelerants, showing their samples, photos and diagrams while the eyes of the jurors glazed over. She was waiting for the moment when Ross would stand before everyone and answer for his act, when at last she would comprehend what he thought about what he had done.
Mrs. Rodriguez—the mother of Sylvia and Eduardo—testified and the jurors woke up. Daria was angry at Bloomberg for putting Mrs. Rodriguez in front of everybody to stammer and sob. Sylvia and Orlando told their brief stories. Daria noticed how carefully Bloomberg had avoided letting out at this trial the tapes that would figure, she assumed, in the next, that of Petris and then of her brother. Then came Mrs. Rosario to describe the night of the fire that had killed her son.
She did not weep. She sat and spoke quietly; several times her voice died to inaudibility. She sat starkly rigid, for as the questioning brought out, she was still in a brace from a back injury that had crushed her vertebrae when she had leapt from the third-floor window holding her baby. Her husband had rescued the infant from the flaming bedroom, suffering third-degree burns in the act. She had taken the baby and jumped. Neither of them had been able to reach Bobbie, asleep in his bedroom near the head of the stairs. She had been wakened by someone screaming in the hall. The flames had already been fierce, cutting them off from both exits. As she had jumped she could still hear screaming. “I hear it yet,” she said simply and almost inaudibly.
The defense brought in their own experts, their own detectives. The experts for the prosecution had claimed arson was proved; the experts for the defense denied that arson was even probable. Character witness after witness, respectable, eminent, mature, well-heeled, testified to the sterling virtue and probity of the accused. Instead of Mrs. Rodriguez and Mrs. Rosario with their broken English, the street voices of Sylvia and Orlando and Jay Jay, here were the voices of Harvard Business School, of the Rotary Club, of worthy charities and important institutions, all of which were supported, assisted, shored up by Ross Walker. Here were his law partners testifying to his success in attracting lucrative clients to their practice, his previous career of distinguished public service. The partners and Pierre also testified to his presence at dinner parties during the nights arson was supposed to have occurred. Pierre also swore that yes, he had known that the Walkers were having difficulties and that Mrs. Walker was disturbed over the breakup of the marriage. Bloomberg objected and the judge ruled that part of the testimony hearsay.
She stayed up late to leave work for Peggy so that she could attend the trial daily, now that Ross was about to testify. Finally Potter called Ross. Potter treated Ross gently, deferentially, as if apologizing moment by moment for subjecting a man of his caliber to such indignity as a trial. Ross looked lean and tan in a navy suit. Early in his life he had been told he looked well in blue—that it matched his eyes and set off his hair—and he had worn little else since. Browns, rusts, greens made him nervous, for he said they were too hard to match. How strange the things she knew about the man all gazes were now directed toward: how he liked his eggs, the boxer shorts and all cotton tee shirts he preferred, his brand of hemorrhoid medicine, but not any longer how he saw right and wrong.
She was surprised as the initial questioning went smoothly on to find herself yawning. It was not tension but rather mild milk of magnesia boredom. She could no longer remember why she had loved him. Why him? She felt distance and some embarrassment. This cool estrangement felt worse than the hatred and howling bloody-mindedness that Ross and his lawyer attributed to her.
Who was he, tan, freshly shaved, in his well-tailored navy suit? Were they still connected at all, beyond their being caught in a sticky web of actions and reactions? She wanted to feel more. She felt guilty for her lack of excitement. She stared, trying to find in that long slightly fishy face—eyes bulging a little, weak chin—the man she had centered her life around. He was concentrating on the questions Potter asked, designed to show his civic-minded nature, his respectability, his good conduct, his worth. He paused and then dealt with each query deliberately. He was probably an impressive witness, sure of himself, in control, taking his time, sounding extremely precise and in command of the facts. The jury must believe him. Their fine resonant voices played in respectful turn, two lawyers in a duet of calm assurance. A cello and a viola. A counterpoint of dry amontillado and a fine cream sherry, their voices.
She heard him lie in that clear resonant voice with the ring of confidence, authority, probity, so that she half doubted her memory. He had been asking Daria for a divorce since the summer before. How could she have thought he had denied his affair well into December? She was a sick vengeful woman who had become immediatel
y involved with SON upon her first encounter with them: she had invited them into the house and joined them at once in attempting to undo her husband. How could she have forgotten? Every statement issuing from his mouth sounded plausible. The edifice of lies stretched high, smooth and seamless, a wall of shining white marble. She felt sick. He would defeat them.
She was extremely angry as she left court that day. As she was using the women’s room, once again Gail came in. This time Gail gaped at her in outrage. “You can’t injure him, you … you!” Gail blurted out. “You’ll see!” She dashed out without using the facilities.
Sunday Robin had her own complaint. “People are treating me like some kind of outcast! Like I’m a criminal. It’s just awful. I feel so embarrassed. Why can’t the media just let it go on if it must without making a fuss?”
“Robin, the trial doesn’t get much airplay. The bust was much bigger. It’s not on page one. It’s buried halfway back in the papers.”
“Everybody knows about it, everybody! I’m thinking of moving to New York.”
“You don’t have to run away.” She tried to put her arm around Robin, but her daughter ducked away. “It isn’t either of us on trial. We weren’t in his confidence.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t want to!” Robin stuck her chin out, looking like Ross. “Daddy calls me up and whines. He makes me sick.”
“It’s a hard situation for you, but it’ll be over and nobody will remember it in six months except us.”
“He makes it worse. At least you don’t beg me to agree you’re right all the time, when I just don’t want to hear anything about the sticky mess.”
Daria sighed. “Robin, if you want to look for a job in New York, I’ll see if I can give you a little money. I don’t have much, but let me see what I can do.”
“I just can’t stand everybody talking about it. I bet in New York, nobody cares about some dinky landlord case in Boston.”
Monday Daria had to film her weekly segments, trial or no trial. This week she was talking about fall cabbage crops under the title “King Cole.” Monday she prepared broccoli four easy ways; Wednesday’s segment would be on cauliflower; Friday, red, white and savoy cabbages would be her subject.
Tuesday Ross was being cross-examined by Bloomberg. Bloomberg projected a wry amusement. He seemed almost condescending toward Ross, saying in his posture and voice and mannerisms, now, man to man, why don’t we cut the nonsense and get down to facts? Enough of this pretending. We both know you’re up to your chin in it.
Ross had never endured well being contradicted or argued with. That was why she had developed her habit of circumventing him, pussyfooting around his annoyance as if around some cleft in the earth from which clouds of steam and noxious vapors arose. As she watched she remembered that he had never practiced in the courtroom for one of his professors had advised him in school that he was not fitted for a career in forensic law. He had told Ross, as Ross had repeated to Daria with undiminished pique, that Ross lacked a winning style.
A winning style. Last Friday she would have said he had it, but that was under sympathetic and respectful questioning. But challenged, prodded, asked to refute the testimony of witness after witness, Ross showed annoyance. He looked and sounded petulant. “I’m sure I can’t recall petty details of every conversation I engaged in six months ago. I had many business matters on my mind at the time.”
“I’m sure you did. Could you have been annoyed enough that Eduardo Rodriguez had brought Jaime White with him to meet you, that some details of that conversation might have slipped your mind?”
“I had no such conversation,” Ross snapped. “How can I remember something that didn’t happen?”
“Isn’t it true as Jaime White testified that you paid him twenty-five dollars in the tie department of Saks department store near your office?”
Potter objected. The judge overruled the objection. Potter turned to the jury with a look of disbelief. Look how they are harassing an honest man, he seemed to be saying silently. It was a pattern repeated again and again. Finally each time Ross would have to answer, as Potter suggested harassment.
“Mr. Bloomberg, I don’t know these people. Owning buildings in a neighborhood doesn’t mean I know the unemployed bums or the hoodlums who hang out on street corners.”
“Mr. Walker, am I to understand that you are swearing to us that everybody is lying? Jaime White is lying. Louis Ledoux is lying. Daria Walker is lying. Mrs. Rodriguez, Mr. Schulman, the whole neighborhood is all joined in one big lie just to harass you. Do you expect us to believe that?” Bloomberg glanced at Potter, waiting for the objection, but Potter smiled like someone who has turned up exactly the card he awaited.
“It is a conspiracy, yes,” Ross said with passionate conviction. “Run by those SON people. Helped by the spite of my ex-wife.” He glared straight at Daria, one of the few times he had looked at her since the trial began. “Who’s come here daily to gloat over me.”
“Mr. Walker, are you aware your former wife is a Boston television personality?”
“I know she cooks on television sometimes.”
“Are you aware she appears three times a week? Have you ever watched the program?”
“No.”
“Are you aware she’s well known as an author?”
“Of cookbooks.”
“You don’t approve of cookbooks, Mr. Walker?”
“I think they’re silly.”
“Might we presume you’re aware that your wife has formed a close relationship with Mr. Silver?”
“I know about it.”
“What did the detective you had watching Mrs. Walker just before your divorce report?”
“He said she was seeing that man. He also said she was spending a large amount of time with all the agitators from SON.”
“To your knowledge, did your former wife ever hire a detective to watch you?”
“She hired a detective after the house in Lexington caught fire.”
“Was that detective watching you or was he examining the rubble of the house for clues as to how the fire started?”
“That was the pretext.”
“Did you see the detective’s reports?”
“I saw some reports.”
“Did Donald Lindsey carry out surveillance on you?”
“I suppose not.”
“I would ask you, Mr. Walker, if you would not suppose if you were listening to another ex-husband talk about his former wife, if you wouldn’t think that perhaps the husband was the one who exhibited jealousy and resentment?”
“Objection,” Potter cried.
The objection was sustained and the jury was advised not to speculate on what the answer to that question might have been. Bloomberg was at his best with Ross. With the other witnesses, mostly he was establishing or questioning their stories. With Ross, he was setting him up in a subtle way she did not understand. He had a sense of Ross as prey that fascinated her. Under Bloomberg’s questions, Ross fidgeted. He crossed his legs and uncrossed them. He scowled. He shifted in his chair. His voice dripped with sarcasm, grated with annoyance, rose in what Daria suspected had to be experienced by the jury as arrogance.
“I was merely conducting my business in a businesslike way,” was the statement that stuck in her mind. It was uttered with conviction.
Bloomberg did not try to seem a gentleman conducting business with his peer in the jury’s presence, as Potter did. Instead he took the jury into his confidence. He seemed to be saying to them, us regular guys, we know how it is.
“Those people,” Ross said again and again, those agitators, those tenants, those people. “Those people don’t take care of their children.” “Those people leave trash on the stairs.” “Those people create a fire hazard with their garbage and their drinking.”
Daria began to see Bloomberg’s strategy. What he regarded as the crux of the case was to persuade the jury that a man of Ross’s standing could commit arson by proxy for con
venience and profit. After the careful civic-minded lawyer and liberal businessman of Potter’s gentle questioning, there emerged slowly another Ross Walker: one who could no longer sense how callous certain judgments sounded, how cold and distanced he seemed, how arrogance issued from him to hang like particles of ice in the courtroom air.
That day she realized she would never enter Ross’s consciousness and understand. Whatever he said would be justification and lies, some mixture never to be sorted out. She would not be granted even his picture of himself. Nothing more would be attainable than a provisional guess. She felt as if she had been climbing an enormous mountain for months only to find at the top not the view she had imagined but simply fog and swirling clouds and rocks beneath her feet. No long view of the terrain covered would ever open up.
No climactic moment of truth arrived. Ross never changed his story: he was the victim of a conspiracy of riffraff, tenants, agitators, bums, neighborhood lowlife, masterminded by the malice of his divorced wife. He denied arson and he never stopped denying. Bloomberg could not shake Ross’s account of himself. What Bloomberg destroyed was the character created by the rapport between Ross and Potter. The man who sat fidgeting, who grimaced with his thin lips, who arched his head back and glared, who showed how absolutely infuriating he found it to be challenged and interrogated publicly, was a man of high arrogance who did not consider himself accountable. Ross never contradicted his previous testimony. Only his icy contempt became more and more apparent as cross-examination proceeded. The two lawyers were dueling; neither could cripple the other. Feint and parry, feint and parry, the contest of wills and disparate styles went on.
Daria found the galleys of the seasonal cookbook waiting for her when she came home. She had to begin proofreading and correcting her way through the typeset book at once with Peggy and anybody else who could be pressed into reading aloud, because the difference in a recipe between 1 tsp. and 1 tbs. of salt was the difference between success and disaster. One line omitted could alter the results to high price garbage. Therefore she did not witness the final Thursday of the trial with the summations of Bloomberg and Potter. The jury went out before noon. She worked all day with Peggy.
