Life Sentences

by Laura Lippman

  “Red or white?”

  “White wine,” her father said, “is insipid.”

  His old prejudice seemed a shame, given the rich variety of Low Country seafood on the menu, but Cassandra recalibrated her taste buds, began checking out the plates listed under VIANDES. There was foie gras in the appetizer course, but she preferred that accompanied by sauterne, although she wouldn’t dream of mentioning this to her father. Wine—all alcohol, in fact—was supposed to be his bailiwick. Some fathers remained forever in charge of the yard or the cars. Her father ruled the liquor cabinet.

  Cassandra had been interviewed far more than she had served as an interrogator, but she was developing her own elliptical style these days, inspired in part by Joan Didion’s comment about how she let shyness work for her, so that subjects rushed to fill her awkward silences. Cassandra could never fake shyness, especially with her father. But she could lead him, as if down a series of switchbacks, to the topic she really wanted to discuss. They began easily enough, over light green salads, talking about the problems posed by her father’s story. He was a white man who had collided with a seminal event that affected African-Americans far more profoundly in the end. Was his story meaningful in any larger way, or was it just a heightened love story?

  “You mean, is it War and Peace or Anna Karenina?” her father said. “A little bit of both. In the end, I simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “The fact that you were white—isn’t that part of the reason you were beaten so badly? Sort of like what’s-his-name, in the L.A. riots all those years later, the man who was pulled from his truck.”

  “I suppose,” her father said. “But Annie was attacked first. Don’t ever lose that part of the thread. Other people were attacked, even killed. And they tended to be black.”

  She tried to get him to sketch the scene, but her father had always been stubborn about the facts surrounding the beating itself, insisting he didn’t remember anything after the first blow. He could describe Annie, how he had watched in horror as she got knocked down, then rose up again, as crowds began running down the street toward a drugstore that was being looted. The contemporaneous accounts of looting were, as Cassandra knew from researching her first book, borderline racist, portraying all the rioters as craven opportunists, intent on stealing, burning buildings to destroy the credit records that recounted who owed what. But her stepmother had introduced Cassandra to women who could explain what it was like, that confused afternoon, how they believed they were on the verge of an apocalypse. What began as a desperate quest for food and medicine and baby formula spiraled out of control. It was Judgment Day. “It didn’t,” Annie said dryly, “bring out the best in anyone.”

  At the same time, Annie had always insisted she had no plan, that she was coming home from work when the riot erupted around her and she was knocked down, men tearing at her clothes, prompting Cedric Fallows’s ill-considered bit of gallantry. Would he have gotten out of his car if the woman he had seen had been less beautiful? Probably not, Cassandra knew, although she could never quite bear to put those words on paper. She granted her father his love-at-first-sight version, but she was not required to point out that this love was sparked by Annie’s gorgeous shape, her beguiling face whose only flaw was the gap between her front teeth. Her father adored that gap.

  “Cassandra, I’m not sure you realize how badly injured I was,” her father said now. “I didn’t suffer actual brain damage—thank God, I cannot imagine what my life would have been like if my mind had been impaired—but it was healthier for me to forget, and my brain complied.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been healthier still if there had been more talk of post-traumatic stress disorder then? It’s my observation that your conscious mind may have granted you a respite, but your subconscious is a land mine. You jump at small noises, for example, like a door opening unexpectedly.”

  “I jumped at small noises back when I could hear them,” her father said. “Now, I think, a gun could go off and I wouldn’t flinch.”

  She backed away then, not wanting to push him too hard. And, to be truthful, not wanting to delve into her father’s decline, because it also implied her own. Instead, they discussed her father’s view of the riots, which was admirably benign, all things considered. But then, he had absorbed Annie’s version of things. Her world had rejected him almost as thoroughly as his had rejected her, isolating the couple. It was a good thing that their love had held up, Cassandra often thought, because they really didn’t have anyone else. Her father’s colleagues, polite liberals, did not judge him, but they did not invite his new wife to their homes, and they could be thoughtlessly condescending when he brought her to events at the university. Annie wasn’t a stupid woman, just not a bookish one. With her husband’s encouragement, she had earned a nursing degree. But that mattered little to his friends.

  As for Annie’s family—when she married Cedric Fallows, she was dead to them.

  And so the meal went, Cassandra pressing, then retreating, circling around and around, getting ready for the right moment to hit her target. She found it over the cheese course, her father mellow with port.

  “I still miss cigarettes,” he said.

  Cassandra was amazed. “You quit almost forty years ago.”

  “Yes, I did, and I’ve never strayed, not once. But after a meal like this—I would love a cigarette.”

  Strayed was all she needed.

  “Daddy—when you met Annie, you were an experienced, well, adulterer. You had several lovers before her.”

  “Affairs, not lovers. I never loved them.”

  “Okay, several affairs.” There had always been moments when this semantic distinction rankled, and this was one of them. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that you were experienced at cheating. But when you began the affair with Annie, after you got out of the hospital, you didn’t try to hide it. You flaunted it, made mother acknowledge it, all but forced her to kick you out. Why did you do that?”

  “Cassandra, I think you know.”

  “No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Then what do you think? You know something of adultery—much as that pains me to say. I would never tell you what to write, and your second book is quite well done, but I won’t pretend that I wouldn’t be happier if that document never existed.”

  “Are we having a teaching moment? Are you using the Socratic method to get me to explain your life to you?”

  “I think you have a theory, and you want to know if it’s right. So go ahead, tell me, Cassandra. Why, after a history of furtive behavior, did I enter so flagrantly into the affair with Annie, refusing to conceal what I was doing?”

  “I think it’s because you had always lied—to mother, to those other women. To be an adulterer is to be a liar. The only way you could make Annie special was to never tell a single lie to her—or even about her.”

  He sipped his port.

  “This is not,” her father said, “going to be part of our onstage discussion?” He did her the courtesy of pretending it was a question.

  “No, but—”

  “Then let’s leave it here, with a meaningful silence, where I neither affirm nor contradict your sense of me.”

  She let him drive home, then instantly regretted it, thinking of those dark final miles to Broadmeade. She left a message on his machine, demanding that he check in, pacing well into the night when he didn’t.

  He called about ten the next morning, ostensibly to ask if she remembered the name of the wine he had selected and whether she thought Wegman’s might carry the goat cheese. But Cassandra understood that the call, the timing of it, was to remind her that concern was a parent’s prerogative, not a child’s. She was not his caretaker. Yet.

  CHAPTER

  22

  THE BARRS LIVED IN A BLOCK very much like Cassandra’s own back in Boerum Hill. In fact, the old town houses here—they were too stately to be called rowhouses—were even nicer and the neighborhood ha
d more green, or would, when the trees budded later this spring. Her parents had lived in an apartment here briefly, in the first year of their marriage. “Across the street from F. Scott Fitzgerald,” her father had always said, and it was years before Cassandra realized that Fitzgerald was not an actual neighbor but a literary ghost that her father liked having nearby.

  She wondered at the Barrs’ choice of the neighborhood, the house, if it were a statement of sorts. Donna’s parents had lived not even a mile from Cassandra’s childhood home, but it had seemed like a different world, a modern-for-the-era split-level backing up to the wooded hills on the other side of the Gwynns Falls. Everything in the Howards’ house was new and shiny. She may have jumbled two parties in her memory, as Tisha claimed, but she definitely retained vivid impressions of the sixth-grade “graduation” party held there. And, yes, they had called it a graduation party. Lately, there was earnest hand-wringing over the excessive celebration of minor milestones, which amused Cassandra. Not only had her sixth-grade class staged a graduation, she had marched in a cap and gown when she finished kindergarten. There was nothing new about this.

  But the party at the Howard house had eclipsed the school celebration. She remembered the dress she wore, a very short—really, too short—patterned dress, a Christmas gift. Cassandra had grown two inches in five months, reaching what would turn out to be her adult height of five-four, and the hemline was barely decent. The boys teased her about it. Teased her about her dress and her hair, which she hadn’t washed in three days in anticipation of the party because her hair was more manageable when it was dirty. Instead, she had sprayed some bizarre aerosol product on it—Psssssst. God knows what was in that concoction of pressurized chemicals. She would have done just as well shaking talcum powder over her head. There was a little powder visible on her dress and the boys had claimed she had dandruff, brushing at her shoulders in imitation of a popular commercial. She had wanted to think the boys teased her because they liked her. But even then, she didn’t have much capacity for self-delusion. The boys in her class, black and white alike, didn’t see her as a girly-girl, while they clearly thought Donna and Tisha deserved that kind of attention. She could swear little Candy Barr had been there, doing his dance, but maybe that had been at Tisha’s birthday party two months earlier.

  And Callie? Would Callie have been there? Having stumbled on this forgotten girl in her own pages, Cassandra kept wracking her memory, hoping to discover Callie lurking in some other overlooked corner. It was a big party, everyone must have been invited. But that didn’t mean everyone was there.

  “Cassandra,” Donna said, opening the door to her. She had aged well, almost as well as Tisha. Donna’s delicate prettiness was more susceptible to the years; it was the “interesting” girls who improved. But her voice was the same, sweet and low, forcing one to lean in close to catch each word.

  “You look the same,” Cassandra said.

  “You don’t,” she said, inspecting the outfit revealed as Cassandra shrugged out of her trench coat. “Are those slacks Armani?”

  Cassandra nodded, pleased. The pants had gone a long way toward meeting Teena’s quota, as had the cashmere turtleneck that Teena had picked out, in a mossy green color that Cassandra never would have chosen. But she was also pleased that Donna recognized the designer. She felt as if they were on some new plane, more equal than they had been in school. Back then, she had stroked the blond wood case of the Howard color television cabinet, wondering at the glory of such a thing. Now she and Donna lived in similar houses, wore similar clothes.

  “The hair, though,” Donna said. “I think I might have known you from the back, just from the hair.”

  The hair. With those two words, Donna effortlessly reestablished the old order. Cassandra might have been her peer now, financially, but Donna wasn’t ready to offer her equal stature across the board.

  She decided to make a joke of it. “Sixth grade was hard, but I don’t think I had turned gray yet.”

  “No, that’s true,” Donna said, leading her into the formal living room, which tended heavily toward chintz—good taste, if a little safe. Not Cassandra’s taste. “Your face has grown into that mane. Sometimes it was hard to see you under all that hair.”

  I was hiding, Cassandra wanted to say. I needed that curtain of hair to make it through the day, sometimes, after my father left. She had worn it so far forward that it almost covered her face, and the boys called her Cousin It.

  “Well, it’s quite a transformation,” Donna said. “I feel so boring next to you. Staying in Baltimore, marrying a boy I’ve known all my life. When Reg told me about running into you, I couldn’t help being intrigued by your new project. A book about us and where we ended up. No one will want to read my chapters, though! What did Tolstoy say? All happy families are alike?”

  “I always thought,” Cassandra said, consciously taking on her old role, the provocateur, the contrarian, “that was utter bullshit. Happiness doesn’t come in one flavor any more than ice cream does.”

  Donna rewarded her with a laugh, her old shy, difficult-to-coax laugh, a key weapon in Donna’s arsenal. “You’re right. There’s a world of difference between chocolate and vanilla, but if vanilla makes you happy, so be it.”

  Was Donna implying Cassandra was vanilla? But, no, Donna was not one to stab and poke that way. Cassandra was the one who had used language to bully, tease, assert.

  “It occurs to me just now,” she said, lying smoothly, her father’s daughter, “that you may be one of the most important figures in what I’m doing, the one person connected to everyone.”

  Donna frowned prettily. Donna had always been able to do even ugly things prettily.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Tisha was the personality around which we all revolved.”

  “Yes, back in school.” She may have imagined it, but Cassandra would swear that Donna looked disappointed at her ready agreement, had hoped for more of an argument. “But you married Reg, who worked for your father, and he worked on Callie’s defense. I can’t help wondering—did you ask your father’s firm to take on Callie? Or was it a coincidence?”

  “I suppose the coincidence was that my father was simply one of the most successful lawyers in the city.” Donna’s manner was a little stiff. Was it really that wounding to be reminded that Tisha had been the spark plug of their group? “It was my understanding that the ACLU brought him into the case. I was…away, when it started. I was in Knoxville for much of the eighties. There was a—I was—I was married, before. And not one of those starter marriages. It lasted seven years and the ending was…quite bitter.”

  “Hey, I had two of those,” Cassandra said, and this admission seemed to relax Donna.

  “It’s awful, isn’t it? Divorce. I’d never go through it again.”

  That pussy hound Reg Barr. Teena Murphy had tossed that off almost parenthetically, as if everyone knew and no one cared. It was of more interest to Cassandra than she wanted to admit. She knew the compromises involved in being married to a man who would not stop sleeping with other women, no matter how discreetly. But she couldn’t imagine Donna putting up with it. Perhaps Teena was referring to pre-marriage Reg.

  “Was it strange,” Cassandra said, “dating a man—marrying a man—that you could remember as a little boy?”

  “It was. In fact, I felt a little embarrassed at first, as if two years were some horrible gap. Plus, he was working for my father. But he pursued me, was determined to have me, and I have to say, I was flattered. Reg was quite the ladies’ man, he had his pick of women. I could never see why he settled on dull old me.”

  Cassandra knew she was expected to contradict this premise as well—protest that Donna was never dull, merely quiet, a personality in her own right. Instead, she found herself saying, “Well, you were the boss’s daughter and he did end up making partner.”

  Her tone was light, but apparently not light enough.

  “He made partner before we were engaged. And it grieved him
so, the gossip about how it was because of me. Reg earned that partnership, earned the right to take over when my father retired. You know, it’s only nepotism when you can’t back it up. Reg could have gone out on his own, been a star wherever he worked. It was in my father’s best interest—in the firm’s best interest—to keep him in the fold.”

  “Did he ever speak of Callie to you, when he was representing her?”

  “Of course not. Attorney-client privilege.”

  “Did he ask you about her, try to glean information about her as a child? After all, you and Tisha had known her, a little. If I were her lawyer, I’d have been keen to talk to her childhood friends.”

  “That’s not law, that’s psychology,” Donna said. “Of use in a pre-sentencing, but it had no relevance to Callie’s case. Besides, if you think about it—what did we really know about Callie? No one ever went to her house, only Fatima knew her people. And she was so quiet. Never volunteered in class and when the teachers made her participate, she looked as if she were on the verge of passing out. Do you remember Callie ever saying anything?”

  “I remember her singing. And laughing. But, no, she wasn’t a big talker.”

  “Except to Fatima. She whispered, sometimes, to Fatima, and then Fatima took Callie’s comments for hers. Half the funny things that Fatima said? Callie whispered them or wrote them in the margins of her notebook.”

  Notebooks. Cassandra had a Proustian moment, remembering those notebooks. There were not many variations, then—or perhaps her mother had simply not allowed variations. Everyone had a denim cloth–covered binder with loose-leaf paper. Neatness counted, and neatness was not Cassandra’s strong suit. Donna, though—Donna’s notebooks had been exquisite year-round. She never used those sticky little reinforcements to mend the broken holes, because her holes never broke. She never doodled on the outside, although she covertly filled her pages with drawings. And when they had to make covers for the school-issued textbooks, hers were folded and fitted with the precision of origami, while Cassandra’s managed the trick of being simultaneously lumpy and shredded.