by Eric Flint
Laura Koudsi jumped a little. This was news to her. More and more, she was thinking that she would dearly love to have Francis Murphy under cross examination.
She looked across the room. Johann Georg Hardegg was taking extensive notes as he sat next to Murphy. Murphy turned his head and said something to his attorney. Hardegg motioned, requesting Smithson's attention.
"Yes?"
"My client wishes to state for the record that he did not go to apply for the marriage license, either. When Father O'Malley picked up the ones for St. Vincent de Paul parish for that week at the courthouse in Fairmont, he told the clerk that the stack was missing the one for Francis and Pat. He picked them up every week, of course. And it had been in the paper. So the clerk filled one out according to the information that Father O'Malley gave her and sent it back to Grantville with him. My client states that nobody should blame the clerk, because she probably just thought that he and Patricia Fitzgerald had appeared and applied and that the original had been temporarily misplaced somewhere. Especially since the clerk was his Aunt Bridget, who still lives here in town, and he doesn't want her to get in any trouble."
* * *
That brought the hearing to a halt for a while. On the following day, Bridget Mary Scanlon Jenkins appeared and confirmed Francis Murphy's statement. Then the questioning of Pat resumed.
* * *
"Do you have any other testimony to offer in regard to the period prior to the marriage?"
Pat shook her head at Smithson; the clerk reminded her to give a verbal reply.
"No."
"Then please describe the actual marriage itself, to the best of your ability."
Pat looked straight at him. "The morning I was supposed to marry Francis according to the announcement that Mom and Dad had put in the paper, I went downstairs and said one final time that I wasn't going to do it. That I was getting in the car and driving to Fairmont and going to class, just like I did every other day. Mom said that I was hysterical and at least needed to drink some orange juice or I'd get low blood sugar and have a wreck on Route 250. She handed it to me. I don't really remember the wedding. I don't remember anything until the next morning, when I woke up feeling half dead with my mouth all sour and my head aching and was in bed with Francis in a motel and all sticky down there. So I figured that it was too late."
Laura Koudsi motioned for Smithson's attention. "Before my client concludes her testimony, I would like to submit a list of witnesses who have agreed to testify in regard to Patricia Fitzgerald's physical and mental condition on the day of her purported marriage to Francis Murphy. I would also like permission to call two expert witnesses who have consented to provide technical information in regard to the effect of a class of widely available up-time drugs called 'tranquilizers' on the individual to whom they are administered. I also request that you postpone the conclusion of my client's testimony until after the above material has been entered into your record."
Father Kircher agreed and adjourned the hearing until such time as the additional witnesses could be scheduled to appear before it.
* * *
"My name is Suzanne Fitzgerald Trelli. I am the youngest sister of Patricia Fitzgerald. In March of 1968, I was twelve years old. I don't know whether that's old enough for you to take my word in a court or not, but I'll tell you what I remember.
"Pat's the oldest. Little Mary Liz, the next sister after Pat, was nineteen then. She graduated from high school that spring, joined the navy, and never came back. There was just a year between Mary Liz and Cathy, our next sister. She was eighteen then, so she was of age, and she left with Mary Liz. The navy wouldn't take her because she didn't have a diploma, so she worked for a while in Norfolk, got her GED, and then went on working at the shipyard. They both got married, later on. They have kids and lived down on the coast somewhere, in North Carolina. The next was our only brother. He was seventeen then. He was killed in Viet Nam in 1970. Not married, no kids. That almost killed our parents when it happened. Then Colette. She married Ed Piazza's brother Mark in 1978 and they moved out to California.
"Then me, I'm the last. When I was eighteen, I moved in with my uncle and aunt, Denise Adducci's parents. They helped me to go to college at Fairmont State just as if I was one of their own kids. I'm married to Felix Trelli who does placement for the Tech Center and I'm the language arts and remedial English specialist there.
"We have three children. Mary Suzanne, named for Felix's mom and for me; Patricia Beth, for my sisters Pat and Little Mary Liz who were like mothers to me for a lot of my life, and John Felix, for Felix's dad Giovanni and for Felix. That's 'Mary' in 'Mary Suzanne' for Felix's mother, not for mine. I'd rather have used her middle name, but she doesn't go by it.
"During those years that I was a kid, our mother was mostly checked out on prescription tranquilizers. It was Mom's own Valium prescription she used to give the pills to Pat the day they wanted her to marry Francis.
"I didn't go to the wedding. It was a weekday and I was in school. All I can tell you is what my sisters Little Mary Liz and Cathy told me later. They said that Pat was so zonked out that she couldn't even repeat the vows after Father O'Malley."
* * *
Pastor Ludwig Kastenmayer, sitting in the spectator's section, thought to himself that Frau Trelli's testimony was more remarkable for what it did not say than for what it did. Had he been one of the panelists taking testimony, he would have posed several follow-up questions.
* * *
Dennis Fitzgerald and his wife Rosemary, the parents of Tony Adducci's wife Denise and uncle and aunt of Pat, testified that they had not been invited to the wedding. "They told us that it was going to be very small and private," Rosemary stated.
* * *
"I wasn't there," Francis' brother Andy Murphy said. "I was working up in Pennsylvania back then, didn't have a car, and didn't have the money to come anyhow. It was a weekday, so I'd have had to take off and been docked my wages, too."
"I wasn't there, either," Mag Farrell, Francis' sister, said. "I was in the hospital in Fairmont having another miscarriage. I had three before we finally had Bobbi Jo."
"I did go," Pauline Mora, Francis' younger sister, testified. "I was born in 1947 and I was twenty, so I was of age. And from what I saw, Little Mary Liz and Cathy were telling Suzanne the truth. Pat was totally out of it that day. Wobbling on her feet."
* * *
"At least," Tony Adducci said to Joe Stull three days later, "it's looking more and more like Pat isn't guilty of bigamy. In the sense that her marriage to Francis wasn't good. This testimony that Kircher is taking is only for the purposes of determining canonical validity, of course. In the Catholic church. Not whether the marriage was legal in civil law. But since she says that she had no intention of marrying Francis no matter what her dad and Father O'Malley wanted her to do and that she doesn't remember anything between breakfast before the ceremony and waking up the next morning, the purported marriage probably wasn't legal under civil law, either.
"What did O'Malley think he was up to?" Joe asked. "I'm really not following this."
Tony frowned. "I was only six when all this was going on about Pat and Francis' marriage. I was older when they separated, of course; a teenager, so I remember that. Ignatius O'Malley had his own version of the Catholic hierarchy. Irish on top. Followed in no special order by Germans, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, and Lebanese. Or maybe in about that order, now that I think about it. He wasn't so irrational about the other ethnicities, but he really did think he was obliged to make the Irish Catholic families in St. Vincent's parish toe the line. And one thing he could really hardly stand was the girls marrying out of the church. So every action that Pat had taken since she was eighteen was a total offense to him. He'd have done almost anything to get her back under proper control, as he saw it, I think."
"So you think she's free and clear?" That was what concerned Joe the most.
"She didn't consent. I don't see how any judge or jury, canon
law or civil law, could find that she was capable of consent. I just don't. On top of everything else, when they called Pat's mother—Mary Liz—to testify, she admitted that she tranked Pat with Valium in her orange juice at breakfast, 'because otherwise she'd have been out of there when it came to the crunch and then running back to that Stull man over in Clarksburg.' Another valium in a glass of water before they took her to the church. And two more before they sent her off with Francis for the 'wedding night.' Which, according to the old harridan, she did out of 'mercy' so Pat wouldn't 'fight it and maybe get hurt.'"
* * *
"The informal hearing in regard to the matrimonial cause between Francis Murphy and Patricia Fitzgerald is resumed," Father Athanasius Kircher announced. He gestured to Nicholas Smithson to resume the questioning.
Laura Koudsi motioned. "My client would like to present her concluding testimony as a statement, rather than as answers to specific questions. Naturally, if you have specific questions at the end of her statement, she will attempt to reply to the best of her ability."
"Agreed," Smithson said.
Pat clasped her hands in her lap. "If I'd known that I was married to Dennis, even outside of the church, I'd have run to him even then and begged him to take me back even though I'd been unfaithful to him with Francis in that motel. I would have. But I didn't know it. I'd never heard of that 'common law' stuff. I don't think that West Virginia had it. I thought I was married to Francis. Catholic married, so that I couldn't even divorce him. So I went to him down in South Carolina after I finished the spring semester. Francis wasn't so unreasonable then. He agreed that I shouldn't waste the tuition money; that I should finish up the semester. When I came back after he shipped out, I was pregnant with Keenan. He—Francis, that is—wasn't killed in Viet Nam after all that. He came back just fine. Well, just fine in the sense that he was alive and not injured. Mentally, he was pretty upset. It was my brother who got killed.
"I never prayed for Francis to be killed. I never even prayed for the Viet Cong to take him prisoner. I did pray that he'd stay away and I didn't go to him again after he got back stateside. But after three years the army discharged him, the VA hospital said he was all right, and he came back to Grantville. That was where Maggy, Pauly, and Patty came from.
"By the time Patty was born, he was drinking terrible. He'd lost two jobs, already. But Father O'Malley was still the priest at St. Vincent de Paul, and he said that for a man to drink was no justification for a wife to leave him. That she had to be patient. So I stayed until the night that he came home drunk, picked up Patty, and dropped her on the floor. Not threw her. He wasn't what they called abusive. Just dropped her because he was so drunk. Then I just walked out. I took the girls. I should have taken Keenan, but I knew I couldn't handle him and work a full-time job, too. Sometimes you just do what you can instead of what you should."
She looked up at Nicholas Smithson, then at the bank of other Jesuits sitting at the table. By this time, she was circling her hands around and around one another nervously.
"It seems like, now, that all my life, everything that has gone wrong was because I was trying to do what I'd been taught was right. And every time I've confessed, I've confessed the wrong things, so I've been in a state of mortal sin every time I went to communion. I don't see any way to fix any of it, after all this time.
"I don't want anybody hurt more. All I want now is to be left in peace, so I can go to Erfurt and live with Dennis and be happy for the rest of our lives."
* * *
"Nobody is going to file charges in regard to bigamy," Maurice Tito said, "and I think I'll leave the finer points of sorting out valid consent to Larry Mazzare and whatever kind of canon law Ehegericht he cobbles together here in Thuringia once he gets back. Right now, I don't think that the prosecuting attorney, having read the testimony that they took over at St. Mary Magdalene's, is inclined to file bigamy charges."
"It might not be a bad idea to issue some sort of an explanation," Thomas Price Riddle suggested. People are wandering around all over town asking, 'Is she a bigamist? Is she going to be prosecuted?'"
"How?" Tito asked. "It's not that easy to get across, that the marriage was bigamous but that she isn't guilty of bigamy as a crime. Black's Law Dictionary is my resource of first resort. It defines the crime of bigamy as "willfully and knowingly" contracting a second marriage while a first marriage is still, to the knowledge of the offender, undissolved and subsisting. Pat and Dennis certainly did not know that they were married by common law in Kansas and Iowa. That seems to be perfectly clear to me. Though I intend to tiptoe very gently around the possible quagmire arising from whether their statements that they 'wanted to be married' to one another equates to 'they intended to be married' to one another while they were out there."
"Nobody's brought that up," Riddle said. "I suppose that I could assign one of my students to write an article about the distinction between bigamy as a condition and bigamy as a crime and send it to the newspapers. Whether that will make it clear to the average reader of the Grantville Times is another question. The fact remains that she was living in a state of bigamy and it's not going to be all that easy to explain the difference in terms the average person can understand."
"Given the procedural anomalies, such as Pat's assertion that she did not participate in applying for the marriage license. And how distinctly uncomfortable Francis looked when she said that, so much that he made his only contribution to the whole hearing. And that there is some question whether she actually repeated her vows," Tito said, "I'm not even a hundred per cent sure that she was in a state of bigamy. Though it would be nice, some time, to hear what Francis has to say about all the rest of this under oath."
"That's true, too. Is Martin planning to file charges against Francis or Mary Liz, for the way that wedding was arranged?" Admittedly, Tom Riddle was the prosecuting attorney's grandfather, but he did try not to meddle in Martin's business. Better to ask Maurice.
Tito shook his head. "Aside from the fact that the testimony they took at St. Mary's isn't formally before the civil court system in any case, he's planning to use prosecutorial discretion if it does come before us. The most guilty party was O'Malley and he's been dead for years. Pat's not out for revenge against anyone. As she said, she just wants to be left in peace now. We can't see dragging her back and forth from Erfurt to give more testimony. Francis is in custody on multiple charges already, ranging from attempted murder to mutilation of a corpse. Adding a thirty-five year old drug rape charge won't make any difference; it's not a capital offense any more than the rest of them. Mary Liz is seventy-six years old and not well; it's not as if there's a danger to the public in the sense that she might do it again. There's Suzanne and her kids to consider. We're just going to leave it be."
"That's probably about the best you can do," Thomas Price Riddle said. "What a goddamned mess."
* * *
"So," Jonas Justinus Muselius asked cheerfully after the conclusion of the hearing on the Murphy marriage, "What did you learn?"
Pastor Ludwig Kastenmayer looked at him. "That the up-timers who continually assure us that introducing their way of doing things would greatly improve and simplify the existing seventeenth-century practices are often sadly mistaken."
"That, too, is valuable to know," Muselius answered.
Johann Georg Hardegg, who was of course one of Kastenmayer's parishioners, nodded his head solemnly.
"It is undoubtedly true," Kastenmayer continued, "that my service on the Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt Ehegericht for the next few years, sorting through the debris of failed betrothals and marriages, is going to be very time-consuming."
Muselius nodded.
"Yes," Hardegg said. "Undoubtedly."
"Therefore, I think," Kastenmayer said, "given Count Ludwig Guenther's budgetary problems, the parish is going to have to find some way of funding a salary for at least one assistant pastor on its own, without relying on a subsidy from the consistory."
&n
bsp; Hardegg, who by virtue of his university degree had been installed as a member of St. Martin's board of elders almost the instant he took up residence in Grantville, suspected that he had been had. Coming up with a source for that salary and persuading the parishioners to pay the money would now be . . . his job.
February, 1635
"Since I'm going to hell anyway," Pat said to Dennis, "it seems a little silly for me to insist that we have to have a Catholic wedding now. Which we probably couldn't for ages and ages and ages. If ever. I'll marry you Methodist. Or at city hall. Or anywhere you please. I just want to keep the same rings."
* * *
"After all these years!" Dennis Stull said. "After all these years, now Pat agrees to get married someplace other than a Catholic church. If she would have done that in Leavenworth in '65 . . . Henry Dreeson says he'll do a civil ceremony for us next week if you think it's too hot to handle."
The Reverend Simon Jones looked at his wife.
"'In for a penny, in for a pound,' the Reverend Mary Ellen said. "After all the furor surrounding the marriage of Wes Jenkins and Clara Bachmeierin, we can't get into any more hot water with the Veda Mae Haggerty's of First Methodist than we already are."
