Sandrine's Case

by Thomas H. Cook

  “So let’s see now,” Judge Rutledge said. He was looking at the clock. “It’s getting rather late, I think.” He glanced at the jury, then at Mr. Singleton, and finally at Morty. “It seems to me that in light of the hour, it may be best to adjourn for the day,” he said. “Does either the defense or the prosecution have any objection to an adjournment?”

  Neither did.

  “All right, then, we will resume tomorrow morning at nine a.m.,” Judge Rutledge said.

  We rose as the jury left the room. I stood silently, watching them file out, each of them careful not to glance in my direction, as if the way I looked was, itself, in some way prejudicial.

  “Okay,” Morty told me once the last of them had departed. “Get some sleep.”

  I turned to Alexandria, her face in that fixed look of strain and worry.

  “I’ll take you straight home,” she said, as if I were a deadly microbe, a creature, primitive and deadly, that shouldn’t be released into the air.

  I stepped away from the table, turned to leave the courtroom, then stopped cold at the sight of Jane Forbes, a fellow professor at Coburn College, a woman Sandrine had sometimes met for early morning trots around the reservoir. She was standing rigidly in a shadowy corner of the courtroom, wearing a burgundy overcoat, her hands sunk deep in its pockets, a woman whose eyes unaccountably returned me to the now thoroughly incriminating ones that had once gazed at me in the green shade of the park. I had no idea why Jane had chosen to attend my trial, and yet, at that moment, her presence suddenly suggested an as yet unrevealed aspect of my case, the key to a room I had not entered yet.

  “Dad?” Alexandria called.

  “Coming,” I said, then fell in behind her, moving quickly now, past the benches where reporters and spectators alike were gathering up their things, pulling on their coats and jackets, then more quickly still as I surged past them.

  Once outside the courtroom we headed toward the parking lot, the corridor filled with the flotsam that inevitably swirls about any small town courthouse, people under restraining orders or seeking them, people answering summonses of various kinds, people in debt, people in trouble, the twisted knots in which so much of life seems perpetually entangled.

  Ah, humanity, I heard in the low, sorrowful voice I had long imagined as Melville’s.

  “What is it?” Alexandria asked. “You look . . .” She stopped, then shrugged. “I don’t know . . . strange.”

  We were outside the courthouse now, the parking lot only a few yards away, and unaccountably I’d stopped dead at the top of the stairs.

  “Dad?” Alexandria asked worriedly.

  I shook my head. “It’s nothing,” I assured her as I returned to myself.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded, then found my legs and headed down the stairs. “Nothing,” I repeated.

  But that was a lie. For it had indeed been something, a feeling I’d hardly recognized because it seemed so curious, a sense not of life’s sorrow but of its wrathfulness, the conviction that it was a coiled serpent forever striking here then there, a slithering, poisonous thing whose malice no one could at last escape.

  I glanced behind me, up the courthouse stairs, still shaken by this thought, fully expecting to see some B-movie river of blood cascade down those same stairs, red and thick, bent, consciously bent, upon engulfing everything.

  A panic seized me, one so fierce I thought I might surely break into a run.

  I knew better than to do anything like that however, and so I simply straightened my shoulders and headed down the stairs.

  “Let’s go home” was all I said.

  Home Bound

  “I’ll drive,” Alexandria said as we approached the car. She was reaching into her purse, searching for the keys, a gesture that told me she did not intend to argue the point. I’d just appeared mysteriously shaken, and so I was to be driven home, and that was that.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I’d learned by then that an accusation, any accusation, leaves the accused decidedly weakened. An accused person is a straggler in the herd. This is a recognition I’d come to slowly, and had fully understood only after the various local news media had labeled me a “person of interest” in regard to the investigation into Sandrine’s death. No charges had been made against me at that point, and certainly I’d not been arrested. But the accusation had been enough for Charles Higgins, the young, go-getter president of Coburn College, to summon me to his office and, while I sat silently and a little dazed by what I was hearing, request—unofficially, of course—my resignation. The college was in the middle of a fund-raising campaign to build a new sports center, he’d explained, and my “situation,” as he’d called it, might threaten its success.

  “As you must know, Sam,” the president said gravely, “attendance at sporting events brings in a great deal of money.” As if this weren’t enough to sink the spear, he added, “And, of course, there’s always the question of alumni donations, which can easily drop off in the face of poor publicity.”

  Given all the damage I was doing the right course was clear. I should do my duty to dear old Coburn College and resign.

  Charley ran his fingers down his lapels and waited for my response, his gaze neutral, save for the supplication, as if Coburn were a homeless shelter whose residents my staying on would cast into the cruel cold.

  It was impossible for me to guess whether he thought I’d killed Sandrine. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Being a distraction is, itself, a sort of crime, the minimum penalty for which is the loss of your job. I suppose that, had I considered my circumstances more clearly, I would have expected this to happen. Even so, I made a little show of being treated unfairly. After all, as I might have reminded him, my trial had not yet even begun. But it had by then become obvious to me that the presumption of innocence was a legal nicety the athletic program at Coburn College simply could not afford.

  “But what am I supposed to do, Charley?” I asked helplessly. “I mean, if I resign.”

  “Well, perhaps you could work on your novel,” he answered.

  “I haven’t worked on my novel in twenty years,” I informed him coolly. “My novel is a dead baby.”

  He looked at me expressionlessly though I could tell that he regretted he’d been unable to use the book myth most of my colleagues entertained, their way of convincing themselves they still had something to say along with the will and the talent to say it.

  “I see,” Charley said. “Well, at any rate, I’m sure you’ll find something to do.”

  He had no moral ground to stand on and he knew it but that couldn’t matter either. He had other responsibilities. Coburn was the bottom rung for him, a springboard to some later, more distinguished college presidency. He was young, with miles to go before he slept, and he would not let my current predicament get in his way.

  I knew all this, but losing my job would be so ruinous I was compelled to state the simple, if humiliating, truth. “I have bills to pay, Charley,” I told him. “Big bills. Legal bills.”

  Higgins shook his head. “I sorry, Sam. I truly am. And I hope this whole unfortunate matter will clear up in time.” His gaze turned stony. “But for now I’m afraid the board has left me no choice. We could be sued, you know. I don’t know for what, but some lawyer could figure something out, I’m sure. We are responsible for our faculty, for exposing our students to our teachers.”

  So no alleged murderers on board, I thought.

  “If I don’t resign, you’ll fire me?” I asked.

  “It would be suspension without pay,” Charley answered.

  “You’ve already thought this through,” I said. “Laid out the steps if I refuse to resign.”

  “I’m afraid so.” He shrugged. “I hope things eventually clear up and I can reconsider your appointment,” he added. “Af
ter you’ve resigned, I mean.” He shrugged again. “Until then,” he said, and shrugged a third time.

  Until then I would be out of work.

  No, not “until then.” Forever.

  No matter what the outcome of my trial I would be radioactive at Coburn College. And beyond Coburn, what college would hire a professor who’d brought such a cataract of bad publicity to his school?

  And so I’d left the president’s office knowing full well that I would never teach again, but the loss of my job had paled compared to this other loss, the one made painfully obvious by Alexandria now sitting at the wheel of my car, the loss of the traditional powers of fatherhood, the fact that I had become a kind of invalid to my own daughter.

  This was not a subject I wanted to discuss with her, however, and so I said, “How do you think it went in court today?”

  She turned on to Crescent Road. “Okay.”

  Her voice was flat, inexpressive, a nod to the fact that she simply had no way of knowing how it had gone, what the silent members of the jury might now be thinking. With that recognition, the inexplicable nature of my situation settled over me again. How had so clever a fellow ended up like this?

  This was a question I’d asked myself at each stage in the process that had begun with Sandrine’s death. Even late in that legal process I’d kept expecting it to halt. But it hadn’t, and so as Alexandria turned the wheel and we glided smoothly into the driveway of the house on Crescent Road, I could no longer be certain that it ever would.

  “Edith’s out sweeping the driveway,” I said drily with a nod to the woman who lived next door, Edith Whittier, long divorced, head-over-the-hedge friend of Sandrine, but nonetheless one of the last people to see her alive, a name recently added to Mr. Singleton’s list of prosecution witnesses. She nodded back, but coolly, and with a hint of repugnance, as if she’d just recently discovered my name on the state’s sex offender registry.

  “She hates me, too,” I said mordantly.

  Alexandria wheeled the car into the driveway. “Ignore her,” she said.

  Once in the house, I went to the scriptorium and read while Alexandria made dinner. I’d been perfectly capable of making dinner but she felt that I needed time to relax after a day in court. She’d been right, and yet even as I tried to lose myself in a book I incessantly replayed Morty’s earlier remark to me, how prejudice could be easily unearthed in a witness. But what would Officer Hill have had against me?

  I mentioned this to Alexandria over dinner.

  “Don’t be naive, Dad,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “She probably thought you were pretty weird,” Alexandria said bluntly.

  “How could she have thought that?” I asked. “I hardly said a word to her.”

  Alexandria’s eyes whipped over to me. “Well, that’s weird in itself, don’t you think?”

  “What was I supposed to say to her?” I asked. “Nice night, isn’t it, Officer Hill. Think it’ll rain by the weekend?”

  Alexandria shook her head. “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She would have gotten a bad impression, what with the way things look around here, like you and Mom are old hippies.”

  “We were never hippies,” I said. “To begin with, the hippies were way before our time.”

  “I’m talking about the way the house has always looked, Dad,” Alexandria said. “Like you and Mom just moved in. Everything scattered around.”

  “The house was untidy so I’m a murderer?”

  Alexandria lowered her eyes to her plate.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  She looked at me. “Dad, did you and Mom never notice that when we went to other houses, professors and people like that, they didn’t live like this?” She indicated the adjoining living room, where papers and books and CDs were scattered all about. “The house was always a big mess, just the way it is now. At those other houses everything was neat. Books were put away. You and Mom never noticed that?”

  “Oh, we noticed those houses, believe me,” I told her. “And you know what, Alexandria? We didn’t want anything to do with the way those houses looked. Everything in its place. Everything scrubbed and polished. We didn’t want that kind of house because we didn’t want that kind of life.”

  “Yeah, okay, Dad,” Alexandria said somewhat glumly. She returned to her food, toying with the green beans she’d cooked to a mush.

  “What do you mean, ‘Yeah, okay, Dad’?” I demanded.

  Alexandria faced me. “What else can I say? You don’t ever take anything back. It’s like a point of honor for you to win every argument. Even Mom said that.”

  “Really?” I asked sharply. “When did she say this?”

  “About a month before . . . she died,” Alexandria answered. A vision of Sandrine in her last days appeared to surface in her mind. “She seemed really sad. I remember one time she said that most people died wanting an apology, but that she would die wanting to apologize.”

  “To whom?”

  “You,” Alexandria answered.

  “Me?” I asked. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Alexandria answered, her gaze suddenly so disturbingly penetrating I found it hard to look her in the eye.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” I said.

  She pointed to my untouched food. “Eat something. You have to keep up your strength.”

  She had become like this since Sandrine’s death, a little brusque and authoritarian. I’d allowed this new way of dealing with me because I’d come to believe she wanted to feel more competent. She’d graduated from college only three years before, and although she’d hoped to land a job at a New York publishing house, she’d ended up in a small Atlanta literary agency that was little more than a mail-forwarding service for people who couldn’t get reputable agents. “A vanity press is pathetic enough,” she’d once told me, “but a vanity literary agency, that’s really sad.”

  There was little conversation after that. I mentioned this book or that movie, something on Frontline or a Masterpiece Theater episode. I avoided any further reference to my first day in court.

  More than anything I avoided any talk of Sandrine. Even so she was everywhere. I thought of that line from one of Sondheim’s songs: Every day a little death . . . in the buttons, in the bread. Sandrine had listened to that song over and over during her last weeks. She’d downloaded every version she could find. Then she’d sat for hours in the scriptorium, with those white earbuds and her pale green Nano. She’d hardly ever read. She was tired of words and pages, she said. I want to stream, Sam, she told me one evening when I’d mentioned a book she might admire. Please, just let me stream.

  After dinner, I went back to the scriptorium, then to the bedroom I’d shared with Sandrine and in which she’d died. I’d gotten rid of the bed a few days after her death. It was just too much, sleeping on the same mattress where she’d lain, half covered in the light of that flickering candle. I’d had the mattress hauled away, along with all our bedding. We’d never actually had a bed, just the metal frame that held the mattresses, with no headboard or bedposts. That, too, must have looked weird to Officer Hill. It must have looked cold and unloving, that stark metal frame pushed up against a bare wall, the whole thing surrounded by the accumulated droppings of our various intellectual interests.

  The bed I’d chosen to replace that steel frame hadn’t been made up in several days, and for a moment I simply stared at it. I’d chosen it hastily because I didn’t like to shop. It was made of oak but stained to look like mahogany. It was very plain, with a low headboard. A Shaker would have approved of everything but the somewhat glossy stain.

  I looked for an alternative to climbing into the bed but this was Coburn, and after nine o’clock bed was all there was. There were no nightclubs in the town, no theater save for the
Coburn County Thespians who did a lot of Neil Simon, and the last showing at the movie house was already halfway through. But I wouldn’t have gone to the movies anyway. Morty had long ago advised against my going anywhere in the town. His fear was that some not yet selected member of the jury might spot me enjoying myself. Nothing could be more prejudicial than that, he said. A widower—especially one whose wife killed herself or, worse, one accused of her murder—should never smile, and certainly never laugh. The lightness of being had to be weighted down until the trial was over. Widower’s weeds were all that I could wear.

  But surely widowers could go walking in the neighborhood, I reasoned, and so I headed for the door.

  “Where are you going, Dad?”

  Alexandria’s voice was like a hook in my mouth.

  “For a walk.”

  “You want company?”

  “Not really,” I told her, “but thanks for asking.”

  Seconds later I was strolling down Crescent Road, breathing in the crisp night air.

  Early on, during our first weeks in Coburn, Sandrine and I had often walked together in the evening. She would look up at the stars, and a curious happiness would settle over her. “I never really wanted to be an expat, Sam,” she’d said on one of those occasions, “that Hemingway type, drinking too much, hanging around in cafés. It was never what I wanted.”

  “What did you want?”

  She laughed. “To be one of those much-maligned do-gooders,” she answered. “What we talked about before we came here . . . building a school.”

  Was it in the wake of that lost ideal that things had begun to go awry, I asked myself as I continued my solitary stroll down Crescent Road. Had there been within the welter of Sandrine’s youthful dreams one of such singular force that in failing to achieve it she’d come to think of herself as having failed in everything? Had she thought of it as I had thought of my unwritten novel, and had it worked upon her heart as corrosively as that novel had worked on mine?