“What if we let her off, and next year she smashes herself up and somebody else, too?” Smart One asked. “I mean, I feel for her.” He looked around the table, and catching my eye took a quick breath for courage and said, “I’m a recovering alcoholic myself,” with a great lightness, as if it was a privilege to be intimately acquainted with one’s own desolation, an active member of the great, striving, desperate world. My heart reeled: could it be, that someone else got out of Purmort alive? “But, she’s a grown-up, she’s got responsibilities,” he said.
Born Again was the last man in the circle, and as the question came around to him he put his hands over his face.
My heart went out. “I know it’s stressful,” I said. “But this isn’t the final vote after all. It’s only to get an idea, see how we’re leaning.”
He didn’t move. “We’ll have more discussions,” I said. “You don’t have to worry, we can all change our minds.…”
He looked up. “I’m having a dosebleed,” he said, and blood coursed down over his lip on cue, so that he covered his face again.
“I guess we’re a hung jury,” Foreman said happily.
“We are not a hung jury,” I retorted, while Born Again gazed upward and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re an undecided jury … and one of us is having a nosebleed … but we have a job and we’re going to do it. Now it does sound as if we all have some doubt—”
“Not me!” Foreman declared. “I just have to abstain, that’s all.”
“What about the Breathalyzer?” Born Again asked the ceiling.
“She wasn’t driving, the car was parked!” Smart One said suddenly.
“Someone was going to drive that car somewhere,” I said. They didn’t want to deal with it and would do whatever I said, so I wanted to think it through.
“Why did it take so long for the trial?” asked the foreman. “Two months, it’s inexcusable.”
“Five months, five months it was!” I said. “From August to January is five months! Ever heard the phrase ‘the wheels of Justice turn slowly’? For God’s sake, read the paper once in a while!”
“No, I never have heard that phrase,” Foreman said stiffly, but under the table he was counting on his fingers.
“And why couldn’t the cop form an opinion about her drunkenness?” Dow Jones asked for the fifth time.
“He was saying he didn’t jump to a conclusion,” my smart darling explained.
“Didn’t form an opinion,” said Dow Jones. “And didn’t use the Breathalyzer. I just keep coming back to that.”
“Any of us could be in her place,” I said.
“You can say that again,” said Smart One, and I laughed happily. We’d lived through it, we understood.
“What if she’s got three drunk driving convictions on her record? What if she goes out and runs over some kid tonight?” he asked, and relief poured over me. There were two of us, it wasn’t all up to me. I thought of the day the police finally came for my stepbrother; my mother said she couldn’t bear to see it and left me there to look in his eyes while they put the handcuffs on. I wondered if Smart would like me to bear him some children—he was so solid and unadorned—so deeply, beautifully familiar; I felt I knew exactly what it would be like to kiss him, how in him my whole life of longing would be turned to sex and assuaged.
“You’re so right,” I said. “It’s a serious thing.”
Everyone made a long face, and Born Again said, “You gotta take the snake into account—I mean, I can’t condone animal cruelty. If she did that, what else is she capable of?”
“It’s not a charge of animal cruelty,” Smart One pointed out.
“Humans can fight back, but a poor defenseless bunny…”
“It was a snake!” I said, feeling like a racist.
“Is it two-thirty yet?” Foreman asked. “I really gotta go.”
It was 4:45. My husband would be picking Victoria up from Girl Scouts and going home to set up his telescope (he’s an amateur astronomer and something was about to happen in the Orion Nebulae) and start dinner—chicken breasts and mesclun; he’s got a state pension coming, so he’s very conscious of his health.
I polled the group again and we acquitted—against the pain conviction would have caused us, the evidence was not enough. That, apparently, is the definition of reasonable doubt. I wrote a note to the bailiff and gave it to the foreman to sign, and we scrambled into our places—in the right order now.
“Foreman, how say you?”
“Not guilty,” the foreman boomed.
“How say you all?”
“Not guilty.”
Dawn LaRue directed a shy smile to Smart One, then a quick sharp glance at me, as if she imagined, with the prosecutor, that I’d been against her. But the prosecutor looked at me with what seemed to be contempt—why had I given in and betrayed her? The bailiff stood stoically still, as if he himself had been convicted, sentenced to stand there day after day up to his neck in the American muddle. Sitting at the side now was a woman who must have been Dawn’s daughter Sherry, with Tiffany, clutching a stuffed parrot, on her lap. The little girl was wreathed in pink ruffles, which did nothing to mitigate her watchful expression and I thought that years from now when all this was forgotten, she’d hear metal tearing or a man’s anguished voice, and feel a fearful anxiousness so deeply familiar it was almost a comfort, the way the things of childhood always are.
Oh I wanted a cigarette, all of a sudden.
“Great job, Foreman,” said the Smart One as soon as we were back in our quarters. I glared at him and he winked.
The door opened and the judge blew in, saying, “Don’t get up, don’t get up, please.”
“You had an incomplete case,” he said. “You did the right thing. She doesn’t have any other DWI’s. She was polluted, it’s true—she refused the Breathalyzer, but we can’t tell you that.”
He started laughing—“I do wish you could have seen the mug shot,” he said. “But she’s suffered plenty, her daughter’s got boyfriend trouble, the family pet passed away, she got lost on Cape Cod in the tourist season, spent the night in jail, she had to hire a lawyer—those Breathalyzers don’t tell the whole story. A real drunk can drive fine with a stratospheric blood level, it’s only the amateurs who get impaired. That touch-your-nose test, I can’t do it either. These cops get a little overenthusiastic sometimes—you know how it is.”
“But why did it take so long?” Foreman asked. “I mean it’s two months since it happened.…”
“Four months, actually,” the judge said, though it was five, five! Foreman gave me a spiteful glance, which I returned in kind. “You did good, jury. You can sleep well tonight. By the way, does anyone have jumper cables?”
Foreman, looking stricken, admitted he did.
“Would you mind?”
“No, no, of course not,” he said, looking terrified, so that I wondered what else he had in his trunk. Probably Hustler magazine, or a Mars Bar—people don’t need to do much to feel desperately ashamed, God knows.
“Let’s be candid, it was a matter of the lint between a woman’s toes,” the judge said, but I was thinking—suppose it had been a matter of life and death? Juries just like us decide those all the time. “I shouldn’t laugh,” he went on as he left. “I know I shouldn’t, but if you’d seen the mug shot!” And he was overcome, wheezing as he tried to get his breath, while the foreman walked stiff as a puppet behind him.
Out we went into the frigid evening, calling good-byes across the parking lot as if we’d come from a choir rehearsal. “Sometimes you have to go with the flow,” the foreman was explaining to the judge.
“Cigarette?” Smart asked, tapping two out of a pack and holding one out to me. The thrill that ran through me was wildly out of proportion to the offer, but I managed to shake to my head.
“Did that seem at all … odd … to you?” I asked him as the others drove away.
“I have to admit,” he said, “that since I got sober e
verything seems kind of odd. It was nice meeting you, though.”
“And you!” I said. We were standing beside his truck and I patted it tenderly, thinking he probably had another at home in the driveway, for parts. “Brandy,” I said.
“Excuse me?” he said, looking puzzled, even embarrassed.
“My name … I mean, you said you were glad to meet me, so I—”
“Oh! That’s your name! I thought … I…” A wide grin began to spread over him. “I’d figured you for an Elizabeth, or a Caroline.”
“Fooled you,” I thought of saying, but then I’m always thinking of saying that. “Afraid not,” I said instead, giving him a complicit smile, with a memory of waiting for Butchy on the corner on a frozen winter night, watching the lighted tip of his cigarette swing up, glow, and fall as he came toward me. There were cornfields on one side of that road, and the roadhouse my mother worked at, on the other, and me named after a song on a jukebox … was it different, really, than being named Swift Water, or Lily, or Joy? It has the sound of real life in it—a woman weeping, a cash register ringing in back—to say “I’m Brandy” is to say “I’ve known things, taken part in the world.”
“Frank,” he said. “Frank Wills.” And that’s it, I thought, the name, the truck, the hands, that’s all he has—enough to build a solid life on, if you work at it day by day. I slipped my car keys back into my purse—I didn’t want him to know about the Volvo. The sun was nearly down and it blazed out for a minute between the heavy gray sky and the horizon, flushing the soft dry heads of the marsh grasses red all the way to the sea. It was one of those instants so beautiful that everything stops breathing to attend: in that perfect stillness you can feel the pulse of longing that’s always there beneath the ordinary movement of life. Then it was over and I was standing there shaking Frank’s hand.
“Hello, Frank Wills,” I said, feeling a signal flash in my mind—Alert! Family! Remember that family! They were waiting for me—they needed me, at home, where nothing is ever as ardent, as arduous, as it ought to be. I’ll never get used to it, I’ll always feel there’s something missing, something false in the simple good of my life. My husband calls me honey, as if the name Brandy is a little secret we needn’t mention. All evening he’d be checking his telescope, to be sure it was focused exactly where his stars were going to be. It’s his great source of astonishment—the way, if you keep steady night after night, watching, a galaxy begins to sort itself out in your eyes.
It’s the kind of thing no one in Purmort would think of. You can’t concentrate like that when necessity has a knife at your throat. I wanted to escape that place so badly I’d have run the hundred miles to Vassar in my bare feet—but now I thought of the way Butch used to hold me, like he wanted to tear me open and get his hands on my heart.
“And, good-bye,” I said, and walked away without looking over my shoulder, because the natural thing, the right thing it seemed, would have been to swing myself up into Frank’s passenger seat and say, “Take me home. I never meant to leave my own people behind.”
Six Figures in Search of an Author
“He can’t be ninety! My God, he just turned eighty!”
I was speaking of Moss Genthner, the Moss Genthner, who would be Auden’s contemporary if only Auden were alive, whose other associates have long since committed their suicides, so that Moss is all that’s left, now, of his time. He floats around like a Chagall figure, talking in a hallowed poetic voice about Halley’s comet and the conversion of the gas streetlamps, already commanding a reverence no one is supposed to get until they’re dead. His eightieth birthday celebrations had lasted most of a year, with parties in Boston and New York, interviews on PBS, and the conversion of his childhood home into a small museum.
And, of course, readings by his former students, who form the backbone of the poetry community, teaching each other’s work in the universities until almost every creative writing student in this great nation of creative writing students has felt the thrill of knowing that he, or usually she, is studying under a poet who studied under Moss Genthner—it’s as if one had visited Berryman in the asylum, or taken Marianne Moore to Ebbets Field. I felt certain we’d been given a guarantee, that having attended all the eightieth birthday parties, readings, testimonials, and dedications, we were excused from further celebrations. Now I wished I’d asked for it in writing.
“He’s a marvel,” Peregrine said, assuming I’d spoken in admiration—how else did one speak of Moss? “Still teaching … writing, and a three-book contract…” He swept his hand into a fist around some imaginary brass ring. “Inspiring, that’s what it is,” he said. Peregrine’s forebears were Puritans, and like them he is sternly religious—difficult for him because he can find no God to believe in. He believes in Moss.
Who was already looking immortal in so many ways it seemed dangerous to encourage him with another party, but Peregrine was not to be swayed. He began to prepare as if he were bringing Zeus down from Olympus, which meant at least that the party could not be held at our house. Our house faces a seasonal parking lot and the most interesting natural phenomenon we’ve sighted there was a woman who assumed that since she was squatting behind her van she must be relieving herself in privacy. Zeus, and Moss, must look out over brimming seas toward the spouts of the leviathans.
Kit DeLoup’s house is directly on the bay, and Kit is fond of Peregrine, although (or perhaps because) she has never slept with him. Times have changed, but while I was learning to diagram sentences, Peregrine was living in the dunes, drinking Bloody Marys poured from the slit throats of sheep, and sleeping with women. That’s what art was then! When I married him I had to understand that almost every woman of roughly my mother’s age in town had once had physical relations with my husband. They’re all very sweet, solicitous of me when I bump into them in the post office and the pharmacy and the library and the liquor store and the A&P, grandmotherly toward the twins, but it can make for awkwardness, and I have to watch my tongue. Kit only likes black men, jazz guys, so her relationship with Peregrine is easy and calm and she said she’d be happy to let him use her place as long as a couple of friends who were staying with her could come.
Peregrine said no. Easy sociability is not a Puritan virtue. This would be the party of the year on the island, he said, and everyone would want an invitation. We would have to be ruthless if we were going to keep it an intimate gathering of Moss’s dearest friends, and nobody else at all.
Did I really think, Kit asked when she found me evaluating sunscreens at the Wharf General Store, that it was a good idea to let Peregrine do this party thing all on his own? She sounded offhand and confidential, but she always does; she has the voice of someone who sidles up and offers to sell you a pack of pornographic playing cards.
“I know you’re stretched awfully thin,” she said, nodding her gray dreadlocks toward Ruby and Jade, who were crawling toward a low shelf of jelly jars, turning every few seconds to be sure I gave their naughtiness its due. “But it might mean less work in the long run, if you…”
She knows what to leave unsaid, and I nodded. I’m officious by nature, but in any case my time of leaving Peregrine to his own devices would have ended the day I found him trying to “clean out” the electrical outlets with a screwdriver, and no one can hope to be an author, a Visiting Adjunct Lecturer in Creative Writing, and a mother, and still have the time and patience necessary to translate the basic rules of etiquette into language recognizable to a Puritan.
“It’s not possible,” I said, just as the jars came tumbling, and by the time I had gathered them, and the twins, up, Kit had gone her way.
So she had to act as Peregrine’s helpmeet. I eavesdropped on his end of their conversations, careful to hold my tongue. It was going to be a magnificent spread, Peregrine said; everyone would want to bring their best dish in Moss’s honor. Marsha Sewall (widow of Sewall the abstract impressionist, who’d planned to be buried beside Moss, but at the last minute, feeling Moss had given h
is work short shrift, took the plot by the Motherwells instead) was donating two cases of peach champagne. As for the cake, Kit knew a healer who did baking for special occasions.…
“Eddie makes a nice cake,” I said, and wished I hadn’t. Peregrine had not approved of the double replica of Scarlett O’Hara’s hoop-skirted picnic dress—with layers of marzipan and vanilla cream—that Eddie made for the twins’ birthday.
“I’m sure Kit knows best,” Peregrine said stiffly. “People are still talking about the party she gave when she married Piero.”
“We’re not having electric Kool-Aid this time, are we?” I asked him. Kit and Piero have been divorced for twenty years, but certain decades have pancaked in Peregrine’s memory, like so many floors of a high-rise in an earthquake. Bits of the sixties turn up fossilized—his rage at Richard Nixon is still fresh as the dew, and he is shocked, shocked at my shallow understanding of the Bay of Pigs and the Tet Offensive, no matter that I was five or ten years old at the time.
It’s true that the great international movements have taken place outside my consciousness, but I feel a really good historian ought to try to understand the general nature of time and space, and maybe electricity. I know that if one once trysted with a woman who was suckling a babe, and one meets that babe twenty years later in a bar downtown, the babe, no matter how well-licensed, is still something like your own child and you should not try to drink it under the table or seduce it. I know that art has made a desperate leap out of the bars and into therapy—writers these days brag about all the drugs they used to take and which of their friends have AIDS. Peregrine’s still drinking like Hemingway and talking like Mailer, which would be all very well if we were at war, but an epidemic demands a different vocabulary.
Darling? Page 19
