by Robert Inman
But he stopped himself. There was more to this than a matter of a plastic bag of marijuana, a great deal more, and telling her the unadorned facts of all that would not begin to address this larger and more profound thing between them, the thing that had made her recoil. What had happened in court was, in a sense, irrelevant, and telling her about that would not make it okay. He knew, as much as he had ever known anything in his life, that in the ever-so-slight turning away of his wife’s body, they had crossed some Continental Divide of the heart, going in opposite directions.
His breath caught in his throat with a strangled gasp. Clarice gave no sign that she noticed. He felt himself rising, stepping back from the bed, turning and moving toward the door. Even with his back to her, he sensed that she wasn’t watching him, only feeling him go with her head still turned away.
Just before he stepped into the hallway Clarice said, “How could you do this to Palmer?”
There was no answer whatsoever for that. He closed the door behind him.
*****
Clarice went to Greensboro for the night. He heard her descend the stairs and pause in the kitchen, and then she passed through the front hallway without looking into the living room where he sat, and went out the front door. He found the three-word note she had left him in the kitchen. GONE TO GREENSBORO.
He went back to the living room, newspaper in hand. The News and Observer had given it a big headline and a detailed account that began just below the masthead on the top left of the paper and cascaded down the length of the page and spilled over to page 2A. It was complete with photos -- Will at the Channel Seven weather map, Will on the stretcher in front of the Channel Seven studios surrounded by gawkers and law enforcement officers, a mug shot of Judge Broderick Nettles and another of attorney Morris deLesseps. It didn’t take much of the story to recount the facts of Will’s arrest, but the paper had taken the opportunity to regurgitate all of the other sordid details of his unpleasantness. Reporters had scoured his neighborhood for reaction: I’m shocked. He seems like such a nice guy. You see him out in his yard all the time…. Had they nosed about the house and yard, looking for anything growing illegally? Had they been through the garbage?
He read the article twice through in the stillness of the living room. Then he put the paper down and stretched out on the couch and went to sleep. He was vaguely aware of the doorbell several times during the afternoon, but he didn’t rouse himself. Every phone in the house was unplugged. Clarice had done that before he got home. When he finally awoke it was almost dark outside. He sat up, blinking in the dimness.
He realized that he was still wearing the lightweight jacket -- the one with the polo player stitched on the front, galloping jauntily across the polished green fabric, mallet at the ready, poised to slam one home for the old boys at the riding club. He shoved his hands in the pockets, marveling that he had never done that yesterday when he put it on, when he wore it in court. Never put his hands in the pockets. How do you wear a jacket and never put your hands in the pockets? There had been something in there that he should have known about, and one simple movement that would have taken all of two seconds could have saved him. Astonishing.
And that, the act of jamming his hands deep into his pockets, was what finally brought his mind to bear on things, to begin to put some order into the swirling cosmos of space junk. He had been circling for hours with sideways glances at the thing that was his dilemma. Now he looked head-on.
All right, Wilbur. You are facing serious criminal charges, of which you are entirely innocent. Well, technically, mostly innocent. You were in possession of marijuana in Judge Nettles’ courtroom. There’s no denying that. But it wasn’t your marijuana. It belongs to your son, whose jacket you were and are wearing. Your son the doctor-in-training. That, by God, is the bare-bones truth, and we have to start with that, don’t we?
Now. Next. What will happen if you just tell it exactly like it is, come completely clean? The doctor-in-training will be ejected from medical school in the time it takes them to hustle him out the back door. And that’s some more of the bare-bones truth.
So…isn’t that exactly what he deserves? It’s his mess and he should have to clean it up himself. He’s a big boy.
Will sat quietly for a minute or so, letting his mind digest that. Fact and logic. You could chart a reasonable course if you had fact and logic on your side. It was neat and clean.
But then there was this other thing that had nothing to do with fact and logic, but instead with those murky, intangible things that mucked up a good, neat, clean line of thought. It was like carefully writing things on a sheet of paper and then having somebody spill milk on it. Ink runs and words blur and pretty soon you can’t make out a damned thing.
Your son the doctor-in-training, the architect of this incredible mess, is also the golden child, repository of all his mother and his grandparents are and aspire to be: smart, handsome, well-spoken, lithe of body and keen of mind. He has inherited all of the best in them and none of the worst in you. They worship him. And if you come clean, you destroy that. You destroy them.
He remembered a time at Nags Head when Palmer was perhaps five. They were there for the week at the Palmers’ elegantly weathered cottage. At mid-morning he sat in a sand chair absorbed in a spy thriller novel, only vaguely aware of the gentle wash of wave against sand, the scurrying of sandpipers at surf’s edge, the fluttering of the fringe of his umbrella in the brisk sea breeze. Movement caught his eye and he looked up from his book to see them trooping down the path that snuggled between two sand dunes -- knobby-kneed Sidney in the lead in plaid bermudas and a wide-brimmed Panama Hat, Consuela wrapped in a terrycloth smock, Clarice breathtakingly slim and erect in a one-piece bathing suit. Palmer trudged along between his grandparents, holding onto both, while Clarice carried his small yellow inner tube and a beach bag full of suntan lotion, books, towels, plastic pail and shovel. They marched along in soldierly fashion, taking possession of sand, sky, ocean. All of a piece, the four of them. He watched Palmer -- already a stunningly handsome boy with a thick shock of hair and fine, almost dainty Palmer family features. He’s theirs, not mine, Will thought with a sudden pang. His breath caught achingly in his throat and he had to look away. He had never, in all his life, felt so alone, not even in the worst moments following his parents’ disappearance. This was different. This was loss of the living.
It was partly his fault, Will thought now, that there had been that distance, that wariness, between him and Palmer during the years of his son’s growing up. Will had tried to bridge the gap, but had he tried hard enough? Or had he just accepted it after awhile and then gone about immersing himself in his career, his celebrity, all the things that told him he was okay, that he wasn’t alone, that lots of people thought he was pretty goddamned special?
Theirs, not mine. Do I resent that? Of course. Is that a good reason to tell? Or is it a perfectly good reason not to?
Of course, there was another practical thing: he might tell and it mean nothing. Judge Nettles might look down from the bench in his mighty wrath and say, “Are you trying to palm this off on your son? Despicable. That’ll be an additional five years in the slammer, Mister Baggett. Good God!”
But that was really beside the point. He couldn’t decide what to do based just on what was practical or logical. The real business was the murky stuff.
So, what was he going to do? Well, he still hadn’t decided that. He had considered a lot, and that was a big step. But he couldn’t decide until he looked Palmer in the eye in a way he hadn’t done for a good many years.
For now, he sat here in his living room in the gloom of late afternoon with his hands jammed into the pockets of Palmer’s green jacket. One pocket was empty. In the other was the remains of a packet of sugarless gum with one spongy stick left. He unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully until long after the flavor of it had passed.
*****
The Christian renovators were there th
e next morning, demolishing and reconstructing the rear of his home as if nothing had happened. From the spare bedroom where he had spent the night he heard their hammering and banging, the whine of an electric saw of some kind, a constant faint undercurrent of country music from the boom box.
The bedroom door opened, throwing a shaft of light across the bed. Will blinked. It was Morris deLesseps.
“Every phone in the house is unplugged,” Morris said irritably. “Nobody answers the door. How am I going to defend you if I can’t reach you?”
“Morris, you are -- if nothing else -- persistent.”
Morris waved a hand in the direction of the renovation project. “What in the dickens is going on back yonder, son?”
“We’re building an addition on the house to hold my newspaper clippings.”
“Get up,” Morris ordered. “We’re going for a ride. You can’t hear yourself think around here with all that damned ruckus going on.”
Will raised up on his elbows. “Are there reporters outside?”
“No,” Morris said. “You’re yesterday’s headline.”
They drove into the countryside north of Raleigh in Morris’s Saab, out Highway 401 and then up a two-lane road to a little community called Walker’s Crossroads where Morris was to look over some farm acreage for a client, a developer who was considering a subdivision. Clarice would be up here before long, Will thought, selling houses as the sprawl from Raleigh crept even father north into territory that had so far pretty much escaped.
It was a splendid day, the air clear and warm after yesterday’s rain. Morris drove with his window down. He was still in tweed, but he had left his touring cap behind. Will wondered how long he’d be able to hold out in tweed, what with the Raleigh weather getting warmer by the day. Soon they would have a heat wave. It always happened this time of year, a brief reminder of what lay ahead. But for now, things were just about perfect. Will breathed deeply. Morris didn’t bring up the legal business, and Will was grateful. He wasn’t ready to get into that with Morris, any more than he had been with Clarice.
Morris was in good spirits. He was considering part-interest in a sailboat, a forty-five-footer anchored now at Oriental on Pamlico Sound. Will could almost hear the sound of salt-spray crashing against the bow in Morris’s voice. Would he trade tweed for nautical attire -- whatever you wore around the Yacht Club? Would he ask people to address him as Commodore?
Morris had come prepared with hiking boots and overalls -- two pairs of each. They changed and tramped together across the property, gently rolling hills and creek bottoms, part hardwood forest and part pasture, the ground spongy and sweet, ripe with Spring, pasture grass in lush growth, dogwoods sprinkling the woodlands with white blossoms.
They stopped in the early afternoon at a barbecue restaurant near the crossroads, the parking lot still crowded with pickup trucks and vans. Morris fetched sandwiches, chips and iced tea and they ate in the car, watching the ebb and flow of the lunch crowd -- lean, weathered farmers, big-bellied plumbers and electricians, a state highway crew in a yellow Suburban. The Saab drew some curious looks, but nobody came over. Will was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and hadn’t shaved since Monday morning, just before he left for court. It was apparently enough to make him incognito, at least when viewed through the windshield of a Saab. It was just fine that nobody came over.
“These are your folks,” Morris said.
“Mine?”
“Your audience. Salt of the earth people who watch Channel Seven every evening.”
“Used to be my audience.”
“Will be again, Old Bean,” Morris said, “when this all blows over.”
Will thought he might be using it as an opening to talk about the court case, but instead he launched into a lengthy story about how one of the other prospective owners of the forty-five-foot sailboat at Oriental had once met Walter Cronkite, who was an avid sailor and put into port occasionally along the North Carolina coast. From all reports, a regular fellow, Morris said. Just like Will Baggett.
It was nearly three o’clock when they got back to Morris’s office. The receptionist and secretaries were adroit in pretending that nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary had happened to Will Baggett. They greeted him heartily but respectfully, as if he were there to discuss the negotiating of a new contract or to seek advice on wills and testaments. Well, Will thought, people in a law office were used to dealing with all sorts of people and their disasters. Oh, Mister Jones. Haven’t seen you since you murdered your boss. How are things at the office?
They settled in Morris’s plushly paneled and upholstered sanctuary, Will on the sofa just beneath the oil painting of Cochise the Indian chief that Morris had acquired during his most recent western phase, Morris in a leather chair with massive rolled armrests, a legal pad and freshly-sharpened number two pencil in hand. “All right,” Morris said, “let’s have it.”
Will hiked one leg over the other and crossed his arms over his chest in what he hoped was sufficiently negative body English. “I’m not ready to say. Not just yet.”
Morris’s pencil hovered over the legal pad. He looked at the blank page, then up at Will.
“And when will you be ready to say?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to rush into anything.”
Morris studied his fingernails for a moment. “That’s the same thing you told Clarice.”
“You’ve talked to Clarice?”
“Yes.”
“When?” Will asked.
“Last night.”
“From Greensboro.”
“Yes. She called me from Greensboro.”
Morris put down his legal pad on the coffee table between them, placed his pencil neatly beside it, crossed his arms over his chest, leaned back in his chair, and stared at Will. Will looked away, out the window, catching a glimpse of the state flag fluttering gracefully in the Spring breeze in front of the capitol building down at the other end of Fayetteville Street. There was a good long silence, broken at last by a knock on the office door. Morris’s secretary poked her head in. “Clerk of court’s on the line. About the arraignment.”
“Take a message,” Morris said.
“Can I bring you guys some coffee?”
“Gin,” Will said.
She gave Will an odd look, then glanced at Morris for guidance. “Go away,” he said pleasantly. She closed the door.
“Arraignment?” Will asked.
“There is a fairly standard legal procedure here Will, a sequence of events in which you will be involved. You will be arraigned on the charge, the judge will again consider the size of your bond, you will plead ‘Not Guilty,’ and the case will be set for trial. At any and all points along the way, I can as your attorney ask for continuances, thus prolonging the process before the inevitable moment when the case is actually heard and a jury of your peers, based on your testimony, sets you free.” He picked up the legal pad and pencil again. “In the meantime, it’s necessary for me, as your attorney, to hear a recitation of the facts which I will use in your defense.”
“What are the terms of my bond?” Will asked.
“You stay in Wake County, stay out of trouble, show up in court on the appointed day.”
“If I do all that, do I get my money back when it’s over?”
“Less ten percent. Bondsman’s fee.”
“Five thousand dollars?”
“Yes. And if you violate the terms of the bond, they come after you for the whole quarter million.”
“Okay.” Will sat there for awhile, hands on his knees, then rose. “In good time. But I don’t…”
Morris sighed. “…want to rush into anything.”
“Yes. Can you take me home?”
“No. I’m representing a client before the Planning Commission at four.” He glanced at his watch. “The fellow who’s buying the land we saw this morning.”
“It was a nice trip,” Will said. “I enjoyed the barbecue.”
“My ple
asure.”
Will started toward the door.
“There’s another thing, Wilbur.”
“What’s that?”
“Clarice wants a divorce.”
*****
They were on the sidewalk in front of Morris’s office building. Morris was reaching for him, trying to hold him up. Will was staying just out of his grasp, striding along the Fayetteville Street pedestrian mall. “I’ve got to go see my wife. If you won’t let me use your car, I’ll find a cab.”
Morris put a hand on his shoulder. “Will, let’s talk about that.”
“I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to Clarice. Where is she?”
“Will, Clarice doesn’t want to see you,” Morris said. “She doesn’t want any communication. Not right now.”
“To hell with what she wants,” Will cried. “Do you realize what’s happening here, Morris?”
“Yes I do.”
Will stopped abruptly. Morris almost ran into him. “No you don’t. Clarice is upset. I don’t blame her. Every few days I’m on the front page of the News and Observer looking like I’ve just robbed a bank or been caught exposing myself to a busload of school kids. And things haven’t been quite right between us for some time now, things in general. But divorce? No. It’s nowhere near that bad. Clarice is a reasonable woman. We’ve just got to talk this out.”
Morris sighed. “I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple.”
“What then?”
“I’m not altogether sure. Exactly.”
“You sound like that goddamn rental car commercial. Not exactly,” Will said, waving his arms. Passersby were giving them odd looks. He was being recognized. To hell with passersby. “Well, I want to know exactly what the hell is going on here.” He started off again down the sidewalk. Morris followed. They were at a brisk lope now.
“Will, as your attorney, I’m advising you to lay low for awhile until things cool down a little. Then I’ll talk to Clarice’s attorney…”
