“And so Mrs. Madison would become more and more difficult to manage, isn’t that true, Doctor? On a day-to-day basis, I mean.”
“Yes,” Dr. Ortins answered. “I explained to Mr. Madison that his wife would begin to lose her ability to use her muscles.”
“In the end her muscles would entirely desert her, correct?” Mr. Singleton asked.
“With a few exceptions like blinking her eyes, that’s true.”
For the benefit of the jury and to emphasize this dreadful point, Mr. Singleton now took Dr. Ortins through the grim steps of Sandrine’s horrifying decline.
“So, in the end, Mr. Madison would have to feed his wife?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Bathe her?”
“Yes?”
“Even take her to the toilet?”
With this question, I noticed several members of the jury turn to look at me, a grim surmise already in their minds, I felt certain, the grave possibility that I’d plotted then carried out the selfish opposite of euthanasia, a murder motivated by my simple desire to rid myself of the loathsome tasks that would soon be mine.
“Yes,” Dr. Ortins answered.
“So what it comes down to is that during this office visit you informed Mr. Madison that his wife would eventually become completely unable to carry out any of the physical functions of life, did you not, Dr. Ortins?”
“That’s what I told him, yes,” Dr. Ortins answered. “And I warned him that he might become depressed. That almost certainly he would, in fact, become depressed.”
Mr. Singleton glanced at his notes, studied them a moment, then looked up. “When did you next see Mrs. Madison?”
“I never saw her again.”
Mr. Singleton gave every appearance of being surprised by this.
“She never returned for any sort of treatment or consultation?” he asked with a show of almost childlike wonder.
“No.”
Mr. Singleton walked to his desk, retrieved a small square of paper, and handed it to Dr. Ortins.
“Do you recognize this, Doctor?”
“Yes. It’s a prescription. I wrote it for Mrs. Madison.”
“But I thought you said you had no further contact with Mrs. Madison.”
“I didn’t,” Dr. Ortins said.
I knew what was coming because Mr. Singleton now turned toward the jury so that he could see its reaction to Dr. Ortins’s answer.
“Then how did you happen to write this prescription?” he asked.
“I was contacted by Mrs. Madison’s husband,” Dr. Ortins answered. “He called and said that his wife was having quite a lot of back pain. Very severe, he said. Debilitating. She had fallen, he said, and he thought perhaps she’d compressed a vertebrae or something of that sort. He said she needed something strong.”
“But this ‘fall’ was never confirmed by Mrs. Madison?” Mr. Singleton asked.
“I never spoke to Mrs. Madison,” Dr. Ortins told the court. “Only to her husband, when he called to tell me about her fall, her pain, that she needed something strong.”
“Now, Dr. Ortins, have you had occasion to read the pathologist’s report on Mrs. Madison?”
“Yes, I have.”
“So you are aware that Dr. Mortimer could find no sign of a back injury in his examination of Mrs. Madison.”
“I have read his report, and, yes, he found no back injury.”
“Is it fair to say that when Mr. Madison told you of this back injury, he was not telling the truth?”
Morty got to his feet. “Objection, Your Honor.”
“Sustained,” Judge Rutledge said. “Please rephrase the question, Mr. Singleton.”
Mr. Singleton nodded. “Dr. Ortins, did Professor Madison give you any instruction as to what sort of pain medication his wife’s back injury would require?”
“Only that it should be something strong.”
Mr. Singleton was still watching the jury when he repeated, “Something strong?”
“Yes.”
“And did you prescribe a strong painkiller for Mrs. Madison?”
“Yes,” Dr. Ortins answered. “I prescribed Demerol.”
Mr. Singleton paused for a dramatic moment, then said, “I have no further questions for this witness.”
During cross-examination Morty did his best to minimize the effect of Mr. Singleton’s final few questions to Dr. Ortins. I knew that nothing prior to those questions could possibly have cast suspicion upon me, but at the very end of her testimony a dark curtain had parted and Morty clearly feared that the jury might have glimpsed something sinister behind it, the first, shadowy suggestion of a crime.
For that reason, Morty led the good doctor through a series of questions, all of which were designed to make her answer in the simple affirmative.
Is it common practice for you to write prescriptions without seeing the patient?
Is it common practice for you to do this at the request of a patient’s spouse?
Is it common practice for you to prescribe Demerol for severe back pain?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Then Morty switched to a series of questions designed to make Dr. Ortins answer in the negative.
It wouldn’t be unusual for a patient in the first stages of ALS to fall, would it?
In such cases, it also wouldn’t be unusual for such falls to result in an injury, possibly a serious one to the back, would it?
For that reason you weren’t at all surprised to hear that Mrs. Madison had fallen, were you Dr. Ortins?
Or that she had injured her back?
Or that her husband was the person who conveyed this information?
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
“So you didn’t find anything at all unusual with regard to your writing a prescription for Mrs. Madison for Demerol at her husband’s request, did you, Dr. Ortins?”
“No.”
Then, a few, final questions.
“Dr. Ortins, have you had other patients with back pain?” Morty asked.
Dr. Ortins sensed trouble. Cautiously she said, “Every doctor does.”
“That’s true,” Morty said. “And have you had patients who’ve complained of back pain and, despite your best efforts, you’ve not been able to find the cause of that pain?”
“That’s sometimes the case, yes.”
“Have you ever prescribed Demerol for such a patient?”
“Yes.”
At that point, Morty faced the members of the jury in exactly the same way Mr. Singleton had faced them minutes before.
“It is possible for a patient to need medication for a back ailment or injury that medical science cannot find, isn’t that true?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
Now Morty, in a tone designed to replicate in every vocal nuance Mr. Singleton’s earlier statement, concluded with “I have nothing further for this witness.”
It was all quite masterful, as well as wonderfully theatrical, and it seemed to me that Shakespeare would probably have made a lot more money as a lawyer. As Dr. Ortins left the stand, I couldn’t help but imagine what stunning addresses to the jury the Bard would have made.
The stern look in Morty’s eyes warned me that a slight smile had slithered onto my lips.
“Stone face,” he whispered like a father disciplining a child. “Keep a stone face.”
I looked down quickly, duly scolded, then lifted my head slowly.
“Sorry,” I whispered back to him, though there was something in this little episode that had pierced me, the fact that Sandrine would have understood my smile and returned it to me. There’d been a ti
me when I’d had no further questions for that smile. But now I wondered if it would have been one of shared amusement or the fingerprint of some old regret. “You see through everything, Sam,” she’d once said to me. I’d taken this as affirmation of my disdain for all that I considered saccharine or sentimental, my peals of laughter, so to speak, at the death of Little Nell. Sandrine had meant it differently, however. For her it had signaled a core change she’d perceived in me “But whatever happened,” she asked softly, “to the tenderness of things?”
It was a question that once again returned me to those long lost days immediately after we’d met in Washington Square, the slow walks, the inexpensive dinners, the evenings of cheap wine and quiet talk, how in that distant time the goal of her education had been contained in her dream of passing it along, founding a little school somewhere, a vision of her life Sandrine had perhaps never entirely abandoned.
On that thought, I recalled the dingy loft I’d had on Avenue A in those days, how Sandrine had often spent the night with me there. Toward dawn on one of those nights, she’d quoted a line from Love’s Labour’s Lost, how, when asked the purpose of study, Ferdinand had replied that its purpose was simply to bequeath those treasures of heart and mind which, without it, would be lost.
Heart and mind, I thought, and with those words felt the gallows floor creak beneath me.
“Sam?”
I looked at Morty, who was staring at me approvingly, clearly pleased by the grim expression on my face.
“Much better,” he said.
Lunch Break
I watched as the members of the jury left the courtroom to take their lunches. By then I’d noticed that, when court was in session, they behaved like ideal students, listening even to the dullest testimony with the attentiveness and seriousness I’d once given to my long dead novel, and considerably deeper than any I’d later offered to the rudimentary needs of my struggling students. According to the results of their judgment I would either live or die, and I could see that this burden did, in fact, weigh upon them. Sandrine had often referred to Pascal’s observation that the lion’s share of mankind’s many evils derive from the simple fact of not being able to sit quietly in a room, and as the last of the jurors disappeared into the adjoining chamber I sensed that collectively they would achieve this stationary thoughtfulness.
Once they were gone, I made my way to the little room where I’d decided to have my lunch while my case went forward.
Some weeks before, Judge Rutledge had set my bail at a scant $50,000. I was a forty-six-year-old tenured professor of English literature with no criminal record, thus not at all, according to the judge, a flight risk. For that reason, I might have had lunch anywhere in Coburn, but I’d not availed myself of that freedom save for the day of my arraignment, when I’d casually strolled to a local sandwich shop. On that occasion, there had been a sufficient number of stares from the townspeople to cut through my usual obliviousness, and since then I’d taken my lunch in the small conference room down the corridor from the courtroom. Morty often joined me there, so that it was in this room some days before that we’d gone over the jurors’ responses during the voir dire phase of my trial and at last selected the five men and seven women who had moments before filed out of the courtroom, not one of them casting a glance in my direction.
Morty came through the door a few minutes later, looking quite pleased with the morning’s proceedings. He smiled, sat down, and opened his briefcase.
“Let’s go over something one more time,” he said. “Just to make sure there are no surprises.”
A surprise could come from only one quarter, so I steeled myself for yet more painful questions.
“April Blankenship,” Morty said.
Imagine a strip of parched wood, dried by a hundred desert suns, a stick of kindling that had never felt a match, and you would have April Blankenship when I met her.
“We’ve been over all this many times, Morty,” I reminded him wearily because it was a ground seeded with land mines and I didn’t want to cross it yet again.
“True,” Morty agreed. “But I want to be certain, because without doubt at some point Singleton is going to call this woman to the stand and I need to know about anything and everything she might say to the jury.” He looked at me pointedly. “Or read that story you sent her, the one you wrote.” He drew in a somewhat labored breath. “My guess is that it was getting his hands on that story that was Singleton’s tipping point as far as making a case against you.” He shook his head. “Too bad April didn’t burn that fucking thing. I mean, hell, it was just a story, for Christ’s sake.”
I instantly recalled the drizzly afternoon when April and I had been in bed together, her mention of how I was always reading, a remark that had somehow wound me back to my own past literary efforts, and to which she’d replied with a harmlessly sweet plea that I write something, as she’d put it, “for me to read.”
“It was a novella,” I corrected grimly.
Now I recalled those late nights in my college office, tapping out my tale of escape in serial e-mails to April, she the one who’d provided an eagerly appreciatiative audience for my work at last, my grand vision for “The Pull of the Earth” now reduced to a mocking pot-boiler imitation. It was an idea I’d once spoken of to Sandrine, to write a parody of noir fiction. She’d dismissed it out of hand, then put her finger on the deeper problem I’d failed to recognize. “Disillusionment is a shabby gift, Sam,” she’d told me bluntly. “Isn’t that what Fitzgerald said?”
April had thought it a fantastic idea, however, and so I’d tried my hand at it, the result of that effort now no doubt resting snugly inside one of Harold Singleton’s desk drawers.
“The problem, of course, is that it’s about a man who kills his wife so he can run away with his girlfriend,” Morty reminded me. “And so you have to admit that in the context of what happened it could be a tad incriminating.” He shrugged in a way that was clearly designed to calm my obvious agitation. “But look, Sam, I know you never intended to run away with April Blankenship,” he added.
This was certainly true, but at that instant I found myself once again beneath the sheets with April, talking about the novel I’d struggled to write for years but never finished. How sweetly she indulged my maudlin tale of artistic woe, then quite softly asked me to conjure up a tale just for her, the writing of which she seemed to take as a great honor, thus a request my vanity had found it impossible to deny.
And so I had penned a novella I’d felt certain she would have destroyed at the end of our affair, but which, quite unaccountably and to my complete surprise, she hadn’t.
“Now once again, Sam,” Morty said, “you were past this affair before you even heard about your wife’s diagnosis, right?”
“I hadn’t seen April for three months by that time,” I answered. “And I was never alone with April again except for that one time.”
Except for that one time.
With those words, I saw her again at my door, thin as air, with her lips tightly pursed, glancing over her shoulder as if she feared she’d been followed, whispering despite the fact that there was no one around: You’re not going to tell them, are you, Sam?
“The one time she came over after Sandrine’s death, right?” Morty asked. “That’s the time we’re talking about?”
“Yes.”
“And other than that last encounter, you’d had nothing to do with her for almost a year before your wife’s death?”
“Nothing.”
Morty had now fully taken on the role of Mr. Singleton, who would soon be my relentless cross-examiner.
“Now, Sam, by ‘nothing,’ I am to conclude that you have not seen this woman, nor written to her, nor called her, correct?”
“Correct,” I answered.
“You understand that the state can present a case for dual moti
ves,” Morty said. “Or should I say interlocking motives, one reason egging on another, that sort of thing, until . . . I’m sure you get the picture.”
We’d been over this many times, and so with confidence I answered, “Yes, I get the picture.”
“One of them he can never prove, of course,” Morty assured me. “By that I mean you wanted to get rid of your wife because she was going to get more and more dependent upon you, and you wanted to escape that burden and get on with your life.” He paused, then added, “The other motive is April.”
It struck me that April had always been “the other,” the one passed over or discarded, whose feelings were not considered and whose loss of dignity had never mattered to anyone save to her husband, poor cuckolded Clayton.
“April is the ‘other woman,’ after all,” Morty added.
The “other woman” is a label that could not possibly have seemed less fitting to this gossamer ghost of a woman, but the web of life entangles us all, and it had now ensnared April, who, by the time of Sandrine’s death, had certainly felt herself well beyond the reach of so catastrophic a scandal.
Even I had expected that she would escape notice, no matter what inquiry might be made into the manner of Sandrine’s death. It had been a tepid, short-lived affair, with little excitement and no love at all, cheap and tawdry, as bland as the rooms in which we’d met on those listless afternoons. April’s last words to me had perfectly summed up the lackluster nature of our trysts. “I can never let myself go, Sam,” she’d said with a shrug as she got into her car. “What can you do, if you just can never let yourself go?”
Other than the time she’d showed up at my door, I’d last seen April about a month or so after learning of Sandrine’s illness. She’d been standing outside Waylon’s drugstore as I’d driven by. She’d been wearing the same blue dress and digging into the same black purse from which, on our first rendezvous, she’d shyly withdrawn a pack of condoms.
I’d pressed down on the accelerator and the car bolted ahead. I’d been terrified she might glance up as I sped away, but in my rearview mirror I’d seen that she was still rifling through her purse. I made it to the corner and was rounding it when she finally lifted her head, but she was still close enough for me to see that it was her car keys she’d been looking for, a blue Toyota that was already three years old when I met her, a car a lot like April, made for routine chores. That she’d ended up in a cheap romance with one of her husband’s colleagues could not have surprised her more, though I think she might have taken some fleeting plain Jane pride in bedding the man who was bedding the far—from every point of view—more desirable Sandrine. You could be with her, she’d asked with every awkward, self-demeaning glance, so why are you with me?
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