Sandrine's Case (9780802193520)

by Cook, Thomas H.

  “I am an associate professor in the History Department at Coburn College,” he said in answer to Mr. Singleton’s first question.

  He had been an associate professor for more than twenty years, I knew, a teacher of ancient history to students who incessantly tweeted their current location or mood swing in rapid bursts of 140 characters or less. He’d never completed his PhD thesis, and so all his life he’d lived in the all-but-dissertation backwater that is academia’s eternal purgatory. I had rarely paid much attention to him, if only because he rarely made his presence known. He sat in the back at faculty meetings and almost never spoke. I’d often seen him sitting alone on the quadrangle, usually with a book, but often not reading it. Instead, he would stare off into the middle distance, his large brown eyes blinking slowly, his expression fixed in what Sandrine had once called “tragic contemplation,” though she’d been referring to a bust of Marcus Aurelius rather than to Malcolm.

  “Now, during the course of your time at Coburn, did you have occasion to meet Sandrine Allegra Madison?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Yes,” Malcolm answered.

  “And you became friends with her, isn’t that true?”

  “Friends, yes.” His eyes darted over to me. “Only friends,” he added.

  With that response, the pornographic images that had sometimes tormented me with regard to Malcolm and Sandrine immediately dissolved. Malcolm, I decided, was incapable of telling anything but the truth, a man without airs, who never hinted, however tangentially, at any experience he had not had. At Coburn, he had surely lived as a sparrow in a hawk’s nest, I thought, a serene, self-contained man, at home with his own modest abilities, seeking to maintain only the few treasures he possessed, a man with no worlds he wished to conquer, nor any rival he wished to best, nor anything he needed to prove to anyone but himself, and thus, because of all that, a man so deeply grounded that Sandrine, my incandescent wife, had evidently felt the pull of his quiet gravity.

  “She was interested in the women of the ancient world,” Malcolm added. “Cleopatra and Hypatia.” He smiled softly, then added, “She had built a home for these women in her mind.”

  Mr. Singleton could not have cared less for this gracious and vaguely poetic way of describing Sandrine’s intellectual interests.

  “Now, during the last year, you had occasion to see Mrs. Madison quite often, isn’t that true?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Malcolm answered. “We would sometimes meet in the faculty room or in the library.”

  “And what did you talk about on those occasions?”

  Malcolm offered his familiar, self-deprecating smile. “Well, to put it grandly, I suppose you could say that we talked about the wisdom of the ancients.”

  In which sacred wisdom Mr. Singleton clearly had no interest.

  “But there came a time when you talked about things that were a little more down to earth, isn’t that true, Dr. Esterman?”

  “I don’t have a doctorate,” Malcolm corrected, then went on to answer the question.

  “Yes, but it took a while for us to talk about these other things,” he said. “At first it was just ancient history things between us. She was good at picking another person’s mind, finding gems.”

  It was obvious that Mr. Singleton’s pace was too fast for Malcolm. But it was also obvious that the witness would not be rushed.

  “Sandrine was a thoughtful person,” Malcolm continued pointedly. “But not in an abstract way. She thought that the purpose of philosophy was first of all to teach you how to live, and, after that, to teach you how to die.”

  Which surely is the bottom line, I thought.

  “All right, but at some point, Mrs. Madison told you about a recent diagnosis, didn’t she?” Mr. Singleton asked somewhat impatiently.

  “Yes,” Malcolm answered. “She said she had Lou Gehrig’s disease. It was very sad, of course.”

  “In fact, upon receiving this diagnosis, she went directly to you, correct?”

  “Evidently so,” Malcolm answered. “She’d just spoken to her doctor when she came to my house that day.”

  I couldn’t help but imagine the lonely drive Sandrine had made on that rainy afternoon. It would have taken her from Dr. Ortins’s office, down Coburn’s Main Street, along the edges of the college campus, and then down a quiet country lane to Malcolm’s vaguely wooded condominium. She would have glimpsed the school’s quadrangle as she made her way, and the library, and the little restaurant where we sometimes dined. She would have seen the college president’s house, where we’d been so warmly received our first day here. The hospital in which Alexandria had been born would have appeared at the edge of town, and beyond that the reservoir where she ran, the pool where she swam, the pond along whose edges we’d sometimes strolled during our first months in Coburn and where she’d taken my hand and said, as I recalled now, “You can be happy here, Sam, if you let yourself.”

  But I had not, as Mr. Singleton’s next question began to reveal.

  “Now, after she got to your house, Mrs. Madison told you about this diagnosis, and then she expressed some concerns regarding her husband, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes,” Malcolm answered. “She said she thought her husband felt that she had failed.”

  Failed?

  Not once had Sandrine ever indicated such a thought to me. Yes, I had been surprised that her career had been less than meteoric, that she’d never written a great book, or any other book for that matter, that she’d made little effort to rise higher in the academic firmament. But I had blamed Coburn for that, the soporific effect it had had on both of us.

  “Failed in her career aspirations?” Singleton asked.

  “No,” Malcolm answered. “Failed as a woman. Failed to give her husband what he most needed.”

  So she had known after all, I thought, known and blamed herself for my dalliance with April, blamed herself in God only knew how many foolish ways for my folly: that she was often at evening classes, that she spent too much time in the scriptorium or with her students. Sandrine, being Sandrine, could have generated a thousand reasons to blame herself when I alone had been to blame for those afternoons at Shady Arms. For that reason, it struck me that Sandrine had failed only in that she had never confronted me with regard to what she knew about April and me, and because of which her ire had simply grown hotter and hotter until it had finally exploded on that last night.

  But in this, as it turned out, I was, as in so many other things, completely wrong.

  “And what did she feel that her husband needed the most?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Correction,” Malcolm answered quietly.

  “Correction?” Mr. Singleton asked. “What did she mean by that?”

  “A correction in his course,” Malcolm answered. “In his trajectory. She had failed to remind him of what he’d once been.”

  “Which was what?”

  Malcolm’s gaze drifted over to me as he answered.

  “Kind,” Malcolm said. “She said that he had once had a big heart. He read with his heart, and she thought that he could teach with his heart. They’d once even planned to build a school together, she said.”

  Now his attention returned to Mr. Singleton.

  “I think that having to leave her husband was what she most regretted,” he added. “Leaving him the way he was, I mean.”

  Mr. Singleton had by then grown weary of what he clearly considered a form of testimony that was utterly irrelevant to the larger point he now made.

  “Did Mrs. Madison indicate that she thought her husband would be a good caregiver for her during her coming illness?”

  “She said that he probably would not be.”

  “Why is that?”

  Again, Malcolm’s attention returned to me, almost as if he’d planned it that way, his gaze
on me as quietly, and yet with the same intensity, as Sandrine’s.

  “She said that he had hardened over the years,” he answered. “Disappointment had torn at him, she said, and it had left him with a lot of scar tissue.” He paused, then added pointedly, “And scar tissue does not feel.”

  “Scar tissue?” Mr. Singleton said, seizing the word as if it were a bullet he could now load into his gun. “She said that her husband was without feeling, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Mrs. Madison indicate that she thought her husband might grow impatient?”

  “Impatient?” Malcolm asked, his attention now returned to Mr. Singleton, who’d begun to pace back and forth before the witness box.

  “Impatient, yes,” Singleton replied. “Impatient with her illness, the fact that it might take several years for her to die. Did she feel that he didn’t love her, that he didn’t want her to live, that he hoped she would die as quickly as possible? Did she think these things about her husband?”

  I leaned forward, because surely, surely, to this question, truthful, unassuming, with no grudge against me, Malcolm could honestly say no.

  “Yes,” Malcolm said. “Yes, she believed all those things.”

  And so it had never been my affair with April—providing she’d ever even known about it—that Sandrine had accused me of on the final night of her life. Rather, it had been a far more profound betrayal, a hardness that had grown harder year by year until it had finally become a thick, interior wall, a scar tissue of dead nerves that had even separated me from Sandrine in her anguish, Sandrine in her terror, Sandrine dying.

  I thought of the fear and sorrow that must have weighed down upon her. I had not offered my shoulder to any of that overwhelming weight. I should have had only one mission after that meeting in Dr. Ortins’s office, to love and give comfort to the woman whose death it foretold, she who, even in her final communications with this world, had demonstrated the wit, intelligence, and fierce knowingness that had made her, too, queen of the Nile.

  “She didn’t want to leave him still living in this way,” Malcolm added. “Alive, but dead. She wanted to change him before she died.”

  Mr. Singleton glanced at the jury, then stopped his pacing.

  “She needed to find out who he was and so she came up with a general plan,” Malcolm added.

  Singleton took a step closer to the witness box. “And what was this general plan?” he asked.

  “To confront him with himself,” Malcolm said. “To see if it was possible to make him see himself.”

  “Did Mrs. Madison ever give you any idea of how she intended to do this?”

  “She would try to reach him,” Malcolm answered. “She would try to do this tenderly.”

  I thought of all the times during Sandrine’s last six months when I’d come home to find her reading or listening to music, how she’d always stopped to look up from the book and turn down the music, the way she’d mentioned some little nugget from the book or the name of the song, an invitation, as I realized now, to engage her and be engaged by her, as it were, Socratically, all of which I had obliviously turned down.

  “And did Mrs. Madison ever give you any idea as to her success or lack of success in this effort?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  She had, of course.

  “And had she had any success?”

  I hardly needed to hear his answer.

  “No,” he said.

  “Did Mrs. Madison discuss this lack of success with you, Mr. Esterman?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “What did she say about it?”

  “She said that she was going to raise the stakes.”

  “In what way?”

  “There would be no more of what she called ‘tender traps.’”

  Tender traps, I thought, how entirely Sandrine, first to try them, then discard them when they didn’t work, her gaze ever fixed on the bottom line.

  “Did she give you any idea of what these next attempts would be?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  Malcolm shook his head. “I don’t know what they were,” he said, “but she said it would mean pulling away from him.”

  And she had done exactly that, I thought, as I recalled the days and nights of Sandrine ignoring me, barely speaking to me, no longer listening to me, days and nights of Sandrine distant, as I’d described it to Alexandria, Sandrine “streaming.”

  “All right, but even though Mrs. Madison never mentioned whether or not these new methods were successful, she did indicate a final effort, isn’t that so?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And according to Mrs. Madison, what was that final effort going to be?”

  “Fury,” Malcolm said. “She was going to make her husband furious.”

  “How was she going to do this?”

  “By telling the truth,” Malcolm answered. “By telling him to his face in as blunt a way as possible exactly what he had become.”

  “And what was that?”

  A sociopath, I thought.

  “She never said,” Malcolm answered.

  Mr. Singleton paused for a moment, his gaze sweeping over to the jury, where he kept it briefly before returning his attention to the witness.

  “When did Mrs. Madison tell you that she planned to ‘tell the truth’ to her husband?” he asked.

  “The night of November the fourteenth.”

  “November the fourteenth,” Mr. Singleton repeated. “Which was the night Mrs. Madison . . . died?”

  Malcolm nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  “So there were no more plans,” Mr. Singleton added softly, like a man in mourning. For a moment he simply stood silently, his hands folded almost in prayer before him. At last, he said, “Mr. Esterman, did Sandrine ever indicate to you what she wanted at the end of her life?”

  Ah, I thought, the moment had at last come for Mr. Singleton to demonstrate that he is now on familiar terms with my wife, free to use her first name.

  “Wanted?” Malcolm asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She wanted her husband and her daughter to find good lives,” Malcolm answered. “It was as simple as that. She would like to have been able to look into the future and know that they had made good lives. But only fiction can look into the future, she told me. Only fiction could, as she put it, ‘crack the old verities of time and space,’ and show what lies ahead.” He paused a moment, then added, “But if Sandrine had been able to see a good future for her husband and daughter, then I think she would have been at rest.” He smiled softly. “She even had a painting of what she thought that rest would look like.”

  “Did she show you this painting?”

  “Yes, she did,” Malcolm answered.

  Mr. Singleton walked over to his desk, picked up a large book, and handed it to his witness. “Could you turn to the marked page, please?” he asked.

  Malcolm did.

  “Is that the painting Sandrine showed you?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “What did Sandrine say about this painting?” Mr. Singleton asked.

  “That she had first seen it with her husband,” Malcolm told the court, “In a little French town called Albi. It was by a painter named Antonio Mancini. It was called Resting.”

  Then, quite suddenly, I knew.

  It had not been in the cathedral, the moment that had so seared itself into Sandrine’s mind and heart, but in a small gallery off the town’s central square. Not even a gallery, really, but simply a shop that sold reproductions of famous paintings. The walls had been hung with other reproductions, everything from the Dutch masters to Picasso with no sense of order as to either the era during which they’d been painted or the style in which they’d been painted, or in fact anything else that might have indica
ted the owner of the shop knew the slightest bit about the history of art.

  Yet within all this chaos Sandrine’s gaze had been drawn to Resting, and she’d stood before it for a long time, as I did, the two of us quite transfixed not by its technical expertise, nor by our knowing anything about the painter or his school, but simply by what hung before us on that mock canvas: a woman lying in her bed, partially covered by white sheets, her eyes open, her lips parted, a small table beside the bed, and on this table several glass jars, all of them reflecting the glow of a candle that alone illuminates the woman’s face and hair and porcelain white upper body and finally the rose she holds just below her single, exposed breast.

  We stood silently before this painting for a long time. Then, still ineffably moved by it, I said, “Strange, but I really care about the woman in this painting.”

  Sandrine nodded. “I’m sure you do, Sam.”

  “It makes me want to sweep into the room and lie down beside her and just . . . hold her.”

  “Yes,” Sandrine said, then looked up at me and smiled. “That’s what a knight in shining armor really is.”

  And that is precisely what I had failed to be in Sandrine’s darkest hour, the moment when my noble, noble wife had most been in need of me.

  On that recognition it struck me that if, at some moment in a man’s life, he suddenly realizes just how low and selfish and, yes, sociopathic he is, then at that moment, wrenchingly and in silent anguish, he will accept the just verdict that his head should roll.

  There were other questions after that, and more answers, a drone of voices, ghostly and distant, but I no longer heard what was being said until they abruptly stopped.

  “The state rests, Your Honor,” Mr. Singleton said.

  Morty began to rise, but I grabbed his arm. “So does the defense,” I told him.

  Morty looked at me, stunned by what I’d just said, but not in the least doubting that I meant it.