The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

  There was something strange about her tone of voice, something enigmatic about the look in her eye. There was more involved, more than what she had hinted at, but what she said next only added to the mystery.

  “It is a case that goes far beyond what we normally understand by the law.”

  Slowly, and with an effort, Evelyn Pierce rose from behind her desk and walked with measured step across to the window. Her threadbare blue suit had the kind of square shoulders and heavy lapels that had once made spinster principals seem stern and unforgiving. A black judicial robe hung limp on a coat rack next to the door that opened into her courtroom. Standing with her thick legs shoulder width apart and her hands clasped behind her back, she stared down at the busy city streets below.

  “You remember the story of Pitcairn Island: Fletcher Christian and the men who mutinied on the Bounty; how they set the tyrannical Capitan Bligh and some of the other officers adrift in a lifeboat, then went back to Tahiti; how they searched for a place where no one would ever find them, discovered an island, not more than two miles square, out in the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles from civilization?”

  “Yes, of course…vaguely; I read it years ago, and I saw the movie, the one with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton. I think I also saw the one with Marlon Brando, but I’m not sure. I really don’t remember. But why? What does this…?”

  Evelyn Pierce looked at him over her shoulder, a question in her eyes.

  “You were in the war, weren’t you? In the navy, the war in the Pacific, correct?”

  The question surprised him, but even after all these years he could not repress a residual pride. A courtroom trial was nothing compared to what he had experienced then. The war, not any verdict he had later won, was the one important thing he had done; it had been, in a way that only made sense to someone who had been there, the best part of his life. There had been an absence of ambiguity, a certainty about things, and, through it, a discipline that, oddly enough, had made him feel freer than he would ever feel again.

  “Yes, I was in the navy.” He hesitated, wondering whether he should tell the truth. He laughed at his own timidity. “I lied about my age; I was only sixteen, but I looked older.”

  “Which is probably the reason that you can still lie about your age now,” she remarked with a shrewd glint in her eye. “People who look older when they are young often look younger when they get old. How old are you anyway? You don’t look a day over seventy. Well, never mind. You were in the war in the Pacific. Good. You have some idea of the distances involved, more than someone who has only seen the movie or read the book. You know how easy it would be to get lost in that vast ocean; how easily a place that size, far away from the main lines of transit, could remain isolated and unobserved, just another bleak, uninhabited place, a distant shore no one would notice. It was nearly seventy years before a ship, an American ship, first noticed Pitcairn. So it’s not impossible,” she said, turning back to the window and the jostling crowds on the city streets below, the familiar strangers, as she now thought of them, each in a hurry to get to where they were going, where they did not question they had to be.

  “What is not impossible?” asked Darnell when she did not explain.

  She continued to stare out the window, but she was not thinking about what her eyes could see.

  “That the same thing could have happened and not been discovered until now. Strange, isn’t it?” she asked, a distant smile on her lips, “that in this modern world of ours, when we think we can map the universe, there are still things we do not yet know about the earth.”

  She left the window and with a brooding expression on her weather worn face came over to Darnell and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Take the case; it’s the only way I’ll know there is at least a chance that there might be some justice to come out of all this.”

  Her hand stayed on his shoulder while she looked down at him, telling him through the troubled sincerity of her gaze that this was no idle request, that she had pondered the question long and hard and would not ask him if she was not convinced that he was the only one who could do it right.

  “This case – whatever it is – has to do with something that happened on an island somewhere in the Pacific,” said Darnell as she took her seat the other side of the desk. “An island no one has heard of, an island that apparently doesn’t even have a name. Then why is it being tried here?”

  Evelyn Pierce gaze shifted past him into the middle distance. A look of weary cynicism moved relentlessly across her strong, broad mouth.

  “Haven’t you heard?” she asked as her eyes came back to him. “We now have the God-given right to charge anyone with anything, wherever we happen to find them. The situation we now have – the situation you have, if you agree to do this – is one in which someone is charged with crimes that may not have been crimes in the place where they happened.”

  Darnell caught at the suggestion. He could guess what the government would argue.

  “But they should have been crimes, because there are certain things that are always wrong.”

  “Yes, precisely; which is all the more reason you need to take over the defense. You’re old enough to remember that these standards people talk about are not nearly so absolute as they think; and, more importantly, that their own standards, their own beliefs, are scarcely immune from challenge. Still, I have to warn you, the charges against the defendant are serious. The burden of proof will be all on you. The government won’t have much difficulty persuading people that what happened out there was clearly a crime, a violation of human rights that has to be punished.”

  Darnell moved forward onto the edge of the chair.

  “What exactly is the charge? What is that the defendant is supposed to have done?”

  Evelyn Pierce bent her head to the side, a somber expression in her eyes.

  “Murder, rape, and….” She seemed not to want to tell him the rest, which puzzled Darnell. After rape and murder what could be so bad as to make her hesitate like this?

  “And?” he asked.

  “You had a case a few years ago: a sailing ship went down and….”

  “The ship was called the Evangeline and it was the most difficult case of my life. What the captain, Marlowe, did – what he had to do – so that some at least might survive….”

  “Cannibalism,” she remarked, remembering what she had heard about that trial with as vivid a memory as if it had been tried in her own courtroom. “One of the two great taboos, one of the two things that human beings are never supposed to do, one of the two things that are never forgivable.”

  “Yes, perhaps; though in Marlowe’s case, what he did was nothing short of heroic.”

  “And tragic, too; as you know better than anyone.”

  “Yes, tragic; the worst tragedy of any case I ever had. But you said two taboos. What is the other? What is the other thing that, beyond rape and murder, seems to be so disturbing?”

  “Incest – that is what the young man is charged with; and how you defend against that, I swear I do not know.”

  Chapter Two

  William Darnell unbuttoned his shirt and pretended annoyance while Summer Blaine pressed the cold stethoscope against his bare chest.

  “Aren’t you supposed to get that thing to room temperature before you use it?”

  “I do, for all my other patients.” She pushed gently on his shoulders until he was hunched forward and then pressed it against his back. “But for you, the worst patient I’ve ever had, I put it in the freezer first.” She listened for a moment, moved the stethoscope farther up his back and listened again. “In my ignorance I thought it might be a way to get your attention,” she said as she put the instrument in her black bag.

  Darnell’s gray eyes danced with laughter, but at the same time with sympathy for the way she worried about him. He did not want her to worry about him; there was really no point to it. But he was glad she did and knew that he would lose something irrepla
ceable should she ever stop.

  “You always have my attention,” he said in his most courtly manner. “I listen to everything you say.”

  Summer Blaine had been through this before. She glanced around the Pacific Heights apartment they shared on weekends and whenever else she could get away from her practice in the Napa valley. Shaking her head in frustration, she took him by the hand and led him to a living room window and his favorite chair.

  “Why don’t you just sit down? I’ll get a blanket to cover your legs and you can die peacefully in your sleep.”

  “I know I’m not a very good patient,” he began to protest.

  “Not a very good patient? You’re not a patient at all, in any serious sense. A patient is someone who at least thinks there might be something wrong with him.”

  William Darnell sat in the chair and for a moment looked out the window to the Golden Gate, burning orange in the light of dusk. With surprising agility he jumped back up.

  “I’m going to have a scotch and soda,” he announced. “What can I get you?”

  “A scotch and…? You’re impossible,” she said as she followed him into the long, narrow kitchen.

  He got two glasses from the cupboard next to the stainless steel sink.

  “Scotch and…?”

  “Yes, all right; but just a small one,” she replied.

  A table and two chairs sat next to the only window. Alcatraz loomed shadowlike halfway across the bay.

  “Every day this week, while you were up in Napa, I did exactly what you told me. I took those damn pills, every morning when I got up and every evening when I went to bed.”

  She stared back at him, looking for some sign of deceit, knowing that it was not any use.

  “You have the most honest face I’ve ever seen, William Darnell. I should know better than to trust you to tell the truth. I’m not some witness in a trial, I’m….”

  “Witness? I thought you were interrogating me.”

  “Don’t try that with me,” she replied. She stared harder at him now, smiling in a way that told him that what he could do with juries he could never do with her. “You didn’t take your pills every day, did you? You probably didn’t take them at all.”

  He sipped on the scotch and then told her something a little closer to the truth.

  “I honestly…,” he started and then realized it was a mistake. No one ever told the truth with that beginning. “I really don’t remember if I did or not. I think I did, some of the time at least. But during a trial….”

  “During a trial you don’t think about anything except the trial. Yes, I know all about that. Half the time you sleep – if you can call a short nap sleep – in your office.” She took a drink and suddenly felt like a fool. “You didn’t even remember I was coming today.”

  “That’s not true. You said you would as soon as you could on Friday and….”

  Her eyes glittered with triumph. It proved her point.

  “When you walked in and found me here, you were surprised.”

  “I was delighted,” he said with genuine, and almost boyish, affection.

  “But surprised. You didn’t know it was Friday, did you? You….”

  “I won.”

  “I know you did.”

  “You know? But it was just a couple of hours ago. The jury came back with a verdict at four o’clock. You couldn’t possibly have heard.”

  Summer Blaine bent her head to the side and smiled softly. She touched his hand with the warmth of a woman and the confidence of a physician.

  “I knew the trial was over, and I knew you had won, the moment I saw you. I know that look, I know what it means, when you have nothing more to worry about, when everything went the way you hoped it would.”

  No one had ever understood as much about what the work meant to him or how far he got lost in what he did. Sometimes when he looked at her he thought he saw himself, or rather that part of himself that until a few years ago he had not known he had. He told her things that, though he might have spoken the same words when he was younger, when his wife was still alive, held a different and, as he believed, a deeper meaning, a meaning closer to the truth.

  “You’re right about that look, but it’s more a sense of relief. The one thing I know for certain when a jury brings back a verdict of not guilty is that my client won’t have to pay the price for all the mistakes I’ve made.”

  He stared at the crystal glass, amber colored from the scotch, wondering why he still worried so much about what might happen if a verdict went the other way. Summer was saying something, but he was so caught up in his own thought that her voice seemed to come from far away.

  “If you ever made a mistake in a trial, no one else would know it.”

  “A strange thing happened today. I was sitting there, waiting for the jury, remembering back to the first trial I had, all those years ago, and how nothing had really changed. It’s still the same feeling, the sense of watching it all from the outside, as if none of it had anything to do with me.”

  “That isn’t so odd; it’s what happens every time I deliver another baby. Once it’s over, once the umbilical cord is cut and the baby starts to cry and you know the child is healthy and safe, you’ve done your part and the rest of it is in the hands of God or nature.”

  Darnell took another drink. The scotch burned slow and warm against his throat. It gave him a sense of satisfaction, the illusion, if it is an illusion, that the present was all that mattered, that tomorrow and the day after that would somehow take care of themselves.

  “I kept thinking that this might be my last trial, the same thought I’ve had at the end of every trial for a while now, and that if it was that would probably be the end of it, that there wouldn’t be anything else; my life would be pretty much over. That would be all right, I think; I wouldn’t want to hang around, become a doddering old man, a burden….”

  “You’d never be….”

  “Of course I would. We’ve talked about this before,” said Darnell with an impatience he immediately regretted. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to be so damned irritable. But it’s true. You know, what we’ve talked about. The work is what keeps me going; take that away and….”

  The words echoed into the silence, and as they did so his gaze drifted away as if for some reason he could not any longer look her straight in the eye. Summer knew what it meant, she was sure of it. She did not say a thing, she just waited. It would not take long, it never did. He would turn to see if he could keep going, continue with the story she knew he had rehearsed: all the reasons why what he wanted to do, what he was going to do, was the only intelligent thing to do; what she would want him to do once she understood how important it was to his own well-being, even to his own survival. She started to laugh.

  “What…? Why are you…?” he asked with a sharp turn of his head.

  “You’ve decided to take another case. Why don’t you just say so instead of mumbling about what might happen if you don’t, how your life will be over, how that will be all right, how you don’t want to be a doddering old man, how you….”

  “I know I promised, and….” he said with the sheepish look of a thief caught red-handed. “But it isn’t entirely my fault.”

  Summer sat back with her arms crossed, enjoying every minute of his latest attempt to explain why he had always meant to carry out the promise that they had both known was nothing more than a serviceable lie, the myth of a future they both understood would never exist. There would be no easy, peaceable descent into old age and death for either one of them.

  “It isn’t entirely your fault,” she repeated in a teasing voice.

  “No, it’s not. The trial was just over. I was getting ready to leave when Judge Pierce – Evelyn Pierce; you’ve heard me talk about her – sent her clerk to get me. There’s a case she wants me to take. She’s never asked me to do anything like this before. It’s a very unusual situation.”

  Darnell got up, went over to the counter and started to pour
himself another drink. He looked at Summer with a question in his eyes.

  “You think half a drink more would be all right?”

  He stood there with a tender, irrepressible smile on his mouth, waiting, as it seemed, for her permission; willing, as it seemed, to follow her direction in all the small matters of daily life.

  “God, you make me a little crazy at times,” she said.

  He brought the half-filled glass to the table. Leaning forward on his elbows he folded his hands against his chin.

  “I know, and I wish I didn’t. I owe you everything. I would have been dead if you hadn’t been there, that day in court when I had the heart attack….”

  “The second heart attack,” she reminded him. She ignored the fugitive tear at the corner of her eye and then, with an awkward laugh, wiped it away. “The second heart attack.”

  “And there hasn’t been another. It’s the work,” he insisted.

  She could have replied that the work had almost killed him, the tension of the trial, the erratic hours he kept, the almost total lack of sleep. He was right when he said that if she had not been there when he collapsed, if she had not been a doctor who knew that he had to get to a hospital and surgery right away, he would have died. But she also knew that while medical science had saved him, it was not science that was keeping him alive.

  “Why don’t we go to dinner and you can tell me all about this new case that has you so excited.”

  They went down the street to the quiet neighborhood restaurant where they had been going now for years. Their favorite table was somehow always available. There was a vague familiarity, a settled routine, a set of expectations, the way seasoned actors play a part they have played a thousand times before. Invariably, the waiter smiled, led them to their table, and watched with a kind of gentle benevolence as William Darnell, every inch the well-bred gentleman, carefully and with a conscious appreciation for the simple elegance of the act, pulled out Summer Blaine’s chair. Then, when Darnell came round to the other side of the table, the waiter would start to reach for the chair and Darnell would tell him not to bother, he could manage.