(1969) The Seven Minutes (92 page)

She had flown to Chicago to find Bainbridge. As she had expected (or at least hoped), she had found J J Jadway instead. On the way to the airport, she had related to the great man the story of Jerry Griffith. At the airport, he had finally come to his decision. He had said that if he could give Jerry the courage to stand up and confess the truth, then perhaps he himself would find the courage to do the same.

They had flown to Los Angeles together. They had gone to the county jail, where she had left Bainbridge with Jerry for an hour. When Bainbridge emerged from the jail to meet her, he was no longer Bainbridge. He was J J Jadway. He had said simply, ‘Jerry is ready to have the truth known, and so is Thomas Bainbridge, to save the book and all who may be freed by it and by other books like it in the years to come. We are ready for the truth, so that we may both be free.’

Maggie had finished her story. ‘That’s about all I can tell you, Mike. Do you have any more questions?’

‘No,’ he said quietly. Across the room, through the high-set windows, he could see that the day was coming to an end. ‘Let’s go, Maggie.’ They stood up. He said, ‘What would you like to do to celebrate tonight?’

‘Be with you.’ He said, ‘We’ll go out to dinner. We’ll start with that.’

As they went up the aisle she said, ‘I may be a little late for our dinner. After Jerry was released, I told him to meet me at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel bar, Senator Bainbridge is going to join us there after he gets rid of the television people. You know what we’re going to tell Jerry ? To get out of that house. To do it on his own. To get supportive treatment from your Dr Finegood. I’ll pay his bills until he can make his own way.’

‘Do you think he’ll do it?’

‘What?’

‘Make his own way?’

She considered this at the courtroom doors. ‘I don’t know, Mike.

Maybe not right off. Freedom’s a hard thing to get used to. But once you get used to it, it’s a glorious thing. I know. I’ve learned. And I hope that one day Jerry will learn.’

They were in the corridor.

‘Well, if you’re going to be busy for a while,’ said Barrett, ‘then I just might hang around here a little longer. There are a few questions that have to do with Jadway. I’d like to hear Bainbridge’s answers, if he’s still in the building.’

‘You are determined to know it all, aren’t you?’

He smiled. “There are seven minutes. I can’t settle for six.’

She started to leave. ‘See you soon.’

‘Make it sooner,’ he called out.

After she had gone, he wondered where Senator Bainbridge could be found. A police guard was passing, and Barrett asked him.

‘They just moved from here to the sixth floor,’ said the officer. ‘Another network’s set up there in Room 603, and they’re just starting to interview the Senator again.’

Room 603 was the press room of the Hall of Justice.

There were three mahogany desks, and the Los Angeles Times man had vacated the center desk and given Senator Thomas Bainbridge his place.

Except for the circle of free space around this desk, bathed in a white glare of lights, and the two boxy television cameras directing their glass eyes on the desk within this circle, and their bustling crews, every other inch of the press room was filled with curious spectators.

Mike Barrett crowded in at the far fringe of this mob and tried to find out how the Senator was faring.

Senator Bainbridge sat at the desk, cool and imperturbable, waiting.

Somewhere, from behind a camera, sqmeone called out, ‘Okay, Senator, we’re rolling. You’re on camera. You can begin your statement.’

Senator Thomas Bainbridge gave a short nod and looked squarely into the nearest television camera.

One hand folded across the other on the desk blotter before him, he spoke intimately and directly in a flat, unhurried monotone.

‘I have already testified in the courtroom, little more than an hour ago, that in 1934 I wrote the book known as The Seven Minutes under the name of J J Jadway,’ began Senator Bainbridge. ‘Now, since you are interested, I will summarize the essential facts of my testimony, and perhaps add a few autobiographical details more pertinent to this kind of informal statement than they might have been to legal testimony. You want the full story, and you are entitled to have it. You see, friends, I not only support freedom of speech but take advantage of it, now that I have a book to sell.’

Barrett joined in the laughter, and he was pleased that the Senator could smile, too.

Bainbridge’s patrician face was again serious. ‘I was brought up in a strict and formal New England household,’ he resumed. ‘There were five of us. There was my father, self-made, strong-willed, well-intentioned but dogmatic and domineering. There was my mother, a timid servant. There were my two younger sisters, frightened of our father, obedient to his every wish, repressed and hopelessly unworldly. And there was I, the heir, considered by my father as merely an extension of himself, born only to help him in his business and to succeed him in it.

‘My attendance at law school was only window dressing, to make me a more attractive commodity in the family business and socially. I had no real identity, and before being swallowed up by my father and his business, I made one last effort to find out who 1 was or could be. It required all my courage to demand a year abroad, one year, and because I pleaded that this was a cultural necessity and promised to behave, this leave and the money for it were granted me. In 1934 I set off on my voyage of discovery -self-discovery. My destination was Paris, where such explorations must inevitably begin.

‘I had to learn not only that I was a man, but that I was a person. Until then I had not been a man, in either the broadest sense of the word or the narrowest sense of the word. I was as fearful of independence as I was of sex. In truth, as 1 wrote in my book and told the court, I was impotent, both creatively and sexually. I wanted to write, and could not. I wanted to love, and was incapable of doing so. I wanted to be a person who was an individual, with his own history, and not a footnote to his father’s history.

‘During my first months in Paris, I was helpless, inert, lost. I did nothing, gained nothing, won nothing. This was my condition, and my despair, when 1 met a young American girl in Paris, an artist, who had come abroad seeking the same personal identity and freedom that I sought. She had found what, until then, I had failed to find. This was Cassie McGraw. We fell in love. What she saw in me I shall never know. Perhaps she saw that there was a more attractive hidden person imprisoned inside me, imprisoned and hammering and bursting to get out, and this was the person she loved and made an effort to liberate. This is the person she did liberate, the one known as J J Jadway.

‘Cassie and I lived together. She inspired me not only to do what I wanted to do most of all on earth, to write out of myself and my perceptions, truly and honestly, but she gave me an awareness of pleasures no money on earth could buy - the enjoyment of birds on the wing, the comforting greenness of grassy fields, the understanding of stone monuments as living history, the invigorating discovery of the art of conversation, the toleration of alien viewpoints, and, above everything, the knowledge of love that transcended sex.

‘I celebrated Cassie and our love in The Seven Minutes. While I was writing it, my leave abroad expired. I kept making excuses to my father, extending my stay. In exasperation, he cut off my funds, and then my mother and sisters secretly supporting me out of their allowances. Christian Leroux was incorrect in telling the court that I had written the novel in three weeks. I wrote a first draft in three months and spent three added months rewriting it. I did not write it, as Cleland wrote Fanny Hill, to stay out of debtors’ prison. I had sufficient money from my family.

‘As for the book itself, it was drawn upon my experience with and of Cassie McGraw. There was no conscious allegory. This was meant to be a naturalistic novel, perhaps influenced ever so slightly by one writer who moved and another who shook literature, namely D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. It was not only my new feeling about sex, or even Cassie’s encouragement, that enabled me to write the book honestly. It was the counselling I received from an essay once written by Lawrence. ‘A propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” that gave me the strength to create the book without inhibition.

‘There was, for one thing, the problem of language. And Lawrence advised me, “The words that shock so much at first don’t shock at all after a while. Is this because the mind is depraved by habit? Not a bit. It is that the words merely shocked the eye, they never shocked the mind at all. People without minds may go on being shocked, but they don’t matter. People with minds realize that they aren’t shocked, and never really were: and they experience a sense of relief. And that is the whole point. We are today, as human beings, evolved and cultured far beyond the taboos which are inherent in our culture.’

“Then there was the hesitation about honestly describing various acts of sex in narrative. And once again Lawrence collaborated with Cassie to show me the way, telling me, “I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly. Even if we can’t act sexually to our complete satisfaction, let us at least think sexually, complete and clear. All this talk of young girls and virginity, like a blank white sheet on which nothing is written, is pure nonsense. A young girl and a young boy is a tormented tangle, a seething confusion of sexual feelings and sexual thoughts which only the years will disentangle. Years of honest thoughts of sex and years of struggling action in sex will bring us at last where we want to get, to our real and accomplished chastity, our completeness, when our sexual act and our sexual thought are in harmony, and the one does not interfere with the other.”

‘Thus encouraged, I swept aside the dishonest innuendo, the suggestion, the leer, I brushed away the last asterisk, and I wrote my truth. To guide my pen, I derived my outline from Chapter Seven of the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament. You may remember -

“The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.” And then you may remember “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me,” and then “Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine nourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will 1 give thee my loves.”

‘Thus The Seven Minutes was written, and then it was published. I kept my anonymity, refusing to see even my publisher, because it was too early to dare let my father or my family know what I was doing. I waited to see whether the book would be a success and enable me to embark fully on the one career I wanted. Because of its limited publication, and general censorship, the book made me little money. However, it did give me the encouragement to go on, from the talk I heard about it in the cafes, from the letters I received from foreign students and tourists. Initially, I did not repudiate the book. It was only later that I wanted Monsieur Leroux and others to believe that I had repudiated it, out of compelling necessity, and so this fable was given out and gained circulation.

‘At last my time for decision came. Cassie was pregnant. I had more books waiting to be born. I was ready to be my own man. I returned alone to Connecticut to have the final scene with my father. I could not have it. He was gravely ill. My mother was near a nervous breakdown, and my sisters were living in terror, so entire was their dependency on him. What sustained my father, gave the entire family at home hope for his survival, was his return to the Church. He had embraced Catholicism again, devoutly, and it sustained him. It was then that I learned that the Church was investigating J J Jadway, and that Jadway’s book - my secret book - would be listed in the Index. This, I knew, would be a fatal blow to my father - indeed, to my mother and sisters as well. Out of fear for his life, I determined to obliterate J J Jadway forever, so that Jadway could never be traced to me and destroy my parents.

‘I wrote to Paris at once. I wrote to Cassie and to Sean O’Flanagan. I gave them explicit instructions and sent money for them to carry out these instructions. They believed in my good intentions -that while I was obliterating a pseudonym, I would yet be Jadway under another name. I arranged for Jadway’s bad character, his remorse, his suicide, all the worst I could conceive, so that the curious, the investigators, Leroux the Archbishop of Paris, Father Sarfatti, others, would be satisfied and never again come around questioning. When Fa’her Sarfatti tried to reach me, it was Sean O’Flanagan who telephoned him, using my name, and who played the role of Jadway. It was Cassie McGraw who forwarded to Father Sarfatti the letter that I had carefully prepared. It was Sean O’Flanagan who accompanied Cassie to Venice, representing himself as Jadway at the masked ball and at the Curia interrogation in the ducal palace. As for those telephone conversations I was supposed to have had with my publisher, Christian Leroux, it was Sean who made the calls as Jadway, acting out a script I had prepared for him. These conversations were held by Sean and Leroux while I was in the United States, and long after my book had been published, and Leroux reported them accurately as to content, but placed them wrongly in time. From the witness stand, Leroux indicated that his conversations with Jadway had taken place earlier. Either he forgot when they had actually taken place or he deliberately misrepresented the year they had occurred in order to strength his importance to the prosecution as a witness.

‘Arranging my fictitious death proved to be the simplest task of all. Sean O’Flanagan was doing part-time work for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune early in 1937. It was easy enough for him to write and plant the obituary of J J Jadway. It was just as easy to buy the venal French press of the period and get them to run an obituary and a few short feature articles. It was easy for Sean to fan the gossip in the cafes. But it had to be more than this. It had to be real. It was Cassie who arranged a private memorial service for Jadway, which she and some admirers of the book and Leroux attended.