(1969) The Seven Minutes (93 page)

Tt was done. Jadway was no more. I was safe, my father’s life and faith preserved, my family insulated from disgrace. Then I learned that Cassie had been delivered of my child, my daughter, Judith. I left my father’s bedside and returned to France, and had Cassie, with Judith, meet me in Cherbourg. From there we sailed back to New York. I wanted to set a date for our marriage. Cassie would not have it yet. She would marry me once my father was well and I had broken with him and I could again be the man she loved. She waited in New York, and I kept the family and the family business propped up, and waited in New England.

‘My father did not recover. My father died terribly. My father died without my having broken from him. I remained as his extension, his proxy, in life. My mother collapsed. My sisters were helpless and afraid. The business my father had built now floundered, waiting for a strong hand. These responsibilities came pressing down on me. Could I abandon my family ? Cassie had done much toward making me independent, but she had not had time to do enough. I was still the victim of my past.

‘I went to Cassie, pleaded with her to become my wife, to stand beside me until I had straightened out my family and the business on which the women depended. I said I would become Jadway again one day and we could resume our old life. Cassie said simply, “But Jadway is dead, and I loved Jadway.” The next time I went to see her, she was gone. Cassie had disappeared. Only Sean knew where she was, and he kept the promise of silence he had made her. I supported our daughter through Sean until I learned Cassie had married. Later, when I heard that Cassie was ill and destitute, I supported her in a convalescent home.

‘As the years passed, I realized that Cassie was right. Jadway was gone and would never return. The years passed, and I had a wife, more children, enough wealth finally to leave the business. Without Cassie, I lacked the courage to write again. Yes, Jadway was dead. So I revived my interest in the law, where I could serve to keep the word free, and I have been a part of the world of the law ever since.

‘Not until yesterday, when the counsel for the defense, Mr Michael Barrett, found me, was I forced to face the fact that J J Jadway was not dead after all. This morning I made my decision. But before doing so, I telephoned my wife and my children. My wife had suspected the truth; my children had not. They wholeheartedly stood behind my decision. Then I telephoned the President of the United States and asked him not to offer my name to Congress for the Supreme Court vacancy, and I told him why. He was sorry, he was gracious, and he said, in his amusing way, that at least the First Lady would now find me even more fascinating. Finally I telephoned one more person. I called Cassie McGraw. I could not speak to her, so I spoke to her nurse. “Give her this message when she has a good day,” I said. “Tell her simply, ‘Jadway lives.’ She will understand.” ’

Listening, Mike Barrett exhaled softly.

Then he turned and left the press room - and Jadway.

Outside, night had fallen, and the air was clean and crisp.

Entering the Temple Street Auto Park, where his convertible was waiting, he became aware of someone coming up behind him.

He halted, uncertain who the blond man was, and then he recognized him. He stood there wondering, until District Attorney Elmo Duncan reached him.

‘I don’t know if you heard me during all that noise after the verdict,’ Elmo Duncan said, ‘but I did congratulate you, Mike.’

‘I appreciate that, Elmo.’

‘Come on, I’ll walk you to your car.’ They strode in silence for several seconds, and then Duncan spoke again, not bitterly, but wryly, and almost to himself. ‘When I was a kid in Glendale, there was one sports hero I had. That was Babe Ruth. And he once said something that has always stuck in my head, something wiser than anything I ever read by Socrates or Spinoza or Kant. The Babe said, “One day you’re a hero and the next you’re a bum, so what the hell.” ‘ Duncan gave Barrett a boyish grin. ‘So, Mike, I say, what the hell.’

This moment Barrett liked him more than he had at any time before or during the trial. And he knew why. It was because the other Duncan had not been this Duncan, but merely part of a cabal controlled by Luther Yerkes, a cabal that had been joined by Frank Griffith and Willard Osborn II and promoted by Harvey Underwood and Irwin Blair. This was Duncan, plain.

‘You almost had us there, Elmo,’ said Barrett. ‘You did a great job. Until today, you had us on the ropes. We got lucky with one big punch.’

‘You didn’t get lucky,’ said Duncan. ‘You deserved winning and I deserved losing. I tried, but you tried harder. You never quit. At some point, 1 became too confident. 1 depended on - on others, and I began looking beyond the trial while the trial was still going on. If I’d been on my own, fighting for my life, depending on no one, I might have kept going, got to Cassie and Jadway ahead of you, even learned the truth about Jerry Griffith and done something about that. Well, it was a lesson. I won’t forget it.’

‘I’d still bet on your becoming senator one day.’

Duncan snorted. ‘I’d be satisfied if it was safe to bet on my being district attorney again.’

They had come to Barrett’s car.

‘Well, again, thanks, Elmo,’ Barrett said.

“There’s just one more thing,’ said Duncan. ‘Believe me, I’m not saying it because I’m a sorehead.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I still believe The Seven Minutes is obscene. T hadn’t read it the first day you came to my office, so I wasn’t sure then. But right now, Jadway or no Jadway, Jerry or no Jerry, I believe that book is obscene and harmful and should have been found guilty. You freed it because you proved that one of my witnesses perjured himself and another of my witnesses unwittingly lied. But, Mike, you did not prove - at least not to me - that this book belongs in a decent household. Maybe it’s me and my upbringing and my standards, and my overprotective concern about my family, but I still contend that such books are dangerous and should not be published. I believe they can hurt immature or disturbed adults. Even worse, I think they can overstimulate a child in his latency period, before he’s come to accept his sex thoughts as natural. These books can drive him into sex fantasies, divert him from normal growth and from seeking real experiences on his own level, until his fantasies become a preoccupation that cripples his chance for normality.’

‘In other words, Elmo, you feel that all literature, all ideas, should be aimed at satisfying the twelveyear-old reader? If we did so, we would eventually wind up with an adult nation of twelveyear-olds, wouldn’t we? No, I can’t buy that. The very young aren’t keenly interested in grownup sex, and by the time they are they’re usually old enough to cope with reading about it. Anyway, it’s been argued that books represent only a small part of a youngster’s sexual environment, perhaps the least part. Remember that survey they took among four hundred college girls many years ago? The girls were asked what stimulated them sexually the most - a play? a movie? a photograph? a book? The overwhelming majority answered - a man. As for the influence of books on the young, well, if there has to be censorship, then it shouldn’t come from you or the state - it should come from parents, from the mother and father, in the home. Let each family decide for itself how its own offspring should be raised and what they can or cannot read.’

Duncan stared at the ground. Then he shook his head. ‘No, Mike. Too uncertain. I believe in censorship as it is now constituted by the law, not only because it is the law but because it safeguards freedom and protects it from vigilantes. There have simply got to be rules. I remember a censorship case we had down here some years ago concerning Tropic of Cancer. One of the prosecution witnesses, a professor of English named Baxter, was particularly eloquent about this necessity, and I still recall what he said - well, most of it - and I still go along with him. He admitted that censorship troubled him because he hated the idea of censors imposing their opinions and wills upon the conflicting opinions and wills of other people. Nevertheless, he said, in a complex society like ours we’ve got to live by some rules. There’s got to be a rule about automobiles driving on the right-hand side of the road. Now, this may impair the freedom of the driver, infringe on his individual rights, but the rule must be imposed. Then he said, “We know that we can’t sell with impunity cancer cures by mail, which are fraudulent quackeries. We know you can’t sell pornographic postcards in the school yard. There is a level, in short, that is the great concern and the difficulty in the twilight zone of all censorship___Our American society grants a great deal of leeway… but down here there is a level beyond which it is not socially desirable, safe, or healthy for people to be allowed to go.” ’

Barrett nodded. ‘Agreed, Elmo. Now we’ve about made the full circle. Rules. Who sets them? You? Me? Frank Griffith? Senator Bainbridge ? I’ll go with the answer given by Supreme Court Justice Stewart. He argued that those who charted our First Amendment believed a society could be truly strong only when it was truly free. “The Constitution protects coarse expressions as well as refined, and vulgarity no less than elegance. A book worthless to me may convey something of value to my neighbor. In the free society to which our Constitution has committed us, it is for each to choose for himself.” Elmo, there can be no arbiter for everyone, not in the matter of taste. There’s an old joke that tells it best. A patient went in to see a psychiatrist. The patient agreed to take the word-association test, a kind of oral Rorschach inkblot. The psychiatrist was to read aloud a series of words, and the patient was to respond immediately to each word with the first word that came into his mind. So the psychiatrist started with the word “House,” and the patient answered, “Sex.” The psychiatrist said, “Chair,” and the patient answered, “Sex.” The psychiatrist said, “Table,” and the patient answered, “Sex.” After twenty more routine words - like “Kitchen” and “Garden” - each of which brought the response “Sex,” the psychiatrist became annoyed. “Look here,” he said to the patient, “I must say you’ve got an unusually one-track mind.” The patient appeared surprised. “But, Doctor,” he protested, “you’re the one who’s bringing up all those sexy words!” ‘ Barrett grinned and shrugged. ‘There you are.’

The District Attorney smiled briefly. But only briefly. He was not amused. ‘Mike, most of us know what is sexy and what is not. We also know what is dirty and what is not. And I believe most of us feel that The Seven Minutes and books like it are dirty, they’re obscene, and they don’t deserve to be circulated. No matter what, Mike, but as long as that sort of thing keeps coming out, I’ll keep fighting it.’

Barrett nodded. ‘Okay, Elmo. As long as you keep fighting it, I’ll be fighting you.’ He paused, and then he added, ‘And I’ll also be fighting those things I consider to be really obscene today.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning the real fight to be fought is not against writings about sexual intercourse or the use of four-letter words, but against obscenities like calling a black man “nigger” or labeling a person you disagree with “Commie.”,What is truly obscene is clubbing or persecuting a man because he is different from you or has different ideas, or forcing young boys to murder other young boys in distant countries in the name of self-defense, or as one preacher stated it, seeing “a fully clothed man twitching and writhing as the shock of electricity applied by our state prison officials burns through his body.” What is really obscene is teaching students lies, promoting hypocrisy and dishonesty with a wink, making material goals a way of life, ignoring poverty in a land of plenty, condoning injustice and inequality while paying lip service to the Flag, the Founding Fathers, and the Constitution. Those are the obscenities that concern me.’

‘They concern me just as much,’ said Duncan. ‘And when I can, I’ll be battling them side by side with you. But where we part company is over the matter of freedom of speech and the rights of those who take advantage of it for sick or selfish reasons and to the detriment of our families and our nation.’ He stopped and stared at Barrett. ‘Okay, we’re still at odds over the subject of pornography. But leveling now, Mike, you do believe in a little censorship, don’t you?’

‘If you can make me believe in a little pregnant, you can make me believe in a little censorship. And even a little censorship, I suspect, were such a thing possible, might be too much, far too much, because of what it could lead to. George Bernard Shaw spelled it out. Assassination, he said, is the extreme form of censorship. And it is, and I’m not forgetting that. But I’ll tell you what, Elmo. When scientists can prove by tests that obscenity in books is harmful, when the courts can truly distinguish between what is obscene and what is not, and when we can find umpires wiser than any men on earth right now to rule on what should be censored and what should not, without invading and endangering other human freedoms, then and only then will I stop fighting you. How’s that?’ ‘Maybe that day will come, Mike.’

‘We can both pray for it.’ He was about to take his leave when something came to mind, from where he did not know, for it was irrelevant to what had passed between them - or perhaps, after all, it was more relevant than anything that they had discussed. ‘Elmo,’ he said, ‘have you ever heard of the best last will and testament ever written? It was written by a Chicago attorney, Williston Fish, in 1897, in collaboration with and for his client Charles Lounsbury. Do you know it ?’

‘I don’t believe I do.’

‘I think those of us in the legal profession might read it and reread it from time to time. I’ll try to remember to send you a copy.’

“What’s in it?’

‘Well, just to give you an idea. The will starts off: “1, Charles Lounsbury, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, do now make and publish this my last will and testament, in order, as justly as I may, to distribute my interests in the world among succeeding men … First, I give to good fathers and mothers, but in trust for their children, nevertheless, all good little words of praise and all quaint pet names, and I charge said parents to use them justly but generously as the needs of their children shall require.