A Death in Canaan (2 page)

Yet there is much more in the case of Peter Reilly, set down on these pages in rich detail, which makes it such a memorable and unique affair. What could be more harmoniously “American,” in the best sense of that mangled word, than the spectacle of a New England village rising practically en masse to come to the support of one of their own young whom they felt to be betrayed and abandoned? Mrs. Barthel, who lived with this case month in and month out during the past few years, and who got to know well so many of Peter's friends and his surrogate “family,” tells this part of the story with color, humor, and affection; and her feeling for the community life of a small town like Canaan—with its family ties and hostilities, its warmth and crankiness and crooked edges—gives both a depth and vivacity to her narrative; never is she lured into the purely sensational. As in every story of crime and justice, the major thrust of the drama derives from its central figures, and they are all here: not only the law's automata—the two “nice” cops whose dismal stratagems thrust Peter into his nightmare at the outset—but the judge, prosecutor and counsel for the defense. Regarding these personages, Mrs. Barthel's art most often and tellingly lies in her subtle selectivity—and her onlooker's silence. What she allows the State's Attorney, Mr. Bianchi, simply to utter with his own lips, for instance, says more about Mr. Bianchi and the savagery of a certain genus of prosecutorial mind than any amount of editorializing or speculative gloss. As for the fascinating aftermath of the trial—Arthur Miller's stubborn and deservedly celebrated detective work in company with the redoubtable Mr. Conway, the brilliantly executed labors of the new defense counsel, the discovery of fresh evidence that led to the order for another trial, and other matters—all of these bring to a climax an eccentric, tangled, significant and cautionary chronicle of the wrongdoing of the law and its belated redemption.

Joan Barthel's book would deserve our attention if for no other reason than that it focuses a bright light on the unconscionable methods, which the law, acting through its enforcement agencies, and because of its lust for punishment, uses to victimize the most helpless members of our society. And thus it once again shows the law's tragic and perdurable imperfection. It also reminds us that while judicial oppression undoubtedly falls the heaviest on those from minority groups, it will almost as surely hasten to afflict the poor and the “unrespectable,” no matter what their color. But rather triumphantly, and perhaps most importantly,
A Death in Canaan
demonstrates the will of ordinary people, in their ever astonishing energy and determination, to see true justice prevail over the law's dereliction.

PART ONE

1

When Barbara died, some of the news stories described her house as a little white cottage. The phrase made the place sound picturesque, as if it were one of the many charming cottages tucked into the northwestern corner of Connecticut, nestled against the mountains.

But the little house where Barbara and Peter lived was drab and boxy, set very close to the road. Once it had been a diner. It didn't nestle against the mountain, although the mountain was there, a rugged hulk behind the house. At night, especially, the setting was desolate and lonely.

On the north side of the house, stretching toward the town of Canaan, five miles away, there was a swamp with some scrubby evergreens, a few birches, and a billboard stuck in the marsh. On the south side, the owners of the property lived in a big old Colonial house that was only partly used, the rest of it closed off and musty. Past the big house, several houses were scattered down the road. There were no houses across the road, only a gas station. During the day, when Peter was in school, Barbara sometimes wandered over there, to have somebody to talk to. She was there talking when Peter came home from school on the day she died.

Although the house was small, it wasn't cozy, just cramped. There was one bedroom, ten by twelve feet, where Barbara and Peter slept in bunk beds. There were no table lamps in the bedroom, just a naked ceiling bulb, so Barbara put a clamp-on light by the top bunk for reading. She loved to read, especially mysteries. She went to the Falls Village Library regularly, two mornings a week, and when she died, she left two books overdue.

The front door of the house opened directly into the living room, also ten by twelve feet. A person coming through the front door could easily see the bunks in the bedroom just by looking to the right.

Beyond the bedroom was a bathroom, a closet, and a back door leading outside. To get to the bathroom or the back door, it was necessary to walk through the bedroom. The back door was kept locked, except when Barbara washed clothes in the bathtub and took them out to hang on the line, or when Peter took his bike out. Since Barbara rarely did laundry, and since Peter, once he got his driver's license, almost never rode his bike, the door stayed locked and unused. The night Barbara died, the door was unlocked and standing partly open.

As cramped and cluttered as the house always was, Peter was used to it. It was home. Peter was still a child, just turned twelve, when he and Barbara moved in. When she died, he was eighteen, legally a man, so he had spent some important years growing up in the little house. Besides, Peter was the kind of person who got used to things. He seemed to take life pretty much as it came. Barbara was a casual person, and Peter was too. “My mom never got uptight about anything,” he said. “I got used to playing everything by ear. I think things work out best that way, myself. Things work out; they always do. Just give it time.”

It never seemed to bother Peter, for example, that his last name was different from Barbara's.

“She just picked my name right out of the air,” Peter explained. “I don't know who my father was, and I don't think anyone knows it. When I was old enough to understand, about fourteen, my mom told me what happened. She told me—this may shock you—she told me that she was raped in Van Cortland Park when she lived in New York. But she felt I should have my own name, so she picked a name she liked, and she said, ‘Peter Anthony Reilly. That's what his name is going to be.'

“She got up so early in the morning,” Peter marveled. “I need twelve hours sleep, but she'd be up at four-thirty or five, just as refreshed. Wide awake! First thing I'd hear, when I got up at a quarter to seven, was Bob Steele on the radio, lots of old music and old jokes. That was too early in the morning for me, but my mom used to get out her pen and paper and write down the jokes and tell them to me when I got home from school. By then I was awake. I remember this one: Two caterpillars crossing the road. A butterfly goes over their heads. One caterpillar looks up and says, ‘You'll never get
me
up in one of those things.'

“Sunday mornings, my mom would drive over to Mansfield's General Store. They had fresh-baked bread on Sunday morning, and she'd get
The New York Times
too. All Sunday afternoon she'd read
The New York Times
. She liked the Double-Crostic. She could do any kind of puzzles, upside down or rightside up. She was something else. She was reading better when she was five than I am now. She knew opera, you name it. She was terrific.”

Barbara was casual about Peter's school work, so he was, too. But it bothered her, when he started high school, that he didn't like to read. “Let's just read one book,” Barbara said to Peter. “I know you'll enjoy it.” So she took him to the Falls Village Library and got
Tarzan of the Apes
. Sure enough, Peter was interested. “I read it and I thought, ‘That was pretty good,'” Peter recalled. “So I began to read more. I could read a book a week and report on it pretty well. In Modern Literature you could read anything you wanted to, so I read James Bond, and I got eighty-five on it.”

Once Barbara had got Peter off to school, she didn't have much to do. She hadn't worked for several years, since she was fired from her job at an insurance agency. Barbara always drank a lot, and after she stopped working, she drank more. She spent most of her time reading, and writing, and drinking. As time went on, Barbara seemed more and more adrift.

Usually Peter rode the school bus, but on the day Barbara died, he got a ride with two of his good friends, Geoffrey Madow and Paul Beligni. They rode home together, too. The three boys had been friends since the first day of their freshman year at Housatonic Valley Regional High School. When Barbara died, they were beginning their senior year together. They all had pretty much the same classes including Contemporary Problems. This year they were scheduled to study “Crime in Society.”

Barbara was fifty-one when she died, but she always got along far better with Peter's teen-aged friends than with her own contemporaries, their parents. Paul Beligni often stayed overnight, and the summer before she died he stayed practically every night, sleeping on a piece of foam in the living room that he rolled up during the day and stuck into a corner. Paul used to shoot woodchucks in the backyard, using a twelve-gauge shotgun. Once he and Peter were fooling around with the gun in the living room and it went off, blasting away the top of a tall clock. Barbara just shrugged and said they were lucky it hadn't hit the red bowl.

One of her favorite pranks was to spot a car passing on the road, get the license number, then call the police and sob out a story, in a lisping, childish voice: “Oh a car has just run over my cat, and my cat fwew up in the air and it hit the tewephone pole and it came down again and now it's all smushed and dead—sob, sob—but I got the wicensepwate number. Oh, can't you pweath find the mean man who hit my cat?” She'd recite the number she'd written down, then stand in the doorway and, when the police car came by in screaming chase, she'd roar with laughter and pour herself another drink.

“I don't know that Barbara ever hurt anybody, but she could aggravate the devil out of a person,” said Jean Beligni, Paul's mother, who was in Barbara's house only once, to bring back some laundry Jean had done as a favor for Peter. Doing the laundry was not one of Barbara's strengths. The night she died, the bedroom floor was strewn with dirty clothes.

When she felt like being aggravating, Barbara would sit outdoors and shout at passing cars. She liked to read outdoors, too; in the coldest weather she sat in the yard wrapped in a fur coat. She even read at night, under the floodlights that the landlord, Mr. Kruse, had put up for her. She was spontaneous, boisterous, and sometimes just silly, and the teen-agers loved it. Beyond the prankishness, they may have recognized and identified with an uncertainty in her, an indirection, that they sometimes felt themselves. What the boys may not have recognized was that in themselves this was a fact of adolescence, while in Barbara it was a permanent condition.

Barbara's most ambitious and successful prank involved an imaginary truffle hunt to be held on an estate in Sharon. She wrote a story about it and sent it to the
Lakeville Journal
just before presstime, so they wouldn't have time to check it out. On the day of the supposed hunt, Peter recalled gleefully, “everybody you could think of was climbing Sharon Mountain, looking for that estate.”

“If she'd been rich, you'd call her eccentric,” said Father Paul Halovatch, curate of St. Joseph's in Canaan. “Around here, she was just an oddball.”

Along with the very silly things, Barbara did some very serious things, as a woman adrift is apt to do. For a while, she had a black man living with her. Some teen-agers, peeking in the window one day, saw Barbara and the man naked, and the mother of one of Peter's classmates, who lived down the road, had to warn her son about going to Peter's. “Make yourself scarce,” she told him.

Still, in her own way, Barbara looked out for Peter. In fact, her landlord's wife thought Barbara spoiled the boy. Once she drove out at night in a thick snowstorm to buy him some porkchops, because he'd had frankfurters for dinner the night before and didn't want them again.

And Peter looked out for Barbara. The week before she died he insisted on driving her to Sharon Hospital two days in a row for some tests she needed, because their car was in bad shape and he was afraid for her to drive it alone.

Peter was all Barbara had. Barbara was all Peter had. Perhaps that was why they yelled at one another. “They swore like truck drivers,” a neighbor reminisced. “But they cared.” At Christmastime 1971, Peter gave Barbara an electric portable typewriter that he bought with money he earned from playing guitar in a band. “She wanted a typewriter like I wanted a guitar,” he explained. That spring, she'd given him an expensive amplifier. His birthday card said:
Did You Know I Was Put on This Earth to Bring Joy and Sunshine into Your Life? Love, Mom
.

Peter and Barbara. This is what it was all about. “You had to understand my mother,” Peter would say, but hardly anybody did. “She was an enigma,” said the Falls Village librarian, who saw her often. “She had a very keen mind, a lovely voice and enunciation, and a charming manner. But she looked like the dickens most of the time, and she was none too clean.”

Barbara and Peter. Their last photograph was taken in the spring, a few months before Barbara died. The two of them are standing against the shed, near the house, where the landlord kept tools and barbed wire, and Peter kept parts for his car. Both Barbara and Peter are wearing dungarees and matching sweat shirts with striped sleeves. Barbara is rubbing the little finger and thumb of her left hand together, as she had a habit of doing. Peter is looking toward the house, and Barbara is looking at him. She is smiling.

Peter's friends called Barbara by her first name, or, sometimes, “Barbs.” She didn't like the nickname “Babs”; her mother had called her that. She was born in Berlin on November 20, 1921, the only child of Hilda and Louis Gibbons. Her father was in the import-export business, and his work took him around the world. He and Hilda kept a house in England, and they were living there when Barbara started school at the Lady Bon House School in Manchester. Those were years of grace: a sweet-faced Barbara, with a pageboy cut and shiny bangs, wearing a white dancing dress and dancing shoes. A wide-eyed Barbara, chubby and adorable, playing shuffleboard on the S.S.
Baltic
. Barbara flanked by two Irish setters, Fifi and Wapsi, on the lawn of a house in Anglesey. Barbara on the boardwalk at West Beach in Bournemouth.