A Private Sorcery (3 page)

I deliver it straight. “Saul's been arrested.”

Marc exhales loudly. “What the fuck …”

I imagine the dark circle of perspiration in the middle of his University of Pennsylvania T-shirt, his bulging legs, the muscles still engorged
from his run, his thick neck, the black hair trellised from belly button to collarbone.

“Hold on.” I hear water running, gulping sounds as he drinks. The glass bangs on the table. “What happened?”

“It's not clear. Rena says he'd been using drugs, prescription drugs he began taking after that boy lost his legs. He'd started seeing someone for help, but I guess it didn't stick.”

“Yeah, but why was he arrested?”

“A burglary of the pharmacy at the hospital where he works. It sounds like he's being linked with that.”

“Great. Breaking and entering. Conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. Revocation of his license.”

“He needs a lawyer. A criminal lawyer, obviously. Do you know anyone here in New York?”

In the background, I can hear Susan's little screeches. “Look, I have to talk to Susan. I'll call you back. Where are you?”

“With Rena. At their apartment.”

“Give me the number.”

Your brother doesn't know your phone number—a place you've lived for eight years.

I carry the mugs and platter into the kitchen, scattering dank tea leaves over the counter as I try to empty the mesh balls. I turn on the kettle, stand at the living room window waiting for the water to boil. The block association has put metal cages up around the trees. Bags of garbage lean against the sides.

Two women in ski jackets climb the steps and the doorbell rings. The shower is still running in the back. I go to the intercom and ask who's there.

“Ruth, Maggie. Rena and Saul's friends.”

I buzz them in. You introduced me to them shortly after you and Rena started living together: Ruth, who you said had been a classmate of Rena's at Yale and then later told me only became her friend after they'd bumped into one another in Riverside Park; Maggie, whom you called Ruth's lover.

I open the door and Ruth gives me a peck on the cheek. She's wearing a wool cap that makes her face look small and cramped, and she stomps her work boots on the mat before coming in. Maggie towers a good half-foot over Ruth. She pats my arm and runs her fingers through her cropped blond hair. She unwraps a scarf from her neck and untangles her dangling earrings. Although they're both in jeans and turtlenecks, on Ruth the effect is of a squat woman who has opted out whereas on Maggie the clothes suggest an urban chic.

“How are you holding up?” Ruth asks.

“Rena called us at eight,” Maggie says. “We wanted to give you some time alone with her before coming over.”

The phone rings and Rena picks up on the extension in back. Maggie heads into the kitchen as the kettle starts to whistle. Ruth plops onto the couch.

“Thanks for the letter,” I say. “It was very thought-provoking. I should have written you then to say so.”

I think back to when I last saw Ruth. July. At your birthday party. Piecing things together with what Rena has told me, this must have been after you'd gone to see that doctor, during the interlude when you were doing okay. You donned a chef's apron and positioned yourself in the garden next to the charcoal grill Rena had bought you for your birthday, flipping chicken pieces and these marinated slices of something Maggie, who'd made them, told me was ground soy. Although I'd known Ruth was a historian, we'd never discussed our work at any length. I'd felt too insecure about my historical skills, afraid that my first two books would strike her as amateurish, riding on an unused medical degree, my methods slipshod.

Perhaps I was buoyed by your looking better, perhaps it was just the desperation I've felt this past year about the Carmelita project, but that night I threw caution to the wind. I settled into the folding chair next to Ruth, probed her about her work on nineteenth-century women living outside of marriage, the choices she'd made in focusing on the history of three prototypical women, her narrative strategies. Then, for the first time, I tried to explain what I've been struggling with in the
Carmelita story, the multiple frames through which I've been examining Carmelita's life.

A week later, Ruth's letter arrived—two single-spaced pages of additional thoughts she'd had about my project. She knew, she wrote, that I was interested in comparing the religious, psychiatric and economic interpretations of the Carmelita story, but had I considered the sexual politics of the situation? Assuming that Carmelita's pregnancy resulted from intercourse, what were the conditions of this copulation? Was it rape or passionate mutual consent? Perhaps it was a monetary transaction. A paragraph followed on how she'd learned about the centrality of understanding the sex industry in the lives of disenfranchised women from her research on Lydia Johnston, a Presbyterian minister's daughter who until the age of thirty-three had been her widowed father's housekeeper only to find herself destitute on his death, after which she'd become a prostitute and alcoholic around the shipyards of Richmond. Reading her letter, my head spun. I felt keenly aware of how unaccustomed I was to this level of intellectual vigor.

Ruth waves a hand as though to brush away my pesky apology. She reaches for the plate of quartered muffins Maggie has set on the coffee table. Rena comes in from the back. Her hair is wet, combed off her face, and she's wearing a loose white shirt that makes her appear even more pale and sylphish. She squints, steadies herself on the doorjamb.

Maggie moves toward Rena. Rena leans into her. Ruth opens out her arms to Rena, who sinks into the sofa beside her, head touching raised knees. She's still barefoot. Awkwardly, I watch as Ruth massages Rena's shoulder blades.

After a minute, Rena sits up. “That was Marc.” Beneath the even words, I can hear the disdain, faint like the whispering of children who've been bid good night. “He discussed it with Susan, and they've agreed that it would be colluding with Saul to help find him an attorney. Marc said that Susan pointed out what a codependent family we are and how this would be a continuation of that.”

Ruth snorts. “Can you believe the bullshit level of discourse?” Maggie glares at Ruth as if to remind her that you don't comment on other people's relations.

I feel mortified, oddly more mortified by your brother's behavior than by yours. It's so mean-spirited, and Ruth's comment has highlighted for me what I can only call the deep insult for Marc to use this commercial pop-psychological analysis given that he knows how seriously we've both struggled with understanding human behavior. I remember our debate years ago, back when you were in college, about the ethics of hostility: Is hostility unconsciously expressed better or worse than hostility consciously expressed? (You were insistent that we include
expressed
, not wanting to imply that it is the hostility itself that is ethically negative. “That would make us Catholics,” you said, “where thought and deed are judged as one.”) I took the position that hostility unconsciously expressed is less evil because the perpetrator is himself innocent of the act—suggesting that he, too, finds the act abhorrent. You took the position that hostility unconsciously expressed is, in fact, worse since the perpetrator is guilty both of the aggressive act and of not taking responsibility for what he has done. I was so proud of you, barely twenty, of the elegance of your argument, and for a moment I indulge in the reminiscence—until the image of fingers curled around iron bars presses against my escape.

Ruth stands. It's nearly eleven, still dim inside, the scant light blocked by the brownstones across the street. “I'm calling Ann.”

Maggie shoots Ruth a quizzical look. “This is kind of far afield for Ann, isn't it?” She turns to me to explain. “Ruth's sister does—what the hell is it she does?”

“Corporate litigation. But she'll know someone. Their clients, those Fortune 500 VPs, have kids who get in hot water and need bailing out.”

2
Rena

Rena and Leonard take the subway to meet Michael Morton. Rena doesn't know or care what he owes Ruth's sister, only that he's agreed to meet them even though it's a Sunday. They get off at Chambers Street and walk east into a biting wind. She bows her head, cutting the wind with her forehead, relieved that the effort excuses her silence. City Hall looms like a gigantic wedding cake set down on a construction site. They pick their way over ramps and head north through Foley Square, Rena navigating the way she's always done with Saul, whom, absorbed in the pursuit of some line of thought, she's often thought she could lead right off the edge of a bluff.

Everything is closed, the row of kiosks that during the week sell hot dogs and souvlaki and falafel covered with rolled tin fronts. She reads the signs: Criminal Courts, Municipal Building, U.S. Courthouse, New York County Courthouse, Family Court, Customs Courthouse. Her hair blows up from her neck. She quickens her pace, too numb and cold to slow down when Leonard falls a step or two behind. They turn left on Worth Street and look for the number Morton gave her. It's a twenties office building with bubble-letter graffiti sprayed on the red brick:
FUCK YOU JUAN
. She tries the door but it's locked.

“He said he'd be here by one-fifteen.” She looks at her watch, not yet one, takes shelter in the doorway. Saul, naked and handcuffed, sticks stubbornly in her mind.

Leonard marches in place. Across the street, there's a typewriter repair store and a sign,
STENOGRAPHERS-CLERKS-TYPISTS: HOUR, DAY, WEEK
. The setting, a stark contrast from the mahogany-and-marble offices of her clients, is making her nervous; it seems more like the location for a pawnshop, somewhere she and her mother might have gone, than a lawyer's office.

“A lawyer's lawyer,” Ruth's sister had said about Morton. “A former U.S. assistant attorney, street-smart and sharp as a tack. Don't be put off by the shabby office, that's just part of his demeanor—doing what's practical, which for him is to be close to the courts. The courthouse locals call him Monk, for monkey, because he has this big forehead and long, thick arms. They tell this story about when he first came to the U.S. attorney's office and how he was riding the B train late one night and some guy approached him from the rear with a knife, to mug him, and how he spun around and slammed the guy into the platform. The detectives like to tell it that the mugger was left brain-dead, but what happened was a broken pelvic bone. The Monk is also a kind of joke because all he does is work and spend Saturdays going up to Yonkers to see his kid and pine over his ex-wife, who left him because all he did was work.”

At one-twenty, a man rounds the corner. He's not wearing an overcoat and he's running, his arms swinging loosely and the sides of his sport coat blown back so he looks half airborne. Reaching them, he dances around like a child who needs to pee. “Goddamn freezing,” he says, the comment addressed more to the street than to them. He extends a hand to Rena. “Mrs. Dubinsky?”

“Rena Peretti. This is Saul's father, Leonard Dubinsky.”

Morton fumbles in his pockets for keys. They follow him through a tiled lobby to the freight elevator on the right. He blows on his hands and wiggles his fingers. On the fifth floor, he leads them down a dim corridor. He unlocks a door, flips a light switch, then turns toward them, offering a hand first to Rena and then to Leonard as if the greeting downstairs had not occurred.

“Sorry I'm late. I wanted to see the client, and there were some things that had to be taken care of.”

It's the first time he's looked straight at her and she's startled by his eyes: a brilliant pale blue that unnerves her, suggesting, it seems, either utter sincerity or madness. They pass through a waiting area with a secretary's cubicle and then into his office. She'd expected a room with dirty windows and overflowing trash cans, but it's clean and orderly with large windows facing east. The Brooklyn Bridge looms so close and clear, it appears unreal. The opposite wall is covered with photographs: Morton with judges, Morton with a group of men in baseball uniforms, Morton with the Pope. On top of the desk, there's a picture of a little boy, three or four, grinning beside a fishing pole with a silver bucket by his feet.

Morton sits behind the desk and they sit in two chairs across from him. He takes a legal pad from a bottom drawer, pushes back his chair and swings his feet up onto the desk. “Okay, you tell me first what you know. Then I'll tell you what I learned today and we'll talk about where to go from here.”

It takes Rena about ten minutes to tell Morton basically the same story she told Leonard. Morton takes copious notes, interjecting with questions of the
when precisely was that
and
how do you spell that
variety. When she gets to the arrest, he asks a lot of questions about what the police did and where they looked.

“Anything else? Anything at all?”

She catches Morton's glance at Leonard, and it occurs to her that he's thinking maybe she doesn't want to talk in front of Saul's father, an idea that hadn't crossed her mind before but is, she realizes now, partly the case.

“There's something I thought of on the subway here.” She pauses, reluctant to open this door. “There's someone I know, Reed—actually, he's a lawyer, too—from a long time ago. We were roommates in San Francisco. He used to have a drug problem, before I met him, when he was a kid, really. Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, that sort of hippie experimental stuff. We lost touch for quite a while. Then Saul and I bumped into him. We were at the Whitney Museum and we ran into him in the stairwell. We went for lunch, the three of us, got together
a couple more times after that. Saul and Reed started doing things, just the two of them, and I remember feeling pleased because there aren't too many people Saul finds as interesting as a book.”