American Appetites (37 page)

“You know, Ian, don't you, that I had no choice but to tell them about my conversation with Glynnis, that final conversation, and I had no choice but to try to answer their questions as honestly as I could; I couldn't perjure myself even in the interests of friendship, even though I am so . . . even though I love you, Denis and I both love you, as a friend, our oldest closest dearest friend—”

Her voice broke, and Ian said quickly, “Of course I know,” smiling hard at her, his hands involuntarily lifted as if in appeal. “Of course. Of course I know.”

Roberta spoke of the ordeal of appearing before the grand jury; of the questions put to her, which were insidious, snide, unfair, and unjust; of the fact that, as Ian perhaps knew, she had tried, like all his friends, to represent him as he truly was: Glynnis and him, their marriage, their family life, their significance in the community. She had tried, and she believed she had succeeded, to the degree to which the prosecution had allowed her to speak her heart. Of course, at the trial, she would be cross-examined by his attorney, and it would then become clear to the courtroom, if any ambiguity remained, that she was not a hostile witness but a friendly witness, a “character” witness in fact. She would tell all the world what a good man he was: decent kindly generous gentle
good
.

And Ian listened and nodded, his face very warm and his eyes smarting; yes he knew yes he understood yes of course of course but is there no hope of you loving me apart from your husband's “love” of me? Is there no hope? No hope?

Then the timer on the oven rang, and Ian volunteered to take out the tray of pastries, but, foolishly and so very typically, he nearly forgot to use potholders; and Roberta gave a little scream and stopped him, ending, as Glynnis had so often ended, doing the little task herself.

Ian said, “Those smell delicious,” and Roberta said, “There's crabmeat, minced mushroom, sausage, would you like one?—no, wait, they're too hot,” taking them from the baking tray and setting them on a platter.

Ian watched and said again, “They do smell delicious; you're a wonderful cook,” and Roberta glanced up at him as if he were teasing and said, “Of course I didn't make these myself, I bought them; I'm not a purist like Glynnis was.”

Ian waited a bit and said, as he'd said some minutes before, that if Roberta had been avoiding him this weekend he understood; didn't blame her in the slightest; she knew, he thought, he
hoped
, how he felt about her, and—but here she interrupted to say that she seriously doubted that
he
knew: he was under a terrible strain, Glynnis's death and the other, the rest of it; he really didn't know what his feelings were and couldn't be expected to know. He said, smiling, his lips so dry they felt as if they were about to crack, that the high regard he had for her, the love he had for her, was as genuine as any in his life, in his entire life, but he quite understood if being told this simply embarrassed her. “There is nothing worse than being loved when one can't love in return,” he said, wondering if this were true, and why
he
was volunteering it, since he'd had so little experience along those lines. Had Glynnis simply told him? Was all he knew of love, to the degree he knew of love, nothing more than what Glynnis had told him?

Roberta said, “I don't think we should talk about this now, Ian; this isn't the ideal time to talk about it.”

Ian said, “I only want you to understand that, having said what I've said, I
do
love you, I don't want you to think that I expect any sort of reciprocity, any response on your part at all, even a . . . even a calm and considered refutation.” He smiled, and his eyes filled now frankly with tears; and Roberta looked away, as if too deeply, keenly, moved; and he said, hoping she would not interrupt, but hear him out, “I dread your thinking this is some sort of emotional blackmail. Please don't think it! My feeling for you is as disinterested as it can be, though I—I will admit—I will admit I think about you a good deal,” he said, beginning now to tremble, and speaking rapidly, daring to take Roberta's hand in his, then both her hands, in his, trapped in his, as if to hold her still; to make her listen. She did not resist, nor did she return the pressure of his fingers. How like ordinary hands our hands are, Ian thought; how ordinary it all is, after all; while somewhere up the beach a dog was barking in a series of high piercing yips, and the volleyball players were throwing themselves about—Ian could see them through the screened window, had been keeping Denis in sight all along—and the rich warm delicious smell of the pastries lifted from the platter.

After a moment Roberta drew her hands out of his but did not step away. She said, “May I ask you something frankly, Ian?”

“Yes? What?”

“About Sigrid Hunt.”

Ian hesitated. “If you must.”

“Well, no then,” Roberta said evenly. “It isn't that I
must
.”

She picked up the platter, to take outside to her guests. Would Ian like to sample one of the pastries? she asked, and Ian, his glasses misted over, standing very still, frowning, said politely, “No thank you, I'm not hungry,” and Roberta said, “Of course you are, you were swimming this afternoon, weren't you?” and Ian obediently picked up one of the pastries and bit into it, scarcely knowing what he did or what he chewed except, yes, it
was
delicious.

He said, smiling, “You are all too good to us.”

SO THE LABOR
Day weekend passed. Like sand slipping through his fingers.

He left early the following day, before lunch, though it was a clear cloudless lovely day at last, and the ocean had never looked more beautiful: slate blue waves, white-capped like mountains, and the fishy salty smell edged with an autumnal coolness. Denis urged him to stay another day, and Roberta urged him, with a look almost pleading, to stay at least for lunch, but Ian thanked them for their hospitality, shaking Denis's hand hard and embracing Roberta in their quick polite ceremonial manner: feeling her initial stiffness, then her pliancy, the warmth of her lips brushing his cheek. He drove away, waving out the window of his car. The Grinnells stood waving after him, side by side; then their hands dropped and they continued to look after him, he saw in the rearview mirror, until he had passed out of view, and they were lost to one another.

6.

That fall, Ian began volunteer work at the Short North Rehabilitation Center in Newburgh, a twenty-minute drive from Hazelton. He taught in the adult illiteracy program, Monday and Thursday evenings; his course was advertised as Remedial English for Native-born Americans.

At the Short North, so far as he could make out, no one knew him; his name meant nothing; the color of his skin marked him off not only from his students—three black women, middle-aged, and one youngish black man, on parole from Sing Sing for attempted robbery and felonious assault—but from the majority of his fellow volunteers. People looked at him, sometimes stared thoughtfully at him, but he knew himself invisible.

Had it occurred to anyone to ask what had brought Ian to the program, he intended to tell the truth: he really didn't know. He had happened to read about it on a communal bulletin board in the Hazelton public library; it had sounded like a good, helpful, charitable thing, a way of filling in the hours, biding his time. In prison, he thought, if he went to prison, he would sign up for similar programs, teaching inmates to read, even to write.

No one asked. But he had his answer prepared, in any case.

BY THE END
of October the trial had been postponed another time: to January 11.

Ian, who had been marking off the days on his calendar, thought, It will never end. It will never even begin.

There was a rumor too that Sigrid Hunt had returned to the area. She was to be a witness for the prosecution; a witness for the defense. Nicholas Ottinger, who had, in secret, hired a private investigator to find her, told Ian that the rumors were unfounded, unfortunately. “It's quite possible the woman is no longer living,” he said carefully, as if the word
dead
might be too strong for Ian's nerves. “But the body probably won't be found either,” he added.

Ian winced inwardly but made no reply. Why was Ottinger looking at him so closely? What was he supposed to say? That
he
had not killed Sigrid Hunt and did not know who had?

1.

S
o frequently, and with such hallucinatory vividness, had Ian McCullough anticipated his trial, had in fact dreamt of it for months, that, on the first day, a snow-muffled morning in late February—for Ottinger had cannily succeeded in getting it postponed another time—many of its proceedings had the air, to him, of an imperfectly recalled dream: alternately monotonous and jarring, predictable and disconcerting. He had been prepared for the opening of the prosecution's case, but he had not been prepared for the disjointed nature of the session itself: its several delays and false starts, its many interruptions—most of them, in fact, by his own counsel, for Nicholas Ottinger was quick as a pit bull to the attack, rising to his feet to object, to raise points of law, procedure, and propriety. He had been prepared for a crowded courtroom but he had not been prepared for so much seemingly uncoordinated activity in the area of the bench, nor for the initially appealing but finally rather disappointing candor and lack of pretension of Justice Benedict Harmon, who seemed intelligent enough for the authority of his position, but only enough. (“Benedict Harmon is the best of second-best,” Ottinger had told Ian, “which, in the larger context, is after all quite good.”) He had been prepared for the substance of the prosecution's case against him but he had hardly been prepared for Samuel S. Lederer's theatrical, repetitious, and heavily ironic performance: that air, beneath the public servant's zealous vigilance against all things evil, of something mean-spirited and mendacious. Above all he was not prepared for his growing, and numbing, conviction that, though “Ian J. McCullough” was the still point of all procedural motion, and his formally rendered plea of “not guilty” to the charge of murder in the second degree its mainspring, he himself, in the flesh, sitting beside his counsel at the defense table, was irrelevant. I am being tried
in absentia
, he thought.

In the first row, behind him, sat Bianca; beside her, Glynnis's sister, Katherine. (Who had very little to say to Ian McCullough, these days.) Scattered throughout the courtroom were familiar faces: friends, acquaintances, colleagues whom Ian's eye nervously sought even as it recoiled from them in shame. (One of the faces, the mouth very red and the pale skin smooth as porcelain, belonged to Meika Cassity.) Most of the men and women who had crowded into the courtroom on the second floor of this rather churchly courthouse were strangers to Ian McCullough and certainly had not known Glynnis. Who were they, Ian wondered, and why, on this freezing icy morning, had they made the effort to come to this place, to crowd into pews, to observe
him:
to be spectators at
his
trial? What did they, seeing him,
see?

The setting, and the crowdedness, reminded Ian of Glynnis's funeral service at the First Unitarian Church. Where the casket bearing his wife's body had been, Ian himself was now seated; where that spare yet eloquent ceremony had dealt with death, and with life's accommodation of death, this ceremony, protracted, graceless, subject to constant interruptions and derailments and that air, ingrained in the grime of the hardwood floor and the shiny scrim of dirt on the windowpanes, of the defiantly anachronistic, was to deal with punishment. For justice in its ideality can only be measured in terms of punishment, Ian thought. Without punishment there can be no justice.

The Cattaraugus County courthouse in the county seat of Cattaraugus, New York, an easy half-hour from Hazelton along a scenic country highway, had been built in the heyday of Greek Revival fashion: chunky granite columns, with a flurry at their tops of Corinthian excess; numberless granite steps; a stately portico; and, inside, a stately foyer, opening onto yet more stairs of the same smooth-worn stone, rising to the second floor, curved and splendid as a staircase in a mansion. To enter its poorly lit and poorly ventilated interior was to enter a place of, paradoxically, solemnity and cacophony: for the acoustics were terrible, and voices, even when raised, even when rebounding from wall to wall, were difficult to hear. Decades out of date, badly in need of renovation, if not actual demolition—in the right frame of mind, Ian was inspired to note such grandiloquent architectural monstrosities with an architect's unsentimental eye—the building did exact from those who entered it a measure of frightened awe. And the high-ceilinged and many-windowed courtroom with its marble pillars, its oak pews and wainscoting, the judge's raised bench, the heraldic insignia of American justice and the faded, limp, yet still imperial American flag at its front, did suggest a significance scarcely to be named: though those who entered it were dwarfs, those who inhabited it, at its highest echelons at least, were giants. A self-referential little American world, staffed by females, ordained by males.

Entering the building in the company of his daughter and, of course, Nick Ottinger and one of Ottinger's young assistants, Ian had felt, despite his resolve to feel nothing, a stab of physical pain and apprehension, a despairing sense that, however his fate might be decided in this place, it would not really relate to him: would fail to define, to him, the nature of his crime, his guilt, and even his punishment.

THE NIGHT BEFORE
, at the Cassitys', Meika had said, as if impulsively, laying a hand on Ian's arm and squeezing with surprisingly strong fingers, “What we should all do, you know, is reject
them;
reject their damned au
thor
ity; fly away, the three of us, to someplace nice, like Majorca or Rio. Have you ever been to Rio? Yes? It's lovely, isn't it? If you stick to the right quarters.”