Her Father's House (31 page)

Chapter 29

Y
ou really didn't expect to hear anything very different, did you, Mr. Wolfe?” When he raised his eyes Jim saw, past Ethel Rice's shoulders, a room where a younger woman sat at a word processor. A long time ago, back in the 1890s, that room had been a family kitchen and this spacious office had been divided into a dining room and a parlor. The people who had occupied this house had known another world from the present one. The people who would occupy this ground when the house was torn down to make way for an office tower would know yet another world. So his mind roved.

“You really didn't, did you, Mr. Wolfe?”

Mr. Wolfe.
It rang so strangely in his ears.

“I guess—I guess I only hoped,” he said. “After all I've told you—yes, I hoped. Then there were other times when I knew better.”

“Of course you did, you of all people. Twenty years ago I was only starting out, so I didn't mingle with people like you. But I've heard a great deal about you since, and naturally . . .”

The voice, softer now, faded away. The eyes that had been alert and searching turned toward some chirping sparrows on the windowsill. He understood that she did not want to embarrass him by witnessing his pain.

“I thought that after all I've told you just now you might be able to find some mitigating circumstances. I never practiced family law or divorce law.”

“Think. You have no corroboration for anything you've told me, no proof of her morals or lack of them. There are no witnesses to conversations held in bedrooms.”

“The neglect? Being out of the city when the child was so sick?”

“The pediatrician was five minutes away. The child was left with a competent, highly paid nurse. In Lillian Morris's circles, there is nothing so unusual about that.”

Her “circles,” he thought, recalling the drab flat in which she had lived with Cindy.

“Prominent people, active with her in every charity you could think of, have spoken to everybody from journalists, TV reporters, and last but hardly least, to the prosecutor on her behalf.”

He was about to answer when she read his mind. “Your friends in Georgia have known you only since you arrived there with your baby. They know nothing about what happened before you committed the crime.”

“It must seem absurd to you that the word ‘crime' can still startle me,” he confessed. “When I look at my daughter and see what she has become under the care of my wonderful wife and myself, there seems to be no sense in all this. Three divorces, God knows how many lovers during and in between, each marriage a climb up the financial ladder—”

“Not enough. There are no laws forbidding that sort of thing. You have only to look at Hollywood.”

Outside, a fire engine or an ambulance or police car shrieked, rending his eardrums. The cacophony of the city had never disturbed him; he had indeed seldom noticed it. My nerves are failing, he thought, and steeled himself to ask a concluding question.

“So, what is it? Thirty years, or twenty?”

“I shall fight for less. I suppose I don't need to tell you that the best thing we can do is to avoid a trial. We'll plead guilty and go for a plea bargain. Do you agree?”

“You say less. What's less?”

“I'll fight for ten. I'm rather good at fighting, too.”

Ten years. He would be well over sixty. Worn down, never the same afterward.

“I'm in your hands,” he said. And then, rising, he thanked her courteously and went out.

   

Heat lay upon the city's concrete walls and sidewalks; from its source in the sky, it seemed to be returning to the sky where, like a muffling gray blanket, it spread itself.

“She didn't take very long,” Richard said as they met at the door.

“No. Short, and not so sweet.”

“You didn't like her?”

“I liked her very well. She respected me enough not to sugarcoat the facts, with which I am as well acquainted as she is.”

One of Richard's many good qualities was his awareness of mood. Right now it was time to be silent, and so they continued down the long street in silence. Not two blocks distant, quite within view, was the building that housed the offices of Orton and Pratt, where Jim—no, Donald—had occupied a room that looked southward down the avenue. Yesterday, that had been, or else in another century, depending upon the way one happened to feel at any particular moment.

My God! Could I ever, could the people there in that office, could anybody who ever had known me, have believed I would commit a
crime?
I, whose father died for his country? I, a felon, subject to imprisonment for no one could yet predict how long?

No, it could certainly not go to a trial, to a jury filled perhaps with parents of young children. In his mind he had predicted that Ethel Rice would advocate a plea bargain. In that case, all would depend upon the prosecutor's state of mind. Twenty years, or ten . . . Shut away from the world, from life, from Laura and Kate. And from the young man walking beside him, this young man who had become a son to him.

“Let's turn the corner here,” he said.

Yes, turn before we pass the building where Augustus Pratt, or anyone else, might be going in or coming out. Hiding for twenty years out of fear, and now, here where it all began, hiding out of shame!

“We ought to have some lunch, don't you think so, Jim?”

Turn again, and walk past the pocket park where once a man had paused for a few minutes in the shade and there, without knowing it, had met his future. Now, out of rage and hatred, he looked away. “Only if you're hungry. I'm not. And we have to catch the plane home.”

“I checked while you were with Ms. Rice. We've more time than we need, and Gil wants to meet us.”

“I don't want to be seen in the kind of fancy place he'll choose.”

“No, he thought of that. He said I should tell you it's a quiet little place uptown. We'll need a taxi.”

“I'm sorry. I should have known Gil would consider my feelings. He's trying hard to be helpful. I'm cranky, Rick.”

“You're not cranky, you're overwhelmed.”

“I won't deny that.”

In the “quiet little place,” Jim let the young men do the talking. He ordered a sandwich and coffee, but hardly touched either one.

On the wall there hung an amateurish painting of some blue and white Mediterranean village, perhaps Amalfi, as he recalled it. No place could be more unlike the mountains above Foothills Farm, yet its effect upon him was the same. The beauty! The beauty in the world!

People came and went. Two old men, probably retired and partly deaf, held loud, enthusiastic dialogue. A young woman coaxed her little girl to eat her vegetables. Before his eyes, a drama was unfolding, his last drama, with the curtain about to descend.

After a while, he became aware that Richard and Gil were talking about the World Series. Out of consideration for him, they had neither questioned him nor discussed the day's events. Gil, no doubt, would be in touch with Ethel Rice before the afternoon was over. Then it occurred to Jim that he had not even thanked Gil. But it was hard to talk; it would be easier to express his thanks with pen on paper, so he would do that tonight.

When Richard excused himself to telephone home with the time of their flight, Gil made a brief mention of what was on all their minds.

“I wanted you to know one thing: I shall always be there for Laura. You have my word.”

“I know,” Jim said, and looked toward Amalfi to hide the tears in his eyes.

   

The airport, too, was a drama. “International Arrivals and International Departures,” he read. There they went, the honeymooners with new luggage and new clothes for the journey. There they rushed, the gray-haired and the young in their dark suits with their attaché cases in hand, bound for London, Moscow, and any other place you might think of. Well, he had done it all too, had loved it and given it away for something more important.

The plane made a wide curve, crossing the Hudson, rising over the flat clusters of suburbia through which he had once hurried with Laura and her stuffed bear, and over the clouds. Beside him Richard was reading the newspaper. In an odd way, as if he were a child being led by a strong adult, he thought, I'm glad he offered to come with me today. I am not at my best.

Suddenly Richard spoke. “Jim, I've been wanting to tell you something. No matter what Laura does, whether she goes back to medical school or not, whatever she does or wherever you may be, I want you to know I will watch over her.”

“I know that, Rick. I never had any doubt.”

   

Sometimes Jim had a feeling of haste, an awareness of speeding days with so much yet to be done before “things” should happen.

Because Foothills Farm had been pledged to provide his bail, money was short for the first time in many years. Rick, who had spent his time in the field, had had very little business experience at a desk. Kate's realm was the greenhouse. Who, then, is to take my place, he asked himself, when finally “things” do happen? There was a great deal of teaching to be done before they would all be prepared to take over his responsibilities.

Sometimes, on the other hand, he had a feeling that time was crawling. It seemed as though months had passed since the meeting with Ethel Rice, yet when he looked at a stand of pin oaks turning russet, as they do in the fall, he reasoned that the worst had already happened and was behind him.

Then, then always, there was Laura. He worried; he lay awake with his worry. She must, she clearly must return to medical school. But her blue eyes were darkly ringed, and her silences were too long. He argued, tried logical reasoning, did everything short of commanding, and failed. Dr. Scofield alone had been able to pierce the fog of her depression. Pleading the need for some help in his office, he had asked her to take a job there, if only temporarily.

“Because at least you can spell,” he had said, trying to be jovial. No doubt she had seen through his kindly ruse, but had nevertheless accepted the offer as a way to get out of the dreary house.

God bless Scofield, and all the other people who had been so thoughtful with their visits, their small friendly gifts of flowers or pies, and most of all, their tact. Yet his own moods ebbed and flowed. Could it be possible, he asked himself, that if the delay were long enough, he might somehow be overlooked, lost in the mass of papers that collect in a city of eight, or is it nine, million? And a moment later he knew how terrified he must be to have had an absurd, crazy thought like that one.

But then again, there were other thoughts. These came at night when his book was put down—the book in which he tried to flee from reality—and the light was turned off in the room where he slept with Kate. What of their last night? For surely it would come, that last night when they would lie down together and part in the morning. Kate and he, before the long, dark, separated years would begin.

And still, they were all trying to live normally now. She invited him to “come look at the Dutch bulbs that have just arrived.” The greenhouse reminded her of an Edwardian conservatory, where ferns hung out of baskets fastened on the ceiling, and the chair in the tiny office was made of white wicker. Look here, she would say, there aren't too many nurseries in this country where you'll find forget-me-nots, or Turk's-cap lilies. And these blue echinops—if you didn't know, would you ever guess they were simple thistles?

Then he would tell her that she need not put forth such an effort in his presence, because he knew she was just as frightened as he was.

“Oh, it's not fair!” she would cry. “You don't deserve it, as good as you are to everybody. It's not fair. It's rotten. There's no sense in it.”

“Kate, oh Kate, I broke the law and I have to pay for it. It's as simple as that.”

Once, filled with anger, she fought him. “Stop talking like a saint.”

“I'm hardly a saint. I only know that you can't have a country, a civilization, any other way. This is just what it's all about.”

And in spite of all, he meant it; at least until despair returned and struck him down again, he meant it.

   

Laura's notes were short, only a fraction of a page. On most days, she wrote nothing.

Why record and repeat? I already know that she was—is—a frivolous woman, which really means very little. I have no proof of that except for what Rick tells me, and that has to be second- or thirdhand information. And why, if it is true, why should I care? I don't. But that she is vengeful, that I do care. What benefit to her will it be when my father is locked away?

We are all too busy. There is a feverish energy here at mealtimes, with everybody talking at once about crops, planting, hiring, buying, and selling. No one wants to ask outright how this huge place is going to be run when Jim Fuller is no longer here, yet everyone is thinking about it.

Last week Rick told me that very possibly the farm would be sold; the family would disperse and this little family would move who knows where? Then I think he was sorry he had told me that. They don't want to alarm me because they want me to go back to medical school.

Yes, I loved every minute of it there, but not anymore. Can a person concentrate on personal pleasures when there is death in the house?

Ethel Rice telephoned Dad this morning, the day before Thanksgiving. He is to appear before the district attorney in New York next week. Richard says that she told Dad not to get his hopes too high, especially because this man is a new D.A., inclined toward the tough side, and eager as they all are to make a name for himself.

“Not that it isn't the job of a prosecutor to be tough, anyway,” Rick said.

Dad will not allow any one of us to fly to New York with him. I think that is his way of saying that he must learn to live without us.

Chapter 30

G
illigan was his name. A large man with ruddy cheeks, a brusque voice and eyes like X rays, he's about the age, Jim estimated, that I was when I became a partner at Orton and Pratt. Ambitious and competent, he's preparing to rise in the hierarchy, and he will. So there wasn't much hope here, not that there had ever been much to start with.

It was a dark afternoon with electric lights blazing at three o'clock, an hour when people are tired and impatient to finish their day. Jim was chilled, though his palms were sweating.

“So you are positive you want to enter a guilty plea?” asked Gilligan.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Given your past in the profession, I assume there's no need to describe the procedure: that you will appear in court and plead guilty, which will eliminate any trial. You cannot withdraw the plea once the judge accepts it. You will then await the court's decision as to your punishment.”

“Sir, I fully understand.”

I fully understand, too, how much of the court's decision depends upon your prosecution of the case. . . .

Suddenly Gilligan, leaning forward, shot the question as if it were a bullet: “Why did you do it, Mr. Wolfe?”

The small gray eyes were curious. Well, naturally they would be; this was, after all, a most unusual case, even for a prosecutor who must have seen and heard just about everything.

“Sir—she, the mother, had a different way of life. She lived in a different world, and I did not want my child to grow up in it.”

“A different world? Ms. Morris is known for her labors on behalf of charity both here and abroad. She's prominently named in connection with refugee and war relief, among other good causes. She is a woman highly respected. There are no marks against her. So I have tried, but do not quite understand what you mean.”

“Much can be hidden, Mr. Gilligan.”

Ethel Rice, who was judiciously allowing Jim to make his own defense, now objected. “My client is also widely respected, as is evidenced by the reports you have of his activities over the last twenty years in Georgia, not to mention the years before here in New York.”

“But you are omitting the reason that he is here in this room, Ms. Rice. What do you say to that, Mr. Wolfe?”

The repetitious drilling had begun to exhaust Jim. Now all he could do was to make a helpless gesture.

“To all appearances, yours is a classic case, in which an angry divorced husband takes revenge on his former wife by stealing their child. Ms. Morris claims that the wife here is the one who suggested the divorce because you were not getting along with each other. In short, as I see it, she rejected you and your pride was

wounded.”

What sense does that make? Jim wondered. If I were so proud a man, would I have damaged myself as I did when I fled with the baby and threw my whole life away?

“Excuse me, sir. It is true that she is the one who suggested that we end the marriage, but excessive pride is not among my faults.”

Benumbed and sodden in her disheveled clothes, with her wet hair tumbled and her mouth half open, she lay on the sofa.

“She asked for nothing from you, no alimony, nothing but her freedom. She even returned to you the valuable ring you had given her. Is that or is that not correct?”

“It is correct.”

“A mark of unusual character, I would say. She still asks for no damages, other than a rather large contribution to one of her charities. But she asks for nothing to compensate for her pain and suffering, which must have been indescribable, Mr. Wolfe.”

“I very much regretted her pain and suffering. I never wanted to hurt her.”

“Yet you did.”

In his authority, he sits here
judging
me, or I should say
prosecuting
. Of course. He's the prosecutor.

“I know you're trying not to delve too deeply into the very personal, Jim, but you're hurting yourself,” said Ethel Rice.

My lawyer is annoyed with me. Still, she has the consideration to address me as
Jim,
rather than
Donald,
a name I have begun to despise.

Gilligan's quick glance passed from Ethel Rice to Jim. “What do you mean by ‘delving deeply,' Ms. Rice?”

Jim answered for her. “She means that I am thinking solely of my daughter.”

“The daughter you took to Georgia?”

“The only one I have. I want to protect her. There are things about her mother—that she need never know.”

His heart raced, and his head pounded so, he had to come to a stop. If he could have made an escape from this room, this room of a kind once so familiar, with the diplomas on the wall and the flag in the corner, this room that was turning into a torture chamber, he would have done so.

Gilligan coughed, and moving his chair closer, formed a circle of three. Filling a glass from a water pitcher, he handed it to Jim, and with surprising gentleness, spoke to him.

“You surely know very well that anything said here goes no farther, Mr. Wolfe.”

“Yes, sir, but still . . . Sometimes accidentally . . . I don't want to hurt her any more than I have to. She's been studying medicine, she's had enough of a shock and will have more if I—when I—receive my punishment.”

“Please go on, Mr. Wolfe. Tell me why, in the first place, you allowed her mother to have sole custody.”

“I didn't think, didn't care. The baby wasn't even born when we divorced. I said I would provide for it, and I have done so. There's a considerable sum in the bank in Laura—in Bettina's name. At that point, though, I didn't really want a baby, although I wouldn't let her abort it, as she wanted to do.”

“When did you decide that you really wanted the baby enough to take her away?”

“I didn't decide to take her away until much, much later. I've told about that.”

It was so hard to speak; it was like pulling his heart out of his chest so people might watch it beat. “I loved her when she was four months old. She knew me. She smiled at me.” And Jim paused as if reflecting. “It's funny, whenever I had any vague thought about having a child, I always pictured a boy.”

“Can you tell me what is the main, immediate reason you put her in the car and drove off with her that Sunday? Why that day?”

“Of course it was the accident and all the carelessness. But it was other things from long before that I had been trying to forget. Then suddenly I couldn't forget anymore.”

“Whom did you sleep with last night, Lillian?”

“I wouldn't even recognize him if I should ever see him again.”

Abruptly, a torrent of passionate words came rushing out of Jim's mouth. It startled the decorum of the room, and astonished the listeners.

“She wanted what she called ‘fun.' She called me a puritan, a bore. Oh yes! There was a party once with beds on the lawn under the trees. You picked your partner. I knew she would have gone with someone if I had let her, or hadn't caught her on the way. I began to think that perhaps we had made a mistake in our marriage. But I didn't want to think it because I had loved her so.

“When I purposely made her pregnant, we went to Italy. I wanted to make a new commitment. She loved art, she knew so much about it, and I thought it would be wonderful together. Then she met some friends there, and I learned things that she had never told me. She had had lovers there, married men; she had become pregnant and had had an abortion. That was when I saw that I had never known her. We did not know each other. She had lied, lied to me from the start.”

The rain was wild and angry that morning along the river, on the old covered bridge, and on the other side where I walked. . . .

“The baby she didn't want?” asked Gilligan. “That's Laura?”

“Yes. That's Laura.”

Behind Ethel Rice was a desk with the usual photograph on it, this one of twins, a boy and a girl about two years old. Perhaps it was unconsciously that Gilligan had turned half around in his chair to face it. There was a long silence before he looked back at Jim.

“And so it all came to an end?”

“Yes. Especially when I asked her with whom she had slept the night before, after I had refused to join a party.”

“And she answered?”

“That she wouldn't even recognize the man if she should meet him again.”

“You see,” said Ethel Rice, “why Jim doesn't want Laura to know all that. And you also can see how hard it is to prove any of it.”

Hard to prove? Impossible, Jim thought. Lillian had everything on her side. It was he who had committed the crime. Her slate was clean.

Ah, let it all go. Submit. Accept. You've lost your will to fight.

There was a long silence before Gilligan spoke again. “Pull up your chairs to the desk,” he said. “I will lay out some papers for you to read, some unusual mail that came to me this week. I wanted to compare them with what your client had to say, Ms. Rice, before showing them to you. Here, look.”

There was a longer silence while Ethel Rice read what seemed to be two or three letters. God only knew what Lillian had come up with.

“Astonishing,” said Ethel Rice, pushing them in front of Jim.

“Are you acquainted with Arthur Storm, Mr. Wolfe?”

“The man from whom Lillian was recently divorced? No, I am not.”

“Have you ever seen him? Met him? Spoken to him?”

“My answer is no to all three.”

“Then you will be surprised to read this.”

On thick, monogrammed paper, there was a page of strong, black script. Storm lost no time before getting to his point. Because he and Donald Wolfe had each been married to Lillian Morris, he had been especially interested in following this unusual case. Knowing what he did about what he would call her “propensities,” he well understood why any man who cared about his child would want to move her into a different environment. He also understood that, since he himself had left his first wife, he was hardly an example to be admired; yet never had he expected to witness the things he had seen as the husband of Lillian Morris. Moved by the threat of imprisonment hanging over Donald Wolfe's head, he now took it upon himself, purely out of sympathy, to speak on the poor man's behalf.

There was a postscript. His first wife was taking him back.

“Extraordinary,” murmured Ethel Rice, while the lump in Jim's throat kept him silent.

The second letter, scrawled on office stationery and covering three pages, came from Howard Buzley. It was filled with indignant outrage. For nine years, he had been loyal to his bedridden first wife, loyal, that is, in that he had come home to her every night, acting on the theory that what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her. She had died in comfort and peace. When he married Lillian, he had given her the same loyalty, but she didn't know the meaning of the word. She was a cheat, a beautiful cheat who took everything as a good-natured joke. How he had loved that baby of hers! He loved kids anyway; why, he already had two grandchildren! But she—she only liked to show the kid off. Ask anybody; they would tell you how good he was to Tina, and she wasn't even his kid! A good thing the father took her away, poor man. Of course it's a crime, but from what he sees of Tina on TV, he knows the girl is far better off. He, Howard Buzley, knows what it is to bring up good children, and he wants to put in his two cents on behalf of Donald Wolfe, a man he doesn't even know. Donald Wolfe. He's hardly spoken two words to him, except perhaps a couple of times on the telephone.

Again, no one spoke until Gilligan turned to Jim and asked him to take off his jacket. “It's hot for November. We don't have to be so formal here, anyway. Go on, take it off. And read this.”

On lined paper such as one uses for laundry or marketing lists, Jim read the signature first. It was Maria's, and could only be that of the one Maria he had ever known.

“The baby's nurse,” he said. “She's learned to write English! We used to speak Spanish together.”

“‘Dear Mr. D.A.,' ” he read aloud. “‘My boss where I take care of baby give me your address, so I write you about Mr. Wolfe. I work for Cookie Wolfe long time. I read, I see on TV my baby Cookie Wolfe. I see father take her away. Mrs. Buzley wants put him in jail. Is terrible thing. He love that child. I can tell Cookie is big now on TV. She love father. I know right away that Sunday. I can guess and glad because mother no good for her. No good. Everybody know, cook know, doorman know, she have too many boyfriends. Only Mr. Buzley, he don't know so soon, but when he find out, he leave. Same minute. He kiss baby, very sad. Don't think I tell things about Mrs. Buzley because she bad to me and I angry at her. Not so. She always very nice to me, talk nice and give me presents. So I not angry at her. She not
bad
person that way. Only like too many boyfriends and that bad for child. Wrong. Wicked. And Mr. Wolfe, he must not go to jail. Thank you. Your friend, Maria Gonzalez.' ”

It was too much. Unashamed of his tears yet not wanting to display them, Jim got up and walked to the window, where he stood looking out at the coming dusk.

Gilligan coughed again. When he is moved, Jim thought, he covers up with a cough. Ethel Rice rustled papers and made conversation.

“Imagine! All the way from California. And after twenty years. Or more than that, isn't it? Extraordinary.”

The little room, which had for a few minutes become almost a gathering of friends in somebody's house, became again the office of the prosecutor, with flag, framed documents, and voices passing in the outer corridor. Then a chair leg scraped the floor. Jim turned, and knew that the interview was over.

“I don't know what all this can mean, if anything,” Jim said, “but I thank you for your kindness, Mr. Gilligan.”

On the sidewalk he stood for a minute with Ethel Rice before they walked off in opposite directions.

“Naturally, D.A.s get letters,” she said. “I've had letters, too, in support of defendants, but I personally have never seen anything quite like these.”