Life Sentences (16 page)

He called about ten the next morning, ostensibly to ask if she remembered the name of the wine he had selected and whether she thought Wegman's might carry the goat cheese. But Cassandra understood that the call, the timing of it, was to remind her that concern was a parent's prerogative, not a child's. She was not his caretaker. Yet.

THE BARRS LIVED IN A BLOCK
very much like Cassandra's own back in Boerum Hill. In fact, the old town houses here—they were too stately to be called rowhouses—were even nicer and the neighborhood had more green, or would, when the trees budded later this spring. Her parents had lived in an apartment here briefly, in the first year of their marriage. “Across the street from F. Scott Fitzgerald,” her father had always said, and it was years before Cassandra realized that Fitzgerald was not an actual neighbor but a literary ghost that her father liked having nearby.

She wondered at the Barrs' choice of the neighborhood, the house, if it were a statement of sorts. Donna's parents had lived not even a mile
from Cassandra's childhood home, but it had seemed like a different world, a modern-for-the-era split-level backing up to the wooded hills on the other side of the Gwynns Falls. Everything in the Howards' house was new and shiny. She may have jumbled two parties in her memory, as Tisha claimed, but she definitely retained vivid impressions of the sixth-grade “graduation” party held there. And, yes, they had called it a graduation party. Lately, there was earnest hand-wringing over the excessive celebration of minor milestones, which amused Cassandra. Not only had her sixth-grade class staged a graduation, she had marched in a cap and gown when she finished kindergarten. There was nothing new about this.

But the party at the Howard house had eclipsed the school celebration. She remembered the dress she wore, a very short—really, too short—patterned dress, a Christmas gift. Cassandra had grown two inches in five months, reaching what would turn out to be her adult height of five-four, and the hemline was barely decent. The boys teased her about it. Teased her about her dress and her hair, which she hadn't washed in three days in anticipation of the party because her hair was more manageable when it was dirty. Instead, she had sprayed some bizarre aerosol product on it—Psssssst. God knows what was in that concoction of pressurized chemicals. She would have done just as well shaking talcum powder over her head. There was a little powder visible on her dress and the boys had claimed she had dandruff, brushing at her shoulders in imitation of a popular commercial. She had wanted to think the boys teased her because they liked her. But even then, she didn't have much capacity for self-delusion. The boys in her class, black and white alike, didn't see her as a girly-girl, while they clearly thought Donna and Tisha deserved that kind of attention. She could swear little Candy Barr had been there, doing his dance, but maybe that had been at Tisha's birthday party two months earlier.

And Callie? Would Callie have been there? Having stumbled on this forgotten girl in her own pages, Cassandra kept wracking her mem
ory, hoping to discover Callie lurking in some other overlooked corner. It was a big party, everyone must have been invited. But that didn't mean everyone was there.

“Cassandra,” Donna said, opening the door to her. She had aged well, almost as well as Tisha. Donna's delicate prettiness was more susceptible to the years; it was the “interesting” girls who improved. But her voice was the same, sweet and low, forcing one to lean in close to catch each word.

“You look the same,” Cassandra said.

“You don't,” she said, inspecting the outfit revealed as Cassandra shrugged out of her trench coat. “Are those slacks Armani?”

Cassandra nodded, pleased. The pants had gone a long way toward meeting Teena's quota, as had the cashmere turtleneck that Teena had picked out, in a mossy green color that Cassandra never would have chosen. But she was also pleased that Donna recognized the designer. She felt as if they were on some new plane, more equal than they had been in school. Back then, she had stroked the blond wood case of the Howard color television cabinet, wondering at the glory of such a thing. Now she and Donna lived in similar houses, wore similar clothes.

“The hair, though,” Donna said. “I think I might have known you from the back, just from the hair.”

The hair.
With those two words, Donna effortlessly reestablished the old order. Cassandra might have been her peer now, financially, but Donna wasn't ready to offer her equal stature across the board.

She decided to make a joke of it. “Sixth grade was hard, but I don't think I had turned gray yet.”

“No, that's true,” Donna said, leading her into the formal living room, which tended heavily toward chintz—good taste, if a little safe. Not Cassandra's taste. “Your face has grown into that mane. Sometimes it was hard to see you under all that hair.”

I was hiding,
Cassandra wanted to say.
I needed that curtain of hair to make it through the day, sometimes, after my father left.
She had worn it so
far forward that it almost covered her face, and the boys called her Cousin It.

“Well, it's quite a transformation,” Donna said. “I feel so boring next to you. Staying in Baltimore, marrying a boy I've known all my life. When Reg told me about running into you, I couldn't help being intrigued by your new project. A book about us and where we ended up. No one will want to read my chapters, though! What did Tolstoy say? All happy families are alike?”

“I always thought,” Cassandra said, consciously taking on her old role, the provocateur, the contrarian, “that was utter bullshit. Happiness doesn't come in one flavor any more than ice cream does.”

Donna rewarded her with a laugh, her old shy, difficult-to-coax laugh, a key weapon in Donna's arsenal. “You're right. There's a world of difference between chocolate and vanilla, but if vanilla makes you happy, so be it.”

Was Donna implying Cassandra was vanilla? But, no, Donna was not one to stab and poke that way. Cassandra was the one who had used language to bully, tease, assert.

“It occurs to me just now,” she said, lying smoothly, her father's daughter, “that you may be one of the most important figures in what I'm doing, the one person connected to everyone.”

Donna frowned prettily. Donna had always been able to do even ugly things prettily.

“Oh no,” she said. “Tisha was the personality around which we all revolved.”

“Yes, back in school.” She may have imagined it, but Cassandra would swear that Donna looked disappointed at her ready agreement, had hoped for more of an argument. “But you married Reg, who worked for your father, and he worked on Callie's defense. I can't help wondering—did you ask your father's firm to take on Callie? Or was it a coincidence?”

“I suppose the
coincidence
was that my father was simply one of the
most successful lawyers in the city.” Donna's manner was a little stiff. Was it really that wounding to be reminded that Tisha had been the spark plug of their group? “It was my understanding that the ACLU brought him into the case. I was…away, when it started. I was in Knoxville for much of the eighties. There was a—I was—I was married, before. And not one of those starter marriages. It lasted seven years and the ending was…quite bitter.”

“Hey, I had two of those,” Cassandra said, and this admission seemed to relax Donna.

“It's awful, isn't it? Divorce. I'd never go through it again.”

That pussy hound Reg Barr.
Teena Murphy had tossed that off almost parenthetically, as if everyone knew and no one cared. It was of more interest to Cassandra than she wanted to admit. She knew the compromises involved in being married to a man who would not stop sleeping with other women, no matter how discreetly. But she couldn't imagine Donna putting up with it. Perhaps Teena was referring to pre-marriage Reg.

“Was it strange,” Cassandra said, “dating a man—marrying a man—that you could remember as a little boy?”

“It was. In fact, I felt a little embarrassed at first, as if two years were some horrible gap. Plus, he was working for my father. But he pursued me, was determined to have me, and I have to say, I was flattered. Reg was quite the ladies' man, he had his pick of women. I could never see why he settled on dull old me.”

Cassandra knew she was expected to contradict this premise as well—protest that Donna was never dull, merely quiet, a personality in her own right. Instead, she found herself saying, “Well, you were the boss's daughter and he did end up making partner.”

Her tone was light, but apparently not light enough.

“He made partner
before
we were engaged. And it grieved him so, the gossip about how it was because of me. Reg earned that partnership, earned the right to take over when my father retired. You know, it's only
nepotism when you can't back it up. Reg could have gone out on his own, been a star wherever he worked. It was in my father's best interest—in the firm's best interest—to keep him in the fold.”

“Did he ever speak of Callie to you, when he was representing her?”

“Of course not. Attorney-client privilege.”

“Did he ask you about her, try to glean information about her as a child? After all, you and Tisha had known her, a little. If I were her lawyer, I'd have been keen to talk to her childhood friends.”

“That's not law, that's psychology,” Donna said. “Of use in a pre-sentencing, but it had no relevance to Callie's case. Besides, if you think about it—what did we really know about Callie? No one ever went to her house, only Fatima knew her people. And she was so quiet. Never volunteered in class and when the teachers made her participate, she looked as if she were on the verge of passing out. Do you remember Callie ever saying anything?”

“I remember her singing. And laughing. But, no, she wasn't a big talker.”

“Except to Fatima. She whispered, sometimes, to Fatima, and then Fatima took Callie's comments for hers. Half the funny things that Fatima said? Callie whispered them or wrote them in the margins of her notebook.”

Notebooks. Cassandra had a Proustian moment, remembering those notebooks. There were not many variations, then—or perhaps her mother had simply not allowed variations. Everyone had a denim cloth–covered binder with loose-leaf paper. Neatness counted, and neatness was not Cassandra's strong suit. Donna, though—Donna's notebooks had been exquisite year-round. She never used those sticky little reinforcements to mend the broken holes, because her holes never broke. She never doodled on the outside, although she covertly filled her pages with drawings. And when they had to make covers for the school-issued textbooks, hers were folded and fitted with the precision of origami, while Cassandra's managed the trick of being simultaneously lumpy and shredded.

“Yes, she and Fatima did have a special bond. But Fatima doesn't want to talk to me.”

“Really? Well, she's reinvented herself, you know how that goes.” Was Donna suggesting that Cassandra had engineered a similar reinvention or only that she understood how such things were done? “She doesn't speak to me, either, and she wouldn't even have that Spelman degree she's so proud of if it weren't for my uncle Julius. He wrote her recommendation. Fatima didn't begin to have the grades.”

“That was nice of him.”

“She volunteered in his office, the summer after we graduated. Remember how special we thought we were, because we were the class of '76?”

“It wasn't such a big deal at the Gordon School,” Cassandra said. Could Donna really have forgotten that she did not graduate with her? Had she not read Cassandra's book? “We thought of ourselves as hippies, and it was uncool to be patriotic.”

Donna shook her head. “I don't know, Cassandra. I don't see how these little things add up to a book. We knew a girl. She was accused of a horrible crime—which she almost certainly committed, even if she never confessed. So what?”

“I admit I don't know where I'm going with this. But given all the connections, how can I not talk to you and the others who knew her?”

“And Reg. You want to talk to Reg.” It sounded like a challenge.

“Tisha said he wouldn't talk to me.”

“Tisha forgets that she's not the boss of Reg anymore. I am.” Donna allowed herself a wink, but Cassandra realized she was deadly earnest.

“What about the first lawyer on the case, who also worked for your father? Can you get her to talk to me?”

“Oh, Gloria.” Donna made a face. “She's drunk half the time, anyway. And, you know, she left the firm, went out on her own, abandoned Callie. Reg was the one who saw it through to the end.”

“So he's the one I have to talk to.”

“If you feel you must,” Donna said on a sigh. “I'll ask him to make
time for you, as a favor to me. But all it's going to do is establish that this is a dead end. It's such a…small, sad story. Do people really want to read these things?”

“In my experience? Yes.”

Donna smiled. “
In your experience
—that's a funny phrase if you think about it. What else does anyone have? What else do we know but what we've experienced?”

Her voice was benign, musing, and the questions were perfectly fair. But Cassandra couldn't help feeling she had been put in her place somehow. She asked about the painting over the mantel—a Horace Pippin, not that Cassandra knew who he was, but the piece's quality was undeniable—and the rest of their visit passed easily, filled with reminiscences that matched up, more or less. Unlike Tisha, Donna had no quarrels with what Cassandra had written and was unabashed in her admiration for the rewards she had reaped. It was, in fact, quite pleasant.

 

EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER, CASSANDRA WAS
in bed with Donna's husband, more surprised than anyone. She was definitely more surprised than Reg, who, from the moment she opened her door to him, treated the meeting as a ruse for them to be alone. In fact, he was so sure of his interpretation that he was puzzled by her hesitance, treated it as a coy act, and, as he broke her down, she began to believe it might have been. By the time she reassembled the timeline in her head, reminded herself that her interest in Calliope had started long before she had encountered Reg—he was inside her and she was beyond caring.