Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (21 page)

Her smile hung like a frayed string. “Just be sure you do like Morty says, Dad,” she warned me, “and don't bring elitist stuff like that up when you take the stand.”

“It's elitist to read Nathanael West?” I asked with a light chuckle. “Christ what a low culture we have now.”

“Which is what I work for, is that what you're saying?”

“I wasn't aware of saying anything of the kind.”

“Sleeplesseye, I mean,” Alexandria said. “Low culture.”

“Those are your words, not mine.”

“No, they're your words actually.”

“Perhaps, but—”

“It's okay, Dad,” she interrupted sharply. “I know I'm not a tenured professor. And, you know, I'd like to find myself, okay? I'd like to discover something I really want to do, but I haven't, Dad. I haven't. I'm adrift, okay? Can we agree on that?”

“Alexandria . . .”

She waved her hand like a blade, cutting off the subject. “Really, Dad,” she said, her voice now quite soft. “It's okay.” She passed her fingers over the surface of the table in the way I'd once seen Sandrine pass hers over the small indentions of our copper sink, a gentle, tender probing. “So let's drop it, okay?”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said, after which there was another silence, this one longer.

During that silence I found myself returning to the final day of Sandrine's life, the interval between our last heated battle and when Alexandria had returned to have her last conversation with her mother. Before, I'd avoided any discussion of what they'd talked about, but now, following some curious impulse, I wanted to know.

“That evening when you were with your mother—that last ­evening—the one the day she died, did she talk about us?”

“Us . . . meaning?”

“Your mother and me.”

“Not specifically,” Alexandria answered. “But she talked about marriage.”

“What did she say?”

“She said it was like a boxing match,” Alexandria answered. “Between round one and round ten, you swing at each other a lot. But you both have this hope that at some point the bell will ring, and there'll be peace, and the struggle will have been worth it. And so you stay in the ring because you want to make it to that round-ten bell.”

It was as discomfiting a view of marriage as I'd ever heard, and it was hard for me to imagine that Sandrine had thought of ours in such unhappy terms, and yet, like all the evidence in my case, it offered a certain undeniable if circumstantial proof that she had thought of our life together in just that bleak and cheerless way.

“I'm sorry if any of that bothers you, Dad,” Alexandria said when she caught the downcast expression on my face. “But you asked.”

“Yes, I did ask,” I replied softly.

There was another silence after that, this one longer than the previous two, and during which I could feel Alexandria's eyes upon me like two hot beams.

“Do you think you would have made it, you and Mom?” she asked. “To round ten, I mean, if Mom hadn't died?”

I thought of how Sandrine had often tossed and turned in bed, how she had sometimes risen in the middle of the night, tiptoed to the scriptorium to read, her gaze darkly quizzical when she glanced up to find me at her door. Once, I'd asked her what she was thinking about, expecting her to speak about the book she was reading. But she'd said only, “Our school,” by which she'd no doubt meant the dream she had voiced while we were still in New York but hardly even mentioned after we'd taken our jobs at Coburn. When I'd only shrugged at this answer, she'd quietly returned to her book, though later that night she seemed particularly restless, moving about the house, reading awhile, then listening to music, then reading again.

Since her death I've found myself plagued by a similar restlessness because the question of what Sandrine sought in the middle of the night will not let me go. I think of our first days, our tour of the ancient world, those few spectacular weeks in Paris, playing the expatriate game, then our settling down here in dear old Coburn, and through all those memories Sandrine remains the same. Then, rather suddenly, she wasn't the same at all.

“Your mother changed after she got sick,” I said to Alexandria.

“In what way?”

“She became more distant.”

“Distant?” Alexandria asked. “Really? She didn't seem that way to me at all. Frankly, you're the one who seemed more distant.”

“I did?”

“Well, what would you call it?” Alexandria asked. “You hardly ever came out to the gazebo to sit with Mom. You avoided the room where she went to read.”

“The scriptorium.”

Alexandria shook her head. “She hated that name for it, by the way,” she informed me. “She said you gave it that name when you first moved here because you thought you were both going to write great books there.”

“That's true, I did,” I admitted.

“But Mom didn't want to write a book, Dad,” Alexandria said. “That was your idea, not hers.”

This was also true, as I now freely admitted. Sandrine had never intended to write a great book, or any book at all, for that matter. I'd tried to blame her failure to do so at the feet of her unaccountable devotion to Coburn College, those interminable private sessions with its mediocre students, more often teaching them the rudiments of literacy than anything more august. It was a lowly, remedial form of education I'd once ridiculed as “the lofty heights of subject-verb agreement,” to which my firm and passionate wife had fired back, “I will be what they need me to be, Sam, not what you need me to be.”

And what they'd needed her to be was a teacher, not an author, as Sandrine had fully understood.

“You're probably right, Alexandria,” I said quietly. “Your mother was never ambitious in that way.”

Alexandria shrugged. “Anyway, wherever Mom was, in whatever room, you didn't go there.”

“That's true,” I admitted. “But there was a reason for it. Your mother had gotten more difficult, more hard to read, and there was this heat coming from her.”

I stopped, reluctant to go further, then felt the sharp point of a dread Morty had mentioned earlier, the fact that Alexandria might know about that last argument, which was reason enough for me now to be proactive.

“So it really didn't surprise me that last night when she just went crazy,” I said.

Alexandria's gaze suddenly grew more intense and I could see something pent-up and explosive gathering in her mind. “Don't try to put the blame on Mom.” She looked at me quite sternly. “Don't try to paint Mom as the mad woman in the attic, Dad, because she wasn't.”

“I didn't say she was the—”

“Just so you know, Dad,” she interrupted, her voice very firm, “if you and Morty come up with some way of blaming Mom, you can both go fuck yourselves.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I'm not trying to—”

“Haven't you done enough to her,” Alexandria said sharply. “Haven't you done enough to hurt her?” Her lips trembled. “She's dead, okay? Isn't that enough?”

“Enough for what?” I asked.

“Enough to leave her in peace!” Alexandria said quite loudly, then, to my immense astonishment, she leaped up like a geyser of steam. “Mom was dying, but she wanted to live!” she cried. “She wanted to live, and then, suddenly . . . suddenly . . . she was gone.” She shook her head. “It doesn't make sense,” she added vehemently, though now laboring quite forcefully to control herself. “It has never made any sense.”

So there it was, I thought starkly. My daughter, were she a member of the jury in my case, would incontestably vote to convict me.

I looked at her helplessly. “I don't know what to say,” I told her. “I don't know what to say to you.”

Alexandria drew in a trembling breath. “That last day, when I left, Mom put her arms around me, and she said, ‘I love you . . . Ali.
'
”

“Ali?” I repeated. “She never called you Ali.”

“I know,” Alexandria said. “But she said she had always thought I was more of an ‘Ali and that to her I would always be Ali.” She smiled softly. “I guess it was her way of getting closer to me at the end.”

Her way of getting closer to me
.

I suddenly envisioned this scene, Sandrine gazing softly at Alexandria as she called her Ali, and at that moment I heard a mental
click,
a sharp, stand-your-hair-on-end snap that turned my case on its head and brought its disparate elements into a radically new focus.

Sandrine's way of getting closer to Alexandria?

What if it had been nothing of the kind, I thought. What if that entire scene, so tender and loving, had not been designed to bring Sandrine closer to Alexandria at all.

What if, I thought grimly as the darkest conjecture I'd ever had began to take shape in my mind, what if Sandrine's speaking so sweetly to “Ali” had been her way not of getting closer to her daughter on that last evening of her life but, instead, had been her fiendishly clever way of separating Alexandria from me?

Now it was Morty's voice I heard: You have no constitutional protection against your daughter, Sam.

“My God,” I whispered. “What if . . .”

Alexandria peered at me as if I were a microbe under a glass. “What?”

I couldn't tell her any part of the terrifying scenario that was at that very moment unfolding in my mind, unfolding step by step, thread by thread, so that I felt like a man in the process of seeing through and reconstructing a brilliant magician's single most brilliant trick, every angle by which the audience was distracted, every false wall and trap door, all the blue smoke and mirrors.

I thought of the deadly coil of circumstantial evidence that now entangled me, no one piece of Singleton's case enough to convict me but how, when one connected to another, together they created a lethally persuasive argument for my guilt.

Alexandria stared at me. “What are you thinking, Dad?”

My latest surmise settled over me like a winter frost. My God, I asked myself, could it be true? I thought about asking Alexandria directly if Sandrine had told her about the terrible argument we'd had on that last evening, the cup whose shattered parts had still been strewn across our bedroom floor, and which, yes, Alexandria might have seen. And what if she had seen them and asked Sandrine about them, and what if Sandrine had then told her everything about that night, ended this no doubt masterfully constructed tale with the final word she'd shouted to my retreating back: sociopath.

To open up that subject now struck me as dangerous to my case. If Alexandria had seen those incriminating fragments she'd never mentioned it. Nor, before now, had she mentioned anything about her final conversation with Sandrine. And so, given the fact that Alexandria had so far revealed nothing having to do with her last hour with her mother, I decided it was best for me to allow those lips to remain sealed. After all, what I didn't know hadn't hurt me yet.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

In the chill of the following silence I considered all the pieces that had come together in such a way as to first engender and then steadily build a case against me: the “suicide note” that had been no such thing, a back injury of which Dr. Mortimer's autopsy had found no evidence, my subsequent call to Dr. Ortins, the way I'd always been the one who'd picked up and signed for the Demerol because Sandrine had always had a class or a meeting or some other activity that had prevented her from going to Wayland's, the coup de grâce of antihistamines in her blood, the incriminating research she'd done on my computer, claiming hers was on the blink, though a subsequent investigation had found it to be in perfect working order.

Was it possible, I asked myself, in grave wonder that such a question could ever have occurred to me at all, was it possible that fiber by clever fiber Sandrine had fashioned the hangman's noose that now dangled above my head?

With that arctic question, I found myself coldly in awe of an intrigue whose elaborations had finally formed so subtle and oddly beautiful a design, elegant in the way mathematicians use the word, a beauty “cold and austere,” as Bertrand Russell once called it, a phrase often quoted by the brilliant wife I now found myself imagining as a master puppeteer, one who'd never shown her hand, each element arranged to be discovered at a slant, nothing too obvious, no bloody knife or smoking revolver, these stage props replaced by a couple of paragraphs on Cleopatra that she'd described to me as her “final word,” and which I, in turn, had described as a “suicide note” when it had been nothing of the kind. After that everything—even my pedantry, that ludicrous mention of Poe's story—had fallen inexorably into place. How classically Greek, I thought, to set a trap by which a man's own flawed character would destroy him.

For a moment I thought of all the witnesses who'd testified against me in a trial that, until now, I'd thought the exclusive handiwork of Mr. Singleton, the product of his personal zeal for justice. But was it not possible that he, too, had been brilliantly manipulated, his suspicions aroused by one carefully planted piece of evidence, then subtly deepened by another and another and another, all the while believing himself at the helm of my trial when in fact, and from the beginning, he'd merely been the chief puppet in what was not now, nor ever had been, anything but Sandrine's case?