Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (30 page)

D
AY
E
IGHT

Call Jane Forbes

She had shoulder-length hair and was dressed quite elegantly in a navy blue pantsuit, low heels, and a long necklace of azure glass beads. She walked to the witness box rather like a soldier on parade, determined, unafraid, a woman warrior. Something in her demeanor suggested that if she were suddenly discovered after having been marooned for twenty years on a deserted island she would still know exactly who she was.

Yes, I thought, however painfully and uneasily the idea came to me, it would be easy for Sandrine to talk to such a person.

“Jane Wiley Forbes,” she said when asked to give her name.

For the next few minutes, Mr. Singleton took his witness through the usual biographical material. She was forty-seven years old, born in Newton, Massachusetts, educated at Sarah Lawrence, with a PhD in political science. She had taught at a few places before coming to Coburn, all of them modest affairs, a junior college in Boston, a girls' school in Atlanta. At Coburn she'd mostly taught freshmen and sophomores. Despite the modesty of these assignments, there was something formidable about Jane Forbes, something that made me both trust and dread whatever it was she'd come here to reveal.

“Now, Dr. Forbes,” Mr. Singleton said. “How long have you known Sandrine Madison?”

“I met her nine years ago,” Jane answered. “They have these little teas when you first come to Coburn College. Sandrine came over and introduced herself.”

It had been a long time since I'd heard anyone call Sandrine by her first name. For Morty she was “your wife.” For Mr. Singleton she was “Mrs. Madison.” For Jenna she was “my sister.” For Alexandria she was “Mom.” But for Jane Forbes she had been “Sandrine,” and hearing that name on her lips, spoken so softly and with a hint of loss, hit me with a strange poignancy that made me lean forward slightly, a gesture one of the juror's caught, which froze me in place. For what might this juror read in my suddenly becoming so obviously engaged? This was a question for which I had no answer but in response to which I eased myself back again and, like a good actor, prepared a face to meet the faces of the jury.

“Dr. Forbes,” Mr. Singleton said, “did you have occasion to have several conversations with Mrs. Madison during the weeks prior to her death?”

She had, and she further explained.

“I had not really known Sandrine all that well, but last April, toward the end of the month, we happened to be on the reservoir together. Sandrine seemed very tired. She had always been such a presence at faculty meetings, so animated and energetic, it was unusual to find her looking so exhausted.”

“Did you happen to mention Mrs. Madison's appearance to her?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“No, but she mentioned it,” Jane said. “She said she was depleted. That was her word. Depleted. Then she told me about her illness. This was only a few minutes into our conversation. She was debating when she would tell her students. She didn't want them to pity her, and she wanted to keep teaching as long as she could. She had talked this over with Malcolm Esterman, she said, and now she wanted my opinion too.”

And so Sandrine had discussed this most troubling of decisions with two people, not one of whom had been me.

“Did Mrs. Madison mention her husband at all during this time?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“If by ‘this time,' you mean that conversation, then no, she didn't mention her husband,” Jane answered.

“How about during subsequent conversations?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“During subsequent conversations, she did mention him, yes.”

“Can you tell us the nature of those communications?”

They had been quite ordinary, it seemed to me, as Jane continued her testimony. During the trots around the reservoir and their sessions on the bench beside it, Sandrine had spoken of our early days together, the trip we'd taken, how much she'd loved traveling and how little we'd done of it since then. She'd described our first meeting as “interesting,” though she hadn't actually found me very attractive. I was too tall and too skinny, she'd said. But later she noticed not that I was always reading but the way I read, which she described as “heartfelt,” a word I found sentimental, almost schmaltzy, but which had probably been true at the time.

“She said that once she'd found him reading in a small cubicle in the library,” Jane went on, “and that when he'd looked up from the book, he'd seemed so sad, so absolutely sorrowful, that she'd actually caught her breath.”

She paused a moment, a dramatic pause that alerted me to the fact that something was coming, and which propelled me forward in my chair with so gentle and unassuming a force that I lost my actor's pose.

“She said it was an expression that left him after a few years,” Jane added. “And that after a while she never saw it again.”

“But she looked for it, didn't she?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“She said she did, yes,” Jane answered.

“And on one particular occasion, she had expected to see it, hadn't she?”

“Yes, she had.”

“His sorrow, I mean, that sorrowful look,” Mr. Singleton said by way of emphasis.

“His sorrow, yes.”

“And did Mrs. Madison tell you what that occasion was, the one when she'd genuinely expected to see this expression of sorrow on her husband's face?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes, she did.”

“And what was that occasion, Dr. Forbes?”

“When she told him she was dying,” the witness answered. “She said that she had delayed telling him about her condition because she was actually afraid she would not see that sadness on his face. But finally she'd told him, and her fear had been justified.”

I couldn't help it. No matter how much I wanted to prevent myself from reacting in any way to such a devastating answer, I couldn't help it, and so I closed my eyes and slumped backward as if pushed by an invisible hand.

After that, it was only voices coming to me from what seemed a great emptiness.

“And during these conversations, did Mrs. Madison talk about her life in general?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes, she did. She mentioned a paper she'd done when she was a student at the Sorbonne. It was about the case of a woman named Blanche Monnier. She said that this woman had been imprisoned for many years by her family. She'd evidently been found locked in the attic. She'd been more or less starved, Sandrine said, and she'd lived in terrible filth. Also, the shutters had been closed and nailed shut, so this woman had lived in near total darkness. And yet when Blanche Monnier was released by the authorities she'd described this attic as her ‘lovely little grotto.'”

“Her ‘lovely little grotto'?” Mr. Singleton repeated.

“That was the quote Sandrine told me, yes.”

“And did Mrs. Madison add anything to this story?”

“She said that in a way it was her story.”

“Her story?”

“She said that for a long time she had lived in a ‘lovely little grotto' that was, in fact, a cold dark place. She said she thought a lot of women lived in such places. She said it was the place where a woman inevitably lived when the core reason why she had once loved a man was no longer there.”

“The core reason?” Mr. Singleton asked. “Did she say what the core reason she'd loved her husband was?”

“Yes,” the witness answered. “His kindness. He had lost his kindness. His goodness. His capacity to feel sympathy. She said that he was no longer able to be tender.”

My eyes remained closed but now my eyelids felt pulled down and held in place by heavy weights, eyes I could not open.

Fixed in that darkness, I thought of how I'd received Sandrine's diagnosis with little show of emotion, though I'd later made all the sweet, sympathetic motions required to demonstrate my care, not one of which had been genuine. Had she seen through all my unfeeling gestures and seen only the bloodless show they were?

“She said she knew that he had lost all these things because of something she'd seen a week or so before her diagnosis,” the witness added.

Jane's voice now took on a somberness that I could hear quite clearly from the depths of my black chamber. I could also hear that she was laboring to control the tenor of her voice, as if she knew the story she was about to tell would challenge that control, loosen the strings of her own heart, break the very voice she was struggling to keep whole.

“She'd been at the home of a woman she knew, a woman who'd had breast cancer the year before and who'd just had a mammogram and was waiting for the results. Her husband came home while Sandrine was there. He'd picked up the mail, and so he had the results of her mammogram with him. He opened it and they read it together, the man and his wife. Neither of them said anything as they read, Sandrine told me, but very suddenly the man's eyes filled with tears, and he drew his wife under his arm and said, ‘No cancer, no cancer.'”

“And what did Mrs. Madison make of this experience?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“That this was love,” Jane Forbes answered, “that this was truly love. That when the man had heard that his wife was fine, he'd wept with joy and relief and what she called—I remember the phrase—‘heartfelt thanksgiving.'”

I opened my eyes because I thought that with this it was surely over. But I was wrong.

“She added something to this,” Jane Forbes continued. “She said that she could face the fact that her husband could no longer feel what she called ‘the tenderness of things.' Many women did, after all, face that fact. The problem, Sandrine told me, was that she could find no way to bring him back to himself. She had wanted to do that more than anything, but she was running out of time.”

“All right, and when was the last time you spoke with Mrs. Madison?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“About a week before she died,” Jane answered.

“Did she speak about her condition at that time?”

“No. She talked about her daughter, how much she loved her daughter.”

“Did she mention Mr. Madison?”

“No, she did not.”

“Did she mention anything about suicide?”

“No. We talked for about an hour, then Sandrine said she had something to finish, a little note on Cleopatra.”

“A little note?”

“Yes.”

“But not a note that had anything to do with suicide?”

“No, it was just a thought she'd had about Cleopatra,” Jane answered. “She had written the first part of it, about a page, she said. But there was a final paragraph she wanted to write. I fully expected to see her again, probably the very next day, but she never came back to the reservoir, and, of course, a week later I found out about her death.”

“So this afternoon by the reservoir, this was the last time you saw Mrs. Madison?”

“Yes.”

“But this talk about Cleopatra, this was not the last communication you had with her, was it.”

“Not exactly, no.”

But Sandrine had died a week later, and they'd never seen each other after that final meeting at the reservoir. How could that not have been their last communication?

“A couple of days after her death I got a letter from Sandrine,” Jane Forbes said. “She'd mailed it the afternoon before her death.”

Mr. Singleton then went to his table, retrieved a piece of paper, and handed it to Jane Forbes.

“Is this the letter you received?” he asked her.

“Yes, it is.”

“Can you describe the contents of this letter?”

“It seems to be the final paragraph of her thought about Cleopatra,” Jane answered. “I didn't think it had any relevance to this case, but when I heard Detective Alabrandi read the note Sandrine had left beside her bed as her final thought, I knew that it wasn't, and so I contacted you.”

Mr. Singleton nodded toward the note. “Would you read it for us, please?”

And so she did.

Caesar was a worldling who must have enjoyed many a cynical laugh at the benighted mortals who made up the lower orders of the world. But surely it is possible that in the last days of her life Cleopatra came to understand the outcome of such vanity, that its poison numbs the heart. If this is true, then as the asp sank its fangs into her flesh, she must have feared that Caesar would continue in this folly, that without her desperate intervention, he would die as lost to tenderness as the cruelist who ever died, and that to have saved him from so drear a fate should have been the goal and triumph of her love, his redemption her final, parting gift.

Others might hear this and hear only Sandrine's thoughts on Cleopatra, I told myself, as Jane Forbes returned the letter to Mr. Singleton, then waited for Morty's cross-examination, but I could read between its heartbreaking lines, understand its devastating message, and feel the sacrificial heart that had delivered it.

Oh, my dear Sandrine, I thought, as Morty rose to question this unexpected witness at my trial. My God, what I have lost.

My Dinner with Morty

My Dinner with Andre
had been one of Sandrine's favorite movies, I remembered as I drove toward Pappy's Steak and Brew, where I was to have my dinner with Morty. She'd loved the way the tables had turned in the middle of the conversation, with short, stocky, and wholly unimposing Wallace Shawn suddenly making an eloquent case for the life he'd chosen, a life that during the course of their conversation had unexpectedly emerged as quietly richer and more meaningful than that of the far more worldly Andre's.

I was still thinking of Sandrine's affection for this odd little film, one whose action I'd found predictable and whose message I'd found rather trite, when I sat down across from Morty, then glanced about the place, taking in the longhorns mounted over the bar, the plain wooden tables with their red-checked cloths.