Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (33 page)

Once there, I opened it, expecting to see the usual stack of bills and junk mail, which was exactly what I found. It was the ordinary correspondence of an ordinary life, but among them was a catalog for the French chocolates Sandrine had called “original sin,” and which had been her one gift to herself each month. They'd come in a beautiful red box, tied with a black ribbon, and with each month's delivery Sandrine's face became a sunburst of delight.

I'd canceled the order not long after her death and so no small red boxes had arrived after that. But with this lovely, elegant catalog they had made a final appearance, one last reminder of Sandrine.

Until then, my most vivid memory had been of our last dreadful encounter, the night she'd thrown that cup at me and in one furious statement after another delivered her smoldering
j'accuse.

But now that moment seemed far way, like an ember cooling in the distance, which, in its dying, allowed room for a sweeter recollection than any I'd had since that wrenching night. It was only a few years after our arrival in Coburn. I'd come home to find Sandrine on the back porch, working with one of her students, as she often did, and so I walked into the kitchen where I found a book wrapped in a red ribbon, with a card attached, inscribed simply,
For you from me
. The book was a volume of Yeats's poetry, the favored poet of my youth, whose single-volume collection I'd taken with me on that fabled trip around the Mediterranean and which had grown tattered over the years and at last simply fallen apart. Sandrine had located the exact edition, and here it was, tied with red ribbon, and offered for no particular occasion, since it wasn't my birthday or our anniversary or any date of similar note. When I opened the card, I found Sandrine's message.

With hope that you can be aroused again.

(No double entendre intended.)

Suddenly, on the wave of that memory, I felt a laugh that was half a sob break from me.

(
No double entendre intended.
)

That little parenthetical wink of humor was pure Sandrine, and because of it I'd have known that the note came from her even if she hadn't signed it in that tiny script of hers.

(
No double entendre intended
.)

In the throes of that memory I suddenly felt a terrible wave of longing for Sandrine. Never in my life had I missed her more than now, as I stood, quaking, at the mailbox. Never had I mourned her more or, in the profound weakness of that moment, needed her more.

I might have collapsed, assumed a fetal position in the shadow of the mailbox and bawled like a baby or wailed like an animal, if I hadn't suddenly glimpsed Alexandria standing in the doorway.

“Are you going to stand out there all night, Dad?” she asked. She glanced at the elegant catalog that still dangled from my fingers and saw clearly that I was in distress.

“Are you coming in?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, then shoved the catalog into my pocket.

At dinner, Alexandria talked about everything but my trial. She talked a little about her work, its many dissatisfactions, although, as she said, at least she had a job.

During all of this I remained for the most part silent, a vague, enclosed figure at the end of the table, often gazing out into the backyard, where Sandrine's gazebo rested in the half-light that came from the interior of the house.

At some point I became aware that Alexandria had stopped talking, and when I looked back toward her I saw that she was staring silently at me.

“What are you thinking, Dad?” she asked.

I'd hardly been aware of what I'd been thinking until I was asked. Then it seemed quite a vivid thought.

“About your mother,” I answered quietly.

“What about her?” Alexandria asked cautiously, as if afraid she might set off rather than defuse a bomb.

“She loved Terence, the Roman playwright,” I said. “The one she mentioned to the travel agent. There was a line of his she often quoted.”

“What's the line?” Alexandria asked.

“Terence said that he, himself, was cracked,” I answered. “As a man, he was cracked and leaking from many holes.”

There was a long silence after that, Alexandria watching me with an expression I found hard to decipher, save that it wasn't hostile.

“You've changed,” she said finally and quite softly, like an ornithologist trying to decide if this was a new species of bird or one well known but oddly marked.

A few minutes later we walked into the living room and polished off the wine, just half a glass each but enough to sip at a leisurely pace.

“Where do you think you'd like to live if you could live anywhere?” she said after a moment.

I thought of her question and then of my answer for a long time.

“Here,” I said finally. “In Coburn.”

“But I thought you never liked it,” Alexandria said.

“I never gave it a chance,” I told her softly. “Everything deserves a chance.”

Alexandria watched me silently, and a little fearfully, so that I knew I was cracking, leaking.

“You should go to bed now,” she said, a clear sign that my daughter had no idea how she might mend the breach or plug the holes in what remained of the badly damaged vessel I'd become.

“Yes, I suppose I should,” I told her.

A few minutes later I was in my room, the lights out, thinking of Sandrine, of the book she'd given me so long ago, the message inside it, and from those thoughts, moving on to others, and at last wondering what it was I'd possessed at Albi that had made her say, in that lovely, intense, come to judgment way of hers, “It's you.”

We'd arrived in the town late in the afternoon, that much I remembered. We walked around for a while before going into the cathedral, where, once inside, we separated. Sandrine strolled along the right side of the church, toward where the figure of doomed Saint Cecilia lay, the three bloody cuts by which her murder had been attempted clearly visible, red and raw, on the back of her neck.

I moved down the opposite aisle toward the altar, where I stood and looked at the mural that covered the wall at the front of the church. Sandrine joined me there a few minutes later, then we turned and exited the church. By then the sun was setting and we walked along a terrace and peered out over the valley, the river below us a vein of gold, like the light around us, as softly radiant as any I'd ever seen. It was then Sandrine had said, “You're the one,” with that look of surprise in her eyes. “It's you.”

Such had been our single day in Albi, or at least all that I could still recall of it. We left for Toulouse the following morning and from there by train to Paris, and from Paris home, to where Coburn College's job offers awaited us and which we'd finally accepted and after which I'd lost whatever Sandrine had seen in Albi, but which I still couldn't define or locate no matter how many times I went back over my few memories of the place. And how many times was that? Fifty times during the course of the evening? Perhaps a hundred? Perhaps even more than that as night first deepened, then lightened into morning, so that I was still awake and staring at the ceiling when Alexandria tapped at my door.

“Dad,” she said softly. “Time to get up.”

“Do I really have to?” I asked, and truly and profoundly I meant it.

My daughter's answer was like herself, practical, matter-of-fact, deeply connected to the bottom line.

“Life goes on,” she said.

D
AY
T
EN

Call Malcolm Esterman

He gave me only the most peremptory glance as he made his way to the witness stand, a look that was hard to read, partly Malcolm being Malcolm, which meant his being somewhat shy, partly a vague dread, like a reluctant bearer of bad news.

I nodded to him casually, as I might have greeted him on the street, a friendly gesture toward the man to whom Sandrine had gone in her hour of need, and with whom she had no doubt shared quite painful intimacies.

On the stand, Malcolm raised his hand at the same slow pace that his short legs had taken him to it. He was perhaps five-foot-three, with small, rounded shoulders, and he wore thick glasses that gave him just the sort of owlish look the students of Coburn College had surely mocked. I had little doubt that he'd endured his share of such mockery, both as a boy and later. The world is rarely kind to the bookish, especially if there's nothing of the warrior-athlete-poet in the bookish boy's physique. A pipe with a gnawed stem would have completed the image but, mercifully, Malcolm had never smoked.

“I am an associate professor in the History Department at Coburn College,” he said in answer to Mr. Singleton's first question.

He had been an associate professor for more than twenty years, I knew, a teacher of ancient history to students who incessantly tweeted their current location or mood swing in rapid bursts of 140 characters or less. He'd never completed his PhD thesis, and so all his life he'd lived in the all-but-dissertation backwater that is academia's eternal purgatory. I had rarely paid much attention to him, if only because he rarely made his presence known. He sat in the back at faculty meetings and almost never spoke. I'd often seen him sitting alone on the quadrangle, usually with a book, but often not reading it. Instead, he would stare off into the middle distance, his large brown eyes blinking slowly, his expression fixed in what Sandrine had once called “tragic contemplation,” though she'd been referring to a bust of Marcus Aurelius rather than to Malcolm.

“Now, during the course of your time at Coburn, did you have occasion to meet Sandrine Allegra Madison?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes,” Malcolm answered.

“And you became friends with her, isn't that true?”

“Friends, yes.” His eyes darted over to me. “Only friends,” he added.

With that response, the pornographic images that had sometimes tormented me with regard to Malcolm and Sandrine immediately dissolved. Malcolm, I decided, was incapable of telling anything but the truth, a man without airs, who never hinted, however tangentially, at any experience he had not had. At Coburn, he had surely lived as a sparrow in a hawk's nest, I thought, a serene, self-contained man, at home with his own modest abilities, seeking to maintain only the few treasures he possessed, a man with no worlds he wished to conquer, nor any rival he wished to best, nor anything he needed to prove to anyone but himself, and thus, because of all that, a man so deeply grounded that Sandrine, my incandescent wife, had evidently felt the pull of his quiet gravity.

“She was interested in the women of the ancient world,” Malcolm added. “Cleopatra and Hypatia.” He smiled softly, then added, “She had built a home for these women in her mind.”

Mr. Singleton could not have cared less for this gracious and vaguely poetic way of describing Sandrine's intellectual interests.

“Now, during the last year, you had occasion to see Mrs. Madison quite often, isn't that true?” he asked.

“Yes,” Malcolm answered. “We would sometimes meet in the faculty room or in the library.”

“And what did you talk about on those occasions?”

Malcolm offered his familiar, self-deprecating smile. “Well, to put it grandly, I suppose you could say that we talked about the wisdom of the ancients.”

In which sacred wisdom Mr. Singleton clearly had no interest.

“But there came a time when you talked about things that were a little more down to earth, isn't that true, Dr. Esterman?”

“I don't have a doctorate,” Malcolm corrected, then went on to answer the question.

“Yes, but it took a while for us to talk about these other things,” he said. “At first it was just ancient history things between us. She was good at picking another person's mind, finding gems.”

It was obvious that Mr. Singleton's pace was too fast for Malcolm. But it was also obvious that the witness would not be rushed.

“Sandrine was a thoughtful person,” Malcolm continued pointedly. “But not in an abstract way. She thought that the purpose of philosophy was first of all to teach you how to live, and, after that, to teach you how to die.”

Which surely is the bottom line, I thought.

“All right, but at some point, Mrs. Madison told you about a recent diagnosis, didn't she?” Mr. Singleton asked somewhat impatiently.

“Yes,” Malcolm answered. “She said she had Lou Gehrig's disease. It was very sad, of course.”

“In fact, upon receiving this diagnosis, she went directly to you, correct?”

“Evidently so,” Malcolm answered. “She'd just spoken to her doctor when she came to my house that day.”

I couldn't help but imagine the lonely drive Sandrine had made on that rainy afternoon. It would have taken her from Dr. Ortins's office, down Coburn's Main Street, along the edges of the college campus, and then down a quiet country lane to Malcolm's vaguely wooded condominium. She would have glimpsed the school's quadrangle as she made her way, and the library, and the little restaurant where we sometimes dined. She would have seen the college president's house, where we'd been so warmly received our first day here. The hospital in which Alexandria had been born would have appeared at the edge of town, and beyond that the reservoir where she ran, the pool where she swam, the pond along whose edges we'd sometimes strolled during our first months in Coburn and where she'd taken my hand and said, as I recalled now, “You can be happy here, Sam, if you let yourself.”

But I had not, as Mr. Singleton's next question began to reveal.

“Now, after she got to your house, Mrs. Madison told you about this diagnosis, and then she expressed some concerns regarding her husband, isn't that true?”

“Yes,” Malcolm answered. “She said she thought her husband felt that she had failed.”

Failed?

Not once had Sandrine ever indicated such a thought to me. Yes, I had been surprised that her career had been less than meteoric, that she'd never written a great book, or any other book for that matter, that she'd made little effort to rise higher in the academic firmament. But I had blamed Coburn for that, the soporific effect it had had on both of us.

“Failed in her career aspirations?” Singleton asked.

“No,” Malcolm answered. “Failed as a woman. Failed to give her husband what he most needed.”

So she had known after all, I thought, known and blamed herself for my dalliance with April, blamed herself in God only knew how many foolish ways for my folly: that she was often at evening classes, that she spent too much time in the scriptorium or with her students. Sandrine, being Sandrine, could have generated a thousand reasons to blame herself when I alone had been to blame for those afternoons at Shady Arms. For that reason, it struck me that Sandrine had failed only in that she had never confronted me with regard to what she knew about April and me, and because of which her ire had simply grown hotter and hotter until it had finally exploded on that last night.

But in this, as it turned out, I was, as in so many other things, completely wrong.

“And what did she feel that her husband needed the most?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Correction,” Malcolm answered quietly.

“Correction?” Mr. Singleton asked. “What did she mean by that?”

“A correction in his course,” Malcolm answered. “In his trajectory. She had failed to remind him of what he'd once been.”

“Which was what?”

Malcolm's gaze drifted over to me as he answered.

“Kind,” Malcolm said. “She said that he had once had a big heart. He read with his heart, and she thought that he could teach with his heart. They'd once even planned to build a school together, she said.”

Now his attention returned to Mr. Singleton.

“I think that having to leave her husband was what she most regretted,” he added. “Leaving him the way he was, I mean.”

Mr. Singleton had by then grown weary of what he clearly considered a form of testimony that was utterly irrelevant to the larger point he now made.

“Did Mrs. Madison indicate that she thought her husband would be a good caregiver for her during her coming illness?”

“She said that he probably would not be.”

“Why is that?”

Again, Malcolm's attention returned to me, almost as if he'd planned it that way, his gaze on me as quietly, and yet with the same intensity, as Sandrine's.

“She said that he had hardened over the years,” he answered. “Disappointment had torn at him, she said, and it had left him with a lot of scar tissue.” He paused, then added pointedly, “And scar tissue does not feel.”

“Scar tissue?” Mr. Singleton said, seizing the word as if it were a bullet he could now load into his gun. “She said that her husband was without feeling, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did Mrs. Madison indicate that she thought her husband might grow impatient?”

“Impatient?” Malcolm asked, his attention now returned to Mr. Singleton, who'd begun to pace back and forth before the witness box.

“Impatient, yes,” Singleton replied. “Impatient with her illness, the fact that it might take several years for her to die. Did she feel that he didn't love her, that he didn't want her to live, that he hoped she would die as quickly as possible? Did she think these things about her husband?”

I leaned forward, because surely, surely, to this question, truthful, unassuming, with no grudge against me, Malcolm could honestly say no.

“Yes,” Malcolm said. “Yes, she believed all those things.”

And so it had never been my affair with April—providing she'd ever even known about it—that Sandrine had accused me of on the final night of her life. Rather, it had been a far more profound betrayal, a hardness that had grown harder year by year until it had finally become a thick, interior wall, a scar tissue of dead nerves that had even separated me from Sandrine in her anguish, Sandrine in her terror, Sandrine dying.

I thought of the fear and sorrow that must have weighed down upon her. I had not offered my shoulder to any of that overwhelming weight. I should have had only one mission after that meeting in Dr. Ortins's office, to love and give comfort to the woman whose death it foretold, she who, even in her final communications with this world, had demonstrated the wit, intelligence, and fierce knowingness that had made her, too, queen of the Nile.

“She didn't want to leave him still living in this way,” Malcolm added. “Alive, but dead. She wanted to change him before she died.”

Mr. Singleton glanced at the jury, then stopped his pacing.

“She needed to find out who he was and so she came up with a general plan,” Malcolm added.

Singleton took a step closer to the witness box. “And what was this general plan?” he asked.

“To confront him with himself,” Malcolm said. “To see if it was possible to make him see himself.”

“Did Mrs. Madison ever give you any idea of how she intended to do this?”

“She would try to reach him,” Malcolm answered. “She would try to do this tenderly.”

I thought of all the times during Sandrine's last six months when I'd come home to find her reading or listening to music, how she'd always stopped to look up from the book and turn down the music, the way she'd mentioned some little nugget from the book or the name of the song, an invitation, as I realized now, to engage her and be engaged by her, as it were, Socratically, all of which I had obliviously turned down.

“And did Mrs. Madison ever give you any idea as to her success or lack of success in this effort?” Mr. Singleton asked.

She had, of course.

“And had she had any success?”

I hardly needed to hear his answer.

“No,” he said.

“Did Mrs. Madison discuss this lack of success with you, Mr. Esterman?”

“Yes, she did.”

“What did she say about it?”

“She said that she was going to raise the stakes.”

“In what way?”

“There would be no more of what she called ‘tender traps.'”

Tender traps, I thought, how entirely Sandrine, first to try them, then discard them when they didn't work, her gaze ever fixed on the bottom line.

“Did she give you any idea of what these next attempts would be?” Mr. Singleton asked.

Malcolm shook his head. “I don't know what they were,” he said, “but she said it would mean pulling away from him.”

And she had done exactly that, I thought, as I recalled the days and nights of Sandrine ignoring me, barely speaking to me, no longer listening to me, days and nights of Sandrine distant, as I'd described it to Alexandria, Sandrine “streaming.”

“All right, but even though Mrs. Madison never mentioned whether or not these new methods were successful, she did indicate a final effort, isn't that so?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“Yes.”

“And according to Mrs. Madison, what was that final effort going to be?”

“Fury,” Malcolm said. “She was going to make her husband furious.”

“How was she going to do this?”

“By telling the truth,” Malcolm answered. “By telling him to his face in as blunt a way as possible exactly what he had become.”

“And what was that?”