The Age of Miracles (27 page)

“I have to go.” She snuffed out the half-smoked cigarette in a little tin ashtray on the windowsill and tossed her head and sighed. “I have to type a brief.” She turned on her heels and went into the law office, and, I suppose, spent the afternoon typing up things Eugene had marked for her in law books.

As for me, it was Friday afternoon. At five o'clock Happy Hour started at the Lonely and I wanted to go home and put on my long cotton skirt and sandals. It is hard getting one of the umbrella-covered tables on weekend afternoons. I have a group of friends who take turns getting to the Lonely early to grab a table and today it was my turn.

I told my assistant to close up and walked out of the building into the March day. Harrisburg was getting ready for spring. The grime of winter had been washed off the streets by spring rains. Window washers were at work on ladders at the courthouse. The baseball diamond behind the high school was loud with batting practice. Down at the Lonely Bobby Lee would be wiping off the tables, straightening up the bandstand, making fresh coffee and Sports Tea.

I stopped by the courthouse and thought it over. I was trying to decide what blouse to wear. The past Friday Judge Watts and I had done a mean jitterbug to “All You Want to Do Is Ride Around, Sally.” If he was there again this week I had resolved to really cut loose. I believe it is good for young people to see old people having fun. It keeps them from believing that hard work makes everyone as sad as their parents.

I decided on a white peasant's blouse. And of course Judge Watts was there. As soon as he spotted me he came over and took a seat beside me underneath the umbrella. “You ready to teach them how to dance?” he asked.

“That's why I'm here,” I answered, and we went out onto the dance floor and began showing off. We had the floor to ourselves for a few minutes. Then a good-looking carpenter led his partner out onto the space beside us. He was wearing a black T-shirt that said OFF DUTY, and his hips were moving like he meant it. I started copying everything he did and the judge copied me. To be a good dancer at the Lonely you have to move into the zeitgeist of the afternoon. If someone hot comes on the floor, move into their energy. Anyway, that's the theory Judge Watts and I were working on that afternoon.

We had not been dancing ten minutes when Ginger appeared in the door. She still had on her suit and heels and she just sort of stood there, looking around and trying to take it in. “That's Bobby's wife,” I whispered to Judge Watts, and we started in her direction. Bobby beat us to it. He laid his saxophone down on the stage and climbed down off the bandstand and started walking toward her. The crowd of dancers let him through. Behind him Roberta stepped up to the mike and raised her horn. She broke into her famous rendition of “Chase the Clouds Away.” The audience cheered. A few people were staring at Ginger and Bobby Lee but most of them pretended not to notice. This is a polite town. A town this size has to be.

“You'll have to recuse yourself if the divorce ever gets to your court,” I told the judge, thinking I was joking.

“You know I can't talk about that,” he answered, and we broke into “The Statue of Liberty,” a special dance we have created here in Harrisburg for Friday afternoons at the Lonely.

You put one arm up into the air and try to stay as straight as you can from the waist up and only let your hips and legs move.

The next week new evil began. Ginger's trip to the Lonely had only served to make her madder. In the first place she was annoyed to see how well Bobby Lee was doing and it made her greedy. In the second place she had only gone down there, she said, to ask him to sign the divorce decree. When he refused on the grounds that he still loved her, she went into attack mode. She decided to draw blood. She got her mean lawyer to draw up papers demanding twice as much alimony as before and complete custody of the children, including the right to take them out of the state without asking permission.

“Has she gone insane?” my best friend, Cynthia, asked me when she heard about it. “Everyone knows she's sleeping with half the men in southern Illinois. If she drags this into court, she's the one who will suffer.”

“Who is she sleeping with? How could she be sleeping with anyone? Oh, well, the girls are gone every weekend, aren't they?” We were transplanting daisies in my backyard beds. Cynthia was squatting beside the new-turned earth, looking up at me. The sun beat down. Nature was by our side on this clear spring day and here I was, being surprised by nature.

“She's sleeping with her boss, everyone knows that. And she's sleeping with Harlon Davis over in Marion. He was in her class in high school.”

“Where'd you hear that?”

“I saw them in Marion a couple of weeks ago. They were out at the mall together. They were holding hands in the B. Dalton Bookstore. They kept on holding hands the whole time I talked to them.”

“Cynthia! Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure. Now look here, Letitia. Either we have to bunch these up or we have to make another bed. There's not enough room for all of these. Where did you get all these daisies?”

“I started them in the kitchen during that snowstorm. How many people know this, Cynthia? About Ginger and Harlon Davies?”

“How would I know? Well, now you know.”

Yes, now I knew and I would live to regret knowing it. Even as we put those daisies in the ground I was regretting knowing it. My mother's warnings about gossip all came back to haunt me. Mind your own business. Stay out of other people's lives.

“Not to mention she's flirting with every man in town,” Cynthia continued. “I wouldn't let her near my husband. I can tell you that.”

 

Ginger's new demands were the last straw for Bobby Lee. Now
he
changed lawyers. Fired darling Mr. Harrison, whom we all adore, and hired a slick young lawyer who had just come to Harrisburg from Chicago. His name was Mr. Petronilla and it turned out he was even meaner than Ginger's lawyer. If Ginger wanted blood, there would be blood. Bobby Lee counterfiled, charging Ginger with adultery, and we were all subpoenaed. Every single person she had talked to about the divorce. How I regretted that conversation with Cynthia. How I regretted everything I had heard. With the threat of being sworn in
under penalty of perjury
hanging over my head, I began to regret every word.

Also, I was appalled at how well I remembered every conversation and who said what to me. So powerful and wicked is gossip. So fertile and unforgettable is rumor.

My subpoena was delivered to my office on Monday morning. The trial was set for the third of May. I had planned on taking that week off to work in my gardens. Now, instead, I would be down at the courthouse, locked into the witness stand, with mean lawyers making me repeat things said to me in privacy by people that I liked.

The worst divorce in the history of Harrisburg, Illinois, was about to commence.

The day after everyone was subpoenaed I saw Little Ginger and Roberta riding their bikes down Maple Street. There was a pall around them. They looked like girls no one would want to know. The bloom had left their cheeks.

The trial drew near. Those of us who had been subpoenaed were afraid to discuss it even among ourselves. I was afraid even to talk to Cynthia. At any moment I was going to have to drag her name into court or go to jail. Who told you that? the lawyers would ask. My best friend, Cynthia, I would be forced to reply. We were transplanting daisies.

To add to the complications, the court responsible for divorces in Saline County is Judge Watts's court.
My dancing partner
at the café of one of the litigants. In my worst fantasies Ginger's lawyer would be leaning over me, his foul breath breathing cold germs down into my face, the dust in the courtroom making me sneeze. “Are you the woman who has been seen doing immoral dances with the judge? Immoral and unpatriotic, I might add?”

“The Statue of Liberty is not unpatriotic,” I would defend myself. “It is a paean to liberty. Land of the free, home of the brave.”

Well, of course that part didn't come true. Judge Watts recused himself and a judge from Centralia was brought in. Judge William Watson, who is a first cousin of our beloved Judge Watson, whose daughter is my best friend. I gave my depositions to both lawyers, mumbling and saying yes and no and I don't remember and pretending to have to blow my nose every time they made me mad.

The day for the trial came. We all assembled in the smaller courtroom at the courthouse. Judge Watson presiding. I was sitting with my hands in my lap. Outside the sun was shining. A fine day for anything but what we were doing.

“Call your first witness,” the judge said.

“Miss Letitia Scofield,” Bobby Lee's lawyer said.

I got up and walked slowly to the witness chair. I sat down. “Raise your right hand and swear after me,” the bailiff said.

“No,” I answered.

“What?” said the judge.

“No,” I answered. “I am a tax-paying citizen of the United States of America, the state of Illinois and the county of Saline. This is my courtroom. Your salary is paid by me. I have a right to speak in this court of law and I demand that right.”

The judge only nodded, his gavel in his hand. I had caught him off guard.

“I am acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Finley,” I began. “But I don't know what is going on in their minds that they would drag us all down here to be involved in this.

“What is this trial about, Your Honor? If I thought it was about the welfare of their little daughters who they brought into the world, I would agree to waste a day of my vacation helping them decide what to do. But this isn't about the welfare of children. This is about ego and money. About greed and cruelty and revenge. About two people who want to make each other do things. About a woman who likes money and wants to make a man give it to her. About a man who is jealous and will do anything, no matter how insane, to make the object of his jealousy uncomfortable and unhappy.

“Yes, I know about this divorce. And I am guilty of gossiping about it and listening to the gossip. But I will not lay my hand on a Bible and agree to repeat that gossip in this court. Bring out the handcuffs. I will not be part of this.”

I stood up, clutching my pocketbook. I looked from Ginger to Bobby Lee. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” I added. “How dare you do this to all of us. I was supposed to be putting in tomato plants this morning.”

So the court was recessed and I was taken into Judge Watson's chambers and given fifty hours of community service, which he is allowing me to serve in my capacity as head of the Literacy Council.

Of course, my leaving would not have stopped the trial. It took an act of karmic retribution to do that. While we were in the judge's chambers Ginger's baby-sitter called the bailiff to say that Roberta was having trouble breathing. Bobby Lee beat Ginger out the door but she was right behind him, with half the courtroom trailing in their wake. Bobby Lee and Ginger jumped into his Isuzu and took off for the hospital emergency room. Everything that happened that afternoon I had to hear over the phone later in the day. Roberta's asthma had returned. She was so dismayed over thinking about what was going on down at the courtroom in front of everyone in town (those people she had striven so hard to win on Friday afternoons blowing her little lungs out on that trumpet) that her breathing apparatus had seized up like a fist. She had been at home with a baby-sitter because she was too upset to go to school. As soon as she decided the trial had begun she had started wheezing until she could not talk. The baby-sitter had called an ambulance and then the courtroom.

Bobby Lee and Ginger stood beside her bed (so Cynthia told me—she is head nurse on that ward and was right there for every minute of it), looking down on their daughter but not at each other. Ginger was not going to back down, even if her daughter died to punish her. It was Greek tragedy, Cynthia said. (She is an actress with the Harrisburg Little Theater and this is not the first time I have heard her say something right here in Harrisburg was Greek tragedy.) “It is tragedy because Ginger refuses to compromise,” she went on. “Bobby would have been on his knees in an instant but she just coldly looked from Roberta to the wall.”

I got my first report at six in the evening. That night Roberta grew worse. What had started off as a simple asthma attack became critical. They moved her into the intensive care unit, hooked her up to the heart-lung machine. She had a weak heart when she was born but Bobby Lee and Ginger had kept that quiet, thinking someday a boy might not marry her for fear she could never bear him children.

By eleven o'clock the news was all over town. Preachers were writing sermons. Kind heads were bowed in prayer. I was watching the
Tonight Show
when Cynthia called me back. “The joke is over,” she said. “They have killed their child. I heard Judge Watson ruled a mistrial.”

“Does that mean I don't have to serve my community service?”

“This is serious, Letitia. There were four doctors in conference when I left the hospital. They aren't sure what to do.”

“What do they think is wrong?”

“She's lost the will to live. I've seen it before but never in a little girl. She's always been fragile, more fragile than we know.”

“Where is Bobby Lee?”

“They're both there. Sitting in the waiting room.”

“I'm going there. I can miss work tomorrow if I need to.”

“Then go if you think you should. What harm can it do. I've got to get to bed. I'm beat. I'm going back in at seven.”

I put on my shoes and found my pocketbook and drove down to the hospital and went up on the elevator and found them there, in the hall outside her door. They looked like hurricane survivors, like people who had been through a flood.

“What can I do?” I asked. “Is Little Ginger in good hands?”