A map of the world, p.20
A Map of the World, page 20
Chapter Twelve
——
THERESA APPEARED AT OUR door the night after the preliminary hearing. I wasn’t expecting to see her. It was mid-July and they’d been gone almost a month. I had been trying to clean a cherry stain off the new white T-shirt my mother had given Emma earlier in the summer. Emma had realized, too late, that wiping her dirty hands on the shirt would spoil it. She was trying to be calm and hold steady while I scrubbed hard against her ribs. Claire was in the living room, glassy-eyed, watching a musical-variety show. If my mother had been with us she would have rushed to the shirt and held cold compresses to the stain. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a shadow in the yellow light of the evening. I thought a cloud had passed over the sun. Theresa came right up to the screen and pressed her hands against it, around her face. “Is anyone home?” she asked. Her voice was so small I wondered if she hoped we were gone.
The stain had gotten smeared and was worse than it had been at the start. In the weeks that Alice had been gone I had done my best to keep up appearances. If we let ourselves fall apart the neighbors, or the police, might descend upon us and pick our bones clean. Even though I had vacuumed and disposed of old tuna cans for the sake of normalcy, there were certain tasks I didn’t do well. For one thing, I was not in harmony with the soiled shirt, the way my mother would have been. For another, I couldn’t work up sympathy for extraneous items such as throw rugs. Why wash the table, sweep the floor, settle the rugs, swab the counter after every meal, when we’re coming back within four hours to disrupt what I’ve labored over to make right? I ask the question only half-jokingly. Alice always said I had a high threshold for filth and squalor. When we first knew each other in Ann Arbor she had me pegged as a nose picker in the car, the kind of person who wipes his hand under the seat if there isn’t a Kleenex. I said, “What’s the alternative?” She looked over her sunglasses at me as if the answer was obvious. She used to occasionally get on the bandwagon after she’d been with Theresa for an evening. She’d rail on, something about how my household dysfunction was a habit my mother had nurtured in me from infancy. There’d been clear female boundaries in my birthplace, she said, across which males did not venture. I assume she meant the chain-link fence around the broom closet and the dishwasher. So I was cultivated to be an unremorseful slob. Dairying has only reinforced my natural tendencies. I’m outside all day long, in dirt and dung and chaff. It’s unwieldy in nature, no cap on dust, or broken machines that must come to rest somewhere. There’s no end to bailing twine, rusty nails, old fencing materials a person might someday want to use again. Beyond a certain point I’ve given up trying to bring about order.
“We’re in here,” I said to Theresa as I opened the door. I wondered if she knew about Alice’s arrest. I wondered if she was going to quote some Scripture or put my eye out. She looked around herself as she set foot in the door. She saw, I guess in one penetrating glance, that I’d been doing the best I could. She saw that my best effort wasn’t worth much.
“I’ve been trying to get a cherry stain out of Emma’s white T-shirt,” I said, to explain why everything else had gone by the wayside.
“Let me,” she said, reaching for the dish towel in my hand. “Hold still, Em.” I relaxed some then, figuring that if she was going to worry over a spot, she might not know. She kneeled, massaging the shirt for a minute. “This isn’t going to work,” she said. “Boil water, Howard. For a fruit stain you pour hot water from above. You hold it way up—there’s something about pouring from a distance that makes a difference. It’s all in the heat and distance.”
“Heat and distance,” I repeated. “Better take off the shirt, Emma.” I filled the kettle at the sink and then walked across the room to the stove. “Here,” I said on my way, pulling out a stool for Theresa. After I fiddled with the temperamental knob on the one working burner I went to the table and stood across from her, trying to casually lean on a chair with my elbows.
We watched Emma taking off her shirt, trying to work her way around the wet spots so they wouldn’t touch her face. I couldn’t remember ever having been alone with Theresa before, without other adults. I can’t say I actually knew her outside of the context, the strictures, of other people’s associations with her. She was my wife’s good friend. She was my neighbor’s wife. She was the mother of our children’s playfellow. If our families had dinner together, Dan and I would often stand outside before the meal was ready. We’d talk about whether I should buy the new high-tensile wire fences or stick with what I had, about the Potawatomi Indians, about storm systems, local history, town politics, national politics, the Brewers, the achievements of our daughters. At dinner, around the table, Alice might get off and running about doing something commonplace. She could make a transaction at the walk-up window at First Federated in downtown Prairie Center sound as elemental as a Greek tragedy. She’d fling her arms around, raving. Her hair would come out of its band. Sometimes I’d rein her in. She tended to see the world in black and white, and if I’d make a remark about how the bank manager wasn’t actually evil, that he was forced to be conservative because of federal banking regulations, she’d lower her eyes and pinch up her lips, butter a piece of bread. Theresa would urge Alice to go on, to continue the story. It was always Theresa who would say something lighthearted and probably true. “Don’t pay any attention to that man,” she’d say, laughing at me. “Men, they know too many details for their own good.” With modest prodding Alice would continue, looking to the right of me. She meant to tell her story only for the benefit of our neighbors.
Emma had removed her shirt. The three of us stood watching the coil under the teapot turn orange, as if the electric stove had the mesmerizing power of a campfire.
“What is this about, Howard?” Theresa had a naturally soft voice. When she spoke, a person had to watch her mouth to understand what she was saying.
“What?” I asked.
“How are you?”
How was I? I needed to get Alice out of the county jail. I needed to work. I was spending the day walking in circles, getting close to nothing done. I needed to care for Emma and Claire, and protect them. I made them take naps in the afternoon so I could rest from their noise. They were then wide awake half the night. We had run out of food and I didn’t know if I had the energy to drive far enough away to buy groceries. It seemed that the world beyond the farm was itself floating farther and farther from us. I wasn’t sure I was going to meet the month’s payment, let alone come anywhere near the bond or Rafferty’s fee. I wasn’t at all sure that our cows were going to have anything to eat in the coming winter, or for the rest of the summer, for that matter. I was hungry myself. “I’m fine,” I think I said.
“I’m so upset about this,” she whispered across the table. She was taking quick, short breaths so she wouldn’t cry. She rolled her eyes and pushed her glasses up. “We only got home this afternoon. We took longer than we planned. I hate this country. I walked in the door—I nearly tripped over the stack of papers in the hall. I’m standing reading, saying out loud, ‘What? What?’ And who should come along but Suzannah Brooks, of course, the model Christian, making sure I’ve heard the dirt. When she said ‘Robbie Mackessy’ I just shut my mouth and closed the door.”
I put my hand to my lips, to make her stop talking. I didn’t want her to say anymore in front of Emma.
“If I’d been here I could have prevented this, I just know it. I would have insisted on interviewing Robbie. I would have talked to the police. I know the Mackessys—I’ve had them in therapy. Give me four, five hours, and I could tell you their troubles. Carol’s parents, both of them, were profoundly deaf. I mean, they’d never heard a thing. They had about six kids and every single one of them ran wild. Carol never said exactly, but I’ve a feeling that her two older sisters are—”
“Let’s talk later—” I began.
She was skipping from thing to thing, literally rattling on. She was shaking both hands, spitting as she spoke. “Robbie is an accomplished liar! I’ve seen children like him who will do anything to manipulate his family. His mother has given him plenty of opportunities to build his conman skills. When I told Dan that Alice had been arrested, that she was in jail, he said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Don’t worry about it! Can you believe it? That man is practically unconscious. When I told him I was coming down here he said, ‘That’s probably not a good idea, Theresa. You know how people talk.’ Do you see what I mean? He’s lost his senses! I put it to him: I said, ‘They’re in trouble, so they’re not our friends anymore?’ The worst of it is, I don’t have a clue how to help him. It’s my business to tend people who are suffering. If he was a patient, a stranger, I would say the right words. Oh God, I don’t know. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, Howard. Someone makes an accusation and the judge can’t dismiss it because it’s so loaded. The press, the parents, the civic leaders get all sanctimonious about believing the children. The school nurse! It would kill the poor judge’s career if he let Alice walk the streets.” She quit talking and bared her teeth. She squeezed her eyes shut and let off some steam with a guttural, “Gaaahhhh.”
“Emma, go upstairs and get a clean shirt on,” I said. She stood at the head of the table, fixed on Theresa.
“And Myra Flint, the child protection worker—they put Myra Flint on Robbie? This whole thing is like a bad joke, like a caricature of the system. I mean Myra, if you haven’t been abused in this life she’ll sniff it out in past lives or future lives. Robbie has a lot of symptoms of a character-disturbed child, and you know what? Myra Flint isn’t going to see that! Robbie is going to wrap that woman around his little finger, I’ll bet you. I’ll bet you money on that one. And Mrs. Mackessy will do the same. I get so frustrated trying to treat people like the Mackessys because they don’t want help. Some people actually work to make changes, once in a rare while. But Carol had no interest in figuring herself out. None. She wanted what she wanted. She’d go off on weekends to—”
“I don’t want to talk about this right now,” I said, moving Emma into the living room. Theresa was laughing, saying, “And anyway, I just can’t believe that anyone could possibly think that Robbie would make a reliable witness. I’m not sure he hasn’t been abused, judging from the family, but to think that he’s going to testify and be coherent. I can just see it, Howard! I can see Robbie telling his mother that something dreadful has happened and Carol, all of a sudden, and finally, tuning into that kid. What do you expect? Robbie has at last figured out that he has to get hurt, really hurt—not just fall off his bike and skin his knee—for his mother to give him the time of day, for his mother to be outraged. What did the paper say about three more boys filing charges?”
“Please,” I said, “I don’t like talking about it—” I cocked my head toward Emma in about as exaggerated a way as I could.
“Oh God,” she cried, “I’m out of my mind, Howard. I really am. I’m so sorry. What can I be thinking?” She had Emma’s offending shirt in her hand and she twisted it around and around and then thwacked the wall with it.
“What are you doing to my shirt?” Emma whimpered.
“What, honey?” Theresa asked.
“What are you doing to my shirt?”
“Oh, Emma, oh for goodness sakes. I’m just so darn mad, I don’t know what I’m doing. We’ll get this stain out, you’ll see. Howard, I’ll go, I’ll—”
“Why don’t you run upstairs and get your pajamas on, Emma?” I said. “By the time you’re back down the water will be boiling. We’ll watch Theresa do her heat-and-distance trick.” I was moving toward the porch, hoping that Emma would do as she was told.
“When’s the preliminary hearing?” Theresa whispered at my back as I led the way. “They usually put the hearings off forever.”
“It’s been,” I said, sitting down on a bench I’d made from a slab of walnut. “Monday. Yesterday. Rafferty made an effort not to have it continued indefinitely.”
Emma came to the door and stood watching us. “Please, Emma,” I pleaded. “I need to talk to Theresa and when we’re done we’ll get us some—” We didn’t have anything good to eat. “When we’re done we’ll do the shirt.” She turned slowly and disappeared around the corner.
“What happened? Tell me.” Theresa was sitting on the edge of her chair across from me. She must have sat right there any number of times, asking with the same urgency. She and Alice often had some big secret. They were always cackling in disbelief.
The dark was moving in and the few crickets were striking a note here and there. I peered through the door and I could just make out Claire, curled up in front of the television. She had fallen asleep while women with chops and synthetic cleavages belted out their distress. I went and shooed Emma from behind the wood stove in the kitchen. She dragged along to the stairs, her head hanging down, her arms limp at her side.
Alice would have been able to make a good story from the hearing in spite of the fact that it was supposed to be a low-key affair. Rafferty had told me that the preliminary hearing was not the place to draw out the details. He said that if he brought into focus the slatternly mother, the ill-mannered boy, months later at the trial the D.A. would have had the time to create Mrs. Mackessy as Mother Theresa and Robbie as the all-American choirboy on a PBS special. He had told me that the defense holds everything close to the chest, that it is the prosecutor who must play the hand. At the hearing the judge might be sympathetic to the poor single mom doing her best to raise up her child. At the trial Rafferty would introduce the real Mrs. Mackessy, as well as sing, and dance, if necessary, Alice’s praises: the fine caring professional nurse who is being blamed for Carol’s neglect and Robbie’s failures.
For all my background in history, I had been thinking lately that stories were pretty useless. The first scientists, way back, in pre-Socratic time, figured out that if they were going to understand anything they would have to discard narrative in favor of empirical methods. The Creation myths explained, after a fashion, who and why, but science would tell how and what. I had tried not to see the hearing as a story but as a series of facts which explored these questions: How did this happen? What is Alice? It was an absurd question, I realize, What is Alice? And yet I found myself asking, and not knowing how to answer. I had gone over and over the hearing in my mind and with each passing hour I was more and more bewildered. That night Theresa came over I thought, for about five minutes, that the splintered facts might make sense. I thought I might be able to lay out the pieces for her. With her experience she would amplify and connect where I could not.
“I think a lot about Alice,” I said.
“Oh Howard,” she blew, “if you only knew how I think about her. My sister asked how I could still be friends with her and I said, ‘If the same thing had happened in your built-in pool, do you think I’d stop speaking to you?’ I feel as if I’ve lost two people, that’s what no one, least of all my husband, understands.”
I couldn’t, of course, ask her what had been nagging at me since the day before. What is my wife, Theresa? I mumbled something about how we have air-conditioned squad cars instead of wooden carts but that nothing else had changed much since the Inquisition.
“And you can pay your fines with American Express,” she added. “You’re right! The changes are insignificant.”
On that Monday I had left the girls off at a day-care center in a shopping mall on the outskirts of Racine. It had been the only place I could find that would take them on a drop-in basis. The morning had gone badly at the beginning. The gallon jar of milk had fallen out of the refrigerator and shattered on the floor. The car keys had gotten lost. A cow in her prime was sick with diarrhea for no good reason. When we got to the day-care place, Happy Haven, Emma and Claire screamed about it. I had to shake them off of me and leave them sobbing in the hands of two high-school students. They had badges on their red aprons that said, “Trainee.” Out in the parking lot I could still hear my daughters crying. When I was trying to drive away the engine flooded. I had to sit for fifteen minutes before the car would run. I wasn’t sure by the end if I was hearing their appeals or imagining the worst. The noise continued as I drove. I could still hear them after I was a mile down the road.
There were jackhammers going in front of the courthouse. I was very hot in my suit. There’s an inscription on the north side of the entrance, a quote from Goethe. “In the government of men,” it says, “a great deal may be done by severity. More by love. But most of all by clear discernment and impartial justice. Which pays no respect to persons.” Those jackhammers were going in my ears and the sun was bearing down through my suit coat, my white shirt, my T-shirt. I read the quote several times. There was so much sweat dripping into my eyes and stinging that I couldn’t read very well. The trouble with Goethe, I thought then, is that when it’s you on trial you want to be particular, an individual. You don’t want to be one of the indiscriminate masses.
Even though it’s only a dowdy provincial courthouse it’s enough of a hulking edifice to remind the passerby that inside some men are ruined while others make their fortunes. Around the entrance there are crude bas-reliefs of the common man plowing and forging chains, trying to stand up straight under their burdens. “You know that thing Goethe said about justice that’s carved on the courthouse wall?” I asked Theresa.
“Oh God,” she said, grimacing. “Justice! That place could stand to have a few window boxes, some happy-face decals on the revolving doors.”
