Defense, page 31
Someone touched my arm. I turned around and found myself looking into the eyes of a stranger I had noticed earlier. He was the only one among the mourners I had never seen before.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” he said, watching me with soulful eyes. “I’m Isaac Friedman. Dr. Isaac Friedman. I was Leopold’s physician.”
He was not nearly as old as Leopold. Closer to my age, he had the taut, lean look of a distance runner.
The rain clouds had been carried off by the wind, and the sky had turned a monotonous slate gray. In a slow, laborious rhythm, a workman with a black cap pulled far down on his forehead began to shovel the damp earth back into the grave. Dr. Friedman took me by the arm and walked me away.
We stopped next to a low-hanging branch of an oak tree. Dr. Friedman ran his hand over his wavy black hair, and then looked directly at me. “Judge Rifkin asked me to tell you something after his death,” he confided.
“After his death?” I asked blankly. “I don’t understand.”
“He knew he was going to die. It was only a matter of time. He had an inoperable cancer. That is what he wanted me to tell you. It was very important to him,” he said earnestly, “that you know he was dying.”
“How long?”
He raised his thick eyebrows. “I’m sorry. How long?”
“Yes. How long had he known? When did he first know that he had cancer?”
“Seven or eight months ago. I told him that he had perhaps six months, a year at the most,” he sighed. “He was a very brave man. The pain was constant, excruciating.”
“Couldn’t you have at least given him something?” I asked.
He shrugged helplessly. “I did. But he wouldn’t take it, not until the pain became virtually disabling. He wouldn’t do anything that might impair his ability to function. And then, when he was charged with this crime—disgraceful business!—he wouldn’t take it at all!”
With both hands I grabbed him by the shoulders. “But if he was dying of cancer! If I’d known that! If he’d told me! If you had told me! I could have done something! There never would have been a trial!”
I was wrong and I knew it. Leopold had to go through with the trial. The law had been his life; he would not walk away from it at the end. But then why the note? Why let the world believe he was guilty when he was not? There could be only one reason: to protect Michelle.
My hands fell away from Dr. Friedman’s shoulders and I nodded apologetically. “You’re right,” I said as we shook hands. “He was a brave man, probably the bravest man I ever knew.”
The wind had quieted to a whisper as I stopped the car at the end of the driveway. Thin shafts of light tumbled down through the shattered sky. I opened the outside door and called Alexandra’s name, listening as the sound of my voice hung heavy in the silence of the house. Tossing my raincoat over the banister, I climbed the stairs. The door to the bedroom was still shut.
Hoping that she had managed to fall asleep, I opened the door just far enough to slip inside, and then quickly closed it behind me to keep out the light. The bedspread was still bunched up around the pillow on the far side of the bed. I sat down on my side, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness reached my hand across until it came to rest on a cold linen pillowcase. She was gone.
Pulling open the blinds, I glanced around the bedroom. The door to the walk-in closet was wide open, and on the nightstand, propped up against the lamp, just the way it had been when I came back from Vancouver, was an envelope.
We always expect what we fear the most, and so I suppose I must have known what the letter said before I read it. Shorter even than Leopold Rifkin’s suicide note and every bit as final, it said simply, “I’m leaving you.” That was all, no explanation, no reason, not even the useless solace of saying she was sorry. For a long time I just sat there, too tired to think, too exhausted to feel. Leopold was dead and Alexandra was gone. It was almost a relief to know I had nothing left to lose.
I curled up on the bed and stared straight ahead. All day long I lay there, fully clothed, listening to the dull, decisive sound of my heartbeat measuring out the life that was left me, watching the shadows dance on the wall as the sun made its pilgrimage across the sky. Long after the last shadow disappeared into the night I stood and walked downstairs to the living room. I wanted to be there, watching out the window, if Alexandra came back.
Through the long listless days and dismal sleepless nights that followed, I wandered through my own house, aware of nothing except the simple sensation of my own existence. I had lost all desire to escape imprisonment in the empty solitude of my soul.
When the telephone rang, I barely heard it and never answered it. When the doorbell rang I ignored it as well, until someone began to beat on the door.
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself saying as I opened the door. “I don’t seem to be able…”
“Oh, my god,” Helen cried, as she took my arm in her hands and led me back to the sofa. “How long have you been like this?” she asked, a worried look in her eyes, as she bustled around the room opening the blinds, letting in the light.
She stood by the coffee table, noticing an empty bottle of scotch, and shook her head. “You haven’t changed clothes since the funeral, have you? And you probably haven’t eaten anything, either. I was afraid of this,” she said, as she grabbed my arm and forced me to my feet. “Soon as I heard Alexandra had left the firm, I knew something was wrong. And when you didn’t answer the phone…”
She guided me upstairs and when she got me to the bathroom, turned on the shower. “Now get out of those clothes,” she ordered. “I’m going to the kitchen to make you something to eat.”
Without a will of my own, I became the obedient child. I did everything Helen told me to do, and in a few days’ time I was back on my feet, ready to consider what I was going to do. The first thing I did was to resign from the firm.
Trewitt and Duncan expressed their regret but made no attempt to convince me to stay. The firm had become so large that even though I still brought in more business than anyone else, my share represented a much lower proportion of the whole than it had when Michael Ryan died. I was no longer irreplaceable. We shook hands like civilized people and said good-bye with the usual pleasantries.
That night and every night for a week the telephone rang for hours on end as friends and acquaintances called to ask what I was up to. I told them I wanted to take some time off and thought I might travel. Everyone seemed to understand; everyone wished me well. It was only when the calls stopped coming that I realized that, for the first time since I was a boy dreaming about becoming a lawyer, I had no idea what I was going to do next. Part of the answer came from Leopold Rifkin.
Three weeks after I stood at the side of his grave watching the damp earth spread over his coffin, I sat in the dimly lit office of an attorney I had never met, listening while he read aloud the last will and testament of Leopold Rifkin. Most of his considerable wealth had been left to a variety of charitable organizations; some of it was given to a small number of colleges and universities; the house and everything it contained was left to me. There were two conditions. If the house were sold during my lifetime, the proceeds of the sale would go to charity. The second condition concerned his books. These could never be sold at all. When I moved, or when I died, they were to be given to the public library. It never occurred to me not to accept Leopold Rifkin’s last act of generosity. I put my house on the market and moved into the one place where I had always felt completely at home.
* * *
For six months now I have lived in the fenced seclusion of an anonymous life, surrounded by the library of Leopold Rifkin. He thought of everything. In the top left-hand drawer of the desk, I discovered what looked at first like a bibliography, but on closer examination turned out to be a list of titles in the order in which they should be read.
The first title was not a book, but a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1785 prescribing a course of study to a young man still in school. “For the present,” it begins, “I advise you to begin a course of ancient history, reading everything in the original and not in translations.” Jefferson recommends the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Arrian, and Diodorus Siculus, among others, and the philosophical works of Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus. Almost in passing, he adds, “you have read or will read in school, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles,” only to then observe the necessity of reading Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, and Swift.
When I finished Jefferson’s letter, I glanced again at the list Leopold had left and realized why this had been the first thing he wanted me to read. The list that had seemed so formidable was nothing more than what two hundred years ago a serious schoolboy was expected to learn. And so I began to work my way through what Leopold thought was important, even though I read them only in translations made by others from languages I am afraid it is too late for me to learn. Almost every evening, and sometimes even in the morning, I begin where I ended the night before, and there are times when the words I am reading sound as if they are being spoken by Leopold Rifkin himself.
I seldom leave this place, and no one comes to see me, no one except Horace Woolner. He never changes. His smile is as broad and genuine as it has always been, and his rumbling, irrepressible laughter still lingers in your mind long after he’s gone. When he came to see me late this afternoon, however, he seemed preoccupied and even, I thought, a little worried.
Lowering himself into an easy chair on the other side of the massive desk where Leopold had spent so many nights poring over his books, Horace thrust himself forward and rested his elbows on his artificial knees. Studying me for a moment as if he had been thinking for a long time about what he wanted to say, he remarked finally, “You don’t have to keep doing this, you know?”
“What? You mean stay here?”
“You don’t have to live like this. You can come back. You can still practice law. You can do anything you want. The point is, you don’t have to live like you’re some kind of prisoner.”
I tried to dismiss it. I laughed. “This isn’t exactly Devil’s Island.”
Twisting his head until he was looking at me from an oblique angle, he said, “Might as well be. You never leave.”
“I get out once in a while,” I said vaguely.
He shook his head. “It’s not good, Joe, and you know it. Why don’t you come back—practice—be a lawyer again?”
“We’ve been over this before,” I reminded him.
Horace straightened up, and then, adjusting his legs, leaned back and locked his hands behind his head. “We’ve been over it before,” he said quickly, “but I still think you’re wrong.”
“Horace, I suborned perjury. I committed the worst crime a lawyer can commit. I got a witness to lie on the stand; I got Carmen Mara to make up a story to make sure Leopold was acquitted.”
“Leopold would have been acquitted without that testimony,” he insisted.
“I wasn’t willing to take that chance!” I replied more heatedly than I had intended.
Shifting his weight around, Horace rested his arm on the side of the chair. He raised his eyebrows and looked at me with mischievous eyes. “I’m the only one who knows you did it. And, you know, they only impose the penalty when you get caught.”
The afternoon light slanted through the French doors. It fell across the middle of the room, dividing in two the shadow that clung to each of us.
“Do you remember that time—at one of Leopold’s parties—when he was talking about the obligation to do what was best for a defendant instead of what the defendant wanted?”
Horace began to nod, and then suddenly laughed. “The time he drove poor old Gilliland-O’Rourke nuts?”
“Well, that’s my point. Doesn’t matter that no one caught me, does it? Besides, even if it had never happened, even if I had never given Mara that story to tell, I still couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t going to defend the guilty, not after Johnny Morel. And after Leopold, I didn’t want to defend anyone, innocent or not. And, after Alexandra…” My voice trailed off and for a moment just the sound of her name made me almost forget what I wanted to say.
Presently, I got up and took a few steps along the wall of books that rose up to the ceiling. I found the volume I was looking for and brought it back to the desk. It was an old, brown, oversized leather-bound book I had never read. The lettering on the spine had been worn away and the only way to know what it was about and who had written it was to open it to the title page. I opened it instead to the very end.
“There’s something I’ve never told you, something I think you need to know.” I removed a sealed manila envelope and handed it to him.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A copy of Michelle Walker’s records from McGill, where she went to school. Emma had someone in Montreal get them. It was just routine. She told me she had forgotten she had even asked until they arrived in the mail, a couple of weeks after the trial.”
Horace put on his glasses, opened the envelope, and began to read. He had barely glanced at the contents when he looked up. “She did very well,” he remarked.
“Keep going.”
Horace finished the first page and turned to the second. His eye fell on the photograph fastened to the side. He looked up again, his mouth half open, a question in his eyes. Then, he looked again at the photograph, staring at it in disbelief. He took off his glasses and slowly rubbed his eyes. “I’m really sorry,” he said in a voice so soft that it seemed almost frail. “I would never have guessed.”
Carefully folding the transcript along the knifelike crease that ran across the middle of each page, he got to his feet and handed it back to me. Dragging one leg after the other, he walked to the French doors, opened them, and took a deep breath. When he turned back to me, his shadow lengthened across the floor until it reached me.
“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” I asked. “I mean, everything makes sense, doesn’t it? The whole thing, start to finish?”
I wandered over toward the open doors until I was standing next to him. My own shadow suddenly descended upon the brightly polished hardwood floor. I looked out across the patio, toward the great towering firs, toward the infinite emptiness of the cloudless sky. “It’s all right, Horace,” I heard myself saying. “It’s really all right.”
Without a word we walked to the far side of the patio and sat down on a low brick wall. Down below, where the driveway circled up from the iron gates at the entrance, the rhododendrons and the azaleas were beginning to bloom.
“Won’t be that long before it comes around again,” I said, squinting into the sun. “April seventeenth—the date I got him off, the date Johnny Morel was killed, the date she killed her mother. Strange, isn’t it, the way it all ended? Leopold was right. Remember what he said when he decided Michelle had done it? She wanted us to know that she did it. She wanted us to know that it was our fault. She wanted us to know what it felt like to be helpless, alone, abandoned by everyone. But what Leopold didn’t know—what none of us knew—was that she wanted me, Horace. She wanted me to know what it was like to be betrayed by someone I loved more than anyone else in the world.”
Horace looked at me. “And you never suspected anything?”
“Nothing,” I confessed. “Not once. Why would I ever suspect Alexandra was Michelle? She managed everything with such exquisite attention to detail. She calls me scared to death and I find two cups half full of warm coffee and a bunch of cigarette butts with lipstick on them. Why wouldn’t I believe her when she told me Michelle had been there? I come home one night during the trial and she tells me she talked with Myrna Albright’s mother on the telephone. Why would I ever think to doubt her? No, Horace, I never suspected a thing.”
Horace reached down and picked up a small twig and turned it around in his massive hand. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Leopold wrote that suicide note for only one reason: to protect her. He gave up his reputation to give her a chance to have a life of her own. So what am I going to do about it? Not a damn thing, Horace. Not a damn thing.”
“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” he asked quietly. “Even after all this.”
I stood up and looked away. “I was in love with Alexandra. I don’t know anything about Michelle.” Suddenly, I turned to Horace. “But you know, despite it all, I keep thinking that she really was in love with me.”
“You going to be all right?” he asked, as we left the patio and walked slowly around the house toward his car at the top of the drive.
“Sure,” I said, “I’ll be fine, Horace, just fine.”
“Look,” he said, standing next to his car, the door open, “I want you to think about something. I came out here to ask you for a favor.”
“Sure, Horace, anything,” I replied, kicking a pebble on the pavement.
“There’s a case.”
“Horace,” I laughed, “for God’s sake…”
“Just listen to me,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “There’s this kid. She’s only sixteen, but they want to try her as an adult.”
I kept kicking at the pebble, moving it around in a small circle. “What’s she supposed to have done?” I asked indifferently.
Horace did not answer. When I looked up his eyes had narrowed to a hard, calculating stare and his mouth was closed tight. It was the way he defended himself against his own emotions.
“She killed her father,” he said finally. “Murdered him. Doesn’t seem to be much doubt about it.”
“Then it’s not much of a case.”
It must have been the same stare with which he had learned to give himself some distance, some protection, from all the awful, soul-destroying violence he had seen so many years before when he was a soldier, still walking firmly on his own two legs, in the forgotten jungles of a place no one wanted to remember. Somewhere behind that stare, Horace was there, watching, waiting, wishing it would all just go away.
