It was a commonplace to Terence Mann that punishment itself is an archaic evil in the law. As special prosecutor, as defense lawyer on a few occasions, in the relatively clean region of civil law, he had tried to favor any reorientation of thought and action that might discredit punishment as a respected motivation and replace it by efforts at healing and reclamation. As a judge, familiar with the endless parade of minor offenders (most of them with no chance of redemption, for where in the modern state was there a sufficient will to redeem even the young, or the time, patience, money, wisdom, to implement it?), Judge Mann had been aware of no impulse in himself to punish, only of a desire to lessen disorder, and try for the long view. And then, Callista Blake. But—balancing crime of punishment: well, there it was simply his own unexpected rephrasing of the issue that had startled him. Apart from that, if that was significant, this self-castigation probably served no purpose.
Fashionable but without merit, to wail that we are all guilty. So we are, in a sense, and (unless one intends to do something about it) so what? Breast-beating is as solitary as any other form of masturbation. The modern spirit, he thought, for a long time before Hiroshima, had grown too fond of the wail, the masochistic acceptance of futility that ended in a downright enjoyment of it, a perversion as sterile as the antics of the louse-eaten monks of the Thebaid. Admit that two years ago he might not have been completely honest with himself. All right: what mattered now was that a slow broadening of reform might look very fine in the armchair perspective of a history book, but was no use at all to Callista Blake, nineteen years old. Capital punishment was on the way out, taking her along with it. Therefore in the very present specific instance: What to do?
Wandering to the other side of the room, fingering the stacks of sheet music and the bound volumes, Judge Mann reflected that a judgeship is a very damned comfortable thing, to the nerves of pocketbook and of vanity, until a moment of self-appraisal brings you the image of a bewildered monkey in a black gown. An image caught as though in multiple mirrors. No good turning your head aside: a mirror in every wall, and the monkey, poor puzzled well-meaning bastard, in every mirror.
He did not want now the fury or grief or laughter of Beethoven; not now the lofty tenderness or robust passion of Johannes Brahms. He took down his one-volume edition of the Well-Tempered Clavichord and glanced at a memory-stirring litter of pencil marks made long ago in the curly script of his teacher Michael Brooks. Mr. Brooks had died before the war, very old and partly blind. He might live another hundred years in these marks, far longer in the spreading influence of his fifty years of teaching, the impetus he gave to other lives continuing beyond any knowledge or measuring. Very good, Terence!… More slow trill practice absolutely essential!! Andante does not mean Adagio. In this Prelude schmaltz is possible but I do not like it. Excellent but you could do better. Bring out the inner voices.
Mr. Brooks grew vivid in memory, speaking with difficulty and panting breath because of age and the burden of fat that seemed (till you learned better) as though it might block his pudgy improbable hands away from the keyboard entirely. He had been seventy when Terence at age eight began lessons; he went on teaching twelve years thereafter. Terence remembered the gray eyes, tiny-appearing, sometimes inflamed, in folds of drooping lids and fat, the completely hairless skull rising to a peak, the wondrously ugly features that after the first impact of astonishment left the word “ugly” without meaning. “You think the Fugues are dry, Terence? Bring out the inner voices.… See, Terence, all the composers have something for you. But when you are unhappy—” blinking, sighing, coughing; and Terence recalled a child’s botheration, dread of giggles, at an old man’s prolonged throat-clearing, guttural noises, conversational spray, habit of patting forlornly at the air when a needed word was gone from him—“or when you have discovered that happiness is only a sometime thing at best, not too important, then try Bach, Terence, try Bach. Because he will let you enter a place where you become bigger than sadness or happiness. And bring out the inner voices.”
He set the old book on the piano. Hands and brain were tired, the hour late, though the neighboring apartment-dwellers were tolerant and often kept their mechanical music perking until after midnight. For a while he was in that place: Well, Mr. Brooks, “container and thing contained”: aren’t we always bigger than what stirs within us? All the same it was a good way to talk to a child. But the very facility of his hands betrayed him, leaving his mind too free. Good at first, to continue private thought while Bach was speaking, but then only another troublesome dividing of the self.
Terence’s father, not a patient man, would have said at this point or sooner: “God-sake, Terry, make up your mind!”
He would have said that, before 1928. In that year Father changed. And maybe the gray and harassed man could have entertained doubts earlier in his life on such an issue as capital punishment. He didn’t have a closed or ungenerous mind; he couldn’t afford to, a small-town doctor with two skittish growing boys and a wife who came to believe herself in deep other-worldly communication with Mary Queen of Scots. But many of Father’s opinions were formed when he was a young man in the era of Teddy Roosevelt, and he didn’t always remember to speak softly. Unlike his older brother Uncle Norden, who must have early learned the advantages of speaking softly at great length—anyhow Uncle Nord built up that accomplishment into a thundering good law practice.
Father (before 1928) would likely have said if you asked him that criminals so hardened as to commit murder—oh, put ’em out. For the good of society. Human failures: the unfit—odd word much loved by the nineteenth century, used apparently in a sort of gentleman’s agreement that no one was going to ask: unfit for what? Father would not have spoken so out of vindictiveness or lack of human feeling: just the impatient judgment of a busy man with troubles of his own, who accepted a number of antique notions because he grew up with them. That few hardened criminals ever commit murder, that most murderers have acted on a blinding impulse unlikely to recur—such facts would have been outside his mental territory, and unacceptable. Knowledge of what Father would have said was for Terence a bloodstream thing, no longer traceable to any remembered words. Like most people including doctors, Dr. Carl Mann had never witnessed an execution, nor known anyone well who wound up in jail. Gentlemen don’t.
After Elinor Mann’s final breakdown and commitment, Father no longer announced his views with much positiveness. In that year 1928 the bottom fell out; Dr. Mann couldn’t even get positive about Al Smith, in spite of a long-standing rage at the imbecilities of Prohibition. When not meeting the heavy demands of a country medical practice, he was beating out heart and brain in a private crucifixion, asking himself the wrong questions: What could I have done differently? Where did I fail her? As though a clarification of his own past might even then help to restore Elinor’s mind, that had never really tolerated the difficulties of living before it made permanent retreat into the smoke of paranoid fantasy.
Terence’s hands fell away from the piano, leaving the third Fugue unfinished. How had he arrived at contemplation of that time-eroded grief? The subject was Callista Blake, not Elinor Mann.
Who still lived, if you could call it that, in the curiously ordered world of yellow brick and manicured lawns that was Claiborne Hospital. She was seventy-eight this year, clouded by senility along with the psychosis. She recognized Terence on his visits, listening or seeming to, usually with patiently closed eyes, as he toiled to create a conversation.
Jack, successful in his own psychiatric practice, had more difficulty when he drove or flew from Boston to see her. Thirty-one years ago the cobwebs of her delusions had wrapped themselves inextricably around the life of the elder son, four years older than Terence and at that time in his Junior year at Harvard. Her voices (many others along with that of Mary Queen of Scots) had informed her that Jack was increasingly involved with gangsters and women of ill fame. The college autho
rities and, for some never-explained reason, Mayor Jimmy Walker, were all in it together. When she was on the point of going up to Cambridge to deal with all that, Dr. Carl Mann, goaded at last into understanding, said no. She flung an inkwell in his face and gouged it with a pair of scissors; though he was fairly muscular and she was not, it required the help of his office nurse to restrain her. Most of that was over, the dust settling, when Terence, sixteen years old, got home from school. Now in her antiquity the sorrows, fantasies, and angers of the past were still preserved for her by the specialized, selective memory of the schizophrenic, flies in amber. A year ago, Terence and Jack visiting her together, she told Terence that she could easily have forgiven poor Jack if he had lived. Then it came out, in a natural, pleasantly quiet conversation, that the slim gray-haired man sitting over there was nothing but a body, stolen for no good purpose by the unclean spirit of Henry VIII. Later, at the airport, Jack remarked: “Psychiatrically speaking it may be a poor symptom, but don’t mind it, Terry. I’ll make out all right as hell-fire Harry Tudor. Less of a strain than some of my other roles.”
“Beyond psychiatry, isn’t it?”
“If you mean beyond effective therapy, yes, boy.” “Boy” from Jack was acceptable—always had been. “It was beyond existing therapy thirty years ago.” Jack also counted years. “We just don’t know the score on paranoid schizophrenia. We know approximately what to expect, which is something maybe. Mental disease could be the last holdout among medical enigmas, Terry. We may be sweating out cases like Mother’s when there’s a pill or a shot for cancer. It’s the—oh, the inaccessibility of mental action.” Jack had been tired, but not remote; fatigue never dulled a shining quality of his alertness. “Wait till you get some big case in court with a borderline paranoid as a star performer.”
That conversation of a year ago had been hampered, Jack waiting on the start of his plane flight back to Boston; no leisure, bustling strangers, time pressure, uproar of loudspeakers and warming engines. Was it relevant now? Callista Blake a borderline paranoid? Rather urgently and emphatically, Judge Mann thought: No, she’s not.
Psychiatry more or less stood in the wings, in People vs. Blake. The State’s man called her legally sane. If he hadn’t, the State would have had no trouble shopping around for someone who did. Warner had had the girl examined by a Dr. Coburn, who might or might not testify; so far Warner had dropped no hint suggesting an insanity defense.
Inaccessibility of mental action: that was relevant. Dominantly. For wasn’t that the very essence of the principle of “reasonable doubt”? And was there any rational formula anywhere in the law, except the principle of reasonable doubt, at all likely to save Callista Blake?
Must see Jack again, soon. He looked out on the city’s darkness past a false curtain of window-glass reflection; a city of magic under a lens of illusion, as long ago in the creaky white-pillared house in Emmetville where he grew up he used to look out from the bedroom he shared with Jack, at images that would not live by day. Especially on rainy nights the vacant lot on the other side of Maple Street became for the boy transfigured, a garden of living shadows; sometimes, under the lash of wet wind, even the sea as Conrad and Melville had given the sea to him. In winter, leaves fallen, one could look past the few naked trees at the back of the lot, to a gleam of water a mile away, Walton Pond reflecting the motion and glitter of the railroad yard on its far side. Every night at 9:25, the ghostly passage of a fourteen-car express (to Terence and Jack, The Express)—one of the great trains that couldn’t be imagined as stopping at Emmetville. You did not hear its thunder, only saw the silent gliding of windows; then thirty seconds after the vanishing came the desolate splendor of the whistle crying for a grade crossing, the night imperfect until that music had fulfilled its mission and died. See him again; and bring out the inner voices.
The once vacant lot was now occupied in front by a filling station, in the rear by a drive-in theater; as a passion-pit, that probably served on a mass-production basis the same purpose once served by the vacant lot, where he and Jack occasionally discovered and snickered at the discarded rubber, stained handkerchiefs, and other detritus of hasty lechery. As for the gracious white house, where Terence had once known every spot, every squeaky board and dim hideaway in closets and under the eaves, it now belonged to someone who had made it a Tourist Home with noxious plastic animals on the front lawn, and called it Tumble Inn. So perish treasures of the spirit, to be born elsewhere in other guise, perhaps.
And he remembered the evening after his mother’s commitment was made definite. Jack had been home for several days, his presence helpful in the confusion, the curious desolation like and not like a death; Jack would be returning to college in the morning. Terence had gone to bed; Jack was about to, lazily delaying. “How honest shall we get, Terry? Are you, inside of you, relieved? I am.” Half undressed, Jack stood over Terence’s bed, smoking, in ever-observant kindness.
“I guess I am.”
“Bad, the last few months?”
“Each day a bit stickier. The moods. No—no way of talking to her. Every remark turned upside down. Like trying to see a room in a twisty mirror.… Jack—”
“What, kid?”
“Does it mean we shouldn’t marry?”
“No.” His brother’s quiet hand waved away smoke from between them, and the question too. “It’s probably not hereditary. Anyway your children get half the endowment from their mother. Marry a mattress type, Terry, brains optional. No, come to think, you couldn’t get along with a clothhead. Make it a mattress type with gray cells; they do exist. Might have to hunt around a little. Testing mattresses.” Jack sat down and spread his left hand light and warm on Terence’s chest, frowning off at the window, saying to it: “Got a kid brother with social conscience yet.”
It was, at sixteen, the first time Terence had encountered the full revelation of love for another, seeing that other as a complete human being all the more beloved for his separateness. He said only: “Not hereditary—how can you be sure, Jack?”
“Nobody’s sure—just the best educated guess. I saw this coming more than a year ago. Had to study into the thing for my own sake, Terry: books, talk with one of the Psycho faculty up there who seems to be able to tell his ass from a barrel of flour, useful accomplishment. I had to answer that question you asked, and others. Like for instance asking a character I saw in the mirror: How about you, Jack, you going that way too one of these days? Studying it seemed to be the only method of meeting it head on.”
“That why you switched to premed courses this year?”
“Partly. Would’ve anyhow, I think. Mother’s brains began to get hurt and kicked around when she was small, I think—but not by the genes. Wish we’d known Grandpa and Grandma Kane. They seem to have been a lovely pair of pious frauds, probably started raping her wits as soon as she could talk. Uh-huh, Terry, I’ve got every intention of marrying and plowing a few seeds into that interesting furrow. You will too, my guess.”
Terence had felt then a hunger to talk bawdy and blow the lid off in words; wondered also if he would cry, because of the secret inner fire that held no name in the language: happiness was not the name, and the new-discovered love for his brother was only a part of it, an opening of a door. “Got something all lined up?”
“Nope—playing the field. A premarriage elective. Technical studies, how to tease down the most drawers with the least squawk.” He said that with no leer but a mild pagan amusement already far removed from the idiom of Emmetville. (As it turned out, Jack went on playing the field quite a while, not marrying till he was thirty-nine; in his terms that probably made sense too.) “You haven’t tried it yet, Terry?”
The sixteen-year-old Terence flushed unhappily and shook his head on the pillow, wishing there had been a hundred experiences, suppressing an impulse to invent a few. But Jack wasn’t dismissing him back to childhood. Jack said:
“I hear tell, and ancient memories within this senile bosom do confirm, that in every well-conducted high school there is at least one—how shall I put it with utmost delicacy?—at least one kitty with an available pussy. Or two, or three.” He grinned and took his hand away. “Relax, boy. There’s no rush.” As he finished undressing with his unfussy neatness, he asked: “Remember Cassie Ferguson, in my class?”
“Cassie—black hair, skinny, lot of eyebrow. Well well.”
“Did the quiet, you-be-damn manner fool you? The ones who put out for the joy of it don’t make much noise about it. Cassie was very very good for me. More tricks than a monkey on a greased flagpole.” Jack turned out the light and sat on his own bed for a final cigarette; he said softly, recalling childhood: “We missed The Express. Did she blow?”
“She blew, she blew…”
“Good night, Terence Mann.”
He turned from the window, from the lights of Winchester. He ran the blunted tip of a thin finger along the edge of the piano’s raised leaf, a motion of affection: another friend. A friend not exactly left behind when he went to law school, but—
It seemed to Judge Mann that his present way of existence, compared to that of, say, Michael Brooks, was not very successful, important, or useful to others. A majority of his countrymen would assess it differently of course: Mr. Brooks, never a concert performer even when young—poor health, no presence, no glamor—why, the old boy probably did well to make three thousand a year, if that. Obviously the bitch goddess wouldn’t have looked twice.
He wondered (not long) why the thought of another face, familiar and vigorously detested, should have crowded away the cherished ugly features of Mr. Brooks. This face was a handsomely carved block of chilly pink meat under white hair. High falcon nose, flexible lips that squeezed a manifest delight out of elaborately precise diction. Words did not simply pass through the lips of Judge Cleever: they were escorted out, by a pair of busy pale red snakes, the only organs of the man’s face that ever knew emotion. The lips writhed, twisted, enjoyed, were sickly passionate: “that you be taken hence to the place from which you came, and thence, at the appointed time, to the place of execution, where—” but give the dreary old cannibal credit, the apparatus under that raptorial beak would squirm with the same enthusiasm when it was ordering a poached egg. The pallid blue eyes of this pillar of society were astonishingly dull. Cleever was an earnest prohibitionist: no drink, no smoking, no cussing, likely hadn’t been laid in thirty years, yet you could observe similar eyes whenever the drunk tank yielded its human load to the courts and hospitals. To learn of an original thought behind those soggy irises would be nearly as incredible as to learn of a generous one. Cleever had been a judge since the days of the political machine preceding Timmy Flack’s, into his present miasmic twilight of senility. Automatically, in a new trial, if Terence Mann were for any reason disqualified, he would sit in judgment on the life of Callista Blake.
The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 45