“There isn’t time, sir, there isn’t time. Are you implying that not everyone is snotty?”
“Something like that.”
“But then we can have no trial. No trial, no justice, no fun. Ah, damn it, I was looking forward to a hanging, with a bang-up speech from the platform and not a dry eye in the entire public square except for a few pickpockets and sellers of soft drinks.”
“Callista—”
“Sir! No—fair enough. I’ll put my scepter down. Maybe I’m tired of being queen. But may I keep my crown a while?”
“You’ve always worn it.”
“No. No. Bring your chair—no, take this one, Cecil. I’d like to sit on the floor with my head on your knee—not that you’re like my father at all. My crown—oh, put it away somewhere, keep it, I don’t care. I don’t hear that wind any more. Is it turning cold?”
“Yes, it’s quite cold tonight. Callista, the prosecution will finish tomorrow, with the reading of those letters. We’ll probably open after the noon recess.… Is there anything, anything at all, you haven’t told me?”
“Yes.”
“You said, in court today, you said there was something.”
“Yes. Why did you stop moving your hand over my hair? I loved it. That’s better. Cecil, I am guilty.”
“The—blank?”
“Yes. Haven’t you almost known it all along?”
“No. But I’ve been afraid you might remember something, or convince yourself that you’ve remembered it, and so come to believe yourself guilty.”
“Oh, Cecil, this isn’t belief, this is knowledge. You’re trying to give me a way out before you even hear. It’s like this: it came back as a clear auditory memory, the dull noise of that bottle being pulled forward on the shelf, and the cork, and a clink of glass, then the tap of her little high heels outside the bedroom door. I remembered what she said, each word very clear in that high sweet voice of hers: ‘Callie, come on now!—I poured a little drink for you.’ That’s how it was, Cecil. And I lay still. I didn’t speak. Knowing what might happen. I won’t say, wishing for it to happen, but knowing, Cecil. Oh, sure enough, my mind squirmed around a bit trying to imagine the drink was from an innocent bourbon bottle, but knew all the time that the bourbon had been emptied the week before and the bottle thrown away. I’m no split personality, Cecil. Call it a paralysis from conflicting drives, if you want to. The self that had no wish to murder was the same self that—that hated her guts and wished she was dead. So I lay still. And my brain began generating the smoke-screen, first the useless fraud about a bourbon bottle that wasn’t there, then the amnesia.”
“I don’t believe you hated her guts, Callista. She was a frustration, someone in the way, as T.J. would insist on saying, has said in fact. But I don’t think you hated her as a person.”
“Not for long, but long enough. I killed her.”
“That was a thing that happened. You did not will it to happen. You were sick, bewildered, temporarily unable to prevent it from happening. If you’d been out in the living-room with her—do you remember that bronze paper-knife you kept on the table, a handsome thing with a sharp point? She was small, slight, your arms are strong. You know you could never in the world have taken it up against her.”
“Why, dear apologist, you’re only saying that I’m a coward about physical violence. I killed her by lying still. She’s as dead as if I’d taken that knife to her. I say the guilt is greater. Seeing red might have excused me, or so most people would say. My very cowardice, weakness, retreat—that’s what killed her. Cecil, I killed her by a failure in simple decency and common sense. If I’d been decent, sensible, I’d have run out there the moment I heard that bottle move on the shelf.”
“Callista, if the good, the righteous, the respectable were half as stern in self-judgment as you are—”
“Oh, there’d be no living with them at all. Mother’s a Colonial something-or-other because some worm-eaten ancestor was a Saint in the Bay Colony. I think Father must have laughed at it, but I was too young to get the point. The Puritan in me gives many a squirm. But the point is, my self-judgment serves no one now—she’s dead. Well, it seems to be a jury of the righteous and respectable, more or less, who are stern enough in judging others, I’ve noticed. Cecil, will you give me a sharp honest answer to a question you don’t want me to ask?”
“I’ll try.”
“Do you think we have a chance?”
“Of course we have a chance. Today was bad. They’ll go on feeling Judd’s collapse, in spite of common sense, in spite of everything. The poor guy couldn’t have done us more harm if he’d been trying. T.J. will manage to drop in some apparently inadvertent reminder of it, no doubt in his closing speech when I’m done talking—hell, mere mention of Judd’s name in a baritone tremolo would be enough, and there’s no legal barrier against that. Terence will charge the jury again to forget it, and most of them will honestly try to, which would mean something only if people knew how to watch their own minds. And today was bad because this was the day when they laid out the heavy circumstantial stuff, proving your episode with Jim, making it official on the aconite, all that. But now, dear, so far as evidence is concerned, T.J. has finished, done his worst. Those letters to be read tomorrow aren’t evidence. T.J. just thinks they are. He’ll try to interpret them as indicating premeditation as well as motive; I know better, and I think I can make that fly up and hit him in the face, in my own closing speech or sooner. I’m not painting it bright for you, Callista. It’s not bright. But we have a chance. There is this: with your story clearly told—as it has been already, really, in that Lamson interrogation—it passes my understanding how anyone in his right mind could find first degree.”
“Mr. Lamson had the answer. Remember?—‘the fact is, my dear girl, we just don’t believe your story.’”
“Hell with Butch Lamson—he’s not the jury.”
“You think they might find second degree?”
“That could happen. The only just verdict would be involuntary man-slaughter.”
“My love, can’t you hear me? I’ve told you, I am guilty. Twenty to life. What do people feel when they cry out ‘O God! O God!’—does the sound do something for them?”
“I don’t know, Callista. I was never religious. Were you, ever?”
“Not for real, I guess. Away back, soon after Father died, I think the fluff and tinsel mythology of Sunday school had some hold on me for a short while. But I kept remembering a few of Father’s comments, spoken when I was too young to get the point. They fell into place finally, made sense. When I was thirteen I told Mother I wasn’t going to make the motions any more. Stuck it out, too, with a bit of surprising help from Herb. One of the rare times I’ve seen him lose his temper—popped half-way out of the armchair while Mother was lecturing, and said: ‘God damn it, Vic, let the kid do her own thinking! She will anyway.’ I could’ve loved him for that, if he hadn’t lapsed back into being Herb Chalmers—if he wasn’t a stepfather—if I wasn’t a crossgrained bitch who never knows how to make advances at the right time. Well, that time Mother was so startled the artillery just didn’t function. She went meek, maybe to see what Herb would do next—which was nothing. But also she never bothered me about it again, much. I suppose because her own religion is pure social conformity. If she’d had any serious convictions I might have had a battle on my hands. Twenty to life. What happens tomorrow?”
“The letters first. We sit quiet and hear them. I can’t ask you to display anything you don’t feel, Callista—as an actress, my dear, you’re nowhere. But if you feel—well, indifferent about those letters; if it seems all far away and irrelevant, don’t let your face shout to the jury that you feel that way.”
“I’ll be thinking of the briers. They’ll read no indifference in me then, I think.”
“The briers—”
>
“Where I lost my baby, Cecil. Some little tree whipped me across the face when I was leaving there—a birch, I think. I remember I was superstitiously grateful, glad of the sting. A primitive game, Cecil, the mind snatching at notions of punishment and atonement. We’re still savages, and I suppose some of the time there’s no harm in it. As if the birch tree—the whole dark place, and the thorns—had accomplished enough of the punishment so that I could meet the rest well enough. And maybe the savage, the poor greasy primordial Eve down inside, would say that I have, so far. After the letters, the State rests?”
“I expect it. Hunter doesn’t bother much with surprises—not his method. The State rests, and I move they dismiss the case, and Terence will deny the motion because he must.”
“Part of the ritual?”
“In a way. We open then, probably after an early noon recess. The defense is going to be brief, Callista. It’s better that way. We have only a few things to say. Reiterating them too much might turn the jury against us. They’ve heard the essence of the defense already, in my remarks, the cross-examinations, the Lamson interrogation. We mustn’t repeat ourselves too much, because—well, heaven help any defendant if the jury is bored. What’s happened is that, in effect, we’re required to prove a negative. In the sense of tangible proof, on the same level as—oh, say Peterson’s photographs—the thing is impossible. Proving a negative usually is, and that’s fairly common knowledge among people who think at all. I’ll bear down on it when I talk to them in closing, and before then. We must also insist on the element of reasonable doubt. I can see that Terence is very much aware of that aspect, and you must have noticed how he’s given us every break he possibly could. Including some that surprised me. I shall open the defense by calling Edith. She’s prepared to say anything at all that might help you, and if T.J. tries to get tough with her in cross-examination I’m sorry for him, that’s all. She’ll make a monkey out of him, and I believe she’ll remember the jury every minute while she does it. In her direct testimony, the thing that will help most will be her emphasis on that suicidal depression.”
“Haven’t I already told Mr. Lamson that no one else knew of it?”
“Yes, but Edith did know, don’t you think?”
“She knew I was unhappy.”
“She’s told me that you gave her the story about Jim, after that damn letter of his.”
“Yes, I went to pieces too, that once. But at that time I wasn’t even quite certain yet about the pregnancy. As for the suicide thing, why, I wasn’t consciously thinking in those terms until the day of the picnic. It was all over, you know, but I’m female enough so I didn’t enjoy watching Jim the tender husband and Ann acting like a new bride, Jim all braced to speak to me politely but hoping to God he wouldn’t have to—and also wanting to—yes, I could feel that. So I wandered off into that part of the garden. It wasn’t till I noticed the monkshood plants that I started telling myself how that way wouldn’t hurt. Then I was digging up two or three, just to look at them. I nibbled at one, and spat it out.”
“You saw Edith every day that week, didn’t you? Went to the studio as usual?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, she knew you were in the depths. She loves you. Your moods aren’t the mystery to her that they are to most people, Callista. As for her factual knowledge—well, you might as well be prepared to hear her exaggerate that a little, even lie some about how much she knew if she thinks it will help you.”
“I’m strangely rich and fortunate. I have two friends.”
“I wish we were stronger. Well, after Edith testifies, then you, if you will promise me one thing—two things.”
“One, that I shall not say I am guilty.”
“Yes. The other is that when Hunter is attacking you, as he will, without mercy and with every trick he knows, you’ll remember that you, and your friends, desire you to live.”
“That I can promise. The other—”
“Callista, look up at me.”
“Not yet. In a moment.”
“Tell me this: is there any virtue, any rational good, in declaring a literal truth when misinterpretation is inevitable, when you know to a certainty that your hearers cannot grasp the whole truth nor keep the partial truth in proportion, nor even guess at the background, the related truths?”
“Virtue—rational good—I’m too confused, Cecil. Other thoughts. I don’t know. I suppose not.”
“You call yourself guilty—of a momentary lapse that happened to end in disaster. But if you say that much, the jury will inevitably charge you with a different sort of guilt. They will say: she brooded and planned to murder her lover’s wife, the old story—let her burn! But is it right, reasonable, is it anything but insane, that for such a lapse, when you were sick in mind and body, you should be strapped in a chair and the life burned out of you?”
“You can frighten me, Cecil. It’s strange. I don’t think the brute fact has really frightened me before, not completely. It wasn’t real.”
“It’s real. I was trying to frighten you. You must not say on the stand what you’ve said to me tonight. I know it to be truth, because you’ve said it to me. Telling it to the jury will not serve truth, because their minds will make a lie of it. Look up at me now.”
“I’ll promise it, I think—for a bargain. I’ll lie by silence, in return for a promise from you.”
“A promise—what is it, Callista?”
“Promise me that if I am acquitted, I may come to you, live with you—in marriage or not, it doesn’t matter—love you and care for you so long as I can have you. Give me that, and then I will lie, I’ll swear anything to save my life, I’ll be such an actress—”
“Callista, I’m sixty-eight, old and fat and ugly and tired.”
“Hush. Understand. It’s you, you, you—the self in you, not old nor young nor anything but you. Promise me. My promise for yours. No other terms.”
“I promise it.”
“Now I can look up at you. Now I know that what Edith said is true: living is journeying, and love’s a region we can enter for a while.”
“Yes, a region that changes if only because we do ourselves. Some try to prevent that, I suppose. They want it to be a closed room thick with perfume and curtains drawn against all weather, against night and day.”
“But when I come to you—you’ve promised it—I’ll make it a region of summer, of morning and summer evening and every star at night.”
II
COURT OF GENERAL SESSIONS
OF WINCHESTER COUNTY, NEW ESSEX
December 10, 1959
Action: People vs. Callista Blake; Justice Terence Mann presiding.
Court in session at 0956.
JUDGE MANN: Do I understand, Mr. Hunter, that you wish to have read to the jury the letters that were admitted in evidence before adjournment yesterday?
MR. HUNTER: Yes, your Honor. I am prepared to read—to go ahead with that right away.
JUDGE MANN: Let them be read by the clerk of the court.
MR. DELEHANTY: Your Honor, I have a—not laryngitis exactly, but a sort of cold. I’m perfectly ready to do as the Court directs, only I’m afraid that with this cold or whatever it is, maybe my voice won’t be too clear to the jury.
JUDGE MANN: Well… Yes, Mr. Warner?
MR. WARNER: Your Honor, the defense will not object to a reading of these letters by Mr. Hunter himself. I am certain my learned colleague would never take any improper advantage of his dramatic ability, admittedly great. Very often, however, written words are capable of conveying different meanings according to where the emphasis is placed, not because of any willful misconstruction, but simply because our language is not always a precise instrument. Therefore I would only stipulate, request rather, that if there should be any doubt in my mind, or in my client’s mind, t
hat the meaning of the letters is being correctly conveyed, we may have the privilege of interrupting the reading at that point, to indicate what we believe is the right interpretation.
JUDGE MANN: Is that agreeable to you, Mr. Hunter?
MR. HUNTER: Yes, your Honor, so long as the interruptions have to do with important points, not trivialities.
MR. WARNER: Sir, there are no trivialities in this case.
MR. HUNTER: Subject to the limitation I mentioned, the request of the defense appears reasonable, and I will not argue it.
JUDGE MANN: You may proceed, Mr. Hunter.
MR. HUNTER: The first of these letters, acknowledged by the defense to have been written by Callista Blake to James Doherty, is dated the 10th of May, 1959. Members of the jury, my dramatic ability is not, as Mr. Warner has described it, great. Any drama here is provided by the force of events, not by me. I must simply ask you to remember, while you hear these letters, that they (that is, the first three and the fifth) were written by a girl nineteen years of age, in the summer of this year, under the influence of a love affair which the testimony of witnesses has established and the defense has not denied. The first letter reads as follows:
“Jimmy—
“Tonight I cannot see you—that was really all I understood over the telephone, though I know you gave me the decent sensible reasons why you cannot come—something about work at the office, wasn’t it?—for as soon as I heard you say that, I thought, Oh, bang goes the whole batch of cookies. You see, I was going to be domestic for you tonight, and I had just taken some cookies from the oven when you phoned—the airy egg-white kind, a sort of culinary idiocy because no damn good the next day, like letting air out of a tire. Therefore if I were a weeping wench they would now be soaked in brine and serve you right. But I never weep, Jimmy. Never. Remember that. So, since you cannot come, I will only count over the times I’ve had you with me, a miser adoring the sparkle and fall of jewels through her fingers. While you are submerged in the honest dreadfulness of whatever you do at the office—what the devil is it anyhow?—do you convey subtle conveyances and do dark deeds (these are puns) or just sit with your feet up and brood over Deals?—think of me playing with my pretties and having a better time than yourself, because this is all I can wish to do when you’re away from me. Because I love you.
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