The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “Sincerely,

  “J.”

  “P.S. I feel we ought not to get in touch again about this for a while as there is nothing we can do. Please read between the lines and don’t be angry.”

  Since the defendant appears to find this letter amusing, I can only say that her sense of humor has not much in common with mine.

  MR. WARNER: Is the defendant on trial for changes in facial expression? I did not know that an unhappy smile was an indictable offense.

  JUDGE MANN: The comments of both counsel are out of order. Continue, please.

  MR. HUNTER: As you have already heard, members of the jury, the last letter we have here was not mailed, but found in Miss Blake’s possession. During her interrogation by Mr. Lamson, she stated certain reasons for not mailing it—part of the testimony which you have heard, to which you will give whatever weight you believe it deserves. This last letter is dated August 8th, 1959, more than a month after Miss Blake received that letter from James Doherty. I would remind you too that August 8th was the day after the picnic which has been mentioned several times in the testimony. The letter reads:

  “Dear Jimmy:

  “Understand, before you start reading this, that you need not answer it unless you wish. I will wait a while, and then take silence for your answer if that is how it must be. I had almost accepted silence already, or thought I had, most of the time this last month. But I saw you yesterday—might have stayed away, meant to, could not—with all the fog of company manners between us, and discovered what I should have known: I am not cured of you. I wish I were, and I shall be after a while. I’ve wished I could hate or despise you—can’t do that, but I’ll be able to forget you sometime, and if there’s no happiness at least there will be peace, of one sort or another.

  “I have gone by two periods, Jimmy. In those good days of June—yes, they were good—we evidently managed to start a certain arrogant little Blake-Doherty thing which now lives in me as if he belonged there. And he does. What does this knowledge do to you? Sorry? Scared? Maybe a little bit happy, or proud? Or just angry with me? I’m shocked to realize I don’t know you well enough to guess the answer.

  “One thing I will not do—and your religion would approve my decision, I believe (at the same time that it provides some cruel obstacles in the way of carrying it out). I will not, Jimmy—I will not creep off on the wrong side of our idiot laws and have an abortion. I want this child. Crazy of me it may be, but I already love it, while it’s just a blob of almost-nothing that’ll soon be making me sick and physically scared. I want it.

  “And I want the child to have a father. From the start. I’ve seen too much of petticoat government—it reeks. I don’t trust my own self to bring up a child alone. In spite of all the best knowledge I have, sooner or later I’d have some damned uprush of maternity to the brain and start making a lot of the mistakes all mothers make—including some my own mother made with me, no doubt—and nobody to check me, nobody to fill the father’s place that must not be empty if a child is to grow up straight and good. I won’t have my baby crippled that way.

  “He’s yours too, Jimmy. It’s your seed in me, the life-package from all your grandfathers and grandmothers. He’s from Ireland, dear, he’s from Italy where my father’s mother was born, he’s from one of the embraces when your sweet strong body could not free itself until I was willing to let you go. I frightened you sometimes, didn’t I? I will again, or at least I dream of it.

  “All right, let’s be sober. For religious reasons, Ann will never even consider a divorce. There is such a thing as separation, that would allow you to provide for her but live with me. The legal formula is not too important to me—I wish we might have it, but it would not hurt me to live without it, and we could educate the child so that his understanding would be too big to care for such cretinous words as ‘illegitimate.’ With your training you could find work anywhere in the States—or abroad for that matter, Canada, England, Australia. So could I. I understand the kind of art work that makes money, as well as photography. I also know shorthand and typing. We’d make out wherever we went, and be the same as married. It only needs your will for it, Jimmy, and an amount of courage that isn’t abnormal. Others faced with the same difficulty have done it.

  “Granted, Ann would be hurt badly, for a while. She’d consider us both lost in sin. (Do you?) Her pride would be hurt, and her love for you, which may be strong—I don’t know that, yes or no. Jimmy, you and Ann don’t have children. You and I do have a child. Granted also that Ann is good and sweet and conventionally right. Does that give her the right—

  Members of the jury, three words are crossed out here, but not illegible. It is my understanding that these letters will be available for the inspection of the jury; the purpose of reading them is to save time and to make sure of the correct interpretation, as Mr. Warner pointed out. Now I think I should read these crossed-out words, but will not do so if the defense has any objection. Do you wish to look at the page again, Mr. Warner?

  MR. WARNER: Not necessary, but wait a moment, please. [Conferring with defendant.] The crossed-out words may be read, so long as the jury is given the whole picture. The words are still legible, it’s true, but not clearly, and it was evidently not Miss Blake’s intention that they should be legible, if she had ever mailed the letter.

  MR. HUNTER: Thank you, Counselor. The words crossed out are “to destroy us”—“Does that give her the right to destroy us”—but with those words crossed out, the letter reads thus:

  “Does that give her the right to keep you and me apart and prevent my child from having a father?

  “Living seems to be full of situations where you can’t do a good thing without an accompanying evil. I suppose it’s questions of this kind that make people give up trying to solve their own ethical problems and ask some supernatural authority to do it for them. And yet I would think that the only answer in any such dilemma is to decide which is greater, the evil or the good. If they seem to balance, doubtless inaction is better than trying to perform your good act. But if one is clearly greater than the other, isn’t the answer plain? I know this goes contrary to your religious views, but Jimmy, this once, think whether I may not be right and yourself mistaken.

  “I am trying to think straight, about the years ahead, the child, about living with you, the difficulties we’d face. I’m trying not to remember that you did look at me yesterday once or twice as a lover might, and with the sunlight falling across your cheekbones, before I quit playing with the Wayne kids and wandered off. Maybe some time I’ll tell you where I went and what I did.

  “I can’t think of Ann as anything but an innocent bystander. She needs you in the common ways, but I—”

  Members of the jury, the letter ends there. The State rests.

  JUDGE MANN: The Court will hear any motions.

  MR. WARNER: Your Honor, I move that the case of the People against Callista Blake be dismissed on the following grounds: one, that the prosecution has not demonstrated that the death of Ann Doherty resulted from a criminal action; two, that the prosecution has not, by witnesses, connected the defendant Callista Blake with the death of Ann Doherty beyond a reasonable doubt.

  JUDGE MANN: The motion is denied, Mr. Warner. Are there other motions?

  MR. WARNER: No, your Honor, not at this time.

  JUDGE MANN: The Court stands adjourned until 1 P.M.

  CHAPTER 7

  Upon this, by us has she been required to voluntarily declare herself to be, and to have always been, a demon of the nature of a Succubus, which is a female devil whose business it is to corrupt Christians by the blandishments and flagitious delights of love. To this the speaker has replied that the affirmation would be an abominable falsehood, seeing that she had always felt herself to be a most natural woman.

  Then her irons being struck off by the torturer, t
he aforesaid has removed her dress, and has maliciously and with evil design bewildered and attacked our understanding with the sight of her body, the which, for a fact, exercises upon a man supernatural coercion.

  BALZAC, The Succubus

  I

  In the robing room after the noon recess, Judge Mann was assailed by a feeling of being out of place, ludicrously so, dismayingly. The village atheist blundering into a crowd of churchgoers to retrieve his hat; or an explorer required to take part in a tribal ritual without a briefing on the rules. Innocent oversight, by the way, on the part of local chieftains and witchdoctors, for why wouldn’t they assume that everybody knew the rules from infancy as they did? What am I doing here?

  He could ask the question of Joe Bass and receive an intelligent answer. No good. No use making Joe uneasy about the Judge’s state of mind.

  Even the door to the courtroom looked unfamiliar. Why had he never before noticed that the swirling grain of the oak resembled the smoke lines of a bonfire? He stood with his hand on the knob, reflecting also that technique is not enough: he should spend several months, say a year, in a special kind of discipline, before it would be right to start taking piano pupils—supposing he had any such intention. He turned the knob, hearing the muted uproar of a hundred conversations in the dull room beyond; opened the door a crack, and the noise became a sonorous flow; opened it then all the way, and the roar was shut off by the action, since every talker had been watching that door, impatient for the continuation of ritual. For example, I would have to learn much more about children—

  “All rise!”

  He walked to the Judge’s bench a stranger. Why the devil must they stand up? Settling their damn lunches?

  Seated, noticing how quickly today the rustle and throat-clearing subsided, his eyes were annoyed by shabbiness. Old stains, scratches on the woodwork, in every corner a pinch of dust; on every face—Callista Blake’s, Hunter’s, even Mr. Delehanty’s—the marks of that peculiarly human strain that people experience in the presence of the heavy institutions they themselves have made. Maybe his eyes were exaggerating the dust, to support the bias of his mind, which insisted on pointing up the dirt, cracks, awkwardly mended spots and general bad housekeeping of the law itself. Well, there are certain things to do before I go. “Are you ready for your opening, Mr. Warner?”

  “Yes, your Honor.” The Old Man could hardly say that no one is ever ready to send his love into the bonfire. “Members of the jury, I don’t think you want to hear any elaborate opening speech from me. A great part of the defense of Callista Blake has already been brought out by testimony for the prosecution. I am not referring only to the transcript of the interrogation of Miss Blake by District Attorney Lamson, in the course of which she told practically everything that she can tell if I put her on the witness stand. I am thinking, for example, of the testimony of a very honest and impartial State policeman, concerning footprints and other evidence by that pond in Shanesville. I’ll revert to his testimony in my closing words. I’m thinking of the testimony of Mrs. Jason.” Anyway, Mann thought, Cecil Warner’s voice was in good shape; he was slow, and calm, and steady on his feet. “And I am thinking, of course, of those letters written by Callista Blake which the District Attorney by some process of reasoning utterly beyond me—I suppose it’s reasoning—appears to regard as evidence of guilt.

  “We’re confronted here, ladies and gentlemen, by a case in which the most vital elements are intangible, subjective. Now, the law doesn’t like intangibles. That’s natural. If we’re dealing with clear, everyday facts of observation we know where we are, we’re used to thinking in those terms, we can manage as well as if we were manipulating a solid object in the hand. Take a common sort of case for an example: a man falls in getting off a bus, is injured, and sues the traction company. All right: you’ve got eyewitnesses, medical testimony, and a few fairly simple questions to decide: did he fall? was he injured, and if so how badly? was the bus company at fault, and if so what’s a just compensation for the injuries? A jury will have minor difficulties in a case like that: there’s the possibility that the man’s a clever fraud, and since most people are not good observers, the eyewitnesses may contradict each other a little, but on the whole juries don’t have too hard a time in reaching a fair verdict in such cases.

  “Here it’s not so. In this case the tangible facts are hardly in dispute, the vital problem is the interpretation of those facts. There was aconitine in Callista Blake’s apartment; the defense has not denied it. I know, and Callista Blake knows, why it was there; the State will try to tell you it was there because of a deep-laid premeditated plot to kill Ann Doherty. Ann Doherty did drink the poison there, undoubtedly; we know it happened accidentally, the State will say she was intended to drink it. The State has demonstrated an affair between Callista Blake and James Doherty; we have not denied it nor thought of denying it. And the State, by inference, supplies Callista Blake with the motive of common jealousy and argues that this led to premeditated murder. Now Callista herself knows that isn’t so; I know it, and so do a few others really well acquainted with her: they’re aware that no degree of sexual jealousy would ever drive her to perform such an act. But how in the world is she to prove it to twelve honest jurors who never saw her before the trial? It’s just not in the field of tangible proof. I could put her on the stand, and if she talked to you all day long, what could she say on that subject that isn’t already said in the traditional words she’s already spoken when she was indicted?—‘I am not guilty.’ Finally, the defense does not deny that Callista Blake drove out to Shanesville soon after Ann Doherty left. The State will have it that she went out there in a sort of pursuit of Ann Doherty, to make sure Ann died. We know she did it because she had just discovered that Ann might have got some of that stuff; we know she went out there in an attempt to reach Ann before it was too late and save her life; and it was too late, and Ann Doherty was dead. So there you have state and prosecution asserting precise contraries. We cannot, by tangible evidence, prove the intentions, motives, ideas of Callista Blake; neither can the State. In this connection I’ll merely remind you for the present that the State’s own witness Sergeant Shields very clearly and carefully said there was no way of telling how Ann’s body got into the pond; he made it clear there isn’t a scrap of that precious tangible evidence to show that Callista Blake did anything except stand there and look down, as she told Mr. Lamson she did.

  “Because of the nature of the case, the primary questions of reasonable doubt and criminal intent or absence of it, I am intending to call only two witnesses for the defense. As a prosecutor, and taking it for granted that he has somehow honestly convinced himself of Callista Blake’s guilt, it was unavoidable that my able adversary should have piled up all that mass of circumstantial evidence, even though hardly any of it was in dispute. As a prosecutor, he had to do it; trying to your patience as well as mine, but that’s how the law works. Yet when the dust of argument has settled and you’ve gone into that jury room, I think you’ll see—or more likely you do already—how the whole thing comes down to the question whether or not you believe Callista’s word. The two witnesses I mean to call are the two who can come nearer than any others to telling you, showing you, convincing you, what kind of girl, what kind of human being Callista Blake really is. And I have no more to say by way of argument until after they have been heard. Miss Edith Nolan, please!”

  She came forward not briskly but with poise, her thin face showing the gravity of concentration. She wore the same green tweed suit, in some need of pressing, that she had worn all through the trial. The dark shade, nearly the green of hemlock, set off her red hair pleasantly, the Judge thought, but did not belong too well with light blue eyes; and to wear the same costume four days running was maybe a little odd. He noticed also, and hoped the jury would not, her moment’s hesitation as Mr. Delehanty recited the oath and held out the Bible for her. Probably she woul
d prefer to affirm but had decided against such action to avoid offending the jury, accepting what to her might be a distasteful absurdity for the sake of her friend. Edith Nolan would not be, like Mrs. Jason, a truth-teller at any cost, though the Judge supposed that whatever she said would be in the service of truth as she saw it.

  And what would Callista Blake do if and when it was time for her to take the oath? If Callista had learned anything yet about the grown-up necessities of compromise, it did not appear in the evidence nor in her own actions thus far. The girl who made the responses in the Lamson interrogation seemed too young, too sharply earnest to understand flexibility or the art of yielding minor issues for the sake of great ones. He thought: Let her learn it quickly! And instructed himself irritably to quit borrowing trouble ahead of time.

  Miss Nolan also took care to make no open demonstration of the friendship which the Judge knew existed between herself and Cecil Warner. One swift eloquent glance he saw, a silent declaration: “I’m with you and will do whatever I can.” Then she was in the witness chair, private tensions skillfully hidden, giving routine information: age thirty-one, unmarried, portrait and free-lance photographer, A.B. Radcliffe plus a year of art school, studio and residence at 96 Hallam Street, Winchester.