The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “Callista and I put the human race on trial the other night. We came to no conclusion, no verdict.”

  “Well, I think there’s an obvious verdict in that case, and maybe only one possible at the present stage.”

  “So? You tell me.”

  “Not proven.”

  “I should have thought of that. Cal would like it. I’ll remember to tell her.” Beyond the melancholy and desolation of his face she saw Herb Chalmers returning along the row of empty seats. Warner nodded to him morosely. “Herb. All by yourself?”

  “I took Vic home.” Herb Chalmers showed the dubious tension of a news-bringer. “Cecil, what way does the jury-room face?”

  “What way?” The Old Man’s eyebrows bunched aggressively in perplexity. “The Court Street side. Why, Herb?”

  “They’re yawping a Courier extra on the street. Judd died in the hospital a couple of hours ago.” He pulled a smeary paper from his overcoat and handed it to Warner, who stared at the splash of black ink and let the thing slither to the floor. “A brass-lunged newsboy, Cecil: ‘Blake Case Witness Dies ree aw abowit!’”

  “Some fool,” Warner said—“some fool in the jury-room is bound to open a window, to let the smoke out.”

  “He was shouting pretty plain. I could make out the words a block away. Any legal significance, you think?”

  “I doubt it, Herb.” Warner looked up hopelessly. “Anyway she gains nothing from a mistrial. Likely it wouldn’t even go before the same judge, a second time. Everything that could happen,” he said. “Malice, chance, blind circumstance, human frailty. Even the malice nobody’s fault really—not even T.J.’s. He’s something worked by strings.”

  “They can’t find first degree,” Edith said, and hated the querulous shake in her voice, its jaded insistence on what she could not know.

  “Twenty to life,” said Warner.

  “She’s young,” Edith said. “She’s very young.”

  Herb asked: “Wouldn’t actually be twenty, would it? Don’t they—”

  “She’s young,” said Warner, his voice all bitterness, “and it wouldn’t actually be twenty years.”

  The door on the right opened for a court officer, who spoke to someone over his shoulder. Warner stood up, breathing carefully. Edith caught his arm; he looked down almost angrily. “Cecil, tell her I’d like her to try it in watercolor.”

  “Oh. Yes. I’ll go with her now.” He was hurrying down the aisle.

  Herb said: “What—he meant to say he’d go to her, I suppose.”

  “He knew what he was saying. Sit here. Stay with me, please.”

  She watched the courtroom coming alive. Knowledge of the jury’s returning had spread as if by a spark of telepathy. A group of the last-ditch curious straggled back from the corridors, and newsmen who must have been waiting at some point of vantage outside, and Mr. Delehanty—gravely ready at his desk before the Twelve filed in.

  Judge Terence Mann came in and took his place without delay, moving for once not easily but with a suggestion of middle age. He did not reach as usual for his note-pad and pencil; he dropped his thin rugged hands on the desk and stared at the space between them until his eyes must turn, like all the others, to the door on the left.

  She was with Cecil Warner. She looked at once for Edith, and seeing her stepfather also she smiled once, quickly and warmly—a new thing to remember. She held closely to Warner’s arm until they reached the defense section; then she stood alone, not troubling to seat herself. No doubt someone, the Judge or Mr. Delehanty, should have told her to sit down; but she remained standing until the jury, at Judge Mann’s word, self-consciously rose.

  Mr. Francis Fielding looked tired and for the first time regretful.

  “Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict in the case now before you?”

  Peter Anson said: “We have.”

  Callista looked on the jury as Edith had never seen her look on others before. It was a look of patience resembling friendliness, a look that one might naturally give to strangers who were confronted by a painful difficulty and not quite able to understand its nature.

  “What is your verdict?”

  “We find the defendant, Callista Blake, guilty of murder in the first degree, without recommendation of mercy.”

  III

  From a letter written by Terence Mann, formerly Justice of the Court of General Sessions of Winchester County, New Essex, July 17, 1960, to Dr. John Sever Mann, of Boston:

  … For that matter, I can hardly understand that more than a week has passed since Callista died. My sense of time seems to be still slightly distorted. For many days and months, too much to endure and understand, hope for and relinquish; then quiet, aftermath. Finished. The new things that begin, some of them surely good, are not yet clear in my mind, nor in Edith’s—we’re tired, Jack.

  Last night I finished and mailed that letter I told you about, to the president of the New Essex Bar Association, setting out in writing my reasons for resigning from the bench. Mr. Paulus, president of the B.A., is a very pleasant character, a successful gentleman but also mellow and moderately philosophical, capable of filling that position with no sense of strain, and yet able to see quite a distance into a stone wall. In him, I’d say that intellectual compromise rises to the level of a fine art, a hedonistic achievement which I respect, though I can’t imitate it—my own hedonism requires its ethical frame of reference to be in plain sight, accessible, subject to change if reason demands. You might understand Paulus better than I do, since in your work compromise (though a very different kind) has to be the order of the day. You try to help your patients live in the jungle, which must mean plenty of yielding here to gain a little there. Well, what I started to say—Paulus is a good joe. It was Paulus who kindly suggested, away back at the time of my resignation, that I should write such a letter, and he gave me advance permission to send copies to newspapers if I cared to—which I’ve done. Perhaps some of them will allow my cerebral verbiage to rub for a moment against Miss Americas and Russian face-making.

  I wasn’t able to start that letter at the time of my resignation. I kept putting it off. For a while—April and most of May—Edith and I were in a suspended mental state, waiting out the appellate decision. I couldn’t say it to Edith—(especially since we knew by that time that she was pregnant, your first nephew apparently aiming for next February)—I couldn’t say it to her, but after the appeal was denied I never had any hope of the Governor. I know him, a cultured nothing, mentally gelded by the modern political rule, never stick your neck out. Even his fishing trip last week was perfectly predictable.

  I began my letter to Paulus after the appeal was denied, and it may be worth something, for the record, but not very much. The memory of newspaper readers is remarkably short, I think. Last week there was the inevitable frenzy over the execution here in Winchester, and I guess elsewhere—I haven’t looked at the out-of-town papers. Mostly pointless—all of it, so far as saving Callista’s life was concerned—the few reasonable voices drowned out by the crackpots petting their emotions in public. This week—oh, in the houses and bars and restaurants this week I doubt if there’s very much talk about Callista Blake. And if a few newspapers publish my letter, or as much of it as will fit comfortably in half a column, most readers will be honestly puzzled: Terence Mann, who the devil’s he?

  It’s natural, you needn’t tell me, Jack. We aren’t geared to endure sustained high tension very long—though didn’t I hear you say once that some patients have surprised you in that respect? The week of the trial was enough to kill Cecil Warner—understandable of course, he must have been ill before it began. I wish you could have met him. I saw him only once after his collapse the night of the verdict. He got home—I think I never told you this—by himself, walked home I believe. His housekeeper called me in the morning because he w
as asking to see me. His doctor wouldn’t let me stay very long—he grew too distressed by the effort to tell me something when words wouldn’t come. It was mostly about Callista’s letters, something he wanted me to understand, as if I were capable of sitting in judgment—but I was not then, Jack, and never have been. Edith was there too—the first time I’d met her outside the courtroom. Warner said, so far as I can bring back the words: “I couldn’t believe the letters wouldn’t get through to them. I thought they had to hear the truth in them, the reason and the sweetness—but I was only sending a child into a snake pit.” He said: “The guilt’s mine, Judge—I’ve killed her, by trusting human nature.” That’s when his doctor told me I had to go, but he let Edith stay, easy to see why. She has that ability—I think you’ve felt it yourself—of sharing her own steadiness. It’s a personal magic—I’ll never know how she does it. I have, myself, achieved enough tranquillity, mental security, to see me through, especially since our marriage and my resignation from the bench. But I seldom seem able to give others the benefit of it; they are most likely to be irritated because I don’t share their excitements of the moment. You have a good deal of her kind of magic yourself.

  Well, there at Warner’s house she came out to me later, told me how he’d talked more quietly a while, forgetting much of the present, and taking pleasure in the sound of ocean, which no one else would hear in this inland town, but he could hear it out of childhood. He died that night.

  My letter to Paulus was, as I said, too cerebral, and that’s why it has left me discontented, aware of much that still ought to be said.

  In that letter I marshalled all the familiar arguments against capital punishment, for the sake of logic and completeness. Paulus has heard them all, and so have most citizens above the moron level. Capital punishment does not deter, nor have any effect on the crime rate one way or another—repeatedly demonstrated by statistical study long before the time of Warden Lawes; vengeance does not restore life, but only adds another evil, namely murder by the state; there can never be complete assurance that the innocent will not be punished and the guilty go free; punishment itself serves no purpose except to excite the self-deceptive emotions of the punisher; and so on, Jack. While I listed and discussed these and lesser arguments in my letter, I grew increasingly discouraged, mostly by realization that it has all been said before, more persuasively than I know how to say it, that the arguments on the other side seem (at least to my best understanding) monstrously shabby, unrealistic, archaic, some of them plain sadism with its nakedness barely hidden by doubletalk, and yet the laws remain on the books.

  You’re a headshrinker, Jack—why do so many minds cling to unreason with such a sullen fury? I am thinking of people like Judge Cleever, or people who can read the entire transcript of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and still declare briskly and earnestly that the innocent are never punished. How do they do it? What’s the faculty of the mind that makes it possible for an intelligent being to look directly on a glaring fact and somehow will it out of sight? For my part I cannot, from sheer physical inability, believe a lie when the demonstration is before me.

  And so finally, when I had done all I could with the clear, sensible, familiar arguments that have beaten on Paulus’ head for forty-odd years without ever moving him to act on them, I found that I was closing my discourse with nothing more nor less than a plea for humility.

  This was perhaps a little different, a little new—or would have been if I had not felt obliged to write my letter in academic and parliamentary language. I think no one ever said to Mr. Paulus: “You, sir, although an exceptionally decent and clever sample of Homo quasi-sapiens, are much too stupid and ignorant to decide whether another human being shall live or die; and so am I, and so are all your colleagues, and all policemen, all Governors, and all juries.” I did say, in terms not obscure, that my reason for resigning the judgeship was that I felt my own self incompetent to decide a question of that magnitude. Since he knows I am not a fool, not badly educated as such things go, not grossly inferior to others in my profession, and not given to false modesty, maybe the implications were clear enough to exert some force.

  Then having gone so far, it was necessary for the sake of honesty as well as politeness to say what I could for the law on the credit side. You can’t (as Callista Blake said) have a human society without laws. The civil law, and with many reservations the criminal law, stumbles and bumbles through a vast amount of necessary work, and not too badly. Concepts broaden, eventually. The law in these years begins to listen more intelligently to your (very young and new) profession, Jack; I predict that quite soon the dear old McNaughton Rule will find its proper place—in historical textbooks. And so long as there are laws, why, the function of a judge is probably required at certain times, and if the judge has intelligence it is a potential means of serving order and human approximations of justice. On the personal level, I admitted to Mr. Paulus that if I had remained in office I could have done much useful work for many years, doing at the same time no more harm than most judges do, and less than some.

  But I did not retreat into the formula of declaring that my decision was purely a matter of private conscience. Mr. Paulus may so describe and pigeonhole it, but I did not say that. What is so private about a conscience if it directs the life and actions of a man? I could not soften the implication that any judge who opposes capital punishment and yet remains in office in a state which keeps that on the books is obliged to justify such compromise before the bar of his own reason. He can do that: he can say that his compromise enables him in the long run to do more good than harm. That is honest; that I can respect. But I say, let him remember that it is still a compromise with evil. And I say also that it cannot be my way.

  I think that in the end all honest reasoning does arrive at the necessity of humility. In effect you say to all your patients: “I don’t know much about you, you don’t know much about yourself; let’s try to find out more, and make what use of it we can, and remember then that we still don’t know very much.” Or as my own dearest teacher used to say to me: “Bring out the inner voices.” No one ever knew all he was capable of learning, or all he needed to learn. The individual self is the heart of everything we understand, the world’s endless complexity being the product of all individual selves living and dead. About the self of another we know one thing for certain and only one: it exists. Therefore, not as a supernatural dictum but as the command of a human being to himself: Thou shalt not kill. Therefore, more light! Therefore, humility.

  I am one of the fortunate of course. I think, Jack, that by next September I can decently start teaching music—with humility, at least something of the strength and humility that I felt in my teacher Michael Brooks but was too much of a child to understand. I shall write books and articles—I told Callista that; or rather I agreed, for it was the first thing she thought of when she learned of my resignation from the bench, and all I had to say was yes. I have a redheaded wife who doesn’t allow dull moments, though we have many peaceful ones, and we shall have children who will undoubtedly teach me a good deal about humility, if only through the slow and touchy business of learning it themselves. But Edith and I will not turn smug and insulated with our good fortune, I think—we know and remember too much for that.

  I was able to see Callista several times in the death house. I remember I wrote you a little about some of those visits, probably not too well. The first time was right after my resignation. I felt I had to see her and talk to her, if only for my own sake. It was no crawling search for “forgiveness”—she would have thought that absurd and contemptible; she knew (I think) as well as I know, that during the trial I was partly a mechanism on the bench, partly a bewildered and rather inexperienced man who liked her and did not want her to die. But I was undeniably in search of understanding. She was someone who had gone into regions I had never known—not all of them dark and fearful either, for surely her brilliance, i
nsight, humor, daydreams, were quite as meaningful as her suffering. She was also someone who was articulate, observant, wise, and could therefore tell me something of those regions, if she was willing. In meeting Callista you somehow by-passed “forgiveness” and other vanities. I think it was because, when she was not too unhappy, she was often able to speak from mind and heart at the same time. She had no acidulous interest in puncturing sham for the sake of puncturing it. It was simply that, once friendship and communication were established, she was so straightforward and clear-minded that one’s own shams and self-deceptions showed themselves up as abominations, and one could only wish to be rid of them, and to exist for a while on her level. She would never have thought of asking a friend to be honest; she merely took it for granted that he would be, took it for granted with an innocence and uncalculated kindness that even Edith says she can’t understand.

  Never suppose that Callista wanted to die. She wanted life, and all it might have brought her. She followed closely and hopefully everything that we were trying to do, the appeal, the later efforts. She was happy and intensely interested when she learned that Edith and I had become close friends and then lovers; it was Callista who urged us to marry without too much waiting. She wanted to know everything about this Emmetville house we’ve bought—yes, I listen for The Express, though it’s always a Diesel now and doesn’t sound quite right to you and me—and she seemed to get a wholly relaxed, natural fun out of telling us how to fix the guest room where she would sometimes be staying. When I told her of Edith’s pregnancy (not even sure that I ought to) she was happy—I swear there was not one moment in the little time I had with her that day when I could see any shadow on her face, any hint that she was comparing Edith’s lot with her own. Later of course, after I was gone—but no one will ever know about that.