“Does this rabbi know of your relationship with the mayor and his wife?” the judge asked.
“No, Your Honor, but if the rabbi objects, I will recuse myself and Mr. Frohling can assign someone else.”
“Have you spoken to this rabbi?” Spodapoulos asked Hornstein.
“I volunteered my services to Attorney Jacob Moskovitzky who is assisting him.”
“This is just an arraignment,” Spodapoulos said. “I will appoint SCLS to represent Mr. Levy. If Mr. Frohling assigns this case to you, Ms. Devlin, I will require Mr. Levy to file his written consent with the court; otherwise, I will disqualify you in favor of another SCLS attorney.” Spodapoulos scribbled an entry on the case file. “I assume you will enter a plea of not guilty, Ms. Devlin.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Hornstein objected. “Mr. Levy lacks the capacity to make this decision without independent legal advice.”
“You represented to the court Mr. Levy has the assistance of Attorney Jacob Moskovitzky.” The judge turned to Levy. “Is that correct, Mr. Levy?”
Hornstein interrupted. “Attorney Moskovitzky is impaired by age.”
“Mr. Levy?” Spodapoulos said. “Do you wish to be heard?”
Levy’s chains jangled. His expression darkened to one Maddie easily read because she had seen it so often. He wanted to say something, but had been instructed not to, an important piece of information no one had shared with her. His squint, his sneer, told her he didn’t want her to represent him. It was as obvious as the locks of hair covering the sideburns on either side of his face. She glanced at the judge who had either ignored or missed the cues.
“Mr. Levy?” Spodapoulos repeated.
Levy paused, then said, “Rabbi ben Reuben knows best.”
“The hearing on defendant’s application for bail will be Friday next at 10 a.m.” Spodapoulos rapped his gavel. “This matter stands adjourned.”
Court officers escorted Levy to the holding cell. In the hall outside the court-room, reporters scrummed for position. Maddie slipped her notepad into her brief-case.
“Sneak us out the back way,” C. J. Ant said to Joe Daley who hesitated. “Please.”
“For you,” Daley replied.
-6-
Frohling had just opened his mouth to eat another prune Danish when Maddie burst into his office with the single-mindedness of a cop kicking in the door of a drug-house raid. “Thanks for the heads up to Hornstein,” she said. Anger imprisoned in court-room decorum now animated her. “It was my ex-husband’s trial all over again.”
In her mind’s eye, she visualized herself smashing the prune Danish across Frohling’s face, laughing as he scraped the gooey frosting off his lips, nose, and cheeks. Impacted rage, Maddie’s therapist had once told her, it’s your full-time job. It’s a colloquial name, the therapist had explained, for a manifestation of a psychiatric disorder classified as Intermittent Explosive Disorder. At its worst, a person with IED was the equivalent of an EF-5 tornado in human form.
Three incidents within a month of Elizabeth’s death had landed Maddie on the therapist’s couch. The first occurred after Maddie had bought an ice cream cone, frozen pudding. Eating it as she walked, she stubbed her toe on uneven pavement and momentarily lost her balance, dropping the ice cream from the cone. Crushing the cone in her fist, she threw it at the nearest parking meter; then, screamed uncontrollably at the lump of ice cream on the sidewalk, hurling every curse word she knew at it as if she herself were sprawled on the pavement, the victim of a purse-snatcher who had kicked her legs out from under her as he grabbed her pocketbook.
The second occurred a few days later. Frohling had complimented her blouse, but said she would look a lot better if she undid a button or two. Swearing, she had grabbed a scissors off his desk and cut off his necktie just below the knot. Frohling had managed to swat it from her hand before she was ab le to shred his shirt.
The third occurred in court the next day. Arguing against her motion to suppress evidence in an assault and battery case, the prosecutor did not address the merits of her position but rather launched an ad hominem attack, accusing her of misstating the facts to intentionally mislead the court. Maddie swept the prosecutor’s file off the table and kicked his papers across the floor of the bar enclosure. The judge called her and her alone into chambers, assuring the prosecutor that the assault and battery case would not be the subject of their conversation. In chambers, the judge told Maddie he was familiar with her behavior because his son also had explosive incidents of rage, often accompanied by some form of violence, after returning from combat in Vietnam. The judge recommended a therapist, Dr. Vernon Przystas, who had helped his son control his rage. Either that, the judge said, or a criminal contempt and thirty days to be served.
In appearance, Dr. Przystas had dressed like a clerk in a Robert Hall store, a chain of off-the-rack stores that sold inexpensive men’s dress clothes, one of the Boston outlets being the store her father had bought his one and only suit, his one and only sport jacket and dress slacks, his two white dress shirts, his two ties. Maddie was reassured by Przystas’s rumpled look. A man wearing expensive tailored suits would have intimidated her. Being several weeks overdue for a haircut contributed to his ordinariness. As nervous as she was about seeing a therapist, Maddie sensed his coming at her with an attitude of superiority would not be an issue.
At their first session, Dr. Przystas explained to her that impacted rage, unlike healthy anger, had a disintegrative effect on physical and mental health. The rage itself and the energy needed to suppress it transformed the body into a pressure cooker with a faulty relief valve. Sooner or later an explosion was inevitable. The strain on the body manifested itself in a variety of ways. In the cardio-vascular system, for example, it aggravated the buildup of fatty plaque in the arteries, damaging the arterial walls. The therapist quoted statistics that people with impacted rage are more likely to die of heart attacks or strokes and at a younger age than people without. Among military veterans who have seen combat, impacted rage, at times with intense guilt, at times without, often resulted in anti-social and self-destructive behavior. Her colleagues at Suffolk County Legal Services had defended a handful of Vietnam veterans with that problem, but Maddie had not.
When Maddie heard the diagnosis, she felt she had been given a death sentence. Don’t be so dramatic, Dr. Przystas said. He prescribed Cognitive Relaxation and Coping Skills Therapy or CRCST, both in group and individual settings. CRCST, he explained, was a sequence of twelve or more sessions, some patients needing more sessions than others, beginning with relaxation training, followed by cognitive restructuring, then exposure therapy, concluding with sessions on resisting aggressive impulses and other preventative measures. He favored talk therapy over regimens of psychotropic medications because the drugs had shown limited success.
Maddie soon became an expert on relaxation mechanisms, her favorites being imagining a relaxing experience like listening to Irish folk music while lying in a hammock or counting backward from 100 to whatever number necessary for her anger to dissipate. Her record, as best as she could remember, was somewhere in the seventies. Cognitive restructuring was like a tug-a-war in her psyche between reminding herself that her rage would not make her feel better but would often make her feel worse and her rage boiling over. Logic, persuading herself she was not life’s victim, only worked before rage engulfed her as rage often rendered logic illogical. The lawyer in her, her rational side, told her impacted rage was a problem and that if she tried hard enough she would eventually solve it. Dr. Przystas cautioned that the frustration of not finding a solution often exacerbated the problem. All-or-nothing thinking, he warned, was one of impacted rage’s best allies. Controlling it will always be a struggle; but if you are disciplined about following the prevention protocols, it should ameliorate over time, he added.
For Maddie, the Elizabeth Fund was the first step toward controlling it. Concentrating on the needs of the Fund was one of the most
effective ways to reorient her mind away from the ordinary bumps and brises of life that triggered her rage. Still, she did not know how long she could keep going without finding the second step.
Now, counting backward to 85 while also taking cleansing breaths, she calmed herself. Why waste a good Danish, she thought, pinching a piece of it and popping it into her mouth. Humor, especially if she made herself the butt of the joke, was another coping mechanism for impacted rage.
“I needed you for the arraignment,” Frohling said. “I figured a hand-off to Almeida or Southworth.”
“Together they’re not worth half me. If there’s a hole in the case, they’ll never find it. How do I get in touch with Levy’s rabbi?”
“In the flap of my blotter. The rabbi’s card.”
Returning to her office, Maddie phoned Rabbi ben Reuben to request a meeting. As soon as possible, she insisted. Reluctantly because soon it would be the Sabbath and business was not to be transacted on the Sabbath, he agreed to see her after Friday evening services. There were exceptions, he explained, and with Talmudic precision he had found one. Minutes later, the intercom on Maddie’s phone buzzed.
“Attorney Michelle Furey, line one,” Carmelita Delgado said.
“I’ll call back Monday.”
“She says it’s urgent.”
“What’s urgent is that I get out of here.” Maddie punched the button for line 1. After a few seconds of dead air, Attorney Furey said, “Maddie, how’re you doing? How’s the Elizabeth Fund?”
Furey’s voice was as Maddie remembered it, throaty, not a purr, more a growl, a creepy-crawly voice, titillative, a voice that gave Maddie the cold creeps, as if she had thrust her hand into a bucket of ice water, yet a voice that was alluring, like an artificial fly to a trout or a bird call to a wild turkey. Fearing the lure of that voice, Maddie had limited her contact with Furey after the incorporation of the Elizabeth Fund to small-talk at continuing legal education seminars. Since their law practices had minimal overlap, they rarely attended the same seminars.
Maddie remembered saying the first time she met Furey, “Interesting name, Michelle Furey.”
“My dad wanted to name me Molly, but my mom put her foot down so they compromised on Michelle.”
“You sound like a Molly.” Not a Molly, Maddie thought at the time, but the Molly.
“Up and down,” Maddie now said in reply to Furey’s question about the Elizabeth Fund. “Always too many victims. Never enough money. A lot of the bench is still in the dark ages.”
“Sorry to hear that. I called because I represent the Estate of Father Gabriel Finn. He has left you a bequest. We’re reading his will in my office tomorrow morning.”
Maddie wedged the phone between her jaw and shoulder and rubbed her forearms. She hoped her reaction to Furey’s voice was nothing more than a touch of paresthesia explainable by tension, pressure, stress. Slowly, her flesh absorbed her goose bumps.
“Who’s Father Gabriel Finn,” Maddie asked, “and why would he leave me a bequest?”
“Father Bartell Darcy, a colleague of Father Gabriel, has come from Dublin with both the will and the bequest and he’ll explain all.” Maddie felt Furey’s voice in her bones.
“Courier me the paperwork. C.O.D.”
“He says it’s essential you be present.”
“Or what?”
“Or you forfeit the bequest. Not you alone but the other Boston heirs. The will is very explicit. You must all be present. If anyone is absent, everyone forfeits.”
“And those who attend will sue those who don’t.”
“That would be my conjecture.”
Curiosity compelled Maddie, not curiosity about the will or the identity of Father Gabriel, but curiosity about the woman behind the voice on the phone. Her curiosity first surfaced when they worked together on the creation of the Elizabeth Fund. Maddie had suppressed her curiosity over the years. In her stronger moments, she wondered how that voice would play out in a court-room. Would it mesmerize the judge, the jury, or so alienate them they would rule against her every motion or objection, find against her every client? Maddie voted for “mesmerize.” In her weaker moments, she wondered how that voice would play out in the bedroom. She doubted it would be as off-putting as her own voice. Again, Maddie voted for “mesmerize.”
“Still at the same address?” Maddie asked.
“Same address.”
“I have a full day tomorrow so it better be a short will.”
“Only one article relates to the Boston bequest. That’s the only one to be read unless someone insists on the boilerplate.”
On the way to the synagogue in Chelsea, Maddie felt her impacted rage boiling up within her at being commanded to attend a meeting she did not want to attend. This was a classic example of a trivial event causing a reaction grossly disproportionate to the triviality of the event itself. Maddie felt a tightening in her chest, a twitching in her forearms, the type of bodily symptoms Dr. Przystas had told her often accompanied impacted rage. To battle it, to bottle it up, she distracted herself by wondering what did a Molly sound like? What did the Molly sound like? Did Joyce have a woman’s voice in mind, a particular woman’s voice, when he wrote his famous stream of woman’s consciousness soliloquy? His wife’s, Nora’s, she assumed.
It had been a while since her impacted rage had threatened to flare so explosively, but things had piled up on her like stones on a grave: the incessant heat, Hornstein, being treated as if she had gone orange on St. Patrick’s Day, Molly Michelle demanding she show up for the reading of a will. Everything in combination had split her atoms. She felt better for imagining the sound of the Molly’s voice reading James Joyce’s stream-of-conscious soliloquy. The more she imagined, the more it sounded like Michelle Furey’s voice and the more it restored her self-control.
-7-
In the synagogue’s sanctuary, the evening service for the Sabbath had concluded and Rabbi ben Reuben had wished Shabbat Shalom to each member of the minyan. Because of Levy’s absence, he had had to telephone several people to get the tenth man. Exhausted from the heat, he rested in the front pew.
“That attorney, she is here?” Moskovitzky asked.
“In my study.”
Moskovitzky held out his hand to help the rabbi stand.
“Do you think he did it, Jacob?”
“He’s such a tsadek, such a nebbish.”
“Such an akytor, maybe. What do we really know of him? A few biographical facts? And we don’t even know if those are true. We just assume they are.”
Moskovitzky pondered the question as if it were a Talmudic enigma. “Why? Why would he?”
“For him, Masada, not the Wailing Wall, is the holiest place in Israel,” Rabbi ben Reuben said. “He has all seven volumes of Josephus’s The Jewish War, both in English and the Greek translation many scholars say was supervised by Josephus himself. He burns with the fire of Elazar ben Yair. He has committed ben Yair’s final oration to memory and recites it as if he were a great leader inciting his followers to martyrdom. ‘I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom.’”
“He is not under siege by the Romans.”
“Perhaps in his imagination or his worldview.”
“Are you saying he is insane?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying.”
-8-
Maddie welcomed the deepening dusk as she waited in the rabbi’s study. The sun’s descent spread darkness across the face of the room and the sharp edge of the shadows dissipated into fuzziness. She needed fuzziness. When the short April twilight passed into night, she turned on the desk lamp and sought distraction in the bookcases that wallpapered the study, shelves of bindings with foreign letters. Hebrew letters. The few words in English were meaningless: Mishnah, Midrash, Talmud, Torah. Her heartbeat quickened. She sat on her hands to stop them from trembling. She felt as if she were trapped in the secret lair of an alien cul
t.
An eternity later, the door to the study opened with a creak and two men, one old, the other older, entered, the old assisting the older who supported himself on a cane and looked like a paragraph sign in profile. Their frailty, their age and infirmities, gave her a sense of empowerment, a sense of having an advantage, and she no longer felt like a stranger in a strange land.
“Let me help,” she offered.
The older one waved her off. “This mishugenah cane. May the Lord take me before they put me in a wheelchair.” He sat. His shirt ballooned as air inflated his clothes. A child’s wristwatch with oversized numbers hung loosely from his wrist. “I’m Jacob Moskovitzky and this is Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben.”
“I’m Attorney Mary Ann Devlin from Suffolk County Legal Services. Everyone calls me Maddie.”
“The Elizabeth Fund?” the rabbi asked.
Maddie nodded. “I came to see you. You contributed $100.00.”
“There are a lot of worthwhile causes to which we can-not afford to contribute but a little.”
“The Archdiocese of Boston with its millions of dollars contributed half that. You would think preventing child abuse would be one of its top priorities.”
The rabbi placed his hands on the desk. His knuckles cast long shadows across the back of his hands. “If Avram is convicted, what in the old country incited pogroms will come to Boston. If he is acquitted, people will believe his innocence was purchased with a few pieces of silver. Either way, the consequences are the same.”
“What is a pogrom?” Maddie asked.
“A pogrom,” the rabbi said, “is what King Billy did to your ancestors.”
Moskovitzky tapped his cane against the edge of the desk. “At my age, I care more about what will be fifty years from now than I do what will be tomorrow.”
“If we don’t focus on the business at hand,” Maddie said, “Levy will spend those fifty years in jail.”
The Fire This Time Page 4