Her Father's House

by Belva Plain

  We are all too busy. There is a feverish energy here at mealtimes, with everybody talking at once about crops, planting, hiring, buying, and selling. No one wants to ask outright how this huge place is going to be run when Jim Fuller is no longer here, yet everyone is thinking about it.

  Last week Rick told me that very possibly the farm would be sold; the family would disperse and this little family would move who knows where? Then I think he was sorry he had told me that. They don't want to alarm me because they want me to go back to medical school.

  Yes, I loved every minute of it there, but not anymore. Can a person concentrate on personal pleasures when there is death in the house?

  Ethel Rice telephoned Dad this morning, the day before Thanksgiving. He is to appear before the district attorney in New York next week. Richard says that she told Dad not to get his hopes too high, especially because this man is a new D.A., inclined toward the tough side, and eager as they all are to make a name for himself.

  “Not that it isn't the job of a prosecutor to be tough, anyway,” Rick said.

  Dad will not allow any one of us to fly to New York with him. I think that is his way of saying that he must learn to live without us.

  Chapter 30

  Gilligan was his name. A large man with ruddy cheeks, a brusque voice and eyes like X rays, he's about the age, Jim estimated, that I was when I became a partner at Orton and Pratt. Ambitious and competent, he's preparing to rise in the hierarchy, and he will. So there wasn't much hope here, not that there had ever been much to start with.

  It was a dark afternoon with electric lights blazing at three o'clock, an hour when people are tired and impatient to finish their day. Jim was chilled, though his palms were sweating.

  “So you are positive you want to enter a guilty plea?” asked Gilligan.

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “Given your past in the profession, I assume there's no need to describe the procedure: that you will appear in court and plead guilty, which will eliminate any trial. You cannot withdraw the plea once the judge accepts it. You will then await the court's decision as to your punishment.”

  “Sir, I fully understand.”

  I fully understand, too, how much of the court's decision depends upon your prosecution of the case. . . .

  Suddenly Gilligan, leaning forward, shot the question as if it were a bullet: “Why did you do it, Mr. Wolfe?”

  The small gray eyes were curious. Well, naturally they would be; this was, after all, a most unusual case, even for a prosecutor who must have seen and heard just about everything.

  “Sir—she, the mother, had a different way of life. She lived in a different world, and I did not want my child to grow up in it.”

  “A different world? Ms. Morris is known for her labors on behalf of charity both here and abroad. She's prominently named in connection with refugee and war relief, among other good causes. She is a woman highly respected. There are no marks against her. So I have tried, but do not quite understand what you mean.”

  “Much can be hidden, Mr. Gilligan.”

  Ethel Rice, who was judiciously allowing Jim to make his own defense, now objected. “My client is also widely respected, as is evidenced by the reports you have of his activities over the last twenty years in Georgia, not to mention the years before here in New York.”

  “But you are omitting the reason that he is here in this room, Ms. Rice. What do you say to that, Mr. Wolfe?”

  The repetitious drilling had begun to exhaust Jim. Now all he could do was to make a helpless gesture.

  “To all appearances, yours is a classic case, in which an angry divorced husband takes revenge on his former wife by stealing their child. Ms. Morris claims that the wife here is the one who suggested the divorce because you were not getting along with each other. In short, as I see it, she rejected you and your pride was

  wounded.”

  What sense does that make? Jim wondered. If I were so proud a man, would I have damaged myself as I did when I fled with the baby and threw my whole life away?

  “Excuse me, sir. It is true that she is the one who suggested that we end the marriage, but excessive pride is not among my faults.”

  Benumbed and sodden in her disheveled clothes, with her wet hair tumbled and her mouth half open, she lay on the sofa.

  “She asked for nothing from you, no alimony, nothing but her freedom. She even returned to you the valuable ring you had given her. Is that or is that not correct?”

  “It is correct.”

  “A mark of unusual character, I would say. She still asks for no damages, other than a rather large contribution to one of her charities. But she asks for nothing to compensate for her pain and suffering, which must have been indescribable, Mr. Wolfe.”

  “I very much regretted her pain and suffering. I never wanted to hurt her.”

  “Yet you did.”

  In his authority, he sits here judging me, or I should say prosecuting. Of course. He's the prosecutor.

  “I know you're trying not to delve too deeply into the very personal, Jim, but you're hurting yourself,” said Ethel Rice.

  My lawyer is annoyed with me. Still, she has the consideration to address me as Jim, rather than Donald, a name I have begun to despise.

  Gilligan's quick glance passed from Ethel Rice to Jim. “What do you mean by ‘delving deeply,' Ms. Rice?”

  Jim answered for her. “She means that I am thinking solely of my daughter.”

  “The daughter you took to Georgia?”

  “The only one I have. I want to protect her. There are things about her mother—that she need never know.”

  His heart raced, and his head pounded so, he had to come to a stop. If he could have made an escape from this room, this room of a kind once so familiar, with the diplomas on the wall and the flag in the corner, this room that was turning into a torture chamber, he would have done so.

  Gilligan coughed, and moving his chair closer, formed a circle of three. Filling a glass from a water pitcher, he handed it to Jim, and with surprising gentleness, spoke to him.

  “You surely know very well that anything said here goes no farther, Mr. Wolfe.”

  “Yes, sir, but still . . . Sometimes accidentally . . . I don't want to hurt her any more than I have to. She's been studying medicine, she's had enough of a shock and will have more if I—when I—receive my punishment.”

  “Please go on, Mr. Wolfe. Tell me why, in the first place, you allowed her mother to have sole custody.”

  “I didn't think, didn't care. The baby wasn't even born when we divorced. I said I would provide for it, and I have done so. There's a considerable sum in the bank in Laura—in Bettina's name. At that point, though, I didn't really want a baby, although I wouldn't let her abort it, as she wanted to do.”

  “When did you decide that you really wanted the baby enough to take her away?”

  “I didn't decide to take her away until much, much later. I've told about that.”

  It was so hard to speak; it was like pulling his heart out of his chest so people might watch it beat. “I loved her when she was four months old. She knew me. She smiled at me.” And Jim paused as if reflecting. “It's funny, whenever I had any vague thought about having a child, I always pictured a boy.”

  “Can you tell me what is the main, immediate reason you put her in the car and drove off with her that Sunday? Why that day?”

  “Of course it was the accident and all the carelessness. But it was other things from long before that I had been trying to forget. Then suddenly I couldn't forget anymore.”

  “Whom did you sleep with last night, Lillian?”

  “I wouldn't even recognize him if I should ever see him again.”

  Abruptly, a torrent of passionate words came rushing out of Jim's mouth. It startled the decorum of the room, and astonished the listeners.

  “She wanted what she called ‘fun.' She called me a puritan, a bore. Oh yes! There was a party once with beds on the lawn under the tr
ees. You picked your partner. I knew she would have gone with someone if I had let her, or hadn't caught her on the way. I began to think that perhaps we had made a mistake in our marriage. But I didn't want to think it because I had loved her so.

  “When I purposely made her pregnant, we went to Italy. I wanted to make a new commitment. She loved art, she knew so much about it, and I thought it would be wonderful together. Then she met some friends there, and I learned things that she had never told me. She had had lovers there, married men; she had become pregnant and had had an abortion. That was when I saw that I had never known her. We did not know each other. She had lied, lied to me from the start.”

  The rain was wild and angry that morning along the river, on the old covered bridge, and on the other side where I walked. . . .

  “The baby she didn't want?” asked Gilligan. “That's Laura?”

  “Yes. That's Laura.”

  Behind Ethel Rice was a desk with the usual photograph on it, this one of twins, a boy and a girl about two years old. Perhaps it was unconsciously that Gilligan had turned half around in his chair to face it. There was a long silence before he looked back at Jim.

  “And so it all came to an end?”

  “Yes. Especially when I asked her with whom she had slept the night before, after I had refused to join a party.”

  “And she answered?”

  “That she wouldn't even recognize the man if she should meet him again.”

  “You see,” said Ethel Rice, “why Jim doesn't want Laura to know all that. And you also can see how hard it is to prove any of it.”

  Hard to prove? Impossible, Jim thought. Lillian had everything on her side. It was he who had committed the crime. Her slate was clean.

  Ah, let it all go. Submit. Accept. You've lost your will to fight.

  There was a long silence before Gilligan spoke again. “Pull up your chairs to the desk,” he said. “I will lay out some papers for you to read, some unusual mail that came to me this week. I wanted to compare them with what your client had to say, Ms. Rice, before showing them to you. Here, look.”

  There was a longer silence while Ethel Rice read what seemed to be two or three letters. God only knew what Lillian had come up with.

  “Astonishing,” said Ethel Rice, pushing them in front of Jim.

  “Are you acquainted with Arthur Storm, Mr. Wolfe?”

  “The man from whom Lillian was recently divorced? No, I am not.”

  “Have you ever seen him? Met him? Spoken to him?”

  “My answer is no to all three.”

  “Then you will be surprised to read this.”

  On thick, monogrammed paper, there was a page of strong, black script. Storm lost no time before getting to his point. Because he and Donald Wolfe had each been married to Lillian Morris, he had been especially interested in following this unusual case. Knowing what he did about what he would call her “propensities,” he well understood why any man who cared about his child would want to move her into a different environment. He also understood that, since he himself had left his first wife, he was hardly an example to be admired; yet never had he expected to witness the things he had seen as the husband of Lillian Morris. Moved by the threat of imprisonment hanging over Donald Wolfe's head, he now took it upon himself, purely out of sympathy, to speak on the poor man's behalf.

  There was a postscript. His first wife was taking him back.

  “Extraordinary,” murmured Ethel Rice, while the lump in Jim's throat kept him silent.

  The second letter, scrawled on office stationery and covering three pages, came from Howard Buzley. It was filled with indignant outrage. For nine years, he had been loyal to his bedridden first wife, loyal, that is, in that he had come home to her every night, acting on the theory that what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her. She had died in comfort and peace. When he married Lillian, he had given her the same loyalty, but she didn't know the meaning of the word. She was a cheat, a beautiful cheat who took everything as a good-natured joke. How he had loved that baby of hers! He loved kids anyway; why, he already had two grandchildren! But she—she only liked to show the kid off. Ask anybody; they would tell you how good he was to Tina, and she wasn't even his kid! A good thing the father took her away, poor man. Of course it's a crime, but from what he sees of Tina on TV, he knows the girl is far better off. He, Howard Buzley, knows what it is to bring up good children, and he wants to put in his two cents on behalf of Donald Wolfe, a man he doesn't even know. Donald Wolfe. He's hardly spoken two words to him, except perhaps a couple of times on the telephone.

  Again, no one spoke until Gilligan turned to Jim and asked him to take off his jacket. “It's hot for November. We don't have to be so formal here, anyway. Go on, take it off. And read this.”

  On lined paper such as one uses for laundry or marketing lists, Jim read the signature first. It was Maria's, and could only be that of the one Maria he had ever known.

  “The baby's nurse,” he said. “She's learned to write English! We used to speak Spanish together.”

  “‘Dear Mr. D.A.,' ” he read aloud. “‘My boss where I take care of baby give me your address, so I write you about Mr. Wolfe. I work for Cookie Wolfe long time. I read, I see on TV my baby Cookie Wolfe. I see father take her away. Mrs. Buzley wants put him in jail. Is terrible thing. He love that child. I can tell Cookie is big now on TV. She love father. I know right away that Sunday. I can guess and glad because mother no good for her. No good. Everybody know, cook know, doorman know, she have too many boyfriends. Only Mr. Buzley, he don't know so soon, but when he find out, he leave. Same minute. He kiss baby, very sad. Don't think I tell things about Mrs. Buzley because she bad to me and I angry at her. Not so. She always very nice to me, talk nice and give me presents. So I not angry at her. She not bad person that way. Only like too many boyfriends and that bad for child. Wrong. Wicked. And Mr. Wolfe, he must not go to jail. Thank you. Your friend, Maria Gonzalez.' ”

  It was too much. Unashamed of his tears yet not wanting to display them, Jim got up and walked to the window, where he stood looking out at the coming dusk.

  Gilligan coughed again. When he is moved, Jim thought, he covers up with a cough. Ethel Rice rustled papers and made conversation.

  “Imagine! All the way from California. And after twenty years. Or more than that, isn't it? Extraordinary.”

  The little room, which had for a few minutes become almost a gathering of friends in somebody's house, became again the office of the prosecutor, with flag, framed documents, and voices passing in the outer corridor. Then a chair leg scraped the floor. Jim turned, and knew that the interview was over.

  “I don't know what all this can mean, if anything,” Jim said, “but I thank you for your kindness, Mr. Gilligan.”

  On the sidewalk he stood for a minute with Ethel Rice before they walked off in opposite directions.

  “Naturally, D.A.s get letters,” she said. “I've had letters, too, in support of defendants, but I personally have never seen anything quite like these.”

  “I guess not. Any mail you've been getting would be in defense of a woman.”

  “Well, perhaps this has been a lesson for me in keeping an open mind.”

  “As you look ahead, what do you see for me, Ethel?”

  “This can't have hurt today, especially that letter from Maria Gonzalez. How much it helped, how can I say? Anyway, you should know very well that's a question I don't dare guess at.”

  “I do know it. But there's no harm trying.”

  “Go on. Don't miss your plane. You'll be seeing me next time in court, but of course we'll be in touch half a dozen times before then. Try to enjoy the holidays, Jim.”

  Chapter 31

  Melted snow lay in the gutters. Valentine candy was on sale, and spring clothes were in shop windows when Laura went back to the hotel and took out her diary.

  This is the year that was. Maybe it would be better for me to wipe it out, forget that it ever happened. But maybe it would
be better to set down what I know, rather than let time and selective memory take over, leaving for Dad's great-grandchildren little more than a legend.

  I felt sometimes that I was watching a play. There on the bench sat the judge in his black robe, and below him stood my father.

  “You have signed an agreement pleading guilty, Mr. Wolfe. Do you now again admit you are guilty of this charge?”

  “I do,” Dad said.

  “Are you saying this willingly? Do you understand what you're saying?”

  “I do.”

  “Has anyone in any way brought pressure on you to plead guilty?”

  “No one,” Dad said.

  “Explain to me why you committed this crime, please.”

  You could feel the movement, like a wave or wind, as everyone craned to hear. And the center of it all, my father, replied. His voice was firm.

  “I took the child away because she was being neglected. I wanted to give her a solid, normal home.”

  On the other side of the courtroom sat Rebecca/

  Lillian. It was the first time we had seen each other except for all those miserable interviews on television and in the newspapers. I was thinking that she looks just like her picture, and that I look a little like her, without any of the glamour. She was quietly dressed, a “portrait of a lady.” I was wondering what she thinks of me.

  As for my feelings toward her, this woman who would, if she could, put my father into prison for thirty years, there was only fear and rage.

  I must write down these bits and pieces of argument before they fly out of my mind.

  “This father was generously given the freedom of his ex-wife's home. He was free to visit the child whenever and wherever he wanted to, but all he ever did was to pass her by in Central Park on a Sunday,” said the lawyer.