by Paul Heald
“Buddy, why don’t I spend the night here while you go home and rest?”
“I’m not ready to leave yet, not with his temperature going up. I don’t think Mom is either. Why don’t you go back home and clean up and dump your bags. You must be pretty tired from your flight. The dog needs to be walked and fed too.”
He nodded at his brother. Despite not being very close, they understood each other. Arthur would much rather spend time with Terri, but he admired Buddy’s work ethic and had no desire be anything but a good big brother to him. Somehow that wasn’t enough to make them good friends.
Terri drove him home and dealt with the dog while he showered. She yelled through the bathroom door that she would come by and take him out to breakfast and then on to the hospital the following morning. Too tired to watch television, he crawled beneath the crisp, clean sheets of his old twin bed and listened to the sounds of the cold winter night. Metal siding popping randomly as it contracted in the plummeting temperature, ice fragments tinkling down onto the roof and blowing across the hard crust of snow outside the window, a low whistle from the weather vane, nails of canine toes tapping across the floor of the kitchen, the hum and rumble of the gas furnace: all the familiar sounds of his childhood.
Although he was exhausted, sleep would not come, held at bay by a vision of his father, kept alive against his will, draining his mother’s resources and spreading their agony over months and years. In the hospital, he had fantasized briefly about turning off his dad’s respirator. With his mother’s decision made, Arthur was the only one who could prevent the nightmare from becoming a reality. All it would take was an act of will and the ability to rationalize the intentional taking of life. He had done that before, he told himself. He had written the words, “Stay of Execution Denied” on the Gottlieb order. Gottlieb was now dead and, quite unlike his father, switched off very much against his will. The ultimate decision had not been Arthur’s, but he had participated. He had been part of the process. And a decision about his father would not be his alone either. If he did anything, he told himself, it would only be because his father wanted it done. Any drastic action would only be the fulfillment of his will. Arthur imagined explaining everything to his dad but fell asleep before any response came.
Terri and Arthur spent the next day popping in and out of the hospital and running errands. Neither of them could grind out a whole day amid the antiseptic hopelessness of the Neurological Intensive Care Unit. Leaving the hospital was like coming up for air after a prolonged swim in foul water. They spent about half of the day there, observing no change in their father apart from a slight decrease in his fever. Buddy and Sally looked even more zombie-like than the day before. Arthur brought them fast-food burgers and watched them doze between bites. By late evening, they were barely able to stand and were willing to let him sit with his father that night. Arthur promised to call them if anything changed, and they left together for the farmhouse.
He bought an extra large coffee at the cafeteria and a paperback novel in the hospital gift shop. Ready for his vigil, he went up to the room and told Terri that he was ready to relieve her. He sat down on a cold naugahyde armchair in the corner and tried to concentrate on the first few pages of a thriller featuring neo-Nazis plotting to take over the world. Terri spent a long time holding her father’s hand, eyes closed and whispering intently. She then kissed him on the forehead, hugged Arthur urgently, and slipped away with tears in her eyes.
The hours of waiting passed quickly. A single night does not allow nearly enough time to weigh adequately all of the arguments for and against killing one’s father. He cataloged in lawyerly fashion all the reasons why he should interfere: He was certain that his father would not have wanted to remain trapped in a vegetative state. He knew that his family would be better off emotionally and financially, and that the community’s burden would be lightened. Helping him die would also be living the Golden Rule. If their positions were reversed, he would have wanted his father to treat him exactly the same way. On the other hand, what he was planning was not only illegal but immoral in the minds of many good people. People that he loved and respected like his mother or sister would not do it. Acts that must be done in secret are by their very nature suspect. Gradually, the more rationally he looked at the situation, the firmer his resolve became. He would do it. As with Gottlieb, he never considered the effect his decision might have on himself.
Between midnight and three, a young nurse entered the room roughly every thirty minutes on the hour. During the first hourly visit, she read his blood pressure and temperature, noting the data on his chart with a clacking of her pen. The second visit each hour seemed to be nothing more than a quick peek to check his general appearance.
After her 3:32 a.m. visit, Arthur turned the alarm volume knob to “off” on the heart monitor and then stood and walked to the respirator. He hesitated for a moment and then switched it off. At first, nothing happened. His father’s breathing slowed, but did not stop. His heart continued to beat, so no alarm sounded down the hallway in the nurse’s station.
What if his father continued to breathe without the help of the machine? The tube in his throat was vented so that in the event of mechanical failure, a patient capable of breathing on his own would not be suffocated. He was not sure if he could cover the opening with his thumb. He touched the top of his father’s hand as the breathing grew so shallow that he could barely discern the movement of the chest under the sheet. Minutes later, the graph line measuring the cardiac rhythm went flat and the slowing beeps were replaced by a quiet monotone buzz. Almost immediately a faint whine sounded from the nurse’s station at the end of the hall.
He quickly flicked the respirator back on, not knowing whether the whoosh of air into his father’s lungs would restart Hal’s heart. He took two quick strides back to the chair in the corner of the room. When the nurse arrived moments later, his head was leaning against the wall. Slack-jawed, book in lap, he looked like he had been sleeping for some time.
He watched the nurse through slitted eyelids as she examined the cardiac monitor and then looked over the body. She watched Hal carefully for a minute and then switched off the respirator and heart monitor. Finally, she turned to Arthur and shook his shoulder gently. He looked up at her groggily, blinking his eyes a couple of times to get them into focus.
“I’m sorry, but your father’s passed away.”
He stood up slowly, approached the body, and touched it.
“Could you call my mother?”
The nurse made a note on the clipboard and left. He dragged the chair over to the side of the bed and sat down as close as he could. The body was still warm. A feeling of utter exhaustion suddenly swept over him. He sat down, rested his head against his father’s arm, shut his eyes, and chased the elusive shadows flickering through his mind.
A doctor he did not recognize touched his back and asked him to leave while he performed a post-mortem examination of the body. Arthur walked past the nurse’s station and found his mom and Buddy waiting for him. Their faces were lined with sorrow and fatigue, but the fierce edge of their anxiety was gone.
“How was it at the end?”
“I’m sorry.” He confessed that he had fallen asleep. “It must have been peaceful—he looked just the same as when you left.”
Don’t worry about it,” his mother said gently. “I’m sure it was a comfort for him to have you in the room when it happened.”
* * *
Arthur did not remember much about the funeral service. Awareness slowly returned afterward amid the buzz of conversations racketing off the cinder block walls and tile floor of the church basement. Impatient lines of overweight, thick-ankled farmers and awkward kids stabbed at a buffet of fried chicken, polish sausages, cheese and ham casseroles, three-bean salad, German potato salad, port-wine nut-coated cheese balls, fresh fruit Jell-O molds, apple pies, cherry pies, and crescent rolls, continually replenished by a vigilant band of blue-haired church matrons. He t
alked to a number of the people, but on his silent trip back to Clarkeston, he could only recall two conversations. Commenting favorably on his hymn-singing, his mother told him that she wished she still had his voice in her choir. Without thinking, he replied that he was joining the Clarkeston College chorus. This brought such a smile to her face that he resolved to call Dorothy Henderson as soon as he got back. Then, before he left with his mom to go home and pack up his bag, Terri came over to hug him good-bye.
“I wish you could come over to the house tonight to eat with us.” She squeezed his hand. “Are you going to be all right? I prayed as much for you during the service as I did for Dad.” Was she letting him know she knew somehow and approved? “You call me if you need anything, okay?”
“All right.” She gave him a weak smile and turned to drag boring Tom off to help her prepare for the next round of analgesic gorging.
When Sally and Arthur got back home, he went immediately upstairs to pack, leaving her in the living room flipping absentmindedly through the newspapers she had not read over the last several days. After packing, showering, and leaving a message on Phil’s machine confirming his arrival time in Atlanta, he went downstairs to make coffee before his mother took him to the airport. He found her dozing on the living room sofa, facing the back cushion and murmuring uneasily in her sleep. He made the coffee quietly, but when he returned, he rattled the cups lightly on the serving tray to keep from startling her. As he set the mugs down on the table in front of the sofa, she rolled over and clutched a small throw pillow tightly against her chest. She whispered, “Arthur, it hurts so bad.”
He lay down on the edge of the sofa and wrapped his arms around her, but no matter how he tried, he could not think of anything to say.
SIDE TWO
(December 1988- May 1989)
XVIII.
LEAVES ARE BROWN, NOW
December passed Arthur in a blur. His father’s death had put him behind in his writing, and by the time he lifted his nose out of the books and filed his last memo, the court had adjourned for Christmas break and it was time to go back to Iowa. The holiday was cheerless. His brother and mother coped with his father’s death by tackling an unending series of chores from morning until night, while Terri escaped to Mexico with some college friends. His own buddies eluded him. Sure, they were around, ready to have a beer or shoot some pool, but a gulf now separated him from the past. His old friends had never met Gottlieb; they had never pulled the plug on their fathers. Conversations went awkwardly and eventually he just stayed home, quietly helping his brother clean, adjust, and repair mechanical things.
He returned to Clarkeston with the odd sense of relief an infantryman feels when his furlough is over and he can finally rejoin his comrades-in-arms. The post-holiday atmosphere in the Judge’s chambers was appropriately subdued, but Suzanne gave him a fierce hug when he arrived at the house. As they disengaged, she cocked her head and gave him a strange look, but before he could decipher it, Maria charged in to show him a toy she had gotten for Christmas and an avalanche of chatter soon overwhelmed him.
January did promise to provide some clarity to his future as he waited to hear from the Office of Legal Counsel and the Department of Justice. Their timetables were somewhat vague, but each had promised to tell him whether he had made its list of finalists by February. The air of expectancy was palpable.
“I’m sorry, Justice Brennan,” Phil spoke brightly into a phone, “but I doubt that Mr. Hughes would be interested in working for you. You see, he’s waiting to hear from the Office of Legal Counsel. I’m also sure he’d appreciate you getting off the line as quickly as possible, since he’s expecting a call from them any minute.”
“You’re a dumb ass.” Arthur shot a pencil across the room at this friend. “You know that?”
Arthur received no important calls, phony or real, during January, but as soon as the college reopened after its holiday break, he rang Dorothy Henderson, the college choir director, to see whether she was still interested in auditioning a new tenor. She remembered her invitation and assured him that she needed men for the chorus’s spring performance of Arthur Honegger’s King David.
The next day, he knocked on her door frame, and she looked up from her piano, an old-fashioned pince nez cemented firmly on the bridge of her prominent nose. With her hair pulled back, she might have been any age from fifty-five to sixty-five, but her demeanor was not grandmotherly, nor even motherly. He felt a strong urge to impress her, but he had not sung except in church for years, nor had he bothered to warm up before coming.
“Well, how are you enjoying Clarkeston, Mr. Hughes? It must be interesting working for the Judge.”
“It sure is.” No matter how many times he heard the question, he never came up with a better answer.
“Why don’t you tell me where you’re from and what sort of singing experience you have.” They talked for a while, and he began to feel a bit more comfortable. She seemed more interested in his legal training than the fact that his mother was a choir director too. She ran him through some vocal exercises and asked him to sing the melody of America the Beautiful and then the tenor line of the same song, which he had not sung before. Finally, to expose his limited ability to sight-sing, she forced him to fake his way through a couple of bars of an unidentified piece of music.
“Well,” she concluded with a bluntness he would come to admire, “you have an adequate range and a very nice tone, but you tend to go flat due to inadequate breath support. You also occasionally scoop to reach high notes, which is one of my pet peeves.” Before he could thank her for her time and beat a hasty retreat, she handed him some papers.
“What are these?”
“The information sheets for the chorus.”
“You mean I passed?”
“We don’t have a full-fledged music degree program.” She broke a smile for the first time. “So, most of my choristers are not music majors. I’m used to teaching vocal technique along with the music, and I expect your bad habits will fade throughout the course of the semester. And don’t worry about your lousy sight-reading; that should improve too. Even if it doesn’t, that’s okay. Sometimes I think those who have to memorize the music follow me better anyway.” She smiled again. “They, at least, tend to keep their heads up and watch.”
She stood up and gave him a firm, dry handshake, welcoming him officially to the group. He wondered whether the Judge would approve of this new distraction as left the office and delivered the forms to Henderson’s secretary.
* * *
“Hello? Angie? How’s life at the highest-paying firm in New York City?” Melanie’s New Year’s resolution was to bring the Carolyn Bastaigne affair to a conclusion, and that meant tracking down the autopsy report on the unfortunate clerk, as well as any other information about her. So, on her first day back in Clarkeston, she called Angela Donaldson, a former classmate and study partner who worked at Cravath, Swain, and Moore in New York City. “Are you getting any sleep at all?”
“No, but I’m saving money on an apartment. I just crash in my office.”
Melanie laughed, but then remembered some of the horror stories she had heard about life in large New York firms. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Of course! I work a million hours, but they don’t chain me to the desk. Time just flies—I’ll be looking at my watch thinking it’s like seven, and it turns out to be midnight.”
“Angie, you’re not doing a very good recruiting job.”
“Well, you said you’d never work up north anyway.” The young attorney clicked off her speakerphone. “How are things going down in the land of the KKK?”
“Not too bad. No cross burnings today. I do have a favor to ask you, though.” Melanie debated whether to claim that the Judge was conducting a personal investigation into the death of Carolyn Bastaigne, but opted for being ambiguous. “This is going to sound really bizarre, but we’re making an informal inquiry into the death of one my judge’s law clerks five year
s ago. She was going to work for Cravath right before she died, and we were hoping to get a hold of her recruitment file.”
“Five years ago? What happened?”
“She had an accident in the courthouse.”
“Ugh.” The young lawyer paused. “Why does it matter now?”
“Well, the mother of the dead clerk is a real crackpot. She thinks her daughter was murdered, and she’s been calling and bugging the Judge, so we’re trying to find out everything we can.”
“How did she die?”
“She was found at the bottom of a stairwell. No signs of foul play, but the mom thinks otherwise. I was hoping that you could talk to the recruitment coordinator and see if we could get a copy of her file.” She felt a brief pang of guilt at sucking a friend in to her unauthorized investigation. “Since she’s dead, there shouldn’t be any confidentiality concerns.”
“But why do you need it? I’ll need to give a reason.” This was a question for which Melanie did not have a good answer, so she substituted bright confidence for substance.
“Well, most of all, we want to do something to impress the mother. She thinks there’s been a big cover-up, and we want to build a file for her. Maybe she’ll get off our back if she sees us doing something. And maybe there’ll be some sort of clues about her in there. Her death actually was a little suspicious.”
“Well, I’ll ask the recruiting coordinator what hoops you have to jump through. I know her pretty well. She spent a lot of time convincing me to come here instead of Sullivan and Cromwell.”
“Cool. Just let me know what she says.”
* * *
When the Judge walked into chambers, he heard three animated voices coming from the library. They’re not getting much work done, he thought. On the other hand, it was the first day back after Christmas, and this year’s group of clerks was pretty productive. Nice kids too. He stood outside the library door and overhead them competing to see who had the most ridiculous eccentric relative holiday story. He wondered what they thought of him, and for a moment regretted the distance he deliberately kept from them. The Judge straightened himself, walked through the door, and sat down at the conference table. By long habit he first addressed the lone female in the room.