Brickmann moved in for the kill. “Why don’t you just admit, Miss Digby, that Iris Moss had no idea, really, what was going on, that you used her and used the ensuing scandal you caused for personal publicity?”
“Publicity?” I repeated.
“Publicity for yourself and your … magazine. You seem to thrive on it.”
“Objection, Your Honor.”
“Sustained.”
He tried another tack. “Let’s just assume, Miss Digby, for purposes of argument, that you did believe Iris Moss’s story. Why is it that you called a newspaper, as opposed to a state investigative agency?”
“Which do you think would give you the fast response?”
There were a few titters.
“I would be grateful, Miss Digby, if we could stick to standard courtroom procedure and allow me to ask the questions here. When you made your decision to call a news periodical, you apparently stated unequivocally that there was sexual abuse of patients at Brookheart.”
“I quoted Iris, who told me unequivocally there was, and now we have other testimony to corroborate—”
“We have ‘testimony,’ if you want to call it that—some confused and wandering patient anecdotes, a handful of blurry photographs that Dr. Bush has stated may have been taken by the patients themselves, and your own rather peculiar opinions about—”
“Objection!”
“Overruled.”
“Your own rather peculiar opinions about human behavior. Would you describe yourself as a man-hater, Miss Digby? Do you think your feelings of animosity for male authority figures—I mean, look at your reactions to Dr. Bush—might have colored your own response to Iris’s accounts of what happened to her?”
“I don’t hate men. And I don’t think men are completely inferior to women. I certainly don’t believe that the missing leg of the Y chromosome has anything to do with the presence of, say, Sly Stallone in the world. Or Jesse Helms. That’s just bad genetic luck, like getting Squeaky Fromme on the female side.”
He looked genuinely perplexed. “I’m not sure I follow, Miss Digby. But your ‘flights of fantasy’ certainly help establish the extent to which you and the late Miss Moss invented this case together—”
“Objection! Counsel is prejudicing the jury!”
“Overruled. This is pertinent inquiry. But we will ask Counsel to limit remarks on personal behavior.”
“Isn’t it true,” asked Brickmann, “that there is an element of fantasy to your testimony?”
“What about the Mirror reporter, Ms. McMahon?” I asked. “Her testimony included an eyewitness account of a rape.”
“An eyewitness account of a male nurse whom Miss McMahon discovered appearing to straddle a female patient in bed … his testimony was clear: He was giving her a back rub.”
He smirked at the jury. “Even Dr. Muller has modified his testimony.”
“Dr. Muller,” I said, “has modified his testimony because he was threatened.” Before anyone else could speak, I pulled Iris’s journal from my coat pocket and flipped it open. Brickmann objected right away, but I began to read loudly, blocking out his protests.
“I happen to be in possession of Iris Moss’s daily journal,” I shouted proudly. I waved the diary in the air, feeling like the Angel of Vindication. “Here is her entry for March twenty-ninth:
“I slouched quietly outside Bush’s office door like a spy, and like a spy I gathered intelligence. Bush spoke in a loud voice; I could hear every word. He was reminding Muller of a certain shadow on his record—”
Brickmann was shouting at me, the judge was gaveling. I went on doggedly, raising my voice.
“On two different occasions Muller apparently misjudged a dosage amount and put two patients in coma, who later died.”
The judge instructed the bailiff to take the journal away from me. I read fast and loud.
“The patient’s names were Curran (or Cohen) and Morris. Bush’s deal was this: I’ll keep quiet about your malpractice if you lighten up on testimony—”
The bailiff, a very stocky, perplexed-looking Japanese man, wrested the journal from my hands.
I faced the judge. “I don’t understand. This is evidence, it tells us why Muller gave such a weak testimony.”
The judge looked at the defense attorney.
Brickmann’s face was bright red. “That is not evidence, that is hearsay, and hearsay is not admissible as testimony.”
I could not believe my ears. “Hearsay? Are you kidding? This was Iris’s private record of what went on at Brookheart—she talks about medication schedules, her own illness, the feelings of the patients about the nursing care. … Why wouldn’t the court listen to—”
Brickmann threw up his hands. “Your Honor, no further questions.”
“Wait a minute,” I called to him. “Are you saying that Iris lied?”
“Miss Digby.” He turned toward me slowly, after smiling at the jury. “Iris Moss was a patient in a mental hospital. She could not distinguish the real from the imaginary. That is our whole argument. But, in any case, journals or letters, these are considered hearsay.”
“Iris was filled with hope, you see.” I turned toward the jury, all of whom were looking at me with interest. “And that sometimes made her exaggerate. But you’ve heard Ms. McMahon’s testimony, you’ve heard Muller—their statements concur with hers. And I have something else to show you. I didn’t have time to show it to the prosecution yet, but—”
“Miss Digby, please step down. I have no further questions.”
I pulled some papers from my coat pocket. “These, these will clinch the argument,” I said. “Take a look, everybody, at these.”
I held up the drawings Danny Hayburn had sent me. They looked like children’s sketches; indeed, some were done in crayon; the colors were bright and the figures primitive. But the scene depicted in each was the same: nurses and doctors preying sexually on patients. One doctor in a white coat rose over a woman’s bed like a vampire; his pointed teeth dripped blood; a huge balloonlike penis rose between his legs.
“I don’t think you can see these clearly; I’ll bring them over,” I called to the jury.
The judge gaveled and shouted at Dorchek. “Counsel, please instruct your witness to leave the stand or she will be held in contempt.”
“Willis.” Dorchek moved toward me. “Please step down.”
I lifted the drawings higher, leaning in the jury’s direction.
“See? See the needles, the injections? See, this is a group rape here! Doesn’t anybody see what these drawings mean? A current patient, Danny Hayburn, found them hidden in a file. They tell the whole story. They—”
“Bailiff!”
The bailiff hurried toward me. “Tell me,” I shouted, “why these are not admissible.”
The judge spoke slowly, in a terrible voice. “I am about to hand down a charge of contempt, do you understand? The prosecution has rested its case. This is the direct examination by the defense, and new evidence from the prosecution may not be introduced at this time, without petitioning the court.” He glared at Dorchek. “The court is inclined to deny such a motion, should it be presented.”
“Get down, Willis,” Dorchek said.
I looked around me. I dropped my hands. I started to step down.
“But it’s so clear, it’s all so clear.” One of the drawings fell free and fluttered to Brickmann’s feet. He leaned down to pick it up and handed it to the bailiff, grim-faced, without looking at it. Some of the others fell, and I knelt down to pick them up. My bun came loose and my hair fell over my eyes. I began to cry. I looked again at the jury. “You should have known Iris—if only you could have heard her testify! They’ve made it sound like she couldn’t think, couldn’t comprehend what was happening to her. …”
“STEP DOWN, WILLIS.”
I stepped down and sat in my chair in the third row, holding the drawings to my chest. People drew back from me. I sat and listened to the judge instructing the jury t
o “strike from memory” everything I had just said.
Twenty-One
A FEW DAYS later I was sitting at my little red desk, piled high, as usual, with letters. Iris’s yucca plant was barely visible behind one stack, but the picture from her wallet was pinned prominently to my bulletin board. Dresden Bostec was seated in my visitor’s chair. Everyone else was at lunch, and she and I were contemplating one of her gooseberry pies, which she’d set on a checkered cloth between us. The pie was sunken—it looked like a human face a cow had stepped on.
“Maybe,” Dresden trilled in her warbly old voice, “that’s one of the reasons I never married. You know, so many of the other girls my age devoted their youth to acquiring domestic skills. I just never developed the concentration required to be a good cook.
“Who cares, though?” She shrugged, brightening. “I find that in my old age I can bake pies like Betty Crocker.” She grinned at me and straightened her birdlike shoulders. She was wearing a flowered-print spring dress and a Mets baseball cap.
“Are you still going out with that guy?” I asked. “The one who loves your pies?” I handed her a Styrofoam cup of coffee.
“He’s not too well. Had a little problem with his colostomy bag last week. He had dinner at my place on Tuesday and—”
“Did you serve one of your pies?”
“Of course. He ate three pieces, we went dancing, and, lo and behold, the next day his bag went on the blink, if you’ll excuse my French.” She paused for effect. “He’s a lot younger than me too—seventy-two. They just can’t keep up.”
She took a plastic knife and a paper plate out of her purse. She cut out a wedge of pie, put it on the paper plate, and slid it toward me. I looked at it.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Dresden. I’m not very hungry. I keep thinking about the trial.”
The jury had been out three days, and we were expecting a verdict today. I was not expecting a vote of confidence. Every time I’d tried to say what I thought Iris would have wanted said, I’d defied due process. Yet the defense was able to mop up the stand with me. Dorchek was still hopeful; I’d just spoken on the phone to him, but he sounded strained.
“You need cheering up, I can see,” said Dresden. “That’s why I brought you something for your Letters Hall of Fame.”
I had personally annexed a section of bulletin board in the hall near my office and posted some of my All-Time Letters. There were a couple of Dino Pedrelli’s, two from the stewardess, two from the U.F.O. expert, one from the King of New Jersey, from the woman who fed cat food to her husband, from Bea Plotkin, a recent one from The Watcher (which simply said, “I’m cured! Will you marry me?”), a recent one from W.I.T.C.H., making me an honorary lifetime member, a very recent one from Terence (“I’m not cured! Will you stay married to me?”), one from the Pissed-Off Chef: “Now here’s an hors d’oeuvre guaranteed to get rid of late-staying cocktail guests. I call them Death Weenies,” and one from Bob Hargill, suggesting that I stop my “reign of terror.” (Every time I sang along with the radio now, Page demanded I stop my “reign of terror.”)
Dresden ferreted in her big needlepoint carpetbag and brought out an ancient-looking letter. It was dog-eared, yellowed with age, bearing a stained and peeling stamp. (I strained to see it, one cent?)
“You know, Willis,” she said, “I was thinking about you and your tie-up with W.I.T.C.H. the other day. I don’t know why they don’t ask me to join! I could have helped the night you got after Hargill. I look better than that sad sack, and I’m”—she paused—“can’t quite remember now. Eighty-three?”
We drank our coffee in silence for a bit. “Yes,” she said emphatically. “Eighty-three. I was just remembering 1917—the year this letter was sent to me. It’s from my older sister Lillian,” she said, and showed me the spidery handwriting on the envelope. “She was very strong in the Movement, you know, Lillian. She was twenty-two, and I was only fourteen, awkward and gangly. I had two other sisters, but she was the passionate, smart one and the beauty, too! That was a violent time, when they chained themselves to the White House gates and to the wheels of important men’s carriages. The marches here in New York got rough. Dear Lord, I remember coming home from school once and finding her standing at the window in the parlor, her long brown hair shining down her back. Then she turned around. Someone had flung mud all over her, from head to toe, her white dress and her ‘Votes for Women’ shoulder banner were covered with dark smears. She had been crying, I could tell. She came up to me, and I remember being a little afraid of her. ‘Dressy,’ she cried, and took me by the shoulders. ‘Look at me. They threw handfuls of sludge at us—men, women, even children. They’re so afraid.’ Take a forkful of pie, Willis,” she suggested. I shook my head.
“Later she went down to Washington and was there when they arrested Alice Paul on the White House steps, took her to jail and sentenced her to seven months—which is when she began her hunger strike. That’s what this letter starts with, the arrest of Alice Paul. She wrote it to me from Washington.” She pointed to the pie again, and again I demurred.
She opened the old letter and began to read aloud:
“Dear Dressy,
“Well, here we are, back at Mrs. Kramer’s after the most extraordinary day of my life! We are having hot cups of soup and coffee, drying our clothes—and I thought I would write to you, dear little sister.
“You’ve expressed interest in history and in this great Cause—I charge you now to remember this day—the day they took Alice Paul to prison from the White House steps! Our shamed president said nothing. The crowd screamed, ‘Traitors!’ and ‘Turncoats!’ the way they have all through the War, and they threw stones at us.
“Well, dear, we tried to sing our songs and keep our spirits up, but then a large fat man in the crowd threw a stone and hit Theresa in the neck. She fell, but recovered herself. ‘Where are your husbands?’ the fat man shouted. ‘Where is your wife—she needs us!’ we called back. ‘Madam! No wife of mine would march in a monkey line!’ he cried out. Oh, Dressy, you should have heard them then—the other men started jeering, ‘Monkey line! Monkey line!’ and ‘Get back to your kitchens and your mending! Get back to your neglected children—or are you all barren? Spinsters!’ they cried. ‘Hags!’—the worst epithets men think to call the fair sex. One man left a rearing horse he’d been beating in the street and snapped his bloody whip smartly in the air, yelling, ‘This tongue would talk sense into them!’ And the others cheered—I recall particularly the faces of the policemen, for whom this provided great merriment. They pushed the crowd back halfheartedly and laughed heartily at our expense.
“Then the horsewhip man called out, ‘And what would you creatures make of the right to cast ballot?’ And Miss Turner, who reads law and history, cried, ‘Our cause grew from the abolitionist—would you have woman stay slaves and go without representation in a democratic land?’ And the cursed man—Dressy, I hope not to injure you with this, but he looked right and left, then shouted, ‘Niggers and slatterns, slatterns and niggers—you say? Well, that is a monkey line—if I do say!’ He turned to his comrades, who all held their sides with laughter.
“And then Constance Dalton, of our company, who is a mulatto, came forward and stood front of the line, to face this man. ‘Sir?’ the brave woman called out. ‘Are you suggesting that I should be ashamed of my skin—and my sex? Come forward,’ she said, ‘and say what it is you mean to my face.’
“There was a low rumbling that started deep in the crowd, and when I heard it, Dressy, I was very frightened. I saw the man move toward her with his whip, and I felt her flinch. And suddenly I felt lifted up, free in such a manner I cannot explain. I made a face, I made a monkey face at the unfortunate men, since they’d called us a monkey line—then all the women began making faces, sticking out their tongues, cawing and shrieking, putting their thumbs in their ears and waggling their fingers. A fine display!
“The men fell back. They were frightened, as if they’d s
uspected this to be the way women had always wished to behave—like wild creatures. Their expressions were horrified, as if they expected us to tear off our corsets and swing from the trees! Oh, Dressy, we might have!”
“Willis, have a piece of that pie!” she commanded, interrupting herself. “It’s got a flavor you won’t believe! Willis, you want to know why men fear women? My sister says it later in this letter,” she said, folding the pages into the envelope. “Because we’re anarchists, deep inside, anarchists to a woman! Anarchists for love. EAT THAT PIE!” she bellowed.
I jumped to, digging in with the plastic fork. She watched me carefully. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton took a scissors and cut a law from the books of her father, the judge, because it said men could sell property out from under women and she’d heard a poor woman weeping over it in his chambers. She was only ten when she did it. Anarchists!” She stuffed a big piece of pie in her mouth and spit a little out as she talked. “Those women could have taught W.I.T.C.H. some tricks!”
I put on my rabbit ears; I just felt a need to suddenly.
“You know, Willis,” she said, leaning forward a little, whistling through her teeth and spitting pie crumbs, “I’ve never liked that damn contraption you wear on your head. It makes you look goonish.”
“Dresden,” I said, and took the letter out of her old thin hand and kissed it, then pinned it up next to Iris’s wallet snapshot, “I can’t stand your pies.” I took the fork and stabbed the loathsome confection. “They’re vile.”
The phone rang. I picked it up and said, “I’m an Anarchist for Love, and I’m on my way to lunch. Talk fast!”
Mr. Dorchek, the Assistant D.A., said, “Is this fast enough? Our good jury of peers came back with a winning vote for us. They took ’em down on eleven counts! Not bad.”
I hugged Dresden, then I picked up Iris’s Hot Line to the Supreme, Somewhat Preoccupied Intelligence, and said, “I believe,” and hung up.
Dear Digby Page 18