Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Then, as she regained strength, and her voice, Louisa began to insist that she had not ever identified her son as her assailant: that this was an “outright lie.”

  She had no memory of that night—or, the vaguest memory.

  Things had passed in a “blur”—“like a dream”—yet she was sure that Bart had not been “anywhere near” the house that night.

  At the trial, testifying on behalf of her son, Louisa Hansen spoke haltingly but forcefully as everyone in the courtroom stared at her; and no one more avidly than Bart Hansen.

  Louisa said she didn’t know if she’d dreamt—something. She knew that her brain had been injured and she’d had neurosurgeries and had been unconscious and conscious and unconscious and “floating” with painkillers—but sometimes things were sharp, what was cloudy became clear like a smudged glass that was polished, and so she thought now she could remember—she did remember—a human figure, a man, a “stranger”—she’d had an impression of a “swarthy” skin—a “creased” face—a “not-young” face; he’d had that kind of beard that’s trimmed short—“I think it’s called a—goatee.”

  Carefully Deekman summarized: “Your assailant, Mrs. Hansen, was a ‘swarthy-skinned’ man, ‘not-young,’ with a ‘creased’ face and a ‘goatee’? No one you recognized?”

  “I think so. Yes. Or it might have been a . . .”

  Louisa’s single, occluded eye shifted in its socket, as if with effort. Her sunken mouth was fixed in a small determined smile of the kind intended to assure others, I am all right, I am fine: don’t worry about me! despite her ravaged face and slight, broken body. She was peering past the aggressive Deekman at her son Bart who sat at the defense table not fifteen feet away with hunched shoulders, an abashed and stricken look on his face. Bart’s youth was fading, even his dun-colored limp hair appeared thin at the crown. His skin had become puffy and sallow as if water bloated. His eyes formerly quick, elusive, and sly as small fish darting in a pond were puffy, too, and chronically ringed in fatigue. Yet on Bart’s lips, too, there appeared a faint hopeful smile.

  Son and mother had seen little of each other in the intervening eleven months.

  “. . . might have been a dream. I can’t be sure.”

  “But you are sure, Mrs. Hansen, that you didn’t see your son Bart in your bedroom that night?”

  “Oh yes. I am sure of that. I didn’t see my son Bart in my —our—bedroom that night. The intruder was a—stranger.”

  Louisa’s right eye had been surgically removed and had not yet been replaced with an artificial eye: the socket was empty, but resembled melted wax, and was not deep. Her skull and facial bones had been smashed and had not quite healed, appearing re-aligned, mismatched; her nose had been mashed and flattened; her skin was scarred and ravaged and her mouth shrunken, for her lower jaw had been badly lacerated; most of her teeth had been lost, and she’d been fitted with an abbreviated set of artificial teeth. Her hair, shaved for surgery, had grown back thinly, and was ghostly white. Yet relatives and friends of Louisa Hansen claimed that within the mutilated face you could see the former face of Louisa Hansen, unmistakably.

  The poor woman’s body appeared broken, her spine hunched and her head pushed forward; she walked with difficulty, using a cane, needing assistance, yet there was an air of resilience and even defiance about her, that made her a powerfully appealing figure. For her courtroom appearance Mrs. Hansen had dressed herself, or had been dressed, in a way to suggest understated good taste, a dark mulberry pants suit, a white silk blouse, a strand of pearls and matching earrings.

  In the Rensselaer-Albany area there was intense, intrusive interest in the “murderer’s mother”—in Niagara County, hundreds of miles to the west, there was a sympathetic if somewhat morbid interest in the “mother of the defendant”: Louisa Hansen’s bravery, her composure. For Louisa was a widow, too—she’d lost her husband, as she had nearly lost her own life. Yet she seemed totally without bitterness or reproach.

  She’d described herself as A Christian woman. That is my family heritage, and it is my son’s heritage, too.

  Bart wiped at his eyes with his fists. Oh Christ now he would cry!

  Crying was a sign of guilt, remorse. He would not cry.

  He was sulky, sullen. He’d been humiliated, plenty—his frat brothers had let him down publicly. No girl would ever go out with him on the S.U. campus even if he was fully reinstated. Unflattering photographs of him had appeared in print, on TV, and online—he’d have liked to protest That is not me! That is not me God damn you.

  Why the Delt-Sigs had caved and testified for the prosecution, Deekman had explained: they’d been threatened with aiding and abetting a crime and obfuscation of justice if they’d supported Bart’s alibi and it had turned out that Bart was found guilty of the crime.

  Hadn’t had faith in him, that was the point.

  At least his mother was on his side. Finally!

  Her—she’d caused all this. She’d let him down. She’d reneged on promises she’d made to him, many times. She’d cared more for her God damn garden-club friends than she ever had for him.

  In the flower beds about the house, those tall showy neon-orange flowers—gladioli? Weird vertical flowers that had to be propped up or they’d fall over in a rainstorm.

  Still, Louisa Hansen’s flowers were impressive. Classy, eye-catching. His mom was some kind of star in the Rensselaer Women’s Garden Club—he’d seen her photo in the local ­newspaper —that meant a lot to her.

  He hadn’t even realized that she was forty-six years old!—until it was mentioned in the media. And his father, fifty-one.

  So old. Bart intends to never wind up so old.

  Seeing their pictures was weird. The first thing you think, why’d anybody care enough about Dad to print his picture in the paper? Or Mom?

  The grotesque melted face, the faltering voice, the single recessed eye and the way her slight body was collapsed into the witness chair like a discarded puppet—all this seemed to assure the courtroom that Louisa Hansen was telling the truth. Where her testimony differed from the testimonies of others, it was those others who were mistaken, or lying, and not her. In fact, after Louisa Hansen’s testimony it was difficult to recall others who’d preceded her.

  Until now, the trial had passed, for Bart, in a toxic haze. To save his sanity he’d had to let his mind wander. Shoot up with something like Novocain. Hadn’t smoked pot in such a long God damned time, he tried to recall the sensation, that was soothing. Comforting. And the beer buzz at the back of his head, Christ he missed that. Ritalin and any uppers he didn’t want, fuck no. Just needed to be calm—like, meditate. Sat at the defense table with his arms folded tight across his chest, trying not to wince with intestinal pain. Try not to scowl he’d been advised by Deekman. Fuck he wasn’t scowling!

  Continually outside the courtroom Deekman is asked: Will your client take the stand? Testify in his own defense?

  Deekman is courteous, deadpan No.

  No? And why not?

  Which part of the word don’t you understand? N—O. NO.

  Bart is thinking he should testify—people think you’re guilty if you don’t. But Deekman won’t even discuss the issue with him. And frankly Bart is relieved, he’s seen how witnesses who start out confident can get tripped up, make fools of themselves, or appear to be deceitful when questioned by a shrewd and (it seems) conscienceless attorney. Like the police officer who’d claimed to “question” Louisa Hansen despite her terrible injuries—who’d claimed that Louisa had actually nodded her head in response to his questions—Deekman had made an asshole of the guy in just a few words.

  How Deekman did it is a mystery! Bart has to concede, you wouldn’t want this guy on the other side.

  Five hundred bucks an hour, minimum. Plus there’s a “defense team”—a half-dozen younger assistants,
looks like.

  Bart had said he wasn’t sure if he could pay him—or when. Deekman laid a hand on his shoulder like Bart Hansen was his own son saying My fee is not an issue. Getting you free is.

  Bart tells himself that when this fiasco is over, and his real life resumes—he’ll see an adviser at the university to plan a pre-law major.

  Corporate law. Sports-injury law. Those guys raked in dough!

  Criminal defense law, he didn’t think he could master. Not like Davis Deekman. You had to be quick-witted and kind of duplicitous—tricky. It was something like playing chess if you could find a way to guide your opponent’s hand, too—force him to move a chess piece in a way not to his advantage.

  Bart was grateful to Deekman, though, for showing him a way to see how the ax attack might’ve occurred without Bart being involved. It was possible—some other individual, maybe a Delt-Sig, driving to East Rensselaer, etcetera. Beyond a shadow of a doubt was a sound principle.

  After Bart’s mother’s testimony, no one else and nothing else seemed important in the trial. Bart’s mother continued to attend the trial, seated just behind the defense table. She dressed herself, or was dressed, in dark clothes like a woman in mourning, very tasteful, classy. She sat with relatives who took care of her, Bart was relieved to see.

  She’d help him with the law school tuition. Anything to do with school, courses, self-improvement—she’d always encouraged him. Dad had had the attitude—Well sure. Let’s give it a try—so you could see he was skeptical, bemused, waiting for Bart to fuck up.

  Why’s it my fault, he’d wanted to demand of them, you didn’t have more kids? Superior kids? Think if you’d had some other sons, they’d make you more proud than Bart did? Fuck it!

  Had to laugh. Not once had his dad been on his side.

  After five and a half weeks the trial ended. After jurors deliberated for seventy hours, a message came to the judge that the jury was “deadlocked.”

  Meaning that nine jurors had voted guilty while three had voted not guilty.

  It only takes one. We will find that one. Deekman had not predicted he would find three!

  What was—astonishing—almost unbelievable—was how immediately following the jury’s decision, as the courtroom registered shock, and even the judge stared at him, Bart Hansen was a “free man.”

  Months he’d been kept in captivity like an animal, now he was a free man.

  Bart went to his mother, seated behind the defense table. Bart stooped to embrace her and they wept together.

  I love you, my darling baby, I love you. You are my darling darling baby I love you so.

  I love you, too, Mom.

  Now he would wish he hadn’t told so many of the guys that he’d hated his parents. That if something happened they’d deserved it.

  Well, that had been true of the old man. Not so true of his mother.

  Mom I’m so sorry! Hey Mom I love you.

  I know you do, Bart. I know you love me.

  The prosecutors were poor losers. Threatening how they’d try Bart another time. Deekman assured him this would not happen. They had no way to circumnavigate Louisa Hansen’s testimony—a new trial would end with another hung jury. It only takes one.

  In the months following the trial the mother astounded many observers by giving interviews—print, TV. It was fascinating to see the fragile woman with the face that looked like melted wax, a single eye and sunken mouth, insisting that her son had nothing to do with hurting her or with hurting his father.

  In a pleading voice she said You would have to be this boy’s mother to know him.

  There is a place in a child’s soul only a mother can know.

  She would be led to volunteer, drawn out by sympathetic-seeming interviewers on cable TV, that when she’d been a “young, immature mother” she’d taken tranquilizers and sleeping pills because motherhood had seemed “overwhelming” to her—she’d wanted to be a perfect mother and lost sight of the fact that no one is perfect.

  So she believed she had lost her son for some years. From the time the child was five or six until—oh, maybe sixteen—or, maybe—to the present time. Not his fault but hers.

  She wrote a letter to area newspapers claiming that the prosecutors of Rensselaer County had unjustly persecuted her son and never made the slightest attempt to find the actual murderer of her beloved husband. As if, if they couldn’t blame her son, they had no interest in anyone else.

  The letter was many times replicated in print and online.

  I am pleading with you, the Prosecutor’s Office of Rensselaer County, New York, to desist in harassing my son with threats of retrying him for a crime he did not commit and knew nothing of. I am begging you to allow us to get on with our lives after this catastrophe as we are trying to do.

  Sincerely, Louisa Hansen

  It was curious, Louisa Hansen rarely mentioned her late husband. It was as if the catastrophe that had happened, had happened to her and her son Bart alone.

  The son escorted the mother to interviews. Sometimes the son consented to be interviewed with the mother though Davis Deekman strongly advised against this: for there was the possibility of a second trial, still.

  The tabloid press and cable channels paid as much as $3,500 for an interview. There was a need for money: the two-hundred-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy paid to Louisa Hansen had gone for Bart’s legal expenses, entirely; the house at 29 Juniper Drive had to be sold, below its market value, for the remainder of Deekman’s bill, as well as for living expenses for the mother and son.

  The Bolton Landing property, valued at one million dollars, had been on the market for months and few prospective buyers had seen it. The sprawling old Adirondack house was badly in need of repair, the dock on Lake George ravaged in storms, and the gravel driveway nearly washed away.

  In the Village of East Rensselaer, Louisa and Bart Hansen have become a familiar pair. Mrs. Hansen has bought a two-bedroom condominium in a whitely shining new high-rise building in a residential neighborhood close by the First Episcopal Church and within easy commuting of Rensselaer Community College where Bart is enrolled in a degree-granting program in business administration. With her myriad disabilities, Louisa isn’t able to drive: Bart drives her everywhere. The Explorer had to be sold and so Bart drives his father’s sturdy dun-colored Lexus, taking his mother to her many medical appointments, to her hairdresser, to the Village library, to the First Episcopal Church of Rensselaer, to the homes of certain of her faithful friends, and to her several women’s clubs.

  Louisa says in interviews I have no one but Bart now. I will devote my life to clearing my son’s name.

  There have been those—Louisa’s family, relatives, friends—who’ve tried to reason with her, to suggest that living with Bart might be dangerous, but Louisa cuts them off curtly. Ridiculous!

  There is enough money to live on—just comfortably. Nothing like the multi-million-dollar estate Bart had naively anticipated. Joke’s on him, Bart thinks! For it seems that Laurence Hansen died leaving behind questionable investments in discredited hedge funds, snarled finances. And he hadn’t kept up repairs at the Bolton Landing house.

  Bart blames the father for the mother’s money worries—“He should have left you better taken care of, Mom. He always seemed to be boasting about that.” Halfheartedly Louisa defends Laurence—“Well. Your father loved us. He just didn’t always know how to show it. He was a good man”—and Bart says, humoring her, “Sure, Mom.”

  At church, the Hansens are often observed. Rarely do they miss a Sunday service. Their pew is fourth from the altar, facing the pulpit. Patiently Bart walks with his mother, who grips a cane in one hand and Bart’s arm in the other: she is half his size, small and broken-backed, yet warmly friendly to all who greet them, and always very tastefully dressed in somber clothing. After church, B
art drives Louisa to the Women’s Village Club, or to the Garden Club, for a lavish Sunday brunch. Bart is the only son in the gathering.

  Eyes move on them, mesmerized.

  Do you know who. Who they are?

  What the son did . . .

  No girl will come between them. No deceitful frat brothers.

  He’d quit the fraternity for sure. Never again pledge any fucking fraternity in good faith, Bart has learned his lesson.

  Still owes the Delta Sigma Corporation about one thousand dollars, with fines. Fuck you, sue me, Bart says.

  His Rensselaer high school friends have mostly departed. He has friends numbering in the hundreds, online.

  His names there are Cloudsplitter, Hercules II, Sabbathblack, Hotdickke. He has never arranged to meet anyone he has contacted online, however—how’d you trust any of them to be who they claim they are?

  Just like the Delt-Sigs, probably. Lift any rock and what you see scuttling beneath—that’s human nature, mostly.

  He tries not to be cynical, though. At church, he sits beside his mother gazing at the minister’s face, nodding, smiling, with a look of intense listening, rapport.

  God forgives. It is not given to us to comprehend God’s ways.

  The only lengthy drive Bart is required to make with Louisa is to the medical center at the Albany Medical School. There, Louisa sees a neurologist whose specialty is impaired vision. For Louisa is losing vision in her single remaining eye and has been experiencing flashing lights, migraines. Louisa relates to Bart that her nightmare is of something ugly and sharp flying loose—like a rabid bat, except not a living thing.

  “Yeh.” Bart rubs his eyes with his fists, grunting. “Some weird-fuck thing like that, I dream of it, too.”

  Louisa stiffens. Bart realizes, he has misspoken.

  “Hey I mean—yeh. Some weird thing like that.”

  Helping his mother out of the Lexus, at the entrance of the neurology clinic, while he drives into the high-rise parking garage to park. Then hurrying back to her as he sees her walking, trying to walk, toward the revolving-door entrance, leaning on her cane, faltering, as if determined to show that despite her infirmities, she can walk by herself. Bart comes up behind her—“Hey, Mom. Wait. Let me get the—” It pisses him that she’d have plunged into the revolving door, the cane would get caught and she’d be knocked down or worse yet, dragged inside the door like some kind of beetle on its back, except he’d run back in time to intervene. Christ! A tinge of impatience in Bart’s voice but at once fleeting, gone.