The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “No!” He sounded scandalized.

  “But you were affectionate. You were kind to her. You did her favors, like driving her around if she had an errand to do, even if it inconvenienced you that you were seen together with her in public.”

  “She didn’t have a car,” Ashley said again.

  “You gave her gifts.”

  Now he looked uncomfortable. Briefly he glanced at Heather. “I might have. Nothing major, though.”

  “You gave her jewelry.”

  “It wasn’t expensive,” Ashley protested. Naomi felt her stomach tighten in distaste. Judith went to her table, opened her briefcase, and took out a small plastic evidence bag. She held it up: a puddle of gold glinted in one corner of the plastic.

  “You recognize this?” Judith said. Ashley gave a brief nod.

  “I gave her a necklace once. So what?”

  “This the one? Are you sure?”

  She made him take it in his hands, but he held the bag pinched between thumb and forefinger, and barely looked at it.

  “What is it, Ashley?”

  “I said. A necklace. It has a little H on a chain.”

  “H for Heather.” It wasn’t a question, and he did not feel compelled to respond. “That was a sweet idea for a gift. Do you think Heather appreciated it?”

  “Who knows,” Ashley said. “I don’t know.”

  Judith entered the necklace into evidence. Then she went back to her table and lifted her legal pad, squinting at it a little.

  “You testified that when Heather told you she was pregnant, in the winter of 1984, you ‘had no way of knowing’ whether the baby was yours. Is that correct?”

  “Sure,” Ashley said. “I didn’t know.”

  She gave him a supremely dubious look. “Ashley, are you going to tell this jury that you entertained serious doubts that the baby was yours?”

  “I didn’t know,” he said petulantly. “I’m not a doctor.”

  “No,” she said carefully. “You were the man she was having sex with five times a week. You were the man she said was the father of her child. Either of these things alone would have been enough for you to at least consider the possibility, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I never said it wasn’t possible,” he pointed out.

  “No. But you implied that some phantom lover had sneaked in and impregnated the girl you happened to be having frequent unprotected sex with.”

  “I just said I didn’t know. I couldn’t be sure.”

  “But didn’t you want to know? I mean, one way or the other? Somebody says they’re having your baby and you’re not even interested in finding out?”

  “Not really,” he said, honestly enough.

  “Did it occur to you to make any financial provision for Heather’s baby?”

  “She wasn’t asking me for anything. And my wife was having a baby, too.”

  “Well, in that case, were you interested in establishing that you were not the father of Heather’s baby? I mean, what if Heather decided to come back to you one day and demand money that should have gone to your rightful heir; that is, the child you were having with your wife, Sue? Surely you know that, if you were the father of Heather’s baby, then Polly had a legal right to some financial support from you.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t really think about it, to tell you the truth.”

  “It really wasn’t that important to you,” Judith observed, “this child your girlfriend was pregnant with.”

  “She wasn’t my girlfriend.”

  “Sorry. This child the woman you were having sex with five times a week was having. It wasn’t very important to you.”

  “Well no,” he affirmed. “I had other stuff on my mind. Like my own baby.”

  “Right.” Judith smiled. “Little Joseph. Bouncing baby boy.”

  He grinned: proud father.

  “Did you stop having sex with Heather when she became pregnant?”

  He blushed briefly. Naomi couldn’t imagine why. He said no.

  “You continued to have sex with her? In the car?”

  “She wanted to,” he said.

  “And you also wanted to, apparently,” Judith observed. “Until what point in her pregnancy did you continue to have sex with Heather?” Ashley was silent. “Five months? Six months?”

  “I don’t know.” He put up his hands. “She was pretty big the last time, I remember that.”

  “So pretty much all the way to the end, right?”

  “Maybe,” he said, offhand.

  “And were you having sex with your wife at the same time?” Judith asked.

  Ashley looked at her in horror. Charter objected loudly, and they went into a huddle at the sidebar again. Again, Naomi saw, Judith got what she wanted. She went back to her table and asked the question a second time.

  “Sue didn’t want to,” he said tightly. “She said it hurt.”

  “So your wife didn’t want to have sex during her pregnancy. But luckily for you, your g—Oh”—she grinned—“sorry again! But luckily Heather didn’t seem to mind. So you got to keep having sex.”

  “Was that a question?” Ashley said dryly. Judith smiled, almost fondly.

  “Now, when Heather’s baby, Polly Elizabeth Pratt, was born the following summer, did it occur to you then to wonder whether you were her father?”

  “She looked like Heather,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, is that an answer to my question?”

  “She didn’t look like me,” he said again.

  Judith shook her head. “In other words, no. You didn’t wonder whether you were her father, even then, because she didn’t look like you. Is that right?”

  He shrugged. “Right.”

  “But even if the baby didn’t look like you, in your opinion, the fact remained that your g—excuse me, the woman you were having sex with five times a week, had a new baby she said was yours. Did you then feel moved to make some kind of contribution to this child’s care?”

  “You mean money?” Ashley frowned.

  “Well, money, support. Diaper changing. I don’t know. Something?”

  “I gave her my car,” he said hotly.

  “Yes, so you did. A curious baby gift.”

  “It wasn’t a baby gift. It was for her, because I wouldn’t be that free anymore to give her lifts.”

  “Or have sex with her.”

  “No,” he agreed. “I was trying to break it off.”

  “But it didn’t work that way. In fact,” Judith said thoughtfully, “didn’t you have sex with Heather on the very day you brought the car over to her house?”

  He considered this. He looked away in disgust, and answered the question.

  “So basically you weren’t that committed to breaking it off, after all, were you?”

  And on. The money he didn’t give her, the toys he didn’t buy, the doctor’s appointments he didn’t attend, the acknowledgment he didn’t make, even as he proudly displayed his son Joseph to neighbors and acquaintances. Judith kept her disgust barely restrained. Ashley chaffed beneath her questions, but he never betrayed any sense that he had behaved at all badly. Polly might be his in the remotest sense, the logic seemed to go, but she was Heather’s in actuality, and since nothing was asked of him, nothing was given. Judith got him to begrudge Heather’s warmth as a mother, her love for Polly, her attentiveness to the baby’s needs. She forced him to admit that even faced with the evidence of her fertility, he continued to have sex with her without using birth control. And finally, she hauled him through a narrative of that final night, their interrupted concord, in the back seat, atop the tools, in the winter forest. He didn’t know how many people were out there, or who they were, most of them, because he had seen only Sue, and Sue’s mother, who was barking that high, aggravating bark she made. There were flashlights, all aimed at him, and he was pissed, furious really. So yeah, he’d taken Heather’s arm and they had gone away, the two of them, just to show them all that he wasn’t going to knuckle under just because
they said so and his wife bawled a little in front of strangers.

  “You left your wife there,” Judith said, her voice newly soft. “You took Heather and you left your wife and the others.”

  “Yup.” He nodded, smug.

  “How that must have hurt Sue, to see you walking off like that with Heather.”

  “Well, we’re still married,” he said in his own defense.

  “You didn’t mind hurting Sue, in other words.”

  He looked surprised at her obtuseness. “If she hadn’t followed my car, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

  “And what about Heather, Ashley? How did you think Heather was going to interpret this, your having the choice to stay with your wife but choosing her instead?”

  “I didn’t choose her,” he said scornfully.

  “You don’t think so? You don’t think that’s what it felt like to her? You took her arm and you walked away from your wife.”

  Charter objected. Ashley could not know what it felt like to Heather. Judith nodded. The question was as potent unanswered.

  “So you left your wife in the woods and you went off with Heather. Whose idea was it to go to the mill?”

  “I don’t remember.” He sulked. “Might have been mine.”

  “Whose idea was it to break in through the window?”

  “I knew I could fix the window the next day.”

  Judith nodded. “I see. And do I understand correctly that you broke into the mill because you wanted sex?”

  Again, that look of disapproval, for her coarseness.

  “We had unfinished business. We both wanted it.”

  “I just want to make sure I understand,” Judith said. “Heather never actually said, ‘Let’s go to the mill. Let’s break into the mill. I want to have sex.’”

  He shrugged. “She might have. I don’t remember.”

  “You have no memory of her saying those things.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “And yet,” Judith reflected, “those things happened. Is it possible that Heather communicated them to you telepathically?”

  “What?” Ashley stared.

  “Or is it possible that these were your decisions? That you did not consult Heather at all? Because, let’s see, you were pissed, by your own account. And what better way to get back at your wife and all her busybody friends than to grab your girlfriend and go and have sex with her as soon as possible? And the mill was close, right? And it really didn’t matter if you broke in, because you’d be the one to fix it, anyway. And when you get right down to it, this whole thing made you pretty horny, too, I guess.”

  “Hey,” Ashley said, “just wait a minute.”

  “What, you weren’t horny?”

  “I didn’t-”

  “But after you were finished with Heather you knew you were going to go home and make it up with your wife somehow, right? So you looked down at this girl who adored you, who was lying there next to you, so completely happy because, after years of loving you, and bearing your child, and watching you go home to your wife, you had just chosen her, and taken her away, and made love to her. And you looked down at this girl and said, Well, so long, sweetie, this seems like a good time to break up. Or words to that effect. Right, Ashley?”

  The room, was silent.

  “Is that right?”

  “I was a married man. I never said I would leave my wife.”

  “Well, I guess that makes you some kind of paragon, Ashley,” Judith said cruelly.

  He sulked, his arms crossed. The women on the jury were glaring at him.

  “And she was pregnant. And you were the father of her second child.”

  “If you say so.” He wouldn’t look at her now.

  “Because there was nobody else for Heather, Ashley, was there?”

  “There might have been!”

  “Because she adored you, and there was nobody else. And eight months later she gave birth to one baby, and you were its father.”

  That wasn’t a question, Charter objected, and Hayes concurred.

  “And you never contacted her again,” Judith said. “You never gave a damn about her. You just dropped her, isn’t that right?”

  “We broke up,” he affirmed.

  “Were you aware that Heather’s grandmother died suddenly on the very day that you dropped her?”

  “I heard that,” he said.

  “Did you call her to offer your condolences?”

  He said no.

  “Did it occur to you that Heather must be devastated, losing her only relative and the father of her child on the very same day?”

  He scowled at her.

  “Can you imagine how it must have felt for Heather to discover that she was again pregnant, so soon after this moment in her life?”

  Ashley shrugged and examined his hands.

  “You never gave her a second thought, did you, Ashley? You just went back to your wife and kissed and made up, and got her pregnant again, is that right? And it was all right with you because you were a married man, even if you didn’t behave like one, and it was too bad for Heather if she made the mistake of thinking you cared. That about it?”

  “Nope,” he said, sarcastic, downright adolescent.

  “Too bad for Heather. Too bad for Polly, who would never know her father. Too bad for the second child you’d already conceived with Heather, who would also never know her father. She knew you were married!”

  “Hey,” he shouted, “you can’t just say I was their father. I don’t know that!”

  Judith sighed. She twisted on the desktop and opened one of her files, fishing out a form and holding it before her, peering at it. “Would it surprise you if I told you that a forensic serologist has concluded to —I’m quoting here—a ‘high degree of certainty’ that you are in fact the biological father of Polly Elizabeth Pratt?”

  He took this in. “I guess not,” he said grudgingly.

  “You’re not particularly surprised.”

  “I just said so.”

  “And would it surprise you if I told you that the same forensic serologist has concluded, to an equally high degree of certainty, that you are also the biological father of an unnamed infant girl, born last September, and in fact one of the babies at issue in this case?”

  “You can get anyone to say anything,” he said bitterly. “You just hire your own expert and pay them, isn’t that how it works?”

  Judith appeared taken aback. She fluttered the report in her hand. “Well, I wouldn’t know. This report was actually made by the prosecution’s expert.” Wide-eyed, she let the jury note her surprise. She smiled.

  “Ashley,” she said after this moment had been milked for its worth, “let me ask you something. You knew Heather pretty well, obviously. By your own account, you saw her almost every day. Did she ever tell you that she was seeing another man?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me, no.”

  “Well, did you ever actually see her with another man?”

  He hadn’t seen her either, he admitted.

  “Or ever come across any concrete evidence that she had met with and had a physical relationship with another man?”

  She would hardly leave evidence, he countered. But no.

  “And you have no idea who this phantom Christopher Flynn is, do you, Ashley?”

  “I said I never met him. I said that before.”

  Judith sighed, a mite theatrically. “You know perfectly well there’s no such person as Christopher Flynn, don’t you, Ashley?”

  “I don’t-”

  “You know there was you and just you. A pregnancy that produced your daughter Polly. Then a second pregnancy that produced only one infant, your second daughter, who was born and died without a name. You know that, don’t you, Ashley?”

  “I don’t know shit,” he yelled, and then Charter was yelling, too, and Judith, with a deeply disingenuous smile, briefly thanked the witness and said she had no further use for him.

  Chapter 33<
br />
  friends Can Quarrel

  “GUESS I’M GOING TO NEED A NEW CARPENTER,” Judith said the next morning as Naomi approached. She was waiting on one of the benches in front of the courthouse, wrapped in her heavy coat, her briefcase pinched between her calves.

  “What, did he call or something?” Naomi said. She took a seat and gave Judith one of the two takeout coffees she was carrying. It didn’t matter which one, they took it the same way.

  “No, but Sue did. Around midnight. You won’t believe what she called me.”

  “What?” Naomi put down her cup, peeled off the plastic cap, and carefully tore out a triangle. A triangle-shaped wedge of steam hit the cool air when the cap went back on.

  “A kike,” Judith said smugly. “Can you believe it? I’ve never known anyone who was actually called a kike.” She considered. “I’m not sure I even know exactly what it means.”

  Naomi shook her head and sipped, instantly scalding her tongue. “Jesus, Judith. I’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t be. My only problem was calming Joel down. He wanted to call the papers. But I don’t think it would actually help.” She peeled off the lid and blew at the black surface. “For all I know, it might reflect badly on Heather if her lawyer started whining about being called names. And frankly, those eight or nine people in New Hampshire who can’t figure out on their own that somebody named Friedman is probably Jewish, why should I tell them?”

  “But it’s nasty. For you.”

  “Nah.” She grinned. “Listen, it’s rare in life you get to be so totally on higher moral ground. Especially in my line of work. This is just fine.”

  Naomi laughed. “Maybe she resented your implication that her husband ought to keep his fly zipped a little more tightly.”

  “Maybe. I would.”

  “Maybe you were a little hard on her yesterday,” Naomi said, testing the waters. She didn’t actually believe that herself.

  “I don’t think so.” Judith blew and sipped. “But if I was, it’s because I had to be. In something like this, you just can’t take prisoners. I needed to show that Ashley always went to Heather, you know? Never the other way around. He went to her when he wanted sex. He took her in his car. He chose the place in the woods. He went to her house. He bought her gifts. He called all the shots in the relationship. Sue’s resentment was misplaced. I had to show that I would have been disgusted, too, if he’d been my husband.”