The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “It is possible. Yes.”

  “All right. Let’s talk about the second baby.”

  She was so crisp, Naomi thought with admiration. Judith walked back to her table, put down her notes, and picked up other notes. She never broke rhythm. It was a kind of dance.

  “The pond baby. You testified, I believe, that there was air visible by X-ray in the baby’s lungs, indicating a live birth. Is that correct?”

  But he was still thrown. It took him a moment. “Yes. A live birth.”

  “And you also testified that the baby’s body had been in the water for a period of approximately four to five weeks. Is that correct?”

  “It is.” Petersen nodded.

  “Now, Dr. Petersen,” Judith moved in, “would you agree that some decomposition would have taken place after four or five weeks in the water?”

  He frowned. “Well, certainly.”

  “And this decomposition, would it necessarily be visible to the naked eye? For example, in the kind of photograph Mr. Charter showed us a few minutes ago?”

  “Not always,” Petersen said. “Decomposition may be more evident internally than externally. Bacteria in the gut, for example, are strong activators.”

  “In other words, the bacteria that’s already inside the body begins work to decompose the body.”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” she considered. “Now, this bacteria, it produces gas in the process of decomposition, does it not?”

  Again, he saw where she was headed, but the fight seemed to have gone out of him.

  “It often does.”

  “And how would gas appear on an X-ray?”

  The medical examiner looked at her dully. “Very like air, I would think.”

  “‘Very like air?’ If gas appeared very like air, what criteria would you use to tell them apart?”

  “It would not be possible to tell them apart.”

  “Oh? In that case, perhaps you do not mean to say ‘very like air.’ Perhaps what you mean to say is identical to air,” she said firmly.

  “All right. Identical. On X-ray.”

  “So it’s possible, is it not, that what you identified as air on the pond baby’s X-ray might actually have been gas produced by decomposing bacteria?”

  He nodded grudgingly. “Yes, it’s possible.”

  “Now, you did not testify to any ligature marks on the baby’s neck, or other abrasions or signs of strangulation of the baby. Is that correct?”

  “There were none,” he agreed.

  “So, without visible ligature marks or signs of strangulation, and without an ability to point to the X-ray and be certain that there are pockets of air in the baby’s lungs and intestines, what other evidence do you have that this baby had in fact breathed after birth?”

  He gave her a stony look. “My finding that the baby breathed after birth was based on my interpretation of the X-ray evidence.”

  “But you yourself stated that what you identified as air might conceivably be decompositional gases!” she said with theatrical confusion.

  “My finding might have been in error,” he conceded, though with bitterness.

  “Your finding might have been in error,” Judith repeated. “Like your finding on the Sabbathday River baby, in other words.”

  “Objection!” Charter exploded. “Mrs. Friedman has no call to insult the witness.”

  Judge Hayes concurred, and Judith was chastised.

  “Dr. Petersen,” she said when she resumed, “babies do sometimes, tragically, die during or just before birth, do they not?”

  “They do,” he agreed.

  “What are some causes of fetal death at these times?”

  “Well, the placenta can detach prematurely from the wall of the uterus, inducing labor and cutting the blood supply to the infant. This kills the baby in utero. Or the placenta can be abnormally placed, blocking the birth canal. This is known as placenta previa. Or the umbilical cord might be knotted, rendering the fetus incapable of respiration. Or the umbilical cord might be looped around the baby’s neck, strangling it.”

  “There are quite a few possibilities, aren’t there, Doctor?”

  “There are,” he agreed, but he added hastily that an attentive physician or midwife could almost always prevent these tragedies. Charter, from his table, groaned audibly.

  “Ah,” Judith said sadly, “but as you know, Heather Pratt did not have an attentive physician or midwife. She gave birth unattended. Now, in your opinion, would an unattended birth give rise to a greater likelihood of these conditions?”

  “The conditions themselves, no. But a bad outcome from one of these conditions, yes.”

  “A bad outcome being a stillbirth, yes?”

  Petersen said yes.

  “Then you do feel there is a greater likelihood that this baby died before birth or during birth, rather than after birth?”

  “I didn’t say that!” He was clinging to his dignity now. “I said it was possible.”

  “It’s possible that this baby died during birth and was born dead, exactly as Heather Pratt has consistently claimed?”

  “I am not familiar with Heather Pratt’s claims.”

  “It’s possible that this baby was born dead.”

  “It is,” he said tersely.

  “It’s possible that this baby was not”—she walked back to her table and read from her notes his own words—“asphyxiated ‘due to manual strangulation and obstruction of the external airway.’”

  A look at Charter. A brief nod. “It is possible.”

  “In fact, you have no incontrovertible evidence at all that the death of this baby was due to any unnatural cause, do you?”

  He thought about this for a long moment. Clearly, he was searching for a way to disagree, but there wasn’t one.

  “No incontrovertible evidence, no.”

  “And yet you testified to the contrary,” she said sharply. “Why is that?”

  “The other scenario is also possible.”

  “That may be, but you did not present strangulation as one possible scenario. You claimed that it was the definitive scenario. Why did you do that?” She sounded caustically authoritative now, like a mother who’d caught her child in a lie.

  “I might have been in error,” he said again, and the skin of his scalp was sheened with sweat now.

  “Yes,” Judith commented. “So you said earlier. I’d like to ask you again, Dr. Petersen, whether you think of yourself as a thorough and professional medical examiner.”

  “I am.” Though he sounded childish when he said it. “Of course I am.”

  “But you made assumptions, didn’t you?” She walked briskly to Heather and placed a hand where it had probably never been before: on Heather’s shoulder. “Because you didn’t particularly care that this young woman’s life is up for grabs here. Because it wasn’t very important to you that an error, as you put it, might destroy her future and her daughter’s future. So you thought of horses, and you left it to someone else to think of zebras. Isn’t that right?”

  Charter got up to object, though not before Petersen could make his final, ineffectual protest. “That is not right,” the medical examiner said wearily. But by this point, everybody knew it was.

  Chapter 38

  Medical Oddities

  “I’M A LITTLE WORRIED ABOUT YOU,” NAOMI SAID. She and Judith were eating lobster rolls in one of the lesser-traveled corridors adjacent to the courtroom.

  “And why is that?” Judith said kindly. “Because this is treif?”

  “No. I have no concerns about your spiritual life. But you’re sort of burning your bridges here, aren’t you? I mean, not only in town, but in your work. I guess I was thinking about it, and it occurred to me, isn’t that the guy you’re going to have to cross-examine on every case you try? And isn’t he going to hate you now?”

  Judith took a sip of her iced tea and appeared to think about this. “You’re right, but it’s immaterial. They detest us anyway. They’re
in opposition to us on a fundamental level. If the jury acquits, the message is that the medical examiner either hasn’t done his job by finding proof of guilt or hasn’t managed to convince the jury of what he has found. So yeah. Of course they don’t like us.”

  “But what about the people in Goddard? I mean, you’ve just moved here. Doesn’t it worry you to start out this way? It’s one thing for me, I kind of traipsed into town with a sign that said JEWISH COMMIE FEMINIST WANTS TO CHANGE YOUR WAY OF LIFE. But you just want to live in a gorgeous old house and have kids and commute to Peytonville, right?”

  Judith shook her head. She chewed her sandwich thoughtfully. “You don’t have to worry, Naomi. Though I appreciate it. I’m comfortable with my choices.”

  She wasn’t quite sure she understood this. “But … you mean you were aware of what might happen and you chose to do it anyway?”

  “Yes,” said Judith. “I thought it was important. That’s why I didn’t care if it kind of queered me with some people. Those were probably going to be people I wouldn’t like, anyway. Because, to my mind, this is the most important case I’ve ever tried. It’s probably the most important case I’m ever going to try.”

  Naomi looked at her in amazement. Judith, finishing her sandwich, crumpled the paper and set it aside.

  “But how can you say that? You don’t even like this case! And you don’t like Heather.”

  “That’s completely irrelevant. This case is about a great deal more than Heather, and you know it. It’s important to me. I care very much about the outcome.”

  Ann Chase stalked past, returning from the women’s room. She turned her head away from them at such a sharp angle Naomi wondered if she might lose her balance and fall. Beside Naomi, Judith took out her notes. The doctor who had examined Heather in jail was due to testify next.

  “You’re putting your politics ahead of personal inclinations,” Naomi said. “I really respect that.”

  Judith looked up. Her face wore an expression of mild surprise. “Oh, I wouldn’t be too impressed. What I’m doing here is not particularly admirable.” Naomi began to disagree, but Judith shook her head briskly. “No. Let’s not talk about it anymore. Besides, I need to ask your advice about Monday. Joel’s already driving me crazy.”

  “What, he wants you to cover your hair or something?”

  Judith smiled. “No. But he’s afraid I’m not taking this seriously enough. He’s afraid I’m going to ‘entertain,’ as he puts it, like this is a dinner party instead of a cultural lifeline all the way back to Mount Sinai. I’m going to botch the haroseth, or throw some pine needles on the table and call it bitter herbs.”

  “Well, don’t look at me. I don’t have a clue how to make haroseth. I told you, my grandfather used to spit at rabbis whenever he saw them in the street.”

  “This is going to be your first Seder?” Judith said. “Oh no.”

  “My second. Linda Grossberg had one, in sixth grade. Her mom got the matzo-ball soup at Zabar’s, and the maid served it. I think we sang ‘Dayenu,’ but I can’t remember the words.”

  “If you remember the title, you remember the words.” Judith laughed. “You’ll come at six?”

  “Yes. With Polly, if that’s okay.”

  “It’s okay,” Judith said. She hunched over her notes.

  Naomi, watching her, sipped the end of her soda. It had been so long since she’d thought about any of this that she couldn’t even remember what the haroseth was supposed to be for. Naomi’s family, after all, had not been religious for generations. Their American story, so very unoriginal, had hit all the classic signposts in its eighty-year journey from immigrant to American, and from piety to smug disbelief. Early on, God had been revealed as the masses’ morphine, a kind of colossal swindle visited upon people who would otherwise thrive, achieve, create. As for the vast migration from the laws of the Old Country to the rising red sun, this had been explained as a logical shift, and utterly in keeping with that Jewish habit of holding one’s nose to the text. Of course we’re people of the Book, only the Book is by Marx and Lenin.

  It was not precisely the case that religious Judaism had been completely absent from her life. In college, there had been an annual attempt among her women friends to recast the Passover Seder into an expression of feminist ideology, and Naomi had once attended this curious event—with its cup of wine for Miriam on the table, and its orange sharing the Seder plate with the more familiar bitter herbs and eggs (not specified, the orange signified, but not expressly forbidden, either). The Haggadah had been clipped from Ms. magazine, Xeroxed into a gray blur, and annotated with references to female circumcision and foot binding. But it was still about God, and Naomi didn’t believe it. Disbelieving it, she could not appreciate it, and after the first year she did not go back.

  Even so, she had always considered herself a good Jew, given that, in her view, a good Jew was a person who did good things and happened to be Jewish. Besides, as far as she was concerned, their history of spectacular oppression, their very own wing in the cosmic museum of victimhood, meant that Jews should be allowed to claim solidarity with any other ethnic or cultural underdog, anytime, anywhere. That they had been enslaved, expelled, and butchered so relentlessly across countries and centuries gave them all sorts of special privileges, like the unique dispensation she currently enjoyed of not having to actually believe in God, so long as you did everything else right. Or, as her mother had once put it—meaning this to be funny—“We all know perfectly well what the God who doesn’t exist expects of us.”

  So she was a Jew without a religion, but then religion was not relevant. The Nazis, Naomi grudgingly accepted, had understood this. After all, did Eichmann really care whether his cattle cars were full of atheists or dovening Hasids? And if it troubled Naomi that she used for Jewishness the precise requirements that the Nazis had, that they were even that much in agreement, she still could not help herself, Because it was true: Judaism was a tribe, not a faith. A genetic imprint, a specific river of DNA. Other religions might feature permeable borders, the ebb and flow of conversion or attrition—a person could join a church or become a Christian, but on the most essential level a person was Jewish. You could not become a Jew, in her view, any more than you could become Inuit or Aborigine; either your ancestor was waiting at the foot of Mt. Sinai for Moses to return or he wasn’t. Also, you couldn’t get out, even if you wanted to.

  Naomi got up and wandered off down the corridor and outside for a breath of air. There were more women today, diffused over the steps and along the pavement—some students, but several older. One of the Boston affiliates had run a news segment the night before, at six and eleven, featuring Ella. As Ella had gleefully reported that morning, the telephone in her off-campus apartment had begun ringing before the broadcast even ended.

  Today, they were organized. They had somehow procured a few seats inside the courtroom, and when Naomi turned to rise after Petersen’s testimony, they could be seen glowering in the back row, dressed uniformly in white. They would be back in the afternoon, she knew, but she could not quite decide that this was a good thing for Heather, that these incensed women would win favor from the jurors, or indeed anyone else. But whether they did or not, they were indisputably here, and not banishable. Heather, Naomi knew, belonged to them in a way she did not belong to Naomi, or indeed even to Heather herself. She belonged to them in the pure way that symbols belong—deeply, intimately—the way Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner had belonged to Naomi, or Hannah Senesh had, or Harriet Tubman. For the first time, she wished that she could feel that way about Heather, that she could embrace the cause, if not the girl, with the passion of her past adherences. But she could not. The women of Dartmouth, the “friggin’ fan club in San Francisco,” were welcome to Heather-the-symbol. Naomi’s far less glamorous job would be to pick up the pieces, wherever they were going to fall, when all of this was over.

  Inside, she took her usual place behind Judith. Nelson, nodding to her as she passed
, was seated on the aisle, his face strained. She was still angry and would not return his greeting, but she did manage a smile for Sarah Copley, who had turned up and was seated a row behind Naomi on her own side. For an instant it occurred to her to wonder whether this signified some change in allegiance on Sarah’s part, as if the courtroom were divided like a church in a wedding—bride’s side, groom’s side—but Naomi quickly dismissed this thought. The courtroom, after all, was now jammed, and the few familiar participants of the trial’s first days had been edged out by the avid faces of strangers, some clucking various disapprovals at the proceedings, some madly scribbling notes or sketching likenesses. A limitless nautilus had sprung up around them, Naomi thought, carrying their small local tragedy far out into the world of other people, wrapping up more and more of them into this laughable and pathetic drama. From that moment five months before when she had reached out to touch the lost baby in the Sabbathday River to this surreal permutation of justice, there had been only such a crazy circling, such an utter absence of lines logically straight. Perhaps the world would go on like this, Naomi thought. Perhaps this was how lives were actually lived, like great swirling teacups in a child’s amusement-park ride, one circle tearing around within a larger circle, but never actually making any progress. Perhaps it would all one day just stop, and she would climb out, dazed and dizzy, to see where she had got to. Then again, it might never stop.

  Heather was brought in. Despite Naomi’s pleading that she try to eat something for lunch, it was instantly apparent that Heather had not made much of an effort, if any at all. She stumbled a bit, and though her eyes passed over Naomi as she was led to her seat, they did not pause. Alarmed, Naomi reached forward for Judith, but Judith was already looking keenly at Heather. She pulled back the chair and the girl sat, half falling. Then she shrugged and went back to her writing.

  The doctor arrived, a Peytonville obstetrician-gynecologist whom Charter had tapped to examine Heather. He was a bleak little man in a brown suit with an important-looking briefcase. From this he produced, by request, Heather’s medical chart, a fan of blue X-rays that slapped together as he held them to the light, and volumes of notes, all of which, Naomi assumed, were intended to make him appear clinically disinterested and adept. They settled into dialogue, a genial tone belying the extraordinary content of their conversation, which was Heather.