The Evangeline

by D. W. Buffa

  Time only slowed down on Saturday afternoons, an hour or so before four. There was a mathematical precision, a strict proportion, between how much he looked forward to her visit and how long it took for that last hour to pass. From the moment he heard the car until the moment she left, he did not think about time at all. He wondered if she ever did. She was always on time, never more than a minute early or a minute late. It was not, as far as he could tell, either a discipline to which she had trained herself or one to which she had been forced to comply. She was the most organised person he had ever known, a woman who had to do dozens of things every day without any way of knowing exactly how long each of them would take, and each of them had to be done in the proper order and without delay. It was, he had decided, a gift she had been born with, a gift that somehow allowed her to make time belong to her.

  Summer Blaine parked the ancient Mercedes in front of the garage. She seldom drove it more than a few miles a day, but had it washed every week. She gave it a quick inspection, frowning at the dust, and then threw a mock-evil glance towards the window where Darnell stood watching, to let him know that he really ought to pave the drive. With a bag of groceries in her arms she pushed on the open door with her shoulder and let herself in.

  ‘Tell me everything about the trial,’ she said as she started to put things away.‘But tell me first about you.’ Her hand was on the cupboard door. She looked at him and smiled.‘How are you, Bill? Is everything all right? Are you taking the medication?’

  Darnell tugged at his chin, as if he could not quite remember.

  ‘That means you are. That’s good.You have to, you know,’ she said with a breezy air, moving from the cupboard to the refrigerator. ‘We’ll eat about six, is that all right?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather go out? I thought we might go up valley, to that place you like. We have to go out anyway, and I thought that after…’

  ‘You eat out every night in the city—if you remember to eat at all. Tell me the truth … No, don’t tell me that,’ she said, laughing quietly. ‘I know enough already. Did I ever tell you that you’re the worst patient I’ve ever had?’

  It made Darnell smile, the way she looked at him when she said it; the girlish, high-spirited sound of her voice that made him think that time had run backward and he was only half his age.‘If I was a better patient, you might stop making house calls.’

  A shy smile floated over Summer Blaine’s wide and rather fragile mouth. ‘Then Saturdays would be wasted and I wouldn’t have anything to do.’

  They looked at each other with affection, grateful that they still had each other, mourning gently the past they had not shared. They had known each other from the earliest days of their marriages, first through the death of her husband and then, a few years later, the death of his wife.

  ‘Come into the living room,’ she whispered after she had kissed him on the side of his face and, for a fleeting moment, clung to his neck.

  He sat in the easy chair across from the sofa. Unbuttoning his shirt-sleeve he rolled up the faded, threadbare sweater that was as old as her Mercedes.

  With a physician’s clean efficiency, Summer Blaine pumped the blood-pressure cuff. ‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘Bend forward.’

  It was a known routine. He pulled the shirt and sweater up over his back and leaned on his knees. The stethoscope felt ice-cold against his skin.

  ‘Now back.’

  He leaned back in the chair, exposing his frail chest.

  When she had finished listening, she folded the stethoscope and put it back in her bag. ‘This is your last trial, remember—we agreed.You’ve had two heart attacks already, and the way you’re going I can’t promise there won’t be a third.Your heart may not be strong enough to take that. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’

  Darnell got to his feet, tucked in his shirt and adjusted the sweater. He grinned defiantly and bounced up on his toes.‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ he insisted.

  ‘This case may kill you,’ she insisted with a worried look.

  ‘This case may keep me alive. I would have been dead years ago if it weren’t for the work. That’s when people die—not when they’re working, but when they don’t have any more work to do. It’s a law of nature.’

  It was false bravado, but that was not the reason he immediately regretted the remark. She had lost her husband; he had lost his wife.Work, or the lack of it, had had nothing to do with either death. ‘Sorry,’ he said, touching her arm. ‘But there is some truth to it. I have to stay active; I can’t give up. And if I have a heart attack and die … What of it? Better that way than what happened to Sarah.’

  ‘And to Adam, too, perhaps. Though I’m not sure how much better it is to go too quickly. At least we were able to say goodbye. The point is, I don’t want to lose you, and your heart isn’t what it used to be. I want you to be careful. And you did agree, remember?’

  ‘That this would be my last trial.Yes, I suppose…’

  ‘Suppose? You’re incorrigible. I should know better than to rely on a lawyer’s promise.’

  ‘A lawyer’s promise?’ said Darnell, a sparkle in his pale grey eyes.‘A lawyer who knows what a promise is, would be more like it. A promise, to be enforceable, has to be supported by a promise in return. I promised this would be my last case, but what promise did I get in return? Are you going to stop the practice of medicine? Give up your blissful sixty-hour week and spend the rest of your days puttering around the garden with me? Remind me, but I don’t remember any promise like that.’

  ‘Better bring a jacket,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘It’s November now. I don’t want you catching cold.’

  He did not think he needed one, but she worried about him and he liked that she did. If he would not yield to her in the larger questions of his life, he did not mind doing what she asked in the smaller ones. He threw on a corduroy jacket and caught up with her at the car.

  ‘And how was your week, Dr Blaine?’ he asked as she drove. ‘I envy you a little, able to help people without harming anyone else.’ He watched the houses set far back on the hillside slip by, neighbours he scarcely knew. ‘That would have been a good life, never having to choose. Although I suppose it must happen sometimes,mustn’t it? When you have two people dying and you don’t have time to save them both. That’s what intrigues me so much about this case: the moral ambiguity of everything that happened. I keep wondering what I would have done if I had been in Marlowe’s place.’

  She kept her eyes on the twisting road, but her gaze, or so it seemed to Darnell, became more intense. ‘You can’t always help. Sometimes the best thing you can do is not to help at all.’

  ‘I’ve thought about that, too,’ he replied, staring out the window at the familiar scene, the route they travelled together the first or second Saturday of every month.‘Doctors who let their patients go; the ones who decide that the only life left is pain and suffering, and that to prolong the agony makes medicine a kind of evil. It must happen every day, but no one would ever admit it because life— existence—is the only standard on which anyone can agree. That is what I keep coming back to: that there are certain things that should never be made public. I’m a lawyer, and there are rules. If you start making exceptions, arguing that in certain instances the rules don’t apply, then it isn’t long before everything is an exception and the rules don’t exist. And so we insist that everyone follow the rules even when we know there are times when that might be the worst thing anyone could do. Marlowe should never have been charged with murder, and yet charging him with murder was the only thing the prosecution could have done. What happened out there should have stayed a secret, but there were too many survivors for that. It was not enough that they were alive, they wanted absolution, too. This is both the greatest case I have ever had and the worst. The law wasn’t made for this,’ he said, growing more energetic.‘It’s too far out of the common experience.’

  Summer parked the car and from the back seat retrieved t
wo small bouquets. She gave one of them to Darnell. Holding hands, they walked up the path that led between the rows of headstones until they were at the very top of the cemetery.

  ‘A few minutes,’ she said.With a wistful glance, she let go of his hand and, while he headed in one direction, she went in the other.

  When Summer Blaine reached her husband’s grave, she looked back over her shoulder, waiting until Darnell had gone the farther distance to where his wife lay buried. He did not turn around to look at her; he never did. She smiled to herself, then bent down and replaced the old flowers, withered with age, with the new.

  She was waiting for him at the path when he returned. ‘Did you have a good visit?’ She took his arm and held it tight, afraid he might fall, as they moved down the narrow, uneven trail to the car. The scent of burning leaves floated in the air. The soft November sun left a burnished glow on her cheek.

  ‘I talk to her now in ways I never talked to her when she was alive. That’s the trouble with words, I think—they always get in the way. They never quite come out the way you want.When I come here it is not so much a conversation as a meditation, a sense that she shares whatever thought I have. It’s a kind of catharsis, I suppose; but it’s more than that: it’s the way she always makes me better than I am. Death does that, doesn’t it? It puts things in the right perspective, gives you a sense of what is important and what is not.’

  Under the darkened shelter of an oak tree, they sat together on a wooden bench. Summer nestled close, keeping hold of his arm. ‘You were lucky to have her. There aren’t many men who married the first girl they ever loved. I don’t talk to Adam when I visit his grave; I didn’t talk much to him when he was alive. I suppose I come here because I was married to him and it doesn’t seem right he should just be forgotten.We were never any good together. That wasn’t his fault, it was mine. Sometimes I try to remember what things were like, in the beginning, before things got bad. The truth, though, is that if he had lived—if he hadn’t gotten sick—we would have divorced and I doubt I ever would have thought, or tried to think, about how things had been at the beginning. But he died instead, and I feel this responsibility. The dead go on living, don’t they? They’re alive in us.’

  Darnell pulled his jacket close around his throat.

  ‘You’re cold.We’d better go.’

  She drove him home and, while he sat at the kitchen table reviewing some material for the next week in trial, she made dinner.

  ‘Did I tell you that yesterday morning I delivered Olivia Ceballos’ baby? A girl, seven pounds, eight ounces.’

  Darnell looked up, a blank expression on his face.

  ‘The second generation,’ she said, reminding him of what she had told him before.

  Darnell’s eyes lit up.‘Of course! You delivered Olivia—twenty years ago.’

  ‘Yes, and her mother came, and afterwards we had a photograph taken: three generations and me.’

  ‘Twenty years from now, you can have another picture with four.’

  ‘And I suppose you think you’ll still be trying cases,’ she remarked as she brought their plates to the table.

  ‘I wonder what kind of world it will be then.’ Darnell lifted a glass of red wine to the level of his eyes, studying it with a strange fascination.‘On the surface, no doubt, even more artificial than this.’

  ‘Artificial?’

  ‘You see it every day,’ he said, as he put down the glass.‘What we all believe; that with all the new advances, all the things that science will soon be able to do, we will live longer, better, more productive lives. Every week in the papers I read how the normal life span will become a hundred and fifty years, maybe more. As if that were any great achievement; as if by some small delay death could be defeated! That is what has everyone so fascinated with this case. It shows how artificial we have made—or tried to make—the world. Feel bad? Take a pill. Have a problem? Suffered a loss? See a counsellor who can teach you how to cope. It is the narcotic of the modern age, a way to try to forget that we’re as much a part of nature as everything else that is born and dies. But out there, in that lifeboat—without food, without water —what good was all our modern science to them? What difference would it have made whether life expectancy was measured in terms of centuries instead of years to people who did not know if they would live another day? That is what has everyone on the edge of their seats: this knowledge that all the things we take for granted have made us forget what it really means to be alive!’

  But Summer’s mind was on a question she was almost afraid to ask.‘What happened to the others? There were other lifeboats, weren’t there? There were twenty-seven people on the Evangeline. What happened to the other thirteen?’

  A strange, distant look came into Darnell’s eyes. It was a look Summer Blaine had seen before, seen on the faces of her patients when she had to tell them they were dying and that there was nothing she could do. The look faded away, but it left behind a sense of something sombre, troubling and profound.

  ‘What happened in those first few minutes? What happened in that first hour? When that comes out, I’m afraid that no one will understand Marlowe then.’ He looked at Summer Blaine, a question in his eyes. ‘If there really is nothing more important than life, why is it that I feel so much more sorry for the living than I do for the dead?’

  Chapter Seven

  JOSHUA STEINBERG DID NOT UNDERSTAND THE question.

  ‘The reason, Doctor; the reason why you found it necessary to hospitalise the survivors of the Evangeline?’ Bent over the counsel table, examining a medical report, Michael Roberts looked up.

  Tall, thin, with the gaunt look of the long-distance runner, Dr Joshua Steinberg sat on the side of his hip, two long fingers stretched along the side of his jaw. He had dark, intelligent eyes and a fine, sensitive mouth. He had none of the arrogance of his profession.

  ‘There were different reasons for each; but if you want a statement that encapsulates their condition, I’d have to say the effects of exposure and exhaustion.’

  ‘They were hospitalised here, in the same hospital where you first examined them?’

  ‘That’s right. They were brought by ambulance from the airport, as soon as they arrived from Brazil. Benjamin—Mr Whitfield —made all the arrangements.’

  ‘Would you describe what, if any, medical attention they had received before you saw them?’ Roberts closed the file, but did not move from the counsel table. ‘I assume they had not been in a hospital.’

  ‘No, not in a hospital, but they had been given medical attention. A doctor in Rio de Janeiro examined them. He set— or, rather, reset—some of the broken bones. Some of them had been set originally when they were still in the lifeboat; the rest on the freighter that picked them up.’

  ‘The White Rose? Captain Balfour’s ship?’ said Roberts to make sure the jury understood. ‘Was there a doctor on board?’

  ‘No, apparently not. It was a freighter, not a passenger liner. Some of the crew had the kind of first-aid training you would expect, and they did have medical supplies. Captain Balfour did an admirable job with what he had. I don’t think there is any question but that at least two of the six survivors would have died within days if he had not taken care of them the way he did.’

  ‘Dr Steinberg, I’m going to read you a list of six names.Would you tell us, please, if these are the people you treated at the hospital?’

  Nodding after each name, Steinberg agreed with the list.

  Roberts then went back to the beginning and asked what had been the condition of each.‘James DeSantos—would you describe for the jury his physical condition at the time you examined him?’

  Steinberg gestured towards the table. ‘May I refer to the records?’

  Roberts brought him the document. Steinberg glanced at it a moment and then held it on his lap.

  ‘Broken ankle, three broken teeth. Suffered temporary blindness. He had severe ulceration.’

  ‘What about his mental condition
, Dr Steinberg?’ asked Roberts, moving to a crucial element in the prosecution’s case. ‘Was he lucid? Was he, as we laymen might say, in his right mind?’

  ‘Yes, very much so. He was fully alert and in command of his senses.’

  ‘So he was not delusional? He knew where he was, what was happening to him, he could answer all your questions? In other words, Dr Steinberg, he was normal?’

  Joshua Steinberg was not someone’s paid witness, brought in to give expert testimony for a fee. Roberts’s question posed a dilemma.

  ‘Normal?’ he mused aloud.‘No, I would not think to call him that; not after what he had been through. I understand your question,’ he said as Roberts started to ask the question a different way.‘Yes, he was lucid, rational; he could answer my questions; he knew where he was. But he was not right, and I doubt he or any of the others will ever be again.’

  ‘Yes, but my question is really much more narrow than that. What is important for us to know is whether he had suffered the kind of mental deterioration—whatever the cause—that would make it impossible for him to give an accurate account of what transpired between the time the Evangeline sank and the time they were rescued.Was he delusional, was he insane, is the question— and I take it from your answer that he was not. Is that a fair interpretation of what you said?’

  ‘During the time I examined him, during the time he was my patient in the hospital, I saw nothing to suggest that he lacked the capacity to think clearly.’

  ‘And what of the others?’ asked Roberts.‘Well, perhaps we’d better go through each one in turn. Let’s start with Hugo Offenbach.What can you tell us about him?’

  Steinberg smiled to himself and shook his head. ‘I saw him play, here in San Francisco, ten years ago: the greatest violinist in the world.’

  Everyone knew who Hugo Offenbach was. The fact that he had been saved, rescued from the sea, had been seen as a miracle— but then, as the rumours started, it seemed to intensify the shock. Normal people, driven to desperation, might do such things, but someone like him? No one wanted to believe it; there had to be some other explanation.