His words pave the way for an expression of sympathy, but I find myself unable to come up with one. Of course the contours of the story he described sound terrible, yet I feel nothing in relation to it, feel incapable of sympathy or even clear thought, conscious of nothing save the visceral sensation of slipping, falling, my feet fumbling over disintegrating ground. Some reasonable part of me advises that an expression of sympathy for the family in question might show him we are not monsters, Fred and me, that we, too, are worthy of his consideration, and yet: “A foreclosure,” is all I am able to say, dumbly, working to sort out the meaning of this. “But you’re a defense lawyer.”
“Oh, well, I do some criminal defense, sure, along with some civil suits, some real estate, some estate planning. Trusts, wills. Divorce settlements. The gamut. Practice like this, we get to do it all.” He smiles and the bags pouch up under his eyes in a way that seems designed to appeal, a bid for my sympathy. “We get a cross section,” he adds, spreading his mottled hands in the air before him, as if the spirit of helpfulness dictates he ought to demonstrate the size of the cross section. Apparently it is the size of a bread box.
“But you are a public defender?”
“Well,” he says, in his impressive rumble, “I’m in the assigned counsel program—that’s how it works up this way—and I do what I can for ’em, take what cases I can. Get an awful lot of them, to tell the truth. We’re overrun.” He places a palm on one of the high stacks of paper before him.
“Oh.” The air hangs dense with odors of banana and cough medicine and I’m still in my coat, my coat still damp, my nose still runny. I must look badly dismayed because the lawyer reddens slightly.
“We do what we can,” he reiterates encouragingly, leaning forward. “Those of us in the program. It’s voluntary, so. I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t believe in it. Fourteenth Amendment. Equal justice under the law. Regardless of means. That’s not the founding fathers, you know, that’s Pericles. Cradle of civilization. Problem is, the caseload doesn’t allow for me to meet with every indigent client in advance of court dates. The resources simply aren’t there.”
On a mechanical level my hearing is operating fine; the phonemes and everything are coming through, but I seem to be processing their meaning at an awfully slow rate. Now I repeat the word, “indigent,” for example, sampling it with my own mouth. It fairly cuts my palate. I cast my eye at the great litter of paper, all the ruffle-edged legal pads, gaping manila folders, dusty black binders and sheaves of photocopies, newspapers, warped magazines and yellowing journals; also at the framed photographs on his desk, their blank backs turned to me so that I can only imagine the clean, congenial faces of his relatives posed in obliging semicircles at family gatherings; also at a little row of prescription bottles up high on a shelf, and a bottle that looks like aftershave, and another of Pepto-Bismol, unmistakably pink. The single, narrow window reveals a lowering, smoky darkness, through which the lights of shops across the green shine as faint and small as the ends of cigarettes.
A telephone warbles in the outer office, not an electronic sound but a real old clapper-and-bell: brrrrring brrrring. Mr. Charles glances toward the door. I touch the inside of my wrist to my forehead and rest my eyelids. When next I open them, Mr. Charles has produced a box of tissues and positioned it at the edge of the desk close to me. I take one, only to clutch it in my hand and say—surprised at how rapidly and with what honest strength the words emerge—“I came to see my brother, Mr. Charles, and I haven’t been able to do that yet, and also I came to see if I could help, I thought you were helping him, and that maybe it would be good if I could explain certain things to you, things that would help you help him, you know, and I’m not at all good at this but now I don’t even know if you are helping him, but maybe, if not, you could help me at least, because I don’t even know how to get in to see him, and I’ve been here since yesterday. And I haven’t seen him in so long.”
“Oh.” He gives a single, condoling cluck of his tongue. “Mrs. Manseau.”
“It’s Ava.”
He acknowledges this with the slightest of nods. “The particulars of the case, your brother’s case, let me be honest, are pretty tough. On paper, of course,” he qualifies, as if anticipating my interjection. “But, ah, on paper, I’ll be straight with you, they’re tough. We may do worse than consider a plea.”
“A plea?” Such a shy little pansy of a word. A plea, please. Please is the magic word, even Dilly knows that. It sounds like it should signal hopefulness, but I can tell from the excessively gentle way he says it that it is, in fact, a blow.
“Yes, well, I haven’t yet had a chance to assess the particulars . . .” He gets to rummaging again, this time standing up to check through yet another stack of folders on a different table, eventually striding over to stick his head through the doorway. “Lisa, honey, do you by any chance have the Frederick Robbins folder out here?”
At last—an anticipatory current of relief. Now he is getting the folder. Now he is going to do something, tell me something, make things clear. I notice the tissue still crumpled in my fist and use it on my nose.
In the doorway, Mr. Charles says, “Thanks, sweetheart,” returns to his desk with a not very fat manila folder, and sits down again, spreading it flat before him. I don’t like his calling his secretary honey and sweetheart, don’t like having to make my appeal to a man who thinks that’s the way to address women, but I tell myself it’s just cultural, that if I’d grown up in his time and place, I wouldn’t think anything of it. The truth is, I am a foreigner here. When in Perdu, etc. So long as I don’t judge his ways, perhaps he won’t judge mine. I concentrate on engendering goodwill toward him, even as I hope for his in return.
But he opens the folder and when I crane to see its contents I spot, amid the photocopies and forms, newspaper clippings, and then my earlobes burn because I know what all the articles say, what kind of story they tell about Fred and how far short they fall of engendering anything like goodwill. They use the words “drifter” and “vagrant.” And “drawn.” As in “drawn to young children.”
“Let’s see now,” Mr. Charles says in his deep, silty voice as he leafs through the papers and then finds the one he wants: the charges, he explains, and begins to read aloud slowly as if he himself is discovering for the first time what they are.
“Weren’t you—I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m confused. Doesn’t a lawyer have to be present when someone’s being charged?”
“Hm?” He squints up at me, deepening the creases around his eyes until they recede so far into the folds of skin they are like caraway seeds tucked into a bun. “Well, it looks like they brought in someone from the Public Defender’s Office. Ideally, I’d have been there, but I didn’t hear from O.A.R. until after arraignment.”
“O.A.R.?”
“Offender Aid and Restoration. They provide the affidavit of indigency. Then they fax it down to the guy who runs the whole assigned counsel program, and he gets in touch with me.” His tone conveys both his own easy familiarity with the system and his expectation that whether or not I follow every bit of it precisely does not really matter. It makes me think of Dennis explaining something about soffits or joists—the way we both know, as he speaks, that I am going to absorb it only superficially, and also that it’s not necessary for me to understand it any more than that.
I wrap my arms around myself and nod: go on.
He resumes reading aloud, presenting the charges and explaining after each count what it means: unlawful imprisonment in the first degree, kidnapping in the second, unauthorized use of a vehicle in the third.
“Unauthorized use—?”
“The Toyota pickup,” translates Mr. Charles. “Registered to a Mr. Ronald Ferebee. Maternal grandfather of the deceased. Reported stolen the morning of November ninth.”
He speaks of class E and B felonies, and a class A misdemeanor, of minimu
ms and maximums and priors and mandatories and my bones have become glass tubes, my veins brittle pipettes, they are all shivering cold as if a fierce wind is whistling through them and I imagine I am emitting a kind of thinly audible vibrato. I am wretched. Wretched against the backdrop of Bayard Charles’s mellifluous recitation, which continues, his tone unmistakably businesslike; he is using what are for him workaday terms, and I grasp finally what I have been stupid not to understand: that his only idea of me—his only possible idea—is as the sister of a person who has been linked to contemptible acts. I am, to him, surely nothing more or less than a member and product of the household that formed Fred.
Those picture frames on his desk, the contents of whose photos I cannot see, only their impersonal, impenetrable backs tilted toward me on their little hinged stands—they contain the people Mr. Charles recognizes and cares for, the individuals whose histories, entwined with his, render them comprehensible, worthy not simply of sympathy but the status of full-fledged humanity. Those clients he started to tell me about, the ones whose farm is being foreclosed on, those people, whether or not he’s even met them in person—the father in Afghanistan, the mother taking care of all the little children and the ailing grandmother—they, too, are worthy of his sympathy. Their story comes handsomely wrapped in the American flag, and in the flaggy tropes of farm and family. And the secretary, the one he calls sweetheart, sitting out there engrossed once more in her paperback novel—she, too, has his . . . what, affection? It isn’t affection; it’s something more substantial, more practical. She has legitimacy to him. She works for him and he pays her and they are part of the same system, the same portrait; they uphold each other’s roles and standing in the community. They help ensure each other’s worth and so she, too, is safe with him, enjoys a kind of safety within his penumbra. If her brother were in trouble, Mr. Charles would know exactly where that file was kept, would drop everything to help in any way he could, would afford the brother every benefit of the doubt. I am jealous of her, the dimpled young woman with her nurse romance—what did he call her? Lisa. I wish I could make myself Lisa. I wish I were a plump, good-natured girl who’d grown up passing out paper cups of water at the Memorial Day parade and living in a house that hung bunting every July Fourth and walking with my family to church every Sunday and doing all the correct things, all the sanctioned things. I wish it for Fred. Oh, Freddy.
But I am not Lisa. I am Ava. I am from away, as is glaringly obvious to everyone here. We have always been foreigners, Fred and I, always and everywhere and by design; our parents taught us to conceive of ourselves that way, and it has forever been true, and we loved it some of the time, it served us well, and also it has been our enduring loneliness.
Well. My enduring loneliness.
What do I know anymore of Fred.
Seven
THE FIRST SERIOUS DISAGREEMENT I ever knew Neel and June to have occurred about a month before the Manseaus moved into the Art Barn. It was over June’s teaching me how to read music. Not teaching me how to play the recorder—Neel thought that was well and good—but specifically teaching me how to read notes on a musical staff. He believed children should learn to play by ear, and mostly under their own tutelage: in the case of a recorder, by fiddling around with the thing, blowing into it and figuring out what happened when you covered up certain holes, in various combinations. In fact, students at Batter Hollow had always been given recorders when they turned seven, and it was a custom to let them do what they would with their instruments, whether that meant taking them apart, using them as swords, blaring into them as hard as they could (although this inclination was generally short-lived—not, Neel would hasten to explain, because there were rules against it, but because everyone else in the community expressed such annoyance that the kid doing it would decide, on his own, to stop), or discovering how to generate actual notes. Sometimes the little ones would appeal to older kids for help, and that was a fine thing, too, Neel said, to come upon a bunch of students of various sizes gathered cross-legged on the ground or sitting up in a tree somewhere, legs dangling from a low branch, melodies and harmonies and squawky odd notes all issuing forth.
But they didn’t receive formal instruction in any instrument until third grade; Neel believed that this early period of free experimentation, when the child is unfettered by a system of notation and accompanying specialized vocabulary, was vital. That was how he talked whenever he was speaking at a conference on child development or on a radio chat show, both of which were regular occurrences when I was little, so that already by age seven I was familiar with the sound of such words and even had a notion of what they meant: they meant running barefoot over grass and dirt and sometimes over nettles, running loose-limbed and headlong until your lungs felt spicy and your throat pleasurably sore, and a high singing sound spun around your head like tiny silver bells.
“Well, but Neel, vital to what?” June asked finally on this particular summer day, not raising her voice but not bothering to disguise her exasperation either. She was a serious amateur flutist and Neel played nothing, except, as he joked, the radio.
We were all outside, Neel and June at the weathered wooden table behind our house, sitting over the remains of a bread-and-cold-soup lunch; Freddy and I sprawled several yards away on the worn brick patio. We were playing with a giant saucepan full of water and a collection of rocks. We were mesmerized by the way they turned different colors when submerged. After a time we’d extract them one by one, and lay them on a tea towel in rows or clusters: pearly ones in this corner, jagged ones in that. Sometimes I’d sort them by sex, girl rocks here and boy rocks there, and sometimes by kind and wicked, and sometimes by happy and sad.
Freddy was good at sorting things, too, although at this moment he was more involved in producing rhythm; he held a rock in each hand and tapped them together, slowly at first and then woodpecker-fast.
“Vital to their being free,” declared Neel.
I was only half listening, enjoying the rough warmth of the bricks under my bare legs and the cadences of their grown-up speech, which, because I bore no responsibility for understanding it, had the effect of heightening the pleasurable apartness of the little world in which Freddy and I were ensconced: the water bent and bowed in the pot; sunlight curtseyed lopsidedly across it and flecks of mica seemed to waver and rise up, float loose to the surface and break open to become part of the sun.
Freddy plunged one of his rocks into the pot and raised it, dripping, to his mouth. I could hear it scrape against his teeth as he put it in.
“They are free,” said June. “They have so much freedom.”
Neel gave a laugh. “I’m of the opinion freedom isn’t something we measure, or mete out in coffee spoons, like Prufrock.”
Prufrock was a lovely name. I gave it immediately to the rock in my hand, a slippery bruise-colored thing. “Prufrock,” I whispered in its mineral ear. Freddy made a gagging sound.
“You know that’s not what I mean.” June’s voice sounded as if she were trying to thread it through a needle. I glanced up to see her shredding a crust of bread in her lap. Usually I thought of Neel and June as belonging to the same age group: both of them simply parent-age, but every now and then I would be struck by how much younger June actually was. This afternoon she seemed restless. She was barelegged, sitting with her knees apart under her wide gypsy skirt. Her arms were long and cool-looking and her heavy hair hung haphazardly over the back of her chair.
“If you happen upon a child playing in the mud,” began Neel, slipping happily into his public voice—it had a bounce to it, a kind of robust, holding-forth cheer—“would you try to improve upon the shining moment? Would you launch into a lesson on pedogenesis? Would you discourse on soil composition or erosion? What would that contribute to the well-being of the child? What end would you have in view? Simply”—he could not resist answering his own question—“to impart.”
He pronounce
d the last unfamiliar word with such derision it made me think of something rude and foolish, like fart, and I laughed and glanced up to see if they were laughing, too. Neel was beaming, but June sat scowling at the litter of crumbs in her lap. Then she swept them brusquely from her skirt. “Why do you do that?” she said. “Pretend like I’m one of your . . . your nuns or your rubes?”
“My nuns?” said Neel, mock-astonished.
I was astonished, too; that was before I knew that Neel had, as a boy, attended parochial school.
June stood. “You know I don’t believe in teaching for teaching’s sake. And you purposely use words you know I don’t know. Pedo-whatever. Why do you do that?”
Freddy made another gagging sound.
With sudden suspicion, I stuck my hand under his chin. “Spit.”
“I know why,” continued June. “It’s a way of making it seem like you know more about everything. But you don’t. Not about everything. I know more about music, and I think she’d enjoy it, be good at it, hungry for it. How is it freedom to deprive them of instruction?”
Who was this “she” of whom June spoke? Was it—I had a swift conviction—me? Was I hungry for something? Ought I to be? What a peculiar, marvelous idea. I tried to picture the thing I must be hungry for, the thing June had in mind for me.
Freddy’s eyes grew awfully round. His mouth gaped roundly, too, a wet black pit.
“Spit,” I said again, suddenly frightened.
He made a thrusting, doggy motion with his neck. It was his queer soundlessness that scared me now, that and the strange purpling of his face.
“Spit it!” I ordered, and thumped him hard on the back.
The stone flew into my palm along with a great mess of saliva. I dumped it in the pot, wiped my hand against the weedy bricks. There was a moment of shocked stillness and then Freddy began to wail, his face bunched as a prune and still nearly as dark.
No Book but the World: A Novel Page 8