The Book Borrower

by Alice Mattison

  Soon enough, my parents and I were left alone in what felt like a vast space. I no longer wrung out wet cloths. My mother said she wanted nothing, and hardly spoke. Neither she nor my father talked of Jessie or Sarah. Their permanent lifetime moods were selected that week. From then on, they were people of bitterness and suppressed rage. I was alone. Suddenly it seemed that I had no friends. I had thought I had friends. Edith Livingston, who’d taken so to Sarah, did not come to her funeral or make contact with me again. From the vantage point of years, I don’t blame her. The newspaper didn’t report where Sarah was going on that trolley—I sup-pose nobody knew but our family, and nobody asked us— but everyone knew the crash had been on the Lake Avenue line. Of course the Livingstons knew all about it; but what would have been gained if they’d blamed themselves, or sul-lied that little boy’s life with a notion of responsibility, how-ever indirect, for a death? And of course they had meant no harm with their impulsive, sentimental invitation. I pride my-self on being unlike my parents, but I’ve never done anything impulsive or sentimental since. I’ve never suddenly begged a friend to come and see me; I’ve barely invited anybody to come and see me at all, even with advance planning. I have always blamed myself for Sarah’s death, and not just for taking her to the Livingstons’ in the first place, but I am not responsible for any other deaths.

  One night an old friend of my father’s, a member of the anarchist group he’d dropped in recent years, came to see us and talked to him solemnly in the kitchen for a long time. He was an old man, not one of the young people Jessie knew best; he’d been in prison in Russia, and was rumored to have written books. When I finally walked into the room, poured them both some schnapps, and then poured some for myself and sat down with them—knowing I was unsettling them— the old man hesitated and then seemed to decide that maybe, after all, I was a more reasonable person to speak to than my father. He told me that anti-Semitic marchers had held walks past the jail several times. They were shabby, nutty, unin-formed, and secretive, apparently members of an organization nobody knew about. Then the slogan “Kill the Little Jew” had appeared painted on a large boulder visible from the Lake Avenue trolley. Oh, yes, the trolley strike was over. It was just like Denver. The men gave up when somebody died. Even that made me angry. Were they surprised? Either you make up your mind to persist in spite of death, or you don’t do what could cause a death in the first place. The old man who spoke to my father wanted us to make contact with a Jewish organization that might provide us with a lawyer. The anarchists, poor wretches, had no money, and several of their members had been accused, although only Jessie was in jail and only she was accused of murder. They would make a secret contribution to her defense, he explained, but he thought she’d be better off if her connection to them could be made to seem trivial. He thought the anti-Semitism was a good thing, because it might make one of the large Jewish groups take an interest.

  My father, grief-stricken and now terrified of anti-Jewish feeling, was incapable of strategic thinking, and only shook his head, again and again, but I was glad to talk with the old man. And soon enough a lawyer appeared; I don’t remember just who made the connection. A Jewish organization had taken us on. The lawyer was a plump, smooth-haired young man who held his hat on his lap, waving off my offer to take it, and repeatedly stabbed it with his finger. My mother and father faced him, watching suspiciously from their armchairs, and didn’t speak. I think his name was Mr. Arthur, or Arthur somebody. He seemed to guess that they didn’t know English well, because after a few minutes he switched to Yid-dish, and spoke sweetly. I was surprised. He said he was sorry, he was sorry, he was sorry for their trouble. He went back to speaking English when he began discussing the strategy of the case once more; his Yiddish was only good enough for ceremonial phraseology, I suppose.

  He asked me questions that made me impatient; he didn’t understand Jessie. In those days I had abrupt changes of viewpoint. Sometimes I wanted her to fry and sometimes I wanted to mount a defense that would get her acquitted at any cost. The lawyer’s notion was to establish an alibi for her. He wanted to prove that she’d been with us the morning of the wreck, but she’d been arrested outside of town. We hadn’t seen her all day and there was no way to prove that we had.

  “Think,” he kept saying to me. “Sometimes it helps to re-member trivial things. What did you eat? Did she drop in and help cook it?” As if Jessie had ever cooked anything in her life. But he wouldn’t let that topic go. I think he had the notion of proving that she cooked for the anarchists, too, that she served chicken soup with matzoh balls to hungry radicals without listening to them.

  He had talked to Jessie already. “She says she was out in the country drawing pictures of barns,” he said, as if nobody would believe such a thing. “In January. That’s what she was doing. Drawing barns. She said she was tired of the strike. She was angry with everybody.”

  “That sounds like Jessie,” I said, and he looked up quickly, then shook his head. “I don’t think your sister has confidence in me.”

  “I’m sure she’s grateful—” I began insincerely, but he cut me off. “She said, ’They will execute me because I’m young, female, and Jewish, or they will not execute me because I’m young, female, and Jewish.’ ”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, but he just shook his head.

  My parents and I attended the trial every day, even the selection of the jury, an impassive group of businessmen in stiff collars who all looked alike to me. My mother and father sat in the back of the courtroom, not speaking. For the trial itself the room was filled. I sat in the first row, behind Jessie, and people invariably made room for me. She crossed the room stolidly each morning, like someone on her way to clean a toilet. She wore a black dress that looked tight across her breasts. I suppose it was a uniform of some kind for prisoners. Maybe they’d had to send to Boston for it. Jessie’s bulging eyes looked steadily and all but casually around the room as she walked to her place.

  The District Attorney was a tall, wide man who flung his arms out and paced rapidly when he spoke. He had thick, straight white hair that fell over his big forehead and that he shook back by bending his head, as if in prayer, then flinging his chin up and out. His hair floated and slowly settled while he himself continued moving quickly. His hair was like a calm, stupefied wife moving at her own pace beside her wide-awake husband—or like a silent, sinister assistant: a hidden resource, another insidious possible form of destruction for us. By now, of course, I longed for Jessie’s acquittal with all my soul. In my dreams, when Jessie was acquitted, Sarah suddenly appeared alive in the courtroom, smiling, irritatingly unmindful of all the trouble she’d caused.

  The District Attorney spent hours establishing that trolleys are operated by electricity and run on tracks, but he always seemed dangerous, even then. And gradually, slowly, he seemed to trap my sister, almost to photograph her as she walked out into the country and switched the trolley signals. Hours of testimony by employees of the trolley company detailed the way they worked. It turned out that our system was unusual, similar to one in western Pennsylvania. Trolleys ordinarily used a signal system operated by the weight of the passing car, but we had simple hand signals. The track was divided into segments. At the end of each was a siding, where a motorman could pull his car off the main track and wait for an oncoming trolley. When a car entered a new section, the motorman or the conductor had to reach out and flip two switches, one that turned off a string of lights alongside the track on his right, in back of him, and another that caused a new long line of electric lightbulbs to go on. They were on poles stuck in the ground every few yards for the whole segment. If an approaching motorman saw lights on his left, he’d know that a car was in that section of track, coming toward him, and he’d go into the siding and wait. Lights on the right would mean only that another car going in his own direction was ahead of him, and he’d just have to slow down. On the day Sarah died, one long green interurban car entered Section 6—we kept hear
ing about Section 6— while the other car was coming toward it in the same section. The signal lights had been turned off, or the first motorman had neglected to turn them on, or else they were on but ignored by the second motorman.

  Both motormen had been injured in the wreck, but both had lived to testify. The motorman of the first car was a young man with a strong foreign accent. He seemed like a pi-rate, an adventurer. He could give no good reason for coming to Boynton to work as a scab on the trolleys; he’d had a job collecting trash in Boston, but a buddy had told him of this opportunity for a bit more money and he’d taken it. I thought he had woman trouble and was looking for a reason to leave town. He seemed completely capable of ignoring an explanation of the signals, but he swore that the lights on his left were off, and that his conductor turned on those on his right.

  The motorman of Sarah’s car seemed more reliable. He was a middle-aged, balding man, well spoken. He’d taken the job because his wife was pregnant with their fourth child. He said he regretted being a scab. He seemed to understand what he was doing. He also swore that when he entered the section, he turned the lights on, and that the lights on the left were off.

  Jessie had been arrested walking toward Boynton along the track, closer to town than the wreck. The District Attorney undertook to show that she’d walked to the beginning of Section 6, waited until the lights went on, then switched them off. Painstakingly, he established that the motorman who had turned the lights on might not have noticed that they went off. Regular trolley company employees testified that some of the lights often were unlit. Bulbs burned out or became loose in their sockets, wires were damaged. It would not have been unusual for a stretch of lights within a section to be unlit when the section as a whole was lit. A motorman passing through such a section wouldn’t worry; he’d feel sure that the oncoming motorman would see at least one lit bulb on his left, and would retreat to the siding.

  The most painful part of the prosecution’s case was the examination of witnesses called to testify against Jessie. There was testimony that she was Jewish, that she was an anarchist, that she had lovers. Her lover’s wife testified. A man who seemed all but deranged testified that the anarchists had had many more destructive plans. Sometimes Mr. Arthur objected to the more far-fetched or irrelevant parts of all this damaging testimony, but the judge rarely sustained him. Mr. Arthur cross-examined witnesses, but too politely. He couldn’t get either motorman or either conductor to say that the lights might not have been turned on, and he spent a great deal of time trying to establish that Jessie’s lover might have had as his mistress some other dark-haired short woman, which was nonsense.

  When it was time for Mr. Arthur to put on the case for the defense, I was not confident. He called Jessie to the stand, an event the newspaper stories had anticipated for weeks.

  “I went for a walk in the country,” Jessie said, with a slight stubbornness in her voice, as if nobody had a right to know. “I wanted to think. I wanted to think what we ought to do next.”

  “It was quite cold, Miss Lipkin.”

  “I don’t mind cold.”

  “Why did you walk near the trolley tracks?”

  “Less snow,” she said. “And I wanted to see if the trolleys would actually run. And I was sketching.”

  “Sketching.”

  “I sketch. I have piles of sketchpads in my house.” The sketchpads were produced. She sketched on newspaper some-times, in messy black ink, over the printing.

  “What were you sketching, Miss Lipkin?”

  “The hills covered with snow.”

  “But your comrades were back at the trolley barn, Miss Lipkin. Why weren’t you with them?”

  “I was tired of them,” said Jessie. “I was tired of the strike.” Jessie’s claim, made in a loud, slightly hoarse voice, oddly uninflected, was that she had indeed participated in the demonstrations at the trolley company that morning. She had not known of any plan to disrupt the signals. She wanted some time to herself, and she walked out of town with a pencil and pad. What she said chilled me. When had any woman in our town ever wanted some time to herself? I knew the feeling well, though I had never acted on it, but I also knew that my own mother would not be able to imagine what Jessie might be talking about, nor would anybody else I knew. Jessie had drawn hills with a barn in front of them. Her lawyer produced the drawing.

  Jessie did take walks. She often walked five miles or more just for exercise. She was the sort of person who must be active or else be consumed by nervous tension.

  The District Attorney, cross-examining her later, held up to restrained mockery the notion that Jessie had grown tired of the strike. “If you were tired of the strike, Miss Lipkin, why did you participate? You shouted yourself hoarse. You are hoarse now.”

  “I have always been hoarse.”

  He had witnesses to dispute the location of the barn in Jessie’s drawing. He suggested that she had not made that drawing in January at all. Even I didn’t believe Jessie had walked out into the country the day of the crash to draw a picture of a barn.

  Mr. Arthur also produced several anarchists who said that there had been no conspiracy to alter the signals. They were atheists who affirmed rather than swore, and I thought the jury would assume they were liars.

  “What are they saying? What?” my mother would ask me at night. She understood almost nothing, and couldn’t seem to grasp the idea of an adversarial system, a prosecution and a defense. I tried to explain, but while the prosecution put on its case, I’m sure she didn’t understand that we’d get our turn, or even that Mr. Arthur was on our side. At least, during the trial, she wasn’t against Jessie. My father was grim. He did understand. I think that, like me, he had come to regret his early rage. Now he might lose a second daughter to death.

  I was furious with Mr. Arthur. He missed opportunities to object. He was unclear. I could hardly sit still in my seat, hardly keep from jumping up to explain things to the jury, who gradually took on personality. There was a brown-eyed, serious man with a curious look whom I liked, and another, with a nervous smile that appeared occasionally on his face for no reason, of whom I was afraid.

  Toward the end of Mr. Arthur’s case it began to seem that he did have a theory that might cast doubt on Jessie’s guilt. It had to do with the spot in Section 6 where the accident had taken place. Mr. Arthur called a retired motorman who was familiar with the Lake Avenue line. He was a grandfatherly man with whiskers. I thought the grandfathers in the jury box might trust him, if they didn’t look down on him as a mere workingman; they seemed like men of more consequence. The accident had taken place past the halfway point in Section 6—closer to Section 7, that is, than to Section 5. All through the trial, that fact had been taken to mean that Sarah’s trolley had been in the section longer than the first, returning car.

  The retired motorman, Mr. O’Brien, testified that trolleys did not always go at the same speed. He had driven these very cars along the Lake Avenue line for years; he spoke as sadly about the wrecked cars as if they’d been his horses. Parts of the line, Mr. O’Brien explained, were straight and level, and cars in those parts could reach speeds up to ninety miles an hour, which they actually did, making up for time lost on the more difficult sections of the track. The Lake Avenue line had some difficult sections: hills and curves.

  One of those sections, he explained under the somnolent questioning of Mr. Arthur, was at the far end of Section 6, just before it joined Section 7. There was a curve on a hill. If a trolley traveling toward town didn’t go around the curve extremely slowly, he said, the overhead rod almost invariably detached from the wire, and the conductor would have to go out and hook it up again. A great deal of time would be lost.

  The young fellow from Boston who’d been operating the returning trolley would surely not have gone slowly enough to avoid this time-consuming separation of rod and wire. He’d have had to stop. He and his conductor, a clumsy man who also knew little English, would have had a hard time fixing the trolley ou
t there on its roof in the cold. The overwhelming likelihood, it seemed, was that they had been on the Section 6 track much longer, after all, than the swiftly moving second trolley. The lights could have been turned on or off at either end of the section, but everyone in the court-room could see that the operators of the first trolley were far less likely to have used the signaling system correctly than the motorman and conductor of the second trolley.

  The motorman of the first trolley, back on the stand, testified that indeed he’d had a detachment of the rod. The second motorman, the one who’d been traveling away from town, then testified to no such delay. Suddenly Mr. Arthur’s voice took on eagerness and feeling. “Isn’t the likeliest expla-nation of the crash,” he asked this witness, “that the motorman of the inbound car failed to signal when he entered the section?”

  The second motorman hesitated. “Yes, sir,” he said then.

  The District Attorney cross-examined the second motor-man. Wearily, sadly, the D.A. got him to admit that even if he’d entered the section when the other trolley was already in it, he’d have had his own opportunity to turn on the signal lights and avoid a wreck. In order for the wreck to have occurred, both operators had to have failed to use the signaling system—or somebody had to have tampered with it. The motorman had testified that he’d turned on the signals. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, sir. But maybe,” the motorman said quietly, “maybe my mate there didn’t look.”

  The D.A. ignored him and continued asking rapid questions. Couldn’t Miss Lipkin have waited at the siding, after turning off the signal lights lit by the earlier trolley? Couldn’t she have turned them off a second time? The man said faintly that he didn’t know. The District Attorney turned and slogged back to his chair, his shoulders bent. Long after he had seated himself, his hair was still settling.