As Husbands Go

by Susan Isaacs

  I took a deep breath. “In the autopsy,” I said, “or in the evidence you found, was there anything that showed if . . . whether Jonah had ejaculated?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the pointy toe on my grandmother’s shoe stop moving.

  “It’s not that simple,” Eddie Huber said. I sat back, deflated. “I assume you mean was there an ejaculation following a sex act?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was semen found on the meatus of the penis. The meatus is the opening of the urethra in the top thing on the end, the glans penis. But besides an ejaculation in a sexual situation, it’s also part of what’s called the autonomic nervous system. According to the medical examiner, finding semen is common. When someone dies, especially in a sudden, violent death, there is an ejaculation.”

  “But does that mean he didn’t ejaculate before he was stabbed?”

  Eddie Huber eyed my grandmother for a second and apparently decided she could handle the subject matter. She looked back to me. “From what I’ve learned in my experience with homicide cases, there is a little bit of truth in that if there’s no ejaculate found, it may mean the man recently ejaculated—before death. But finding semen around the meatus doesn’t guarantee Dr. Gersten did not have some sort of sexual experience with Dorinda Dillon. That’s especially true in the case of someone being dead for several days at normal room temperature before being autopsied. When there is such a wait between death and autopsy, it usually cannot be determined when the last ejaculation took place. It might have been during a recent marital sex act. It might have been with Dorinda Dillon. An individual can die violently without any ejaculation at all before death and still show no evidence of semen on his glans penis.”

  I was working so hard trying to keep any thoughts about Jonah close up and impersonal, like cross sections in an anatomy text, that when Grandma Ethel did speak up, I was incredibly grateful. “Susie talked to me about the case in some detail,” she said to Eddie Huber. “And on the flight up from Miami, I was reading some press accounts. I forgot where I came across this, but there was a mention about Dorinda getting clunked on the head with an electric broom when she went to get Jonah’s coat. That’s her alibi, that she was unconscious when Jonah was killed.”

  “Yes, that’s her alibi.”

  “And you don’t believe there’s any truth to that?”

  “No, we don’t believe it. When such a heavy object is used as a weapon, it would have traces of blood and, considering it has bristles, a lot of hair. There was dirt, and I believe a couple of her hairs, which the lab said would be consistent with normal human hair loss. You know, picked up by the electric broom during regular cleaning.”

  Grandma Ethel rocked her head from side to side as if she were a balance scale weighing what Eddie Huber had said. “What if someone cleaned the blood and hair off the broom after they clopped her?”

  Eddie Huber tapped the edge of her desk with her fingertips, either a sign of extreme irritation or a long-suppressed desire to play the bongo drums. “Then the broom would show signs of that cleaning. But there was only normal household dirt on it.”

  “If Jonah is dead and Dorinda is lying on the floor like a lox,” my grandmother said, “would it take a genius to run the electric broom someplace not too obvious, like under a couch or a bed, to get it nice and normally dirty again?”

  “It’s possible, of course, but not credible. Believable.”

  “Thank you, but I am functionally literate. I know what ‘credible’ means.” Grandma Ethel kept going, not giving Eddie Huber a microsecond to respond. “Did anyone check her head? If a blow was severe enough to knock someone unconscious, there could be a bruise. Assuming, for a moment, that what Dorinda claimed is true.”

  Eddie Huber didn’t answer immediately. Maybe she was counting to ten. She either did it very fast or stopped at five. “There actually was a bump on the right side of her head, near the crown,” she said, giving her own head a light tap to show the precise location. “But—and this is a big but—it could have come from any knock, and she wove it into her story. Prostitutes do sustain quite a few injuries because of the simple fact that a lot of men are abusive to them. On the other hand, the bump could have been self-inflicted.”

  “It’s hard to imagine anyone being able to hit themselves on the head that hard,” I said. “I mean, they could think about it, but doing it is something else.”

  “That is not the case, as it so happens,” Eddie Huber said. “Suspects have been known to crack their own skulls to fake an alibi.”

  Grandma Ethel curled the side of her mouth into a give me a break expression, then shook her head slowly, as in I’m not buying it. “That must have been one hell of a crack, to still be there when Dorinda was found so long after.”

  “Or it could have been one hell of a crack sustained when Dorinda Dillon looked out of her motel window, saw she was surrounded by the police, and banged her own head. Let me explain something, Ms.—”

  “Just call me Ethel. Everyone does.”

  “All right,” Eddie Huber said cautiously. “What I want to say, Ethel, and to you, Ms. Gersten, is that there is no pristine case. Details crop up. One piece of evidence seems to contradict another piece of evidence, yet both seem solid. What we do, in addition to applying the law in an evenhanded manner, is we rely on the experience and judgment of our law enforcement team, cops, lawyers, forensic experts. It’s not that we are ignoring the bump on Dorinda Dillon’s head. It’s that we’ve considered it and decided it was just that, a bump. None of her hair or blood was found on the electric broom, so there’s nothing to back up her contention that she was knocked out after being assaulted with it. The bump has no meaning to us. It certainly cannot be used to exonerate her. It simply cannot deflect the evidence we have implicating her in the murder of Dr. Gersten.”

  She was a good lawyer. If Grandma Ethel and I had been on a jury, we would be nodding Yes, right, I believe her. Her argument made sense, but sense is what your mind appreciates, not your gut.

  “What about her using a pair of scissors?” I asked. “Does that make any sense to you? Why would someone go into a bathroom, open a medicine cabinet, take out something she definitely wouldn’t use every day, and choose that as the weapon? Why not go into the kitchen and grab a knife? It’s more logical, more normal, in the sense that it’s something a person would do. And a knife is easier to stab with than scissors, isn’t it? It has a handle. And why stab only twice if she was so angry?”

  “I have no idea why she chose a pair of scissors as the weapon. What I do know is that they did come from her medicine cabinet and that her fingerprints are on them. And it’s not really relevant that she stabbed only twice.”

  Eddie Huber wasn’t much good at hiding her body language, or maybe she didn’t want to. Instead of leaning back in her chair, she sat straight and crossed her arms over her chest. She reminded me of an impatient teacher, annoyed at a disruptive student, waiting for the kid to quiet down.

  “One more question,” I said anyway. “Why do you think Dorinda called that lawyer she’d used in the past when she supposedly regained consciousness and saw Jonah lying there, dead? Why did she wait an hour for the lawyer to call back?”

  “We don’t know that she waited,” Eddie Huber said. “She said she waited.”

  “If you can fix the time of the call from the lawyer’s voice mail,” my grandmother said, “then find out what bus Dorinda took at Port Authority, you might be able to subtract the earlier time from the later time and discover whether she really did hang around for an hour.”

  “First, even if she did wait an hour, it in no way proves where she waited, or that she didn’t murder Dr. Gersten. Staying in her apartment for an hour would, to me, indicate a certain cold-bloodedness. If you came across a dead body, would you stay with it in a tiny one-bedroom apartment? Or would you want out?”

  Grandma Ethel didn’t take long to admit, “Out.”

  That was my reaction, too, and I nodded in a
greement. Then I said, “Is there any way I could speak with Dorinda Dillon, ask her a few questions?”

  I could have done without the recoil on Eddie Huber’s part and without her mouthing the word “no.”

  “It’s just that I’d like to know what happened before Jonah—”

  “Absolutely not!” She stood and braced herself on her desk. I wasn’t totally sure what that meant in body language, but I think she was saying I am restraining myself from leaping over this crap-covered surface and throttling you, bitch. “It would taint the entire case. I’m sorry for you, Ms. Gersten. And I admire your wanting to seek the truth. But there is no way I’ll let you get in the way of my office doing what needs to be done.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Grandma Ethel’s arrival meant trouble: From the moment she and Sparky had walked into the living room that night at the shiva, I’d known it was only minutes until some older cousin would search out a quiet corner to call my mother and whisper, “You won’t believe who just came to see Susie!”

  The evening following her appearance, my parents had shown up with a shopping bag full of the plastic containers they’d used earlier in the week to bring home a half-ton of smoked salmon, egg salad, and tuna salad from a platter someone had sent over. “Listen,” I said as they’d come through the door, “there’s something I need to tell you.” As they walked through the house, my mother performed her sneezing/coughing/choking number at every vase she happened to notice.

  Trailed by my father, she headed for the kitchen. Once there, she pushed up the long sleeves of her mourning apparel, a black T-shirt with an understated World Wildlife Federation logo, and started washing the plastic containers in my sink. As she pumped out enough Dawn direct foam to clean a 747, my father explained that their water in Brooklyn wasn’t hot enough. “It’s okay,” I told him, “I’ll put them in the dishwasher.” My mother turned from the sink, shook her head, and told me the heat from the drying process would cause the plastic to release toxins that would infect the next food that went into the containers. I offered to take over the washing for her, or have our housekeeper do it first thing in the morning. When she shook her head emphatically, I suggested putting them in the recycle bin, where they could enjoy the company of all their little plastic friends. But she kept saying no, that I had enough on my hands, by which I assumed she meant Jonah’s death, not bad smells.

  “Mom,” I said, resting my back against the side of the sink so she couldn’t avoid looking at me, “your mother was here last night.” She looked me in the eye, or nearly, and told me she didn’t want to hear about it. If I desired a relationship with the woman, I should feel free, but she didn’t want to know anything about it. My father chimed in that my mother really meant what she said, then asked me where I kept the dish towels. That was that: end of conversation.

  But I knew more discussion was needed and now, having finally deposited Grandma Ethel back at the Regency, my car seemed to go on automatic pilot. It headed for Brooklyn and even found a parking space on Avenue O, around the corner from my parents’ building. (If I’d had to go as far as Avenue P, I probably would have chickened out and gone straight back to Long Island.) I called and cut short my father’s “By the time you get here, it’ll be so late . . .” As I got off the elevator on their floor, I thought that if someone blindfolded me and turned me around a few times, like in Pin the Tail on the Donkey, I would have no problem walking a straight line to the door of their apartment. I’d rely on either the familiarity of having lived in that one place until I was seventeen, or the scent of garlic powder.

  After I’d accepted a glass of store-brand seltzer with bubbles the size of my fist, we sat down in the living room. The only photographs were the ones I’d given them framed—our wedding picture and one of the triplets we’d taken when they were eight months and could sit up by themselves. For that one, I’d ordered anti-UV glass, so it was the only thing in the room not faded. The boys’ blue, red, and yellow onesies, cute but ordinary, made them look like a riotous circus act in that dead brown room.

  “I wanted to talk to you about your mother coming to see me,” I told my own mother. Before she could object, I said, “I need to clear the air. Please view it as a favor to me. I’ll be as quick as I can, and then I won’t bring it up again unless you want to talk about it. Okay?”

  “Do you have any idea what kind of person would walk out on, abandon her own child?” my father demanded. His voice had double or triple the emotion he normally expressed in his most passionate moments—debunking sciatica cures not sold by My Aching Back. “Do you, Susan?”

  “Yes, I do have an idea. She’d be a person with terrible character or who’s really disturbed,” I said. Turning to my mother, I went on, “In her case, I vote for terrible character.”

  “Then why did you seek her out that time you went to Florida?” She often sounded angry, but that was everyday bitterness about glass ceilings, polluters, Al Sharpton, or pharmaceutical companies. This was a different anger; while she wasn’t at all hoarse, her voice sounded raw. “It was early in your marriage, but I’ll bet any amount of money looking for her wasn’t Jonah’s idea.”

  “I was curious.”

  “Curiosity—” my father began, but fortunately, he let it go.

  “Your mother has always been the mystery woman,” I said, “the subject nobody ever mentioned. I wanted to see for myself. Maybe it was wanting to look into the face of a monster. That visit came around the time everybody was getting into genealogy. It was a chance to see where I came from.”

  “You came from me!” my mother said. “And him.” She jerked her chin toward my father. “There was no mystery. What in God’s name is the matter with you? Why is it a mystery when someone doesn’t talk about a person who did them wrong, who put a blight on their whole life?”

  “Maybe I wasn’t mature enough to understand that.” I tried to sound both soothing and sorry.

  “Oh, please! A child could understand that. But no, you heard about her, that she was on TV. The big shot: ‘Oh, everybody in Miami knows Ethel.’ What were you doing, looking for a new mother?”

  “No—”

  “A rich mother who went to the beauty parlor three times a week?”

  I had an awful feeling she was going to add “Someone you weren’t embarrassed about?” and I would have had to lie and say “Don’t be ridiculous.” I quickly said, “I already had a mother. You, okay? Why would I have wanted another one?” There were several possible answers, but I kept going. “And of all the people in the world, if I were searching for a mother figure, why would I pick someone who had proved herself to be totally incompetent as a mother? Worse than incompetent: selfish and cruel.”

  All that was true. Yet walking around Soho with Grandma Ethel after the meeting with Eddie Huber, laughing at lace-sided pants and thousand-dollar military-style boots, then having Japanese beer and sushi and telling her about the weekend I’d moved in with Jonah, had been better for my spirit than any time I had ever spent with my mother.

  “Now that she’s an old lady, she wants a family?” my father wanted to know. “Don’t make me laugh!”

  Knowing that was close to impossible, I tried to tell them that Grandma Ethel wanted something or maybe wanted to do something. She was back in town. But my mother didn’t give me a chance to talk. “You’ll see,” she said, “you’ll be hearing from her again. She’ll call, try to insinuate herself into your life. And then what? You want to know what?”

  “She’ll drop me like a hot potato,” I said.

  She nodded. I guess she meant to look wise, but it came off like a bad imitation of Yoda. “That’s right! She’ll charm the pants off you, then drop you for the pure pleasure of inflicting pain.”

  “I’ll watch out for that,” I said quietly.

  “Look at the bright side,” my father said to my mother. “Maybe she’ll drop dead tomorrow and leave you everything.”

  “Stanley,” my mother exhaled. “How ca
n you be so naive? It’ll all go to her girlfriend.” She shook her head in sadness. “I was always a supporter of gay rights, but to think they can make a will any old way they want and completely cut out the family . . . Not that I ever expected anything.” She turned to me. “I don’t think I have any memories of her.” She tugged at the neckline of her Air America FOR THOSE OF US LEFT . . . sweatshirt. “Is there any resemblance between her and you?” she asked me.

  “Yes. It’s pretty strong, actually. Same color and shape eyes, same bone structure, body type.”

  “Funny,” she said.

  “At least I didn’t inherit her character,” I said, no doubt fishing for an “Of course not!” All I heard was a grumble from my father’s stomach.

  Right after the kids left for school the next morning, I went back to sleep. It was one of those awkward situations when, because you don’t know the person who’s vowing to support you, you don’t know if she means what she says. Grandma Ethel’s “I’m here for you” might have been the truth; on the other hand, when she mentioned she hadn’t been to Barneys in a couple of years, her voice had the wistful tone of someone who had a strong need to scrutinize avant-garde gloves. Still, on the chance she would call, I didn’t turn off the phone ringer to avoid the “just calling to check how you’re doing” calls, though their number had plummeted in the last couple of weeks anyway. Besides, my mother’s warning was still fresh in my ears. It wouldn’t have surprised me if my grandmother had simply picked up and gone back to Miami because she wanted to hurt me for the pure pleasure of it. Not that I really believed she would do that, but I couldn’t rule it out.

  So I was surprised to be wakened at a quarter to twelve when the bedroom door opened and Grandma Ethel, hand on the knob but facing the staircase, shouted, “Thank you, Bernadine sweetheart. I found the room.” It was probably the first time in Bernadine’s life anyone had called her “sweetheart,” and she called back in a sugary voice I’d never heard, “Let me know if you need anything, Mrs. O’Shea.”