Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  In the courtroom, the philistines roared. She could feel their hatred of Sandy, of anything simple and different from themselves, spill out of their braying throats. And she could feel him crouched in his seat behind her, powerless to defend himself, with his white shaven face, a shorn, piteous Samson. The blood rushed to her cheeks; she flamed with temper. “Make them stop laughing,” she said, obdurately, to the judge. “I won’t testify any more unless you give Mr. Gray a fair hearing.” She set her chin. “Order!” cried the sheriff, standing up. “Go on, Miss Lamb,” the judge said gravely. The courtroom was absolutely still. “Mr. Gray,” said Dolly, “is not an ordinary person. You all think he’s strange because he tries to live naturally. He knows all about animals and birds and trees. But he doesn’t go out bird-watching, with a book, like me. He just does it naturally, the way he sleeps and eats. He hates any kind of dishonesty or compromise; that’s why he doesn’t like my painting. He knows the woods the way Thoreau did or the scouts in Fenimore Cooper. He can set traps and shoot and whittle and make bows and arrows. That’s why he’d be a good father; he could teach the children a lot of things that children don’t learn any more. Fishing and hunting and making things. He taught me how to open oysters, with just an ordinary knife. And how to scale fish and clean them. But he’s not a crank, either. He doesn’t want to turn the clock back, artificially. He reads comic books and listens to radio serials; he thinks they’re much more real than modern novels and poems. He’s not afraid of violence, though he’s very gentle himself. He’d teach the children not to be afraid of life. That’s what he’s taught me, and I’m grateful for it.” “Can he sew?” said the judge, drawing another laugh, deliberately, from the courtroom. “Yes, he can,” said Dolly, defiantly. “Why shouldn’t a man be able to sew? He can knit too; he learned in the Merchant Marine, when he was a boy. Is that something to be ashamed of? Don’t you want a man to be self-sufficient? Isn’t that the American ideal?”

  “That was great, great,” said Sandy, when she came back to her place. The other witnesses nodded. Clover’s lawyer had not even tried to cross-examine her seriously. He had only one question: “Are you in love with Mr. Gray?” The judge said she did not have to answer that, but she had said no, in all honesty, and left the stand in a blaze of glory. “You’ve won the case,” Sandy told her, and Barney made a little pantomime of clapping, when the judge was looking the other way.

  Dolly was so flushed with these tributes and with her own extraordinary temerity that she could hardly listen to Sandy, who followed her on the stand. She sat with her own voice echoing in her ears, in a trance of wonder and pride. Vaguely, she heard Sandy testifying to his concern for the children, and how he was fixing up the house for them. He hoped, he said, to marry again, to give the children a mother, but in the meantime he was going to employ a woman to take care of them, after school, in the afternoons, while he was working. He made a good impression—Dolly felt, on the whole—simple and straightforward. But her mind kept drifting off, back to her own testimony, and contrasting it with his. Hers was better, she felt certain. He was a little too apologetic, and his voice was monotonous. People coughed while he was talking; when she was on the stand, you could have heard a pin drop. She was the best; she almost wished Martha could have heard her and seen the lawyer applaud. Even if John and Martha disapproved, they would have to admire her performance. She almost wished that she could be called back on the stand; a second time she would be more sure of herself, from the outset—she had stumbled badly at first, until she found the right note. “How was I?” said Sandy, coming down from the stand and interrupting her reverie. “Marvelous,” said Dolly, mechanically, her conscience smiting her for the vanity and self-absorption that had kept her from paying attention to him. “Marvelous,” she repeated, more enthusiastically. But her mind was still on herself, and all she could hear was the iambs of Sandy’s voice pounding in her inner ear: “You’ve won the case,” “You’ve won the case.”

  Compunction pricked her when Clover took the stand. She was pitiable, pitiable, Dolly said to herself, appalled by the life-history that unfolded. Poor Clover had been a baby-sitter since she was eleven years old, and she had worked with retarded children before she married Sandy, at the age of nineteen. She was wonderful with children, all her witnesses had averred, and her lawyer had affidavits from the summer people who had sent their children to a little play group she had run for the past three summers. She was a poor housekeeper and manager, she conceded, under questioning, but she could not keep the house tidy when it was full of dogs and cats and youngsters. Nearly every night, her children had one of their friends staying with them. They were doing well in school, and last year they had got more Valentines than any other children in the middle grades. She went to the P.T.A. and made costumes for the school plays and played the guitar at school entertainments. Her lawyer presented affidavits from the children’s teachers. And she had a big heart, as Mrs. Viera had said: she had taken in an orphan, a spastic child, whose mother had died of tuberculosis. The child was now in an institution, but Clover went to see him almost every week. She went to see her father, too, who was in the state hospital, and brought him magazines and candies, though he used to beat her horribly, according to her ex-stepmother. “She always slips him a bottle,” the man in the white suit contributed in an undertone.

  Barney was brutal in cross-examination. Was it true, he wanted to know, that there had been complaints and some parents had removed their children from her play group because she let the boys and girls go naked? It was true, Clover admitted, but the children were small, under school age. “That’s a lie,” whispered Sandy. “Some of them were sprouting breasts.” Then Barney began to ask her about what he called “a little episode” at a beach picnic two summers ago. Hadn’t she tried to drown herself after a few drinks? No, said Clover, in a low voice; she had just wanted to be alone and swum out to sea. The others had got frightened and gone after her.

  When he got to the truckdriver, finally, Clover insisted that he was paying board, but she burst into tears when Barney wondered whether she had ever listed his rent as income on her tax return. Naturally, she hadn’t, and she lost her head altogether during the next questions, when Barney was pressing her about where the truckdriver slept and whether the little room she claimed he slept in had a clothes closet. She whirled around and called Sandy a moocher and announced that the real trouble between them was that he had fallen behind on the maintenance payments and would not settle with her when she needed the money. That, she cried, was when he had decided to get righteous about the truckdriver. He was all paid up now because his lawyer had made him do it, before coming into court. “Ask him, ask him, if it isn’t true,” she begged the judge, pointing her stubby finger at Barney. But the judge told her that a lawyer could not be a witness to what passed between him and his client.

  To satisfy her, however, he called Sandy back on the stand. “Is it true that you ceased to make payments until the time this action was begun?” “No, it is not true,” said Sandy, wearily. “Mrs. Gray is a pathological liar. I was short of money during the summer, when Mrs. Gray was getting paid by her play group. By mutual agreement, we decided that I could wait until fall to catch up with the maintenance.” Clover was put back on the stand. “Is this true?” said the judge. “If you mean he told me he couldn’t pay and I said yes, let it go for the time being—yes,” said Clover. “You shouldn’t have done that,” said the judge sharply. “The court awarded you that maintenance. You should have made him pay it; that was your duty under the law.” “But if he didn’t have the money . . . ?” “It makes no difference,” said the judge. “It is not for you and your former husband to decide whether he shall support his children. That is the court’s privilege. When you divorced your husband here, you put those children under the court’s protection. They’re wards in chancery, actually.” The two lawyers wagged their heads respectfully, in acknowledgment of this legal point. The judge turned back to Clover. “Yo
u should have brought him down here, into court,” he said severely, “the first payment he missed. When was that?” “In June, I guess.” “And how long did this hiatus continue?” “Till the end of October.” “And when did this boarder come to live with you?” “Last spring. Around Decoration Day.”

  “Don’t you see what you’ve done?” said the judge, his voice rising. “No,” said Clover. “By letting the maintenance lapse, you’ve practically entered a confession of guilt with this court. You suggest to my mind and to the mind of any reasonable person that you let your ex-husband off paying for your support because you got a new fellow.” “That wasn’t the reason. Honestly,” said Clover. “Look, Your Honor, he had no money. I was making some. I have feelings. I was sorry for him.” She had been wiping her tears with a Kleenex; her makeup had come off, and as a result she looked much prettier. “Then,” she said, “when I needed the money, for some winter clothes for the kids, he told me that he wouldn’t pay me and that furthermore he was going to sue to get them back if I kept pestering him.” “There were no witnesses to this discussion?” “No.” “Well,” said the judge, “in my opinion, you’ve brought this action on yourself. You gave your ex-husband a right to think that he was no longer bound to support you. Regardless of your motive. You didn’t use good judgment. Let me give you a little maxim for general use, quite apart from this case. Never let a fellow drop behind in his payments. Keep after him. Ask the stores. Ask the financing companies. Chances are, Mrs. Gray, if you let him get behind, he’ll work up a grievance against you, because the longer you don’t make him pay, the more he owes you. Pretty soon, it’s got so darn big he can’t pay it.” He slapped his hand on the long table. “Keep after ’em,” he repeated, addressing the courtroom at large. “That’s right, your honor,” agreed the two lawyers, grinning. “Where are those children?” he demanded. “Waiting for you, in chambers,” said Clover’s lawyer, deferentially. The judge got up and went out.

  Waiting for him to come back, the courtroom grew very restless. Some of the witnesses wandered out to smoke and fraternized with the enemy on the courthouse steps. The consensus, as reported by the man in the white suit, was that Sandy was going to win. Dolly’s testimony, it was agreed, had done him a lot of good, and Clover had queered her own pitch: her tears and accusations gave the truth away. And yet no one seemed satisfied. The thought of the children, closeted in there with the judge, who was going to decide their fate, seemed to weigh on the witnesses’ spirits. Faces darkened, moodily; conversation flagged; watches were consulted, repeatedly. A sense that this was a serious matter had somehow permeated the atmosphere. The man in the white suit kept grimacing, as if he had eaten something indigestible. Dolly was sick at heart. If Clover lost the children, it would be her fault: she had “won the case,” they all thought. But now that she had heard Clover, she began to pray that Sandy would lose. She did not want to be answerable for all the little lies she had told on the stand. She gritted her small teeth and tried to send thought-messages to the judge, begging him to ignore her testimony. Clover was not an ideal mother—anyone could see that—but Sandy was not an ideal father, either, despite the picture Dolly had sketched of him. Uncomfortable memories stirred in her: she remembered how cross he had been when she woke him up, one day, at ten o’clock in the morning. He liked to sleep late and he was often brusque and short-tempered. And he was hardly ever on time. It was a little unfair of him, moreover, not to have told her that Clover had “a hand” with children. But she herself was at fault in this: she should never have agreed to testify without hearing Clover’s side. At the very least, she could have asked about her from Martha or the Coes.

  She wondered whether she could retract her testimony. But what would they do to her if she got up and confessed that she had lied a little under oath? And what would Sandy say if she betrayed him after he had been lauding her for her “courage”? “The court favors the mother,” she repeated to herself, under her breath. The way the judge had scolded Clover, about the money—wasn’t that a sign that he really favored her and blamed her for endangering her case?

  The judge mounted the bench. His face was very stern, and he summoned the social worker, who talked to him in whispers, glancing back at Sandy and Clover. Dolly’s stomach turned over; she did not dare look at Sandy. Then the judge announced his decision. Clover was to keep the children! Jubilate! Saved! She could feel the man next to her exhale, as though in relief. He winked. On her other side, Sandy stiffened; his elbows pressed into his body and his shoulders hunched. Dolly stole a look into his shaved face. He was crying. Guilt smote her. She could not bear the thought that she was selfishly glad while he was suffering. He pulled off his white evening scarf and buried his face in it.

  The judge was giving Clover a very stiff lecture. He was going to put her on probation, he said, and have the social worker make reports on her. He was not at all satisfied with the conditions in her home as described by Mrs. Viera and the milkman. But no actual evidence of immorality had been presented in court. In his view, she would do well to get rid of her boarder; the maintenance allowance should be sufficient for the household if she planned her budget carefully and did not waste money on drink. Under normal circumstances, he declared, he would have taken the children away from her, but the record of the father moved him to leniency. He believed, despite much of the evidence, that she genuinely loved her children; they had expressed a strong wish to stay with her. If there had been a respectable person represented in the proceedings, a grandmother or an aunt, he would not have hesitated to remove the children from both parents. But he had found, on inquiry, that there was no such person in the offing.

  The father would have the right of visitation. He had come into court as the plaintiff, asserting that he had changed his ways, and brought a witness to attest this. But the brevity of her acquaintance with him made it impossible to give any legal weight to her impressions. The courts in this district had known the plaintiff over a period of years. The bench ventured to suggest that the plaintiff might have a motive for pulling the wool (laughter) over Miss Lamb’s eyes.

  In any case—the judge’s voice sharpened—here was a man who had been four times married, deserted by one wife and divorced by two on charges of extreme cruelty. One of these wives now appeared before the court to testify to his character as a father—a very contradictory course of conduct, to put it mildly. The practice of bringing character-witnesses was being abused by counsel. The court was capable of forming its own impression of the character of the litigants. It had its own records and the records of the S.P.C.C. to assist it. To bring in a witness who had known one of the parties “about one month” was an insult to the court’s intelligence and would not be condoned if it were ever repeated. The judge glared at Barney.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” said Barney, but he seemed quite unperturbed. He even grinned at Dolly, as the judge continued, in a more and more sarcastic vein. At the same time, observed the judge, disagreeably, he understood counsel’s desire to introduce as a witness a young woman of irreproachable character and fine antecedents, who did not, so far as the court knew, possess a police record. To Dolly’s astonishment, both sets of witnesses began to chuckle appreciatively. Yes, the judge went on: so far as the court knew, Dorothea Lamb had never had her license suspended—his gray eye raked the witness—or been arrested for brawling or check-kiting or draft-evasion or assault and battery or drunk and disorderly or vagrancy. “He’s kidding,” the man in the white suit reassured Dolly. “He’s a great bottle- and trencherman himself. Makes allowances for artists and writers. Used to sit in superior court, where these cases come up. Great sense of humor.”

  Since all the New Leedsians were giggling delightedly, Dolly forced a wan smile, which she slowly let die when she saw that Sandy was unmoved by the judge’s sallies. He had stopped crying, but his deep-set eyes were fixed in a cold stare and his long thin body was rigid. Dolly touched his arm, and he began to tremble, all over, like a person in a high f
ever. As soon as the judge stopped talking, Sandy got up and raced out of the courtroom, without a word to anyone. Dolly followed, alarmed, but she lost him in the press of people. Nobody seemed to care what had happened to him; opinion, even among his own witnesses, had turned against him. He ought to have thought twice, she heard them agree, before washing all that dirty linen in public. That was what had turned the judge against him: a case like that got in the papers and gave the community a bad name with outsiders, which in turn affected rentals and real-estate values. All the judges up here liked to see the lawyers make a stipulation and hear abbreviated testimony. Moral indignation echoed through the corridors. “He’s fouled his own nest,” cried the old woman in slacks, as she limped up to congratulate Clover.

  They were so changeable, Dolly thought distractedly. The courthouse emptied, and nobody would help her look for Sandy. They were closing the building before Barney came to her assistance and found him for her, finally, in the men’s toilet, where he had been throwing up. He was in a dreadful state. All the way back in the jeep, she had to keep stopping, for him to vomit by the roadside. In Digby, he had her get out and buy him a pint in the liquor store, which he drank from in silence as they jogged along.