by D. W. Buffa
“Is there anything I can do?” asked an anxious voice.
I had forgotten the woman. She was still there, watching, terrified, too decent to leave. “There’s a man at our table: heavyset, reddish wavy hair, dark blue suit. Would you ask him to come?”
She hesitated, wringing her hands. “Should I call an ambu-lance, a doctor?”
Jennifer was breathing quietly now and all I could think about was the quickest way to get her home. “No,” I told the woman.
“She’ll be fine. It’s nothing serious. If you’ll just get my friend.
His name is Howard Flynn.”
“Do you think you can get up?” I whispered when the woman had left.
Pale and exhausted, Jennifer looked at me with quiet, curious eyes as if I was a stranger she instinctively knew she could trust.
With my help she slowly struggled to her feet. Holding her, I bent down and picked up her purse.
Flynn arrived as I opened the door. He turned white when he saw her. “Home or the hospital?” he asked as I lifted her into my arms.
I was not sure anymore. I wanted to say home, but now it seemed like some place far away. Flynn read the answer in my eyes.
“Lay her down in the back seat,” he said as he held the car door open. “You better get in with her,” he added as he went round to the driver’s side.
He drove carefully, trying to keep the ride as smooth as possible, while I held her head in my lap, mumbling words the sound of which seemed to soothe her. Once, just before we got there, she grasped my hand and held it tight against the side of her face. From the moment I found her on the bathroom floor she had not spoken a word or opened her mouth to try.
The emergency room of the hospital was nearly deserted. A large Hispanic woman looked up with a start as I burst in shouting for help. A thin, agile nurse and a thick-armed orderly took Jennifer from my arms, put her into a wheelchair, and whisked her through a set of swinging double doors. I signed everything the admitting nurse put in front of me, and without listening to what I was saying, answered every question she asked while I kept my eye fixed on the green doors behind which Jennifer had disappeared.
Forty-five minutes after we arrived—forty-five minutes of anger and fear and strange discordant thoughts whose only connection was that they all had something to do with the woman I had known all my life and hardly knew at all—the doors opened and a young doctor with a surgical mask draped around his neck and a thin file folder under his arm called my name. I followed him through the door and down the corridor. There was a smell of disinfectant in the air, and for an instant I remembered the hospital where as a small boy I had followed my father on rounds.
The doctor led me to an empty examination room and shut the door behind us. I sat on a molded plastic chair wedged between a stainless steel sink and a color diagram of the human circula-tory system pinned to the wall.
“Has this happened before?” he asked. It was ten-thirty at night, but his voice made it seem like three o’clock in the morning. I knew what that was like: to work so long that you forget what it was like to be tired.
“No,” I replied. “Maybe,” I added. “I don’t really know.”
He looked at the chart, and then put it down on the corner of the examining table. “I know you already went over this with the admitting nurse, but, if you would, tell me what happened.”
I described what I had seen when I found her, and he asked if there was anything else I could tell him.
“Jennifer is a manic-depressive. She was hospitalized once—a long time ago. So far as I know, she hasn’t had any trouble—any serious trouble—with it since.”
“She’s on medication?”
“Yes.”
“Lithium?”
“Yes.”
“Does she take her medication regularly?”
“Yes, I … I think so.”
“Do you know exactly when she was hospitalized, or how long?”
“About seven years ago, I think. And I think she was there for about six months. I’m not sure,” I replied, hanging my head.
I felt his hand on my shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll get her records. It shouldn’t take more than a few days.”
I raised my head. “A few days?”
“She is going to have to stay here for a while.”
“A few days?”
“Hopefully, it won’t be any longer than that,” he said. “But I’m afraid I can’t really say for sure. We’ll have to run some tests.”
I was getting confused and I was getting angry. “Look, you’re a doctor. What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know yet. She’s had some kind of seizure, some kind of episode.”
It seemed a strange word to use. “Episode?”
“I’m an emergency room physician, Mr. Antonelli. I’m not a specialist in psychiatric medicine. What I do know is this: Manic-depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.”
It was a condition, he went on to tell me, that could be there for years, without any symptoms, and then, suddenly, with just a slight alteration in the body’s chemistry, everything changed. Usually it happened only once, and then, with the right treatment, the balance was restored and the patient lived a normal life. But sometimes it happened more than once, sometimes after a long interval. No one could tell when it might happen and no one yet knew why.
I heard what he said and I understood it, but it seemed to come from somewhere far away and to be directed to someone other than me. All I could think about was Jennifer.
“Can I see her?” I asked before he was quite through.
“Yes, of course,” he said as I got to my feet. “She’s asleep. She’s been given a sedative. But, yes, of course you can see her.”
We walked down the corridor to the last room at the end. Behind a white curtain pulled to separate her bed from the empty one next to it, Jennifer was lying with her head on a pillow. An IV was connected to her arm.
“We have some very good people in psychiatric medicine. She’ll have the best of care,” the doctor said as he slipped her file underneath that of the next patient he had to see.
I stood next to the metal hospital bed and looked down at Jennifer’s gentle face. In the dim light of the room the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes became invisible and her skin was as smooth and fair as the first time I saw her, a pretty girl I never stopped thinking was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
I stood there for a long time, looking down at her while she slept, talking to her in my mind, telling her what I felt, telling her what she already knew. I would have stayed there longer, stayed there until they made me leave, but Flynn was waiting, worrying about what had happened to us both.
“Is she going to be all right?” he asked as he caught up with me and we walked together out of the hospital.
“She’s going to be fine,” I said, staring straight ahead, wondering as I tried to wipe the tears away when I had first begun to cry.
Twenty-eight
_______
Ihad the strange sensation of spinning rapidly in the same place, taking everything in, unmoved and unaffected by what I saw and what I heard, the invisible observer of everything around me.
For the first time, I knew what it was to be like Danny, and maybe Elliott Winston as well: alone and apart, forced out of the world, the last link severed, no hope left of a normal life. I could hear Morris Bingham talking to me from the bench; I could see the twelve men and women in the jury box, solemn and attentive, turning their eyes to me, waiting for my response, all of them—judge and jury and everyone else in that crowded courtroom—concentrating on someone who was sitting where I was but who was not really me. I waited, like everyone else, to see what I would do, and then, like everyone else, looked to see what the judge would say when I said nothing.
“Mr. Antonelli, does the defense wish to call a witness?” he asked, repeating with the same civil smile the same question he had asked befo
re.
Is this what it was like to go out of your mind: to be aware—
acutely, intensely aware—of everything going on all around you, struck by how strange are all the things you always took for granted, astonished at the infinite complications of even the most seemingly simple things? Words, for example: breathe air in to stay alive; breathe it out to make sounds that explain to yourself and maybe others as well why you should keep doing it. Is this what it was like, locked up inside yourself, seeing things with a clarity you never had before, and then, when you try to explain it—describe what you’ve seen—discover you have forgotten how to talk?
“Yes, your honor,” I heard myself say, surprised to find myself standing up. “The defense calls Dr. Clifford Fox.”
The tan suit coat he wore was a little too wide for his shoulders, and his pants were bunched up in front at his belt. His gray hair curled up over his collar at the back of his neck. He spoke very softly and chose his words with care. He had the tolerant habit of someone who spent much of his time with children. I asked him all the usual questions about his training and experience and, thinking about Jennifer, paid almost no attention to what he said.
“And have you had occasion to examine the defendant in this case, known as John Smith?” I asked, opening the file that held his report.
“Yes, I have.”
I closed the file. “And?”
Fox leaned forward, resting his elbows on the wooden arms of the witness chair. “And?”
“Yes. What did you find? What can you tell us about John Smith?” I pushed back from the counsel table far enough to cross my legs. I put my hands in my lap and began to tap my fingers together.
“Where would you like me to begin?”
I was watching my foot swing back and forth and I did not hear his question.
“Mr. Antonelli?”
“Yes, your honor?” I replied, looking up at Judge Bingham. He seemed to be worried about something.
“The witness asked you where you wanted him to begin. Are you all right, Mr. Antonelli?”
“Of course, your honor,” I said, sliding my leg off my knee as I turned to Fox. “Just begin at the beginning, doctor,” I said. I crossed the other leg and began to move that foot back and forth.
Fox had just begun to say something. “Your honor,” I interrupted, abruptly rising from my chair. “Could we have a short recess?” Before he could answer, I turned away and walked quickly out of the courtroom.
I moved down the hallway, picking up speed with every step I took, banging my fist on the wall, swearing under my breath, wondering why I could not find a telephone. Just as I turned the corner at the end of the hall, I felt a hand on my shoulder and then another one under my arm as someone shoved me through the door to the men’s room. It was Howard Flynn and he could barely control himself.
“What are you doing in there?” he yelled as he turned me around. His eyes were bulging and his face was burning red. “Don’t do this! I know what you’re going through, damn it! But you can’t do this!” His chest heaved with each short, hard breath he took. “You want to end up like I did: a drunk who spends the rest of his life regretting it? You think that will make everything all right?” he jeered. “You’re not doing Jennifer any good! You’re not doing that kid in there any good! You’re not doing yourself any good!” he shouted in my face.
I did not want to hear it. Turning away, I bent over a basin and threw water on my face. “I have to find a phone,” I said as I dried my face with a paper towel. “I have to call the hospital.”
“Look, damn it,” he said, struggling to contain himself, “you’re in the middle of a murder trial. You have a witness on the stand.
You can’t go walking in and out of the courtroom like you’ve got more important things to do somewhere else.”
I wheeled around. “I have to call the hospital,” I repeated, glaring at him. “I shouldn’t have left there last night. I should be there now, not here.”
“What about the kid? What’s going to happen to him?”
“I don’t care what happens to him! Don’t you understand? I don’t care! I only care what happens to her. I should be there now.”
“Let the doctors do their job, and you do yours!” he insisted.
“You can’t do anything for her by sitting around the hospital.”
“I have to be there!”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. Maybe if you’d been there with your wife,” I screamed, taunting him, “instead of spending all your time trying to be a lawyer … !”
The anger, the frustration, all the nameless fear that had boiled up inside me, blinding me to everything except what I felt, vanished in an instant and I realized what an awful, unspeakable thing I had done. I reached for his arm, but he pulled away.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, shaking my head at how easily I had fallen into a state of mind in which the worst thing I could ever have said to him had become a weapon I was only too eager to use.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.”
The color in his face had returned to normal. He sniffed a couple of times and cleared his throat. “You better straighten your tie,” he said. His voice was quiet, subdued. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that.”
He bent his head, biting the inside of his lip. When he looked up, he searched my eyes. “There’s nothing worse than living with the thought that you could have saved somebody and you didn’t.
Don’t let that happen to you.”
I turned back to the mirror and adjusted my tie. “I’ll see you in court.”
The door swung shut behind him, and I gripped the sink with both hands and hung my head and tried to convince myself that there was some excuse for what I had done. I turned on the faucet, threw some more water on my face, and then pulled another paper towel from the metal dispenser. Flynn had ignored my apology and felt sorry for me that I had done something that made me feel I had to make one. It was a measure of his strength, and a measure of my weakness.
When I returned to the courtroom, I stood at the corner of the counsel table, waited until Judge Bingham brought court back into session, and before the echo of his voice had finished fading away began to ask my first question.
“Tell us, Dr. Fox: Is the defendant retarded or in any other way mentally deficient?”
“No, Danny—that’s the name he was given, whether by his mother or someone else I don’t know—is not retarded. He has an intelligence in the normal range, but precisely where in that range, I can’t say for sure.”
“Why can’t you say for sure?”
“Because he can’t read, and because he has a very limited vo-cabulary, and because he knows next to nothing about numbers.
I could not run all of the tests I would normally do with a child.”
“But Danny isn’t a child, is he?” I looked across to where Danny was sitting. He was grinning at Dr. Fox, waving at him whenever he caught his eye. “He’s a full-grown adult.”
“Physically, yes; mentally, he’s a child, a very young child. A very innocent child, I might add.”
Cassandra Loescher rose from her chair ready to object, thought better of it, and sat down.
“Would you explain that last remark, Dr. Fox? What do you mean: a very innocent child?”
There was something inherently kind about Clifford Fox, something that flickered unceasingly from beneath the shadows of his melancholy eyes. No matter how often he had been deceived and disappointed by what they became as adults, he could always find something to hope for in children. He smiled at me.
“Did you ever read Robinson Crusoe as a boy?”
I thought he was going to describe Danny as isolated and alone, without skill or training. “But Robinson Crusoe was a well-educated man, with a knowledge of all the principles of modern science at his disposal. Danny can’t read.”
“No, Mr. Antonelli. He’s not like Robinson Crusoe; he’s like Friday. He
has no education, but he isn’t for that reason stupid, and he knows how to survive in the situation in which he finds himself. Reverse it: not Robinson Crusoe on the island, Friday in London, and you have something close to what I mean.”
He had my attention, and more importantly, that of the jury.
Clifford Fox was a marvel of sense and intuition who had listened to the murmurs of a childlike heart and turned them into a blood-chilling account of human indifference and utter depravity. More even than the story he told, the innocence of the manner in which he told it concentrated your mind. You could almost see the burning cigarettes shoved against Danny’s pale skin; you would have sworn you could hear at least the echoes of his screams, until you learned that the screaming only made them want to do it more. Then you heard the silence, and the silence itself became unendurable.
Asking questions, moving him first in one direction, then another, I kept Fox on the stand until he had told the jury everything he had managed to put together from the long hours he had spent talking quietly with the strange young man who sat next to me accused of murder. When he described the way Danny had been kept a prisoner, shackled to a metal frame bed, soiled in his own feces, or chained to a stake in the backyard and made to sleep outside in the dirt and cold, jurors wiped their eyes or used a handkerchief to blow their nose. If the trial had ended right then, that jury would have returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty before they had reached the door to the jury room. I asked one last question.
“Dr. Fox, based on your examination, is the defendant, in your professional opinion, capable of an act of murder?”
It called for a conclusion, an opinion about the ultimate issue in the case. I expected an objection, but Loescher did not rise to make one. Resting her chin on her folded hands, she watched the witness and tried to pretend that she had heard nothing new and that she was as certain of what she was doing as she had been before. I expected a one-word answer, but I did not get that either.
Shifting his weight to his other hip, Dr. Fox crossed his legs and leaned against the arm of the witness chair. “Not if you mean a planned, premeditated act of violence in which he deliberately set out to kill another human being.”