What, in the meantime, of Reverend Andrews? Dad and Charlie continued to visit him at the Memphremagog jail nearly daily. And though they usually didn’t go together, their reports were discouragingly alike. Without giving way to despair (which any good Presbyterian would make every last effort to resist), the minister was becoming more low-spirited with each passing day.
“I’m worried about him,” Dad told us at one of the family war councils we’d begun to hold in our farmhouse kitchen almost nightly. “I don’t believe he thinks he’s got a chance. He’s even quit talking to downcountry reporters—not that I blame him, but these days they’re about the only visitors he has.”
“I advised him not to,” Charlie said. “It’s never a good idea for a defendant to talk to reporters in a situation like this. But I couldn’t agree more about his low spirits. For a born two-fisted fighter, which I for one still think he is, the guy seems too quiet. I can’t figure out why he isn’t angrier, God knows he has a right to be. One small piece of good news, though, is that he knew the girl was pregnant. She told him so, and he actually called a home for unwed mothers over in Burlington about it. The doctor he wanted to talk to wasn’t in, but we’ve got a record of the call.”
“What does that prove?” I said.
“Not a whole hell of a lot, to tell you the truth. It just makes Zack’s contention that the minister murdered her to keep her pregnancy from coming to light seem a little shakier. Why would he kill her after calling the home in Burlington? Or call Burlington if he intended to kill her?”
“He wouldn’t,” Mom said. “And he didn’t. And you, Charlie Kinneson, Esquire, are going to prove beyond any doubt that he didn’t. I’m positive of it. What upsets me most right now is thinking of poor Reverend Andrews sitting alone up there in that jail cell all day with only you and your dad and a few curiosity-seekers for visitors. Why, even most of his own congregation’s stopped visiting him now that the novelty’s worn off. Worst of all, he’s got no family nearby to help him.”
“Nat’s not all that far away,” I said. “He’s family.”
“Nat’s the last one he wants around, Jimmy,” Charlie said. “Above anything, he doesn’t want Nat involved and I don’t blame him.”
“He’s been rereading Pliny Templeton’s Ecclesiastical History to keep from going crazy,” Dad said “Though how he can concentrate on it I have no idea—Mister Baby Johnson! That’s another thing. He asked me to stop in at the parsonage this morning before I came up and bring along his notes on Templeton and those two newspaper clippings on Templeton’s death. I went through his desk from top to bottom, but Mason White had evidently beaten me to it. The papers weren’t there, and neither was much of anything else. White’s apparently confiscated everything in the desk for ‘evidence.’”
Charlie frowned. “I don’t think White’s got those Templeton notes or the clippings. I’ve seen a list of all the evidence the prosecution’s going to use. There’s no mention of the Templeton papers. Check the desk again.”
“They aren’t there, I tell you. I don’t need to check again. White took them, whether he intended to use them or not.”
“What else does Reverend Andrews do all day in jail?” I said quickly, to avert an argument. “I mean besides reading old Pliny’s History? It must be terribly boring for him.”
“It is,” Mom said. “It’s high time you and I went to see him, Jimmy. We’ll drive up in the morning.”
I knew that my father was not happy about my mother’s driving our rattletrap De Soto up to Memphremagog, even though it was just ten miles away and she was a very capable driver, and he was even less happy about our venturing into the jail in that rough little Canadian-border paper mill town. But with one exception, which had it not reflected the deeper problems of the adults of the Kingdom would actually have been amusing, the trip went as well as anyone could expect such a trip to go under the circumstances.
Reverend Andrews’ cell was in the police station on the main street of town, overlooking Lake Memphremagog. The chief just waved us on down the corridor. As we had hoped, Reverend Andrews seemed very glad to see us, though we had to stand outside his cell and talk through the bars. I was relieved to see that he was wearing his suit pants and dress shoes and a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up; I’d been worried that he might have on a striped uniform. Mom had brought him a carton of Luckies, and he thanked her and assured us with a grin that his “help” at the jail were all very attentive, and the view from his high barred window was capital.
He winked at me. “How’s next year’s starting shortstop?”
Remembering how Reverend Andrews had found my baseball position for me, I had to blink back tears. How, I wondered, could he possibly concern himself with my trivial hopes and dreams at such a time? Yet I believe that it was in a large degree just this kind of unselfishness that made him an effective minister. And there was no trace of irony in his voice when he asked Mom how my father and Charlie were holding up through this whole mess. There was that touch of greatness about the man, that capacity to transcend his own circumstances, however grim, that I suppose he had cultivated as a chaplain in World War II and Korea. Yet I could tell by looking at his eyes, which were grave and unamused and worried, that he was undergoing a terrible ordeal.
“Have you been in touch with Nat, Jim?” he asked after we had settled down.
This caught me completely off guard. I stammered something about a letter and a phone call, until Mom rescued me and told Reverend Andrews that Nat and I had talked on the phone, and she’d talked to Nat, and her impression was that things were fine in Montreal. “I want you to know something, though, Reverend,” she said. “If the time ever comes when, for whatever reason, you need Nat here in Kingdom County, he’ll stay with us and be part of our family for as long as he wants to.”
“That’s very, very kind of you, Ruth. But please understand that it’s imperative that Nat not be mixed up in all this. I’d never forgive myself if I let that happen. I’ve come to think that it was a bad enough mistake to bring him here in the first—Oh, no! Will you look at those blooming little urchins! They’ve been at that for the past three days.”
Reverend Andrews was laughing. He pointed at the window, where I caught just the briefest flash of a kid’s face, popping into and fast out of sight. Then I saw it again! Only this was a different kid, a redhead. What in blazes was going on?
Still chuckling, Reverend Andrews explained. And as he did, his eyes briefly assumed that wonderful amused expression, his voice that mellifluous delight in an irony, any irony, that I’d sensed the first time I saw and heard him, back in the Ridge Runner Diner. “What we’ve got here is a prime example of old-fashioned North American smalltown entrepreneurship, folks, in the tradition of Tom Sawyer. It seems that the local police chiefs son is a bright young chap of about twelve years of age, who’s been operating a sort of sociological peephole show out behind the jail. What he’s doing is selling glimpses of me, for a dime a shot, to younger kids who’ve apparently never seen a Negro. At least not in jail! He boosts them up outside my window and holds them there until they’re satisfied—though most are too scared to take full advantage of the opportunity—Where are you off to, Jim?”
I was already halfway down the corridor.
“I’m going to kick their damn asses into the lake!” I shouted.
“Hold up, chum!” Reverend Andrews called. “That’s not the ticket. Let ’em have their fun. It’s a diversion to me, and at this point any diversion is welcome.”
I don’t think it really was a diversion, though, and apparently Mom didn’t think so, either, because on our way out she marched into the chief’s office and told him he should be ashamed to let such a disgraceful circus go on outside his jail and if he didn’t put a stop to what his boy was doing, she would.
The chief was a big, tired-looking man of about fifty. “Judas Priest, missus, how do you expect me to do that?” he said. “Put a twenty-four-hour guard out
side that window? How would you stop it?”
“Just let me get my hands on that son of yours for five minutes,” my mother said, “and I’ll show you.”
“Oh, Judas,” the chief said, and stood up and started heavily for the door.
The last thing we saw as we drove out of the police station parking lot was the chief, lumbering down the sidewalk behind a gaggle of kids, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it the way mine would have been.
I have mentioned that in many ways it was my mother who helped us all pull through that terrible summer intact. Besides that visit to the jail, which I believe was critically important, if not for the minister then for us, and perhaps for me in particular, she did everything in her power to preserve as many of our ordinary routines as possible during those weeks before Reverend Andrews’s murder trial. Two such instances in particular come to my mind.
The early fifties saw the tail end of what to me was a wonderfully fascinating type of entertainment in rural northern New England. Here and there in outlying corners of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, the very last remnants of the myriad itinerant one- or two-night performers who once toured the entire country still occasionally turned up. I am not thinking of vaudeville performers or chautauqua lecturers so much as, say, the little one-elephant circuses, the family carnivals with half a dozen or so rides and games, the four- or five-man barnstorming baseball teams, and best of all, an individual called “Mr. Mentality,” who came to town every three or four years when I was a boy and who was a mind reader.
Although my father printed up twenty or so big four-color posters advertising Mr. Mentality’s amazing one-man performance to be held on the Saturday night after Mom and I visited the minister in jail, such excursions into the realm of the extrasensory not only brought out the skeptic in him but, I believe, disconcerted him—as anything that was not entirely accessible to strict journalistic scrutiny and reducible to logic and Newtonian physics tended to disconcert him. Mom said that once, years ago, he had sat through a single performance of Mr. Mentality’s show with the objective of demystifying the mind reader’s act in an open letter in the Monitor. When he could not entirely, for at the very least the traveling clairvoyant was a sort of specialized genius, Dad lost all interest in him and wrote him off as a shrewd purveyor of parlor games for pay.
My mother, on the other hand, was endlessly intrigued by all aspects of Mr. Mentality’s performances, and regarded him as the last of a breed and someone I should see while there was still time.
You might suppose that with the terrific uproar over the murder during the past couple of weeks, interest in a magic show many Commoners had already seen three or four times would ran rather low. Not so at all. The “hall,” as everyone in town called the Academy auditorium, was jam-packed by 7:30 that Saturday evening when George Quinn stepped out onto the stage and introduced the astonishing Mr. Mentality: a stooped, solemn-looking man of an indeterminate age in a rusty black cape, with a pointy dark beard, who for the next hour and a half kept us delighted and baffled by various astonishing mnemonic and intuitive feats. He could accurately multiply in his head any two numbers you gave him, up to four digits apiece; instantly name the day of the week in which you were born; and recite verbatim any page of that week’s Saturday Evening Post. He could tell you numbers you were thinking of in your head, the dates of the coins in your pocket, the names of books you’d checked out of the library, the topic of a conversation you’d had in Farlow Blake’s barbershop two days before. (My father had said that for most of these feats Mr. Mentality undoubtedly employed a stalking-horse who acted as advance man and spy as well as in-house confederate—quite possibly a native of Kingdom County—though who this might be even Dad had no idea.)
I kept thinking how much Claire, with her flair for the dramatic, would have loved his performance, his low-keyed panache even on the infrequent occasions when he guessed wrong (shrugging as though to say, “So what? Now you know I’m no humbug. A humbug wouldn’t ever be wrong, would he?”). Suddenly I realized that this was the first time I’d been able to think about Claire without despair, and I was both relieved and surprised, yet slightly sorry, that as Mom had promised, time had already healed some of my grief. But at the end of the evening, during the question-and-answer period, when that ignorant old smart-aleck Plug Johnson stood up and asked Mr Mentality who “rubbed out the Canuck gal staying at the preacher’s,” a question so tasteless and outrageous it shocked the entire room into total silence, the mind reader just shrugged, held out his hands palms up, and said that was up to us to determine, not him—after which he walked off the stage without a backward glance and was never seen or heard of in Kingdom County again. This bad ending put such a damper on the evening that I almost wished Mom and I hadn’t come at all, and f think she felt the same way.
Ruth Kinneson was nothing if not resilient, though. And the very next day, when Dad remarked that he’d told Judge Allen we wouldn’t be spending our usual end-of-the-summer week’s vacation at his fishing camp on Lake Memphremagog, Mom made him call the judge on the spot to reserve the camp for that last week of August before he offered it to someone else. She said that with me going off to high school in the fall, and only four years away from college, there was no telling how many more chances we’d have to be together as a family, and Kingdom County Affair or no, we were going to have our week on the big lake. It was a good and wise decision, and a good week, though of course there was no way to escape from the Affair there, any more than there had been at Mr. Mentality’s show—just some easing of the day-to-day tension and a welcome break from our routine at the farmhouse on the gool.
Every morning at dawn, when the huge lake was at its calmest, I’d start the judge’s old motorboat and ferry Dad the five miles south from the island to the town dock at Memphremagog. After a brief visit to the jail to see if Reverend Andrews needed anything, he’d drive down to the Common to work and I’d troll a big red-and-white spoon slowly back to the camp, sometimes picking up a smallmouth bass or a landlocked salmon or two, which Mom would cook for our breakfast. I spent the rest of the morning exploring and fishing the nearby bays and coves, and afternoons I swam off the dock, and read on the screened-in camp porch overlooking the lake and high mountains to the west. Evenings Mom and I played parlor games while my father read or returned to town to visit Reverend Andrews at the jail.
On our last night at camp, Mom had a big steak cookout, and Charlie, who’d been busy all week in the Common preparing for the trial, came up to eat with us. I hadn’t seen him since our vacation had started, and he looked tired and frustrated when I met him and Dad at the dock. As soon as we got out to the island, my mother went right to work to perk him up.
“How’s Vermont’s best-looking defense lawyer tonight?” she said, and gave him a big hug.
“Tired, Ruthie,” Charlie said. “I still haven’t come up with a single lead on another suspect. I’d make a hell of a prosecutor at this rate, wouldn’t I?”
“Don’t call your mother Ruthie,” my father said.
“You look good, Ruthie,” my brother said. “How old did you say you’re going to be on your next birthday? Thirty-nine?”
“Me and Jack Benny,” Mom said, but I could tell she was pleased because she unconsciously brushed back her lovely long hair with her hand and laughed the way she always did when Charlie teased her.
Usually on the last night of our vacation week at the Allens’ camp, my mother asked Athena and the judge for supper. But Athena was off taking courses at the state university in Burlington, and as my father had tried to explain to me the night before, with the trial coming up and Charlie representing Reverend Andrews, having my brother and the judge both for a meal would be a conflict of interest. At thirteen, I didn’t know the difference between a conflict of interest and the Korean conflict, but Charlie himself had told me that lately when he ran into the judge he would barely grunt at him.
“Sure as hell old Uncle Forrest’ll go out of
his way to give me a hard time at that trial just to show everybody how impartial he is,” Charlie said as we sat down to eat.
“Just don’t you go out of your way to give him a hard time, mister,” Dad said. “You want to play this one straight the whole way.”
Then Mom declared a moratorium on the topic until supper was over, which was fine with me. After dessert Charlie and Mom walked arm-in-arm around the island while Dad and I played catch in front of the camp, and then we sat out on the screened porch in the split-cane chairs that had been there as long as I could remember and watched the lights of Memphremagog came on far down across the water. Dad smoked a cigar, and its rich fragrance blended with the familiar camp scents of spruce needles and woodsmoke and the camphor-soaked ball of cotton on the screen door to keep the flies away. I thought Dad or Charlie might recite one of William Henry Drummond’s marvelous French Canadian dialect poems, “The Voyageur” or maybe “The Habitant,” as they liked to do when we got together at the judge’s camp. They did not, though, and Mom didn’t tease Dad by suggesting that we all play a parlor game, either. I knew they were all thinking about the Affair.
“All right,” Charlie said in a flat, unhappy, determined tone of voice. “All right. Suppose he did sleep with the girl? I’m not saying I think that’s what happened. But what if it did? Here’s a healthy guy, vigorous and in his prime, with no wife and no girlfriend and no social life with the opposite sex at all. And here’s an attractive and lonely and, for all we know to the contrary, rather promiscuous young woman under his roof. So what if he succumbed to the temptation and did sleep with her? That sure as hell doesn’t mean he killed her.”
“Temptation is one thing,” Dad said. “Anybody might be tempted. He might even have been tempted when Julia offered him her precious favors back a couple of months ago—she was a handsome enough woman at one time. But the fact is he didn’t succumb to whatever temptations he may have felt. Besides, he had a much more normal social life than you might think. I wasn’t going to mention this, but he once told me he had a close woman friend in Montreal, a teacher at McGill University.”
A Stranger in the Kingdom Page 35