False Witness

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  Mr. Hale is the third of his name, although he doesn’t use the number. He is the result of the proper breeding, the proper educational background—Groton, Harvard and Harvard Law School. He had the proper stint in the Navy during the Korean conflict and had spent enough time in his family’s enterprises up in Boston to realize he had no great interest in any of the Jameson or Whitney or Hale interrelated corporations. Years ago, at a proper dinner party, he was introduced to the dynamically energetic, newly elected governor of the State of New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller, who just happened to be in the process of putting together the very best goddamn staff in the country. To be located in New York City. Why not give it a try, Jameson? Why not indeed, Nelson?

  The third Jameson took to public life and public service and his young wife and young family settled into their Central Park West duplex where they balanced all the expenses of living in New York City against all the cultural and social advantages. Finally, after years of appointive positions, Jameson Whitney Hale elected to be elected: he ran, virtually unopposed, for the office of District Attorney. He followed in the hallowed steps of Mr. Frank Hogan, and carried on the spirit of honor, trust, cleanliness, decency and objectivity in the running of his office that had made Mr. Hogan’s career the paradigm for elected officials everywhere.

  I have worked in every one of the eight bureaus under his jurisdiction, after a one-year stint in Legal Aid, defending the very cretins I now prosecute. I decided early on to make this office my career; to catch the attention of the boss not by the fact of being one of the very few women around at the time, but by being one of the very best assistant district attorneys working for the office.

  Even after fourteen years on his staff, there is still occasionally the small slight catch in the throat, the abrupt flood of adrenaline, the thump in the pit of the stomach when you are sent for to discuss what you have done, or failed to do, in the course of an investigation or court case. There is the ever-present need to gain the rarely bestowed nod of approval. Every staff member knows when the “Old Man” has given you the dazzling quick grin or the murderous shaft. For me, Jameson Whitney Hale’s approbation is essential. I am ambitious; totally and with great determination, a step at a time, I have been working and moving toward a definite goal. I want Jameson Whitney Hale’s job.

  While my present ambition, given its historical setting in the age of upward-and-onward-let’s-make-up-for-lost-time women, is not remarkable, Jameson Whitney Hale’s commitment to my ambition is very remarkable. He backs me completely and totally. He was never consciously a male chauvinist; it was just that his entire upbringing—education, social environment, generational outlook—precluded any serious consideration of female abilities in a male world. My success in his domain had been singular—not so much because I am a singular woman (although I do have claims in that area) as because I was the only woman to break through the various barriers that had been placed before me. At a time when such intrusion was not only unfashionable but downright outrageous, my success in handling assignments within the diverse bureaus of the District Attorney’s office became known. My experience ranged from prosecution of fraudulent accident cases all the way to indictments/convictions of organized crime lords.

  Had I been a man, my successes would have been noted favorably and placed in my résumé folder against the time when I would, as my predecessors had done, venture into the world of private practice or higher governmental office. The judicial system is so staffed with judges whose initial training was the D.A.’s office, it has been almost a mandatory prep school for ever-higher appointive offices. Except there were no women visible in the scheme of things, unless you were to consider the occasional motherly, elderly woman justice serving in Family Court until her sixty-fifth retirement birthday party and gold wristwatch.

  I did not want Family Court. I do not like gold wristwatches. I had decided, early on in my career with the District Attorney’s office, to get my credentials, my validation, in every area possible. My expertise, in hope that my day would come.

  Had I been a man, my request for transfer from one bureau to the next on the heels of some marked achievement would have seemed highly questionable. Since I was a woman—and who can figure them out in the first place?—it seemed like a harmless enough idiosyncrasy. My mobility was my preparation for my ultimate goal; the time for its attainment had finally arrived. Women were leaders now on the international scene, the national scene, the state and local scenes. I was ready to crack that sacrosanct male-defined domain: the District Attorney’s office.

  Jameson Whitney Hale had been approached several times with offers for other public office. In the past, he had considered carefully and declined. This year, the proposals put to him were very serious and had strong bipartisan backing. They were offering him the United States Senate. He had until late spring to declare himself, to be tested in the primary. He would be damned certain of his victory before committing himself.

  His office would then become available. He would resign as soon as he declared and would appoint an interim District Attorney: either a sitting incumbent with his strong endorsement, who would be a sure thing in the fall elections, or a sitting incumbent from an outside agency who would just be keeping the chair warm until a wide-open election.

  Mr. Hale’s chief assistant, Max Phelan, was in his early sixties and had long been preparing his retirement home on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. That left all the bureau chiefs; most of us had eyes for the office. There was that one other possibility—unlikely, but hovering around in the background. He could appoint an outsider: a former State Attorney General or Congressional Investigator or eminent professor of criminology, for reasons of political expediency.

  There were many forces working on behalf of Jameson Whitney Hale, including a strong, politically active contingent of women’s organizations who would commit to him all-out in the senatorial race, should he appoint a woman incumbent.

  I was the only woman fully qualified.

  In our preliminary discussions, we had a verbal agreement: all things being equal, nothing rocking the boat, no major catastrophic scandal erupting around me, should he get the definite nod to run for the U.S. Senate, he would back and endorse me fully not only as the incumbent but as the candidate most qualified, most suited.

  So much for the silly girl, hopping from bureau to bureau to bureau—let her, what harm can it do, after all, what difference does it make, as long as she does her work properly.

  Our relationship, over the long years and through many different encounters, has always been strictly asexual.

  Practically always.

  There was a moment, years ago, when the air between us as we considered endless charts of data and evidence, alone late at night in his office, was suddenly charged with electricity. When we each became uncomfortably aware of the other, when a casual brushing of hand against sleeve, the accidental eye contact, had a strange, tense and unanticipated significance.

  There had been an isolated fragile moment, caused by great exhaustion from hours of uninterrupted overwork, when we were surprised by the power of the awareness we both experienced at exactly the same time.

  We kissed. Just once. Just our lips touching. No hands, no embrace, no fumbling. Just a rather cool meeting of our mouths that formed both the question and the answer at the same time. Then we both experienced a great sense of relief.

  Without either of us saying a word about it—ever—we knew the moment had come and gone and we were in no danger whatever each from the other. Our relationship would continue along its professional, asexual course.

  “Lynne?”

  Who is this Sanderalee Dawson? I am exactly the right person to answer his question in depth and for a particularly shallow, silly, embarrassing reason.

  Sanderalee Dawson and I were born on the same day of the same year, within fifteen minutes of each other. This information came to me when we found ourselves sharing a dais, guest speakers about to inform ou
r intense audience of women-achievers how it was for us: how each of us had taken her place in the man’s world and succeeded and widened the spaces around us for others to follow. During a break in a totally nauseating luncheon—something greenish and shimmering beneath an ugly, glutinous yellow sauce, which neither of us tried to penetrate—she turned to me and absently asked, “What’s your sign?” Taurus, I told her, and her face lit up.

  I am nearly forty years old. I am actually thirty-eight years old, but for the last two years I have been describing myself as nearly forty, so that when I am in fact forty, I will be used to the whole idea of it. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and, for a frightening moment, I hear my own voice say, “I’m ten years old. Little undersized Lynnie, ten years old. How come I can get away with it, fooling all these people who think I’m someone else? Can’t they see I’m ten years old and scared of the dark?” I get up in the morning and look in the mirror and say to my tired face, “Hey. You’re nearly forty years old.” And I believe it. The kid got lost somewhere in the dark.

  Of course, I never told Sanderalee Dawson any of this. I just looked at her and wondered how she could so easily pass for twenty-five, twenty-six at the most, when we were to the hour what she called astrological twins.

  And so I have had a rather proprietary if passing interest in her career and life. After all, sharing an exact birth moment with someone is something of an intrusion.

  Sanderalee Dawson’s publicized background was Hollywood-romantic, though how much of it was true I wouldn’t know. A girl from the Deep South, sent to live with an aunt in New York City, she had been “discovered” at the age of eighteen by the well-known French director Jacques Gerard, who had been filming in Harlem as a background for his classic three-continent study of youth in the early sixties. She had been a typist in a storefront insurance office on 125th Street when Jacques and crew spotted her and from then on: fairy tale.

  Under the guidance of Gerard, to whom she was later married, Sanderalee Dawson became the most popular, highest-paid fashion photographer’s model in Europe.

  Her features were as delicate and mysterious as those of an Egyptian princess. Her cheekbones caught light and shadow in extraordinary ways. Her eyes were an astonishing shade of pale green, the slight upward tilt emphasized by outrageous makeup. Her hair, thick and heavy, took easily to the avant-garde styles required. The fact that she seemed more a deeply tanned white woman with hints of the exotic in her background was all to the good: it was not yet known that “black is beautiful.”

  Her body might have been created specifically for modeling: it was long and thin, perfectly proportioned, flawless with photographically essential bone structure. After a few years of great success in the European fashion world, after she split up with Gerard, Sanderalee was discovered by Vogue and brought home to be the first major black model in the United States.

  The early, most famous photographs showed an ice-cool woman with smoldering interior or, perhaps, just the opposite: smoldering woman with ice-cool interior. She could flash in any direction. The camera never detracted from nor enhanced her. It captured whatever role she chose to play.

  Inevitably, she tired of being someone’s mannequin. She went to Los Angeles where an adventurous young ad agency took a chance: to use a beautiful black woman in an out-and-out sexual come-on TV commercial for perfume.

  The scene was an all-white bedroom, satins, silks, furry rugs, a great musical background; wordlessly, the camera panned the length, the endless length of this golden tan fantastic creature in an unbelievable white evening dress, clinging as she lay stretched and poised, back to camera, facing an obligatory fireplace. The camera explored her body, reached her back, shoulders, neck, then her head turned slowly and sensuously as she propped her cheek against her hand. Sanderalee made love to the camera, her eyes offered the invitation, her mouth, lips parted lustfully, as in a maddening whisper, she named the perfume: Woman. Quick blackout.

  It became the most popular, sensational, criticized, copied and satirized commercial of its day and led to Sanderalee’s appearance on the talk show circuit: Carson and Griffin; a chance to swap wisecracks on Mike Douglas, where an ogling group of fellow guests let it be known they couldn’t care less for her wit, just let us look at her, right, fellas?

  Within a year of the commercial and the guest shots, Sanderalee Dawson had her own half-hour talk show on the Coast.

  Depending on her mood, her guests, her whim of the moment, Sanderalee slipped back and forth from Carolina nigger gal to New York Bloomie’s dream woman. Anger, which had sparked through many of her early photographs as something strong and mysterious, was no longer the I’ll-show-them sort of thing. In recent appearances, both on her show, which was now New York-based and network-syndicated, and in the political arena, into which she was dipping now and then, Sanderalee’s anger was real and a little frightening.

  She and Gerard had been separated for years, although the marriage hadn’t been dissolved until Sanderalee became deeply involved in a search for racial identity. Her fellow-seeker was a well-known black entertainer who abandoned Hollywood and Las Vegas, gave up his open shirts, gold chains and tight pants in favor of matching dashikis. Although physically they were very different, Sanderalee and friend seemed to have gone to the same hairdresser for a tumble-weed natural; the same speech teacher, from whom they emerged with a slow, cadenced, measured way of talking, as though mentally translating from a much older language into a careful, unfamiliar English.

  They had picked up on the same type of condemnation of all things white. Under her new lover’s careful guidance—he became co-producer of her show—there was a self-consciously “black” atmosphere on her set; her selection of guests and topics ranged from angry black welfare mothers to disheveled white civil libertarians who heaped abuse on the white establishment from which they had recently removed themselves. And she surrounded herself with surly, head-shaven black ex-cons. Members of her crew, both black and white, were rumored to be getting edgy.

  When this affair ended, the entertainer returned to the Coast, ordered a new wardrobe of expensive but subdued clothing, to be worn minus the gold chains, and resumed his temporarily abandoned career. Sanderalee took off her dashiki, had her hair straightened back to normal and moved in another direction: that of outspoken political observer.

  In point of fact, Sanderalee’s political savvy was very shallow and could not stand the test of intelligent interrogation. That makes more astonishing the fact of her tremendous popularity not only with the public, who loved her fresh, daring, what-the-hell-do-I-care attitude, but the lineup of eager potential guests who ranged from Secretary of State to hopeful candidates for the state assembly. An appearance on Sanderalee’s Let’s Take a Stand, 11:15 to midnight, five nights a week, guaranteed more public exposure and more followup press and weekly magazine coverage than any publicist could possibly arrange.

  During the last six to eight months, Sanderalee’s interests had veered sharply toward a fascination with terrorism as a viable weapon against intolerable conditions of life affecting vast numbers of people.

  Her guide, instructor, mentor, was a fully qualified Ph.D. in Education: Dr. Regg Morris, a highly visible, clearly vocal, outspokenly determined advocate of the aims, policies and methods of the PLO. Although he kept carefully in the background, and was glimpsed only rarely on the subsequent TV special, it was public knowledge that the force behind Sanderalee Dawson’s highly publicized, filmed, photographed, magazined and editorialized trip into Arafat-land had been set up, guided, managed and arranged by Dr. Regg Morris.

  On her ninety-minute TV special, Search for Peace in the Mid-East, we were treated to the sight of Sanderalee Dawson, radiant in the hot dusty sunlight, carelessly dressed in her chic Ralph Lauren western outfits, dancing and gun-waving joyously with Arafat and his band of forty machine-gun–armed thieves; slinging an unwelcome, unholy arm around semiveiled women, probably damning them forever into unimag
inable hells for being photographed over and over again with this strangely vibrant, highly excited American woman with pale green eyes. Willing male teachers, grinning boyishly—they were mostly teenagers—instructed her in marksmanship and helped her to sight her automatic rifle. Painted on the targets were the familiar, graspingly evil, large-nosed, Zionist-Jew thugs, and as she fired her weapon, jumping with the kick to her shoulder, as she slaughtered the enemy of the peoples, there was great joy among the Palestinians.

  On the basis of her ten-day visit, spent hopping, dancing, shooting, embracing, cheering, being photographed touching and singing with groups of dirty little children with runny noses, and seething at the refusal of the Israeli government to grant her status other than that of a visiting tourist or working journalist (she felt herself to be an ambassador-at-large, at least), Sanderalee Dawson was metamorphosed into a full-bodied, strong-voiced advocate of Palestinian rights.

  She sat and listened, indifferently, to representatives of our government explaining the delicate situation, the balance of rights, emotions, the quiet, unpublicized talks that were continuously going on; the Camp David accords; the tremendous difficulties and subtleties involved. Finally her eyes hardened into glass that sparkled with passion and fury at her startled guest as she reverted to Sanderalee-perfect, bell-ringing oratory that by its force and delivery, if not by its content, devastated her victim. She managed it all with a superb sense of timing. After all, the television studio was her home ground and she knew how to get the final word in, the unanswerable accusation, the cutting remark that destroyed all that had gone before. As soon as the cameras were off, a good-natured, smiling, gracefully light-handed Sanderalee would help her furiously impotent, insulted, besmirched guest to disengage himself from wire and microphone.

  She had one or two bad days, even with the control she was able to exert. One of her most controversial shows, which had brought forth the most mail, the highest ratings, the most anger, the most vicious amusement, had been her straight forty-five-minute interview with a former newsman who had written a book documenting Arab-Israeli relationships over a period of twenty years.