by Pete Dexter
He stepped back, making room for her to come inside. "Mr. Seagraves has been very good to me," he said.
Paris Trout's wife was old, of course, but there was something in the way she carried herself that did not fit her age. He watched her a moment from behind and then shut the door. She stopped halfway across the floor and turned, waiting for him to indicate where she should go.
He led her to the smaller inner office, and when they were sitting down, he smiled in an uncomfortable way and said, "What may I do for you today, Mrs. Trout?"
"I called Mr. Seagraves this morning to initiate divorce papers against my husband," she said, "but because he continues to represent Mr. Trout in his appeals, he was unable to handle this for me and suggested your name instead."
Bonner opened his drawer and found a pencil to take notes. "Will Mr. Seagraves be representing your husband in the divorce?"
She shook her head. "He said not. Perhaps someone from his firm, but not Mr. Seagraves himself? She looked around the room then. His degrees hung on one wall, commendations from the war on another. There was a canary in a small cage in the corner.
"Have you handled divorces before, Mr. Bonner?"
"I handle everything," he said, and then moved on, as if that had answered the question. "Is the divorce adversarial?"
"I would think so, yes."
"Has your husband been notified of your intention to proceed against him?"
She shook her head. "He stays at the Ether Hotel, and I do not see him except by chance."
Carl Bonner noted the address at the top of the paper. "How long has he resided out of your home?"
"Since late spring."
"And did he leave of his own volition — were you abandoned — or did you ask him to leave?"
"I asked him," she said. "After the girl was shot, I did not want him in the house."
He looked at her then, studying her face. She looked directly back. There was something incongruous about her appearance, but he could not find its origin. "Is that the reason for the dissolution? Moral turpitude?"
She did not answer at first, and he saw she was weighing the answer. "Is it adultery?" Bonner said. He waited to see if the word embarrassed her and saw that it had not. For a moment, in fact, he thought he saw her begin to smile at what he had said.
"I don't believe so," she said. "In any case, Mr. Trout's sexual interests are not my concern, except in that they have led to abuse."
He wrote the word "abuse" across the top of a piece of paper and underlined it twice. Beneath that he printed the Roman numeral I.
"Physical abuse?" he said. She studied him a moment, trying to make up her mind. He wrote the word "physical" and then an A. beneath that, slightly indented.
"Mr. Bonner," she said, "you are a young man, and I know your time is valuable. This situation, however, is complicated in ways that will not fit into an outline form, and perhaps it would be beneficial if we spoke informally at first, to acquaint you with what has happened."
He put the pencil down and leaned away from his desk until the back of his head touched the wall. He felt as if he had been scolded.
"I didn't mean to rush you," he said.
He felt the embarrassment press into his face like the summer sun.
"Do you know my husband?" she said.
"I know who he is," he said. "I have a passing knowledge of his business interests .... "
"Were you in Cotton Point at the time of his trial?"
"I'm afraid I wasn't," he said. "I certainly heard about it."
"Did you find it frightening?"
"In what way?" he said.
"The arbitrary nature of the act itself, did it frighten you?"
"Shooting a woman and a girl?" He shook his head and answered without thinking. "Mrs. Trout, I spent two years not long ago in a place where they shoot back."
She thought for a moment, her teeth holding the edge of her lower lip. "It frightened me," she said.
"I can appreciate that."
"In the first month of our marriage," she said, "I lent my husband a sum of money. He believed it was all I had — in fact, it was half. Mr. Trout, as you probably know, has substantial holdings, both in Ether County and eastem Georgia, and did not need the little money I could add to it. I have never been privy to the figures, but he is a wealthy man."
"That is my understanding," he said.
"At the time I made the loan," she said, "his assets were tied up in his businesses, at least that was his explanation."
"You believed Paris Trout did not have cash on hand?"
She smiled at him then, he did not understand why. "I came into marriage late, Mr. Bonner," she said. "I was forty-four years old and left a career which I had devoted myself to with some success for many years. I did not marry for security, I gave it up. It was a wager I took which I cannot begin to explain, except to say that the reason may lie in the excitement of the wager itself.
"And so, when, a few weeks after we were married, Mr. Trout asked me for the money I had in the bank, that in some way became part of the wager too." She leaned forward for the first time. "I do not do things halfway," she said.
"I see that," he said. "If I may ask, what was the amount of money involved?"
"Four thousand dollars."
"And you kept another four from him?"
"There is another five thousand dollars in an account in Atlanta, which I have been living off since he left."
"I take it your husband did not return the money."
"No, he did not."
"And is this the primary source of the discord? Four thousand dollars?"
"Not the money itself," she said. "The possession. Paris aspired to render me helpless, Mr. Bonner. It is a pattern. That's what taking the money was about. That is why the child was killed."
She paused, and he waited.
"In the weeks following the murder," she said, "Mr. Trout abused me repeatedly. All pretensions of normal behavior disappeared the moment he entered our house."
"There were no witnesses to this abuse?"
She shook her head.
"Beatings? What else?"
"He is a profoundly disturbed man," she said. "The abuse he inflicted reflected the state of his mind."
He nodded as if he understood her. Something cautioned him not to push her for the dissolution."
"I want my house," she said, "and I want the money."
"How much of the money?" he said quietly.
"The money he took," she said. "I wouldn't touch a cent of the rest. The rest is tainted."
Bonner looked at his notebook but did not try to pick it up.
"You've got to live afterwards .... "
"Alimony?" She relaxed against the back of her chair. "I would as soon stick up a bank."
He shrugged. "He must have assets close to half a million," he said. "You're entitled to some consideration by law."
"The house I claim," she said, "for the two years of servitude which followed my marriage. Until shortly after the killing, I worked six days a week, twelve hours a day in my husband's store. I was his bookkeeper and his secretary and his clerk. I did stockroom work and mopped the floors.
"During that time Mr. Trout treated me as an employee, without warmth or consideration, and would fly into fits of temper at the least divergence from his instructions. He would not allow me to visit my sisters in Savannah or my friends in Atlanta. He would not allow me to visit with neighbors. So I will take the house in payment for those two years, although given the choice, I would certainly have the two years back."
"You are forty-five years old now?" He would have thought she was younger, but it was hard to say. With Bonner there was a single stage women passed into when they were no longer young. He could not attach an age to it, but after women had crossed the line, he lost interest in their appearance and could not differentiate the stages beyond it.
"Forty-six," she said.
"And your husband?"
"Fifty-nine."
"Have you thought of how you will maintain yourself?"
"I have my savings," she said, "and I am not incapable of working."
She thought for a minute. "I may return to teaching, I want to do something now to clean myself of this."
Bonner picked up the pencil and made a few quick notes. She didn't try to stop him. "There won't be any problem," he said, looking at what he had written. "My advice would be to ask for alimony, but if this is what you want, there should be no problem at all."
"You may want to interview my husband before you say that."
"There is one law for everyone," he said. That remark seemed to brighten her spirits, he could not guess why.
"You'll handle it then?"
"It will be my pleasure," he said, and smiled at her the way he had smiled to please adults all his life. And once again it cut her own smile in half. He wondered about Hanna Trout and what she saw in him that she did not like.
She stood up, offering him her hand. He took it, noticing the feel of the skin. She was old, but she wasn't. "How long does something like this take?" she said.
"It depends to a large extent on your husband," he said. "I'll file the papers this week, and it could be over in six months."
"Is that what you expect?"
Bonner was still holding her hand, looking right into her eyes. "I don't know. It could last a longer time if he wanted it to," he said. He watched that register and then tried to soften it.
"It shouldn't be long," he said. "This is a favorable settlement for him, his lawyer will tell him. If he knows what's good for him, this will be over in no time at all."
She said, "I do not think you can count on Mr. Trout's knowing what is in his own interest."
* * *
AT THE TIME OF this meeting with Hanna Trout, Carl Bonner had been back in Cotton Point two months. She was his first real client.
Bonner had been away eight years. He had left the town when he was sixteen to attend Tufts University in Massachusetts on a scholarship. At eighteen he interrupted his education to enlist in the U.S. Army and spent two years in Korea, operating field artillery and reaching the rank of captain. He was shot in the hand and returned to Tufts University, decorated and honored, and finished his degree in zoology.
It took two more years to complete law school.
But if he was absent in that way eight years, in another way he was never gone at all. He had been one of those children who imprint themselves on an adult society; he was a part of the way people thought about themselves and the place they lived.
Carl Bonner had been the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of the state. He was the youngest person ever known to preach a sermon in Ether County.
From the age of six on, he had played football with murderous intentions, unconcerned for his own safety. In high school he ran three distances at the state track meet. Under the supervision of his father, the Reverend P. P. Bonner of the First Presbyterian Church, he had studied three and four hours every night but Saturday, completing both his elementary and secondary education with the highest marks in his class. He won state contests in mathematics and science. His picture was in the Ether County Plain Talk ten times a year, often with accounts of his study habits.
His father made the Plain Talk too, although it was usually with people he'd just married or a story about vandalism at the church. Religion was removed somehow from the real business of the county, and the boy came to understand that his father was insulted to be left out and drove him for that reason.
And he understood that his one abiding interest — the songbirds he kept in a shelter he built in his backyard — would never be more than a hobby. He was not meant to end up teaching biology.
The boy's fascination with birds — like his grades and his Scout accomplishments — was common knowledge in town, and some years fifty or sixty mothers, hoping to influence their own children in the same direction, would empty the five-and-dime of its canaries and parakeets at Easter, only to bring them back a month or two later for refunds, feet up in the bottom of the cage.
Carl Bonner lost very few birds.
They were his only childhood friends — the birds and the friends he invented.
* * *
CARL BONNER HAD RETURNED to Cotton Point with a wife and opened an office on the second floor of the Jefferson Building, a few hundred yards up the street from Harry Seagraves's firm.
His wife's name was Leslie Morgan Bonner, and she was a sincere disappointment to the many townspeople who felt a personal stake in Carl's life. It had been assumed that he would end up with a Miss Georgia or someone outgoing.
Leslie Bonner was from Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and she kept to herself. While her husband accepted memberships to the Kiwanis Club, the Moose, and the junior Chamber of Commerce, she eschewed the ladies' auxiliaries and stayed home. He taught Sunday school at the First Presbyterian Church, she met him in front afterward and attended regular services.
Within a year there would be rumors in town that she could not have children.
Their house sat at the end of Leisurebrook, the first development built in Cotton Point. A small brick house with two bedrooms. He mowed the lawn twice a week, and she spent afternoons under a wide straw hat, working in the flower beds. When people waved or blew a horn, she would sometimes look up from her flowers, but she would not return the wave, and she would not smile.
The birdhouse was in back. It was a circular shape, built mostly of wire, with the northern side enclosed. Canaries and lovebirds and , parakeets. The birds were advertised in the American Ornithological Society's monthly publication, and from time to time a pet store in Atlanta or Macon would order a hundred at a time. More often the orders were for two or three birds.
Carl Bonner kept meticulous records and sent Christmas cards to even the smallest customers.
He was as obsessive in business as he had been in school, and as isolated. And even though he had very little, he watched the community of lawyers on Madison Street, thinking they would try to take it away — this in spite of the fact that his only work was what they sent him.
He made collections, he handled their pleas when they were out of town. He would do their research and accept indigent clients they did not want to handle themselves.
* * *
ON THE DAY HANNA Trout hired him, Carl Bonner went home early. There was a Kiwanis Club meeting at seven, things to do at home.
He found the front door of his house locked. Leslie was sitting at the window, reading. She saw him, but she didn't move. The birds began to chatter in back, knowing he was there. He let himself in, wondering if his neighbors had noticed yet how often he needed a key to get into his own house.
People in Cotton Point did not lock their homes, they went off all day without closing the front door.
She was sitting cross-legged on the couch in shorts and one of his undershirts. It hung by narrow straps from her shoulders, sleeveless, the drop of cloth under her arm showing the crease of skin at the bottom of her breast.
He wondered if she had been in the yard without her brassiere again. He walked down the hall to their bedroom and changed into dungarees and an old shirt. She followed him in, still holding the magazine, the New Yorker. He buttoned the shirt and tucked it carefully into his pants, checking himself in the mirror.
"You look fine," she said, "the birds will be dazzled."
He noticed she had not brushed her hair. She lit a cigarette and sat down on the bed with her knees spread wide apart. He saw that she had shaved her legs. The smell of the smoke — a different thing from the smoke itself — filled the room. "Was there any mail," he said, "besides the magazine?"
"Word from the outside world?" she said. He didn't answer, and in a moment she said, "Bird things. They're on the kitchen table."
He went down the hall into the kitchen. Last night's dishes were still in the sink. He found the monthly newsletter from the American Ornithological Society and checked to make sure it had incl
uded his advertisement. She came in behind him, bringing the smell of her cigarette, a faint odor of soap. She dropped her magazine on the table and took the newsletter out of his hand.
"I have Kiwanis tonight," he said.
She held his hand against her mouth a moment, then guided it underneath her shirt until he felt the weight of one of her breasts resting on his knuckles. She was always doing something he did not expect. The first night he asked her out, she had come back from the ladies' room and put her panties into the pocket of his coat. Until that moment he had thought she was shy because she didn't talk much.
He did not move now. She stood in front of him, watching his face. Another moment passed, and then she pulled away. "It's not the same here, is it?" she said.
"Everybody's different when they go back where they come from."
"Everybody hates tits in their hometown?"
He saw the windows were open and hushed her.
"I'm quiet," she said. "You couldn't hear a damn shotgun over the birds anyway."
He moved away from her to shut the window. "I wish you'd make a few friends," he said.
"It isn't that easy for me," she said. "Besides, look at you. You don't trust anyone. All this Kiwanis Club, Junior Boy Scouts of Commerce is a pose."
He got the window down just before she finished that. "You can't make everything a choice," he said. "It isn't you on one side and how I make a living on the other. That's not the way things are after you're married."
"We're not married like other people," she said.
"You do what you have to do first," he said, "and then what you like. And right now I have to take care of the birds and then go to Kiwanis."
It was quiet a little while, and then she went back into the living room and opened the magazine.
"I need to see Harry Seagraves tonight and thank him," he said. He waited, but she did not ask for what. "He sent me a client. Hanna Trout." He saw she did not recognize the name. "Married to the man that shot that Negro child this summer."
"Shot a child?" she said.