“Shame you can’t stay. I’d like to learn more about Jessica. Pity.” Even before he stands to lead them to the exit, his mind is racing, unlocked by the word he last spoke. Pity. Yes, pity, the missing element in his father’s construction of the case. The central theme of damages should not be the economic losses of a life of well-paid work by an intellectually capable but physically handicapped citizen. That truly would be worth three or four million. But there is a different, much more lucrative calculus of the case. The approach to take is to make little Miss Jessica entirely pitiable. In her hearing and speaking and eating and walking and ass-wiping, as pitiable as a human child can be made to seem. So pitiable she seems barely to break the threshold of humanness. Her garbled words, some animal dialect. Her motor ears, some robot assembly. Her gamboling gate, Neanderthalic. Her claw-hand touch, alien. All for the jury to see. He knows already how his closing to the jury will sound. “And what did the defendant doctors do to this poor unfortunate child, this innocent, simple gift of a gracious God? They judged her not worthy. Not worthy of the care you or I or yours or mine might have expected as one’s just due. Just due.
“But Jessica Mary Jackson, not worthy?!” He will shake his head in amazement and disbelief before continuing. “Their wanton act of negligence was their judgment on poor Jessica that she didn’t deserve the special life she was given. Because she was different from the rest of us, they turned away. They turned away and let her . . . strangle to death. Like a criminal hung on the gallows, or a wild animal caught in a steel trap. But Jessica Mary was no criminal, unless the way her imperfect hands stole her parents’ hearts is criminal. And no wild animal, either, unless the spirit in her that clung to life through the pain of her surgeries and the rejections of her peers, is animal.
“And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I know you will not turn away from little Jessica now. You will not join those mighty judges of worth, those doctors sitting smugly there in good clothes and comfortable seats. You will not turn away from the duty you now have to her. They are guilty of her death. And her death is no small thing. Punish them for thinking it is a trifle, a nothing. Punish them for extinguishing the pure light of love that was there in her and in her family with her. Return a verdict for twenty million dollars. Teach them a lesson. Teach these doctors, these healers, these demigods, a lesson in life. They sure to God need it.”
Father waits for B. A. D’Woulfe to unlock the front door with his key. Mother stands at his side. He thinks the attorney looks otherworldly, lost in some complex legal place weighing the good, the bad, on the scales of justice. Father is glad he has retained this firm, this man. Justice, he thinks, justice.
“It would help me a lot if we could spend some time together so I can get an in-depth feel for Jessica, the person she was. Maybe review some photos and her schoolwork, her art, any videos you may have of her, and talk with you at length about her accomplishments. And, of course, her limitations. It is of utmost importance to put forth a full and complete picture of any plaintiff but especially a young child so the jury can form a relationship with her. So that Jessica is not some abstraction we merely talk about, but is instead a real person whose presence in the courtroom is felt. So I was wondering if we could meet again, at your convenience, on days when you, Mrs. Jackson, might have some help with your new baby at home?”
Father has Friday off. They will bring their pictures of me and all my refrigerator art and the video of our beach vacation. And Brian Joseph, too, if he persists in refusing the rubber nipple.
And their memories. They are happy to bring their memories. For the first time since my death, they see their memory of me as a sacred part of who I was. As real, as palpable, as clippings of my hair kept in a plastic pouch or the shriveled umbilical cord pressed between the pages of my baby book. Their memories, now, are not all painful, any more than touching the cut locks from my first haircut is a source of pain. They will bring their memories, troves and troves of them. They will come now with brave smiles and only occasional tears.
Badger writes a memo to his father. “B. A. Met with the Jacksons tonight. Signed the contract and release of records requests. Seems, though, the kid might not have been as bright as they first let on. They’re coming back Friday with videos, school stuff. Art. Then I’ll be able to judge this wrinkle better. Have a thought I’d like to run by you about the damages angle if what I get from the family corroborates this wrinkle. Working lunch tomorrow? Next day? LM know. B. A. Jr.”
Father turns onto Wisconsin Avenue. The last of the evening traffic herds by in headlamp shafts of brightness. If all the streetlights along that corridor were to be extinguished at once, Wisconsin Avenue would pulse with silver light like an enormous wriggling glowworm in the dark.
“I think we should be glad we found this firm of attorneys for our case. That young D’Woulfe, he seems to know what he’s doing. He’s smart. And thoughtful. I looked at his face when we were leaving, and I swear I could almost hear the gears in his head grinding on about Jess, and us, and the case. And in a week, two tops, he’ll know Jess as well as anyone. I think we’re lucky, Kate. And it isn’t costing us a thing.”
Mother’s eyes are closed, though she is not sleeping. “Do you think he could do that with Jess? Get to know her so well that he could make people on the jury—just a group of strangers—see her as she was, love her the way we all did? Do you think he could really do that?”
“That’s what good lawyers learn to do over a career. That’s their duty to their clients, to present them and their case honestly and completely. So, yeah, I believe he can.” He turns his head to steal a look at Mother. Her eyes are still closed. The warmth of the car, the drone of the engine, the sense of confinement in a space, are making her sleepy. He turns back to the road and traffic. Her face, his face, are more shadow than skin in the silver light of traffic.
I watch and listen and loathe those empty words, words that seem the hollow echo of what had been spoken on the same stretch of road eight years earlier as we three drove home from my first outpatient conference with the doctors. “I think we will be real glad to have the doctors we have for Jess. They all seem to know what they’re doing,” Mother had predicted. And now Father’s prophecy.
Jeanine is sleeping in my old room now. Mother and Father had never gotten around to taking the changing table and old rocking chair out of her room after she outgrew the need for diapers, breasts, bottles, and burps. So it seems the best solution is to put Jeanine in my room and hand over her room to Brian Joseph. They wheel the old crib up from the basement. The pony mobile is still clamped to the headboard and plays as loud and clear and quick as ever. Jeanine fusses the first few nights, but my nocturnal ceiling soon catches her imagination. Father or Cassidy sit with her in the dark, after bath and books, and tell her about the constellations.
She is Sagittarius, the ninth sign of the zodiac. She learns to count to nine in the dark at Cassidy’s teaching well before little Brian Joseph takes his first bottle at ten weeks. She bids me goodnight most nights—well, not me really, but the constellation Aquarius—just as Father or Cassidy is at her door to leave.
Ned, Nana, and Cassidy all volunteer to join Mother and Father at the attorney’s office for the upcoming meeting. Each is eager to join his memories with the others’ in constructing my essence. But D’Woulfe forbids it, telling Father by phone it would sully their case if he met with any potential witnesses other than those who brought the case, namely, Mother and him. He will hear what the others have to say about me, but that will occur when the defense deposes them, or at trial if they are called as witnesses. “You can tell me anything at all about Jessica and her family, but I have to hear it from you right now, not from them. Ask them for reminiscences that seem to make Jessica . . . special.” The word drips out of the phone like drool. “That’s going to be the key to unlock the case. Jessica, one of a kind. Unique. Unmatched in all of God’s creation. Remember her that way, bring her to life that way, and w
e all win. We win it all. A special, special child.”
*
I ask Him, bluntly, just how many more tapes must I see? I rattle the canister holding the tape He’s come to collect, realizing how similar all His tapes are to my lost echocardiograms. I rattle it louder. If the point is that life goes on, that people linked together in love can heal their hearts, He has shown me more than enough. Cassidy is sober. He suffers his sadness over my death without the intinction of anger or vengeance, and the purity of his pain has spread to his past. More and more he can miss his child and wife, suffer that loss, without the need to bury his mother in blame. More and more he comes to believe he erred in not making peace with her. There had been so much love among them all, he sees clearly now, it was almost alive, a living thing, that love. He sees now that his blind, unforgiving anger toward his mother accomplished nothing less than the death of whatever love remained after their passing.
He often hears the words Father Larrie spoke the morning after my death. They come at odd times—frying hamburgers at the stove, dropping cans in the trash, searching for matches in kitchen drawers: cherish her memory.
Don’t let guilt and blame tarnish it.
That will only sever your connection to her and to those who keep her alive in their memory and love.
He thinks it the most sensible thing he’s ever heard a priest say.
Cassidy is sober and sad and full of memory and hope. But my parents’ anger demands the compensation of justice. Though it seems their right, I would rather they had no need of justice over my death. Still, what they do seems the proper venting of their justifiable emotion. Their anger unsettles me, but justice will vent that anger, be their vengeance, and they will go on, and away from Brandon D’Woulfe’s complex maze of malpractice law.
I see all this clearly in the tapes. How many more must I watch? I ask Him this. No, I demand it of Him with my double voice, my throat and fingers, pitched and poked. He carries a book in His hands. I recognize the Catechism. “Who is man,” He asks pompously. The tone of His voice— very Moses the Prophet—at first suggests there will be phrases to follow, to complete the question. I expect something like, “Who is man that he should eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life?” Or some such pronouncement. But, no, He rests his Charlton Heston voice a moment and then repeats, “Who is man?” He waves the Catechism. It is His subtle hint that His question and its answer reside there, known to me.
“Man is a being created in the image and likeness of God,” I mouth. It is the third question in the book, I know full well.
“And so should it be,” He intones seriously. The Catechism becomes a tape. Then the Assembler mimics me, rattling His tape like a box of unused bones.
There are days—and weeks and entire months—when B. A. D’Woulfe, Sr. thinks his only son would have made a better used-car salesman than personal injury lawyer. It’s not in the way he dresses—no, he has the lawyerly look down pat, from the width of his pants cuffs to the width of his suspenders to the brief whiff of his cologne. And it’s not in his work habits, for the Badger is known to burn the midnight oil, to cut no corners. And it’s not in his intellect, for he knows the law and how to use it uncannily well. No, sadly, it’s in his face, for he has that erasable look, a “now you see it, now you don’t” sneer, which emanates from his rodent eyes and pointy chin. You look at his visage and expect a lie. Or if not a lie, at least a shaded half truth.
He says with his face, every car on his lot is cherry. Garage-kept. One owner, little old schoolteacher. Never driven over fifty miles an hour. He preys on hope. The hope to believe. So the senior partner thinks, What’s he got on his Etch-A-Sketch mind about the Jackson case? It’s a case made in heaven. Clear-cut negligence, medical fraud, readily apparent injury. Hell, the death of a child. What more could Badger want from it? More money? Well, more money is always nice, but they’re rolling in money already. Last year alone, verdicts and settlements of over seventy-five million. So no big deal if the kid’s not bright and wasn’t going to go to Harvard, and they have to pare back their economics. All right, three mill instead of four, the settlement value. That’s one point two mill to them. For what, sixty hours of work between getting the complaint filed and sitting in on six, seven depositions? That’s two grand an hour compensation. He thinks of his own father, David D’Woulfe, making pastrami sandwiches in the deli he owned in Brooklyn. A dollar ninety-nine, including a whole dill pickle. The old man was happy to clear two bits on each transaction. Two grand an hour now for me, he thinks, not so bad.
If not money, what then, more fame? Hardly. The firm’s already the best on the East Coast. Badger could never improve on that with a single wrongful death case. So if not money or fame, what then for the Badger? Chutzpah? Ego? His coming of age? Yeah, well, maybe. Trying to show the old man what the kid’s really made of. Could be. But who was that guy who flew too high, got too close to the sun? Daedalus, he thinks. Remind the Badger about Daedalus. He makes a note on his legal pad and leaves his office for the meeting at Clyde’s Restaurant.
They order the same lunch out of habit, cheeseburgers and fries and a side salad. Badger will attack with ketchup, his father with mustard and mayonnaise. They drink black coffee before, during, and after the meal. NutraSweet for the elder, sugar for the younger. Neither will touch the salad.
The senior D’Woulfe flaps three packets of sweetener to settle their contents before he rips them open with his teeth and adds the powder to his cup. He stirs with the folded empty paper packets. “So. What’s going on with the Jackson matter? You mentioned wrinkles. I don’t like wrinkles.”
“I don’t either. But maybe the kid was less educable than I heard at the first interview. I’m thinking she must have been, with her deafness and speech impediment and all. Parents are back Friday for an extended interview and they’re bringing her stuff from school and whatnot. But I’m thinking it’s not so much a wrinkle as an opportunity.” He lets that sink in as he gulps his coffee. He’s gone over this pitch eight, nine times since the idea crystallized yesterday evening. He knows he can sell the idea. His father’s face is, as always, a poker stare. “So I think this. We embrace her limitations. We embellish her imperfections. She becomes not the next brilliant architect or lawyer who happens to have a handicap—come on, they’re a dime a dozen these days. Instead, she’s this barely human being, this sort of thalidomide creature with claw hands and no voice and megaphone ears and no friends and hardly a life to speak of.” He pauses a second before saying it. “But she’s loved.” He lets the words sink in, find their way through the hard shell on his father’s heart.
“By her family, see, she’s loved. Hell, everyone loves her.” He flips both hands in the air to suggest a world of love. “She’s as lovable as a sheepdog. Why? Because she really is human. Sometimes, it’s what barely breaks the surface that we see most clearly. And she does. Break the surface. Of humanness. But barely, like a fish half coming out of the water. Weak, wretched, repulsive, ugly, deaf, mute, hands like the creature from the black lagoon, an almost monster, but people love her anyway, just like a full human. Especially her family. Those good simple folk, our clients.” He raises his cup to drink. Poker face has become “you’re bluffing,” the slight rise of his gray brows and the display of a little more cloudy eyeball. “So. You’re thinking, all right, why? Why go the dumb-dumb route?”
“Should I be?”
Badger nods affirmatively. “Here’s why. If we make her a scary sea monkey but one who feels this love of people, here’s what we arouse.” He waits while the waitress refills their cups. He notes with satisfaction that the old man doesn’t grab for the sweetener right away. He thinks, I got him. Then he thinks, NutraSweet, bladder cancer. Then he remembers a fact from his undergraduate study of psychology: behind the fear is the wish. His father coughs into his napkin and Badger continues. “We arouse pity. Pity. We arouse the jury’s goddamn, monstrous, sweet pity.” He tings the rim of his water glass with the nail of his thu
mb. “Pity,” he repeats. The fading ring of the glass sounds like the bell at the end of a round of boxing.
The food arrives. The old man scans the table for mustard. His hands go out into the air, palms up, in a gesture that wordlessly says to the young waitress, “Can you spare it?” after he utters the single-word sentence, “Mustard?” His face is screwed into a sour scowl, a face like mustard itself.
“Right away, sir,” she says.
Badger notes she’s young, a college kid trying to make a buck. And pretty. Sort of Italian face, dark brown hair, nice body, good legs. A runner, probably, he thinks.
“And what does pity get us? Now that it’s aroused, what does it provide?”
Badger pauses until the waitress gets to the table with the Gulden’s. “Twenty million dollars,” he says. His father is looking into the cleft between the top and bottom of his hamburger bun, assaying the thickness and melt of the cheese. Badger looks up to the young woman and smiles. “Forty percent for us.” She smiles back.
“And just how does pity get us twenty million?”
Badger squirts ketchup from the squeeze bottle into his bun’s interior, and smiles again at the waitress. Her name tag says “Angela.” “Thanks, Angela,” Badger says. Then he looks into the face of his father. Gone now are all the veneers. He sees an old man with an old man’s face, saggy and gray and covetous as Midas. “That, Father, is the beauty of this all. Pity is guilt’s one and only offspring and protector. It is pity that guards the guilt in people, and it is guilt, Father, that guards the gilt.” He rubs his thumb against his index and middle fingers. “Twenty million in gilt.” The ketchup bottle sucks air after Badger replaces it on the table. The sound is like a roar from the crowd. A knockdown, he thinks.
The senior D’Woulfe chews his burger. “Inflame the jury’s pity and in so doing stoke their guilt?”
“Exactly.”
The Assembler of Parts: A Novel Page 25