Marital Privilege

by Greg Sisk

  The nineteenth-century conception of prison as a “penitentiary”—in which wrongdoers would have the opportunity to repent of their sinful ways and be reformed—no longer held sway with policy makers or prison officials in the modern world of criminal corrections. Nonetheless, Bill had been given plenty of time to think in prison—and, even though he had committed no crime, he was afforded all the time in the world to repent his sins. Indeed, time to think was about all he could really call his own during those long days—and especially the interminable nights. With all that time to think, he had come to understand and accept his pronounced liability for his own plight.

  The slide downward had been propelled by a cold and professional killer who had murdered his boy and left Bill to take the fall. And Robby Sherburne with his political ambitions definitely had greased the skids. But by hiding his mistakes, concealing his troubles, and breaking faith with Candace, Bill had put himself at the top of that steep chute for the fateful ride to the bottom.

  Bill had never been able to sustain anger toward Candace at any point in their marriage. Not even after she had become the prosecutorial key to his indictment and conviction could he carry animosity. But he had felt abandoned. Like many husbands, he had regarded his wife as his best friend, perhaps his only real friend. Losing her trust had been a devastating emotional blow. Only when she was no longer there had he appreciated how alone he had become. And, much too late, he realized he had removed himself emotionally from his wife long before he had removed himself physically.

  Over the months in prison, his sense of betrayal by Candace’s testimony had faded—but it had never disappeared. He had to admit he had unfairly and unfaithfully withdrawn from her many months, even years, before the tragedy. He had come to regret his deplorable and selfish act in leaving his wife torn between her identity as an officer of justice and her loyalty to a husband who no longer had merited her confidence. He appreciated his unfairness in expecting her to remain perfectly reliable, without being reliable himself.

  In sum, he could not justly blame her for the difficult choice she had made. But assigning fault to himself did not draw the sting from his memories of her words in court.

  Although he no longer could remember the title of the book or its author, he recalled an often-quoted passage in a French romance novel that had been assigned in his college “lit” class: “To know all is to forgive all.” He was not persuaded. He did know why Candace had agreed to testify at his trial. He did understand that she had chosen the only course left to her under the circumstances. Yet it was still so very hard to forgive.

  After his conviction, he initially had refrained from trying to contact her because of his pain and, in all honesty, because of his resentment. Even when he had received legal papers from Candace’s lawyer, which formalized in legal terms their separation, he had signed the documents immediately without reading them closely and sent them back directly to the lawyer.

  Later, when the bitterness had receded even as the heartache lingered, he had abstained from contact with Candace because of his own guilt in having also caused her pain. And given that he thought he’d be locked up for the rest of his life, he had felt an obligation to release her to move on with her life.

  Now he too had been released. Now he too had a chance to move on with his life. But the very fact that the pain endured was ineluctable evidence that he still loved her. And, God knows, he was lonely. He truly missed her.

  He could not reasonably and fairly have hoped she would come.

  But hope he had.

  • • •

  “Can I give you a lift down to the Twin Cities?” asked Burton, interrupting Bill’s unhappy reverie. Burton pointed over to his unmarked police car parked near the bus stop.

  Bill hesitated and then gave in, as he had no other prospects.

  “Only if I get to ride in the front seat this time,” he said, in a lame attempt at humor.

  “Of course. Of course.” And, reciprocating the weak comedy, Burton added, “And we’ll leave the hand-cuffs off this time as well.”

  “Ha, ha,” replied Bill dryly, as the two walked over to and got into the car.

  As the car entered the freeway toward Minneapolis, Burton asked, “What are your plans? Where in town can I take you?”

  “I don’t have any plans,” said Bill in a flat voice. “To be honest, you may as well leave me off at the homeless shelter downtown. I obviously can’t go home. After Pirkle broke in and held Candace hostage that night, we left the house in Eden Prairie for good. I think Candace has since sold it. And I had left the condo in downtown Minneapolis even before the trial. So I don’t really have a home any more. And what little money I have left I’d rather not spend on a hotel room.”

  “Sorry, man. I figured that might be the case. Well, I’ve got you covered. There’s an apartment in Savage, Minnesota, a few minutes south of Eden Prairie, that we use on occasion for witnesses or informants or someone who needs a safe place to stay. I pulled some strings, and under the circumstances, no one is going to say no. So the apartment is yours for a while. I can only let you have it for a couple of months, but at least it gives you a place to lay your head while you think about your next step.”

  “I’ll take it,” Bill said instantly, surprising himself with how quickly he seized on any courtesy. How hungry he had been for human kindness!

  Burton’s cell phone rang, and he flipped it open. “Burton here.” Burton listened intently. “You don’t say! Well, well, well. We’re turning around and will get back there right away.”

  Closing the phone, Burton opened the window, placed a police beacon on the car roof, and turned on flashing lights and sirens. He veered to the left, crossed over the median of the highway, and headed back in the direction from which they’d come. “Back to the prison, pronto,” Burton explained.

  Bill’s first reaction was raw, heart-pounding fear. Oh no, he thought, they’re taking me back to prison. My release was some kind of mistake.

  Bill remembered reading in the Minnesota papers about a former sixties radical who had been captured in Minnesota in the early 2000s and then imprisoned in California after pleading guilty to plotting to assassinate a cop in the 1970s. (Ironically, it suddenly occurred to Bill, the radical group’s plan had been to use explosives to bomb a police car.) This woman had been released to her home in Minnesota at what the California prison warden thought was the end of her prison term. Then she was re-arrested a few days later and sent back to prison in California because the prison administration had made a mistake in calculating her release date.

  Seeing Bill’s face turn pale, Burton interceded, “No, no. You’re not going back inside.”

  Because they hadn’t gone very far on the highway from Duluth to the Twin Cities, and the car now was traveling a higher rate of speed on the return, they pulled back up to the front gate of the prison camp within only a few minutes.

  Candace.

  She had come.

  There she was, standing by the front gate, holding her cell phone.

  Bill vaulted out of the car and sprinted toward her. Then he jerked to a stop and pulled up short of her.

  After all, he thought, this was no movie-style ending, in which the boy and the girl jump into each other’s arms and kiss deeply as tears run down their faces.

  This was the woman who believed he had tried to kill her. This was the woman who believed he had murdered their son.

  This was not the romantic climax to a love story.

  Still, Candace did move closer to him. After a brief but noticeable hesitation, she put her arms around Bill for a short embrace.

  There were tears on her face. And she was trembling.

  • • •

  “I got held up by a construction detour on the highway,” she said. “When I got here and they said you’d already left, I didn’t
know what to do. Then someone said they’d seen you leave in an unmarked police car. I called 9-1-1, not knowing what else to do. They said they’d check into it. Thank God, they got through to Lieutenant Burton.”

  Turning to Burton with a smile, she said, “Thank you, lieutenant, I owe you more than I’ve ever told you. And now I owe you so much more. But I’ll be taking Bill home.”

  As these words left Candace lips, she wondered whether her home could ever be Bill’s home again. Was she being too impulsive? Was her feeling of guilt at misjudging Bill prompting her toward precipitous action? And, yet, was guilt really so bad? If it prompted one to do the right thing, to correct a past wrong, was guilt not to be embraced?

  This man, who had been her college sweetheart, her husband, her partner in life, the father of her child, had mutated into a monster in her thoughts. And then, all of a sudden, she had learned that she, and everyone else, had been wrong. So terribly, unjustly, unforgivably wrong.

  Candace knew now, of course, that Bill had always been innocent. But just as the heart often leads the head in love, the heart may lag behind the head in moving beyond resentment.

  She never had descended to hate. But, God forgive her, she had turned away. She had abandoned him to what she thought were his just desserts.

  Even though she now knew that her enmity had been so badly misplaced, the feeling of . . . disquiet . . . persisted. She couldn’t turn off her emotions like a water faucet.

  And yet, Bill would always be her husband. Not in the eyes of the law any longer, but perpetually in the view of the Church. Shortly after Bill’s conviction, Candace had filed for and been granted a legal divorce. For purposes of property ownership, selling the house in Eden Prairie, planning for the future, and even such mundane things as preparing annual tax returns, she had needed to become a separate and self-sufficient person.

  Some well-meaning friends and acquaintances, as well as busy-bodies who approached her after Mass in church, had urged her to petition the Catholic Church for an annulment. Some even argued that “annulment” was simply “Roman Catholic” for “divorce.”

  She didn’t believe that. Petitioning for an annulment would be a lie. Whatever else might have been true or false, and despite what had later occurred, she had been married to him. It had been a genuine marriage. “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” That wasn’t just Catholic doctrine, it was Candace’s belief. The sacrament of marriage was forever.

  Under Catholic teaching, a grant of annulment meant that no genuine marriage had ever existed. It meant that the parties hadn’t understood what marriage was or one of the two had deceived the other into agreeing to marriage. But there had been a real marriage between her and Bill. They had been a real family.

  As she often had said to herself, and sometimes to others, the monster who murdered her child could not be the same man she had married.

  And, now she knew, the monster who had murdered her child was not the same man standing before her.

  With a civil divorce, then, Candace had resigned herself to being alone for the rest of her life. Well, not so much alone, but with a different vocation for her life. Her family would henceforth be her father, brothers, and their wives and children. Her family would be her colleagues at the University of St. Thomas School of Law who worked side-by-side with her and supported her without question or doubt.

  What now? she wondered.

  Candace walked toward her car, with Bill trailing close behind. An awkward silence prevailed between them.

  Then Candace tripped over a crack in the pavement. Bill reached out. “I’ve got you, Candy,” he said. He took her arm firmly and steadied her against falling.

  “Yes, you do,” she replied. “You do have me. Again. If you still want me.”

  Did she mean it? Could Bill be her husband again, not just in church doctrine but in her heart? Or, if not by romantic emotion, at least at first, by custom of daily life? Could they share a life together again, despite the animosities, real and imagined, that had defined them for the past many months?

  No one else in the whole wide world could understand her experience of losing her beloved son, seeing him killed before her own eyes, learning that her own husband was the author of that tragedy . . . and then learning that he was not.

  No one. Except for Bill. His pain in being labeled as a child-murderer and seeing his own wife deny him was directly parallel to her pain. Or, to be truthful, Candace admitted, his pain, though likely greater, overlaps with my pain. I cannot know what he has suffered in being disowned and discarded, left alone in a prison cell.

  They say that you cannot build a lasting relationship out of shared pain. They say that people who come together in tragedy are unlikely to succeed in a subsequent romantic relationship. But what other foundation was there for them?

  There was another foundation. There was still James Daniel. He remained the strongest tie between them.

  If staying together in marriage for a living child would have been right and appropriate, perhaps the same could be true for a child who has passed on. By building a new life together, J.D. would always be remembered as part of a living and continuing family.

  Who knows if such a relationship, such a revival of their marriage could work? God knows.

  More Information

  For those wishing to further explore the history and nature of places and institutions mentioned in this novel, here are on-line sources:

  Basilica of St. Mary: http://www.mary.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=89&Itemid=102

  Eden Prairie, City of: http://www.edenprairie.org/

  Good Shepherd Catholic Church, Golden Valley: http://www.goodshepherdgv.org/

  Loring Park and Johnson’s Lake: http://www.mpr.org/www/ mnmonthly/9806_lake.shtml; http://reflections.mndigital.org/cdm/ ref/collection/mpls/id/190; http://www.hclib.org/pub/search/mpls photos/mphotosaction.cfm?subject=Johnsons%20Lake

  Municipal Building, City of Minneapolis: http://www.municipalbuildingcommission.org/Building_Information.html; http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_City_Hall

  United States Courthouse, Minneapolis Building: http://www.mnd.uscourts.gov/Courthouses/courthouse_minneapolis.shtml;

  http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/101158; http://skywaymyway.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/17/drumlins-of-federal-courthouse-plaza/

  University of St. Thomas School of Law: http://www. stthomas.edu/law/