When The Butterflies Come

by Rosemary Ness Bitner

  Ben was clearly not a skilled orator, but David’s lawyer was. He’d just summed up a very convincing argument that this matter must be left to the states and their legislatures to remedy, if they even decided remedy was desired. It was a balance between rights of giving on death versus those who could be harmed by a wrongful predator. The chief justice hoped this coughing, wheezing, cigar stench-soaked man could somehow make an argument if he didn’t keel over from anxiety first.

  Ben’s attention wandered when he heard the question from the chief justice, who could tell this nervous little man was afraid to speak. There passed a fearful moment where all present thought the little lawyer might faint. Gently, Chief Justice Renlow repeated the question, his arms extended with his hands palms up.

  “How can you expect us to render a decision that is inconsistent with the statute when your client had no writing?” He widely spread his fingers and raised his eyebrows as if he were a wide receiver waiting to receive a football pass. This was to be the defining moment. The whole case would fall or go forward based upon Ben’s response.

  There were about one hundred people in the gallery that day, including the press corps that followed Supreme Court cases. They all stopped taking notes and looked down from the gallery, all eyes focused on the perspiring, snorting little fat man. He needed to make his case at that moment or return to flyover country.

  Ben spoke in what was to be his finest performance ever as an attorney. “I agree with everything you say, Your Honor. We have no writing, and based upon that simple fact our appeal should be denied.” The judges and the spectators held their collective breaths.

  Ben continued.

  “Except for one thing, Your Honor, which is why you cannot rule to deny! When David was in the bank vault, it is his testimony, by his own words, that he intended that he would keep the pledge to his father, to leave the companies to Israel upon his own death, while at the same time he was showing the codicil to Bob. Therefore, his true intent could never have been to leave the companies to Bob. His true intention was in fact to defraud Bob, defraud him into giving up his career—his life, essentially—for a false promise in the inducement to gain his performance for all those years. David’s intent could not have been anything other than to defraud. This court cannot find that the statute shields such unconscionable conduct! It simply cannot be a shield for fraud! The court must remand our cause with instructions, instructions directing the trial court to order a trial by jury. No other ruling could be just.”

  Ben wiped his eyes, choking back his emotions as he uttered his final soft-spoken words. “Petitioner rests.” The phrase hung silently in the air, as if its absent echo continued resounding from the walls of the courtroom. The gallery spectators knew a magnificent oratorical performance when they heard one.

  With his eloquent delivery, Ben Slipperman made legal history. The chief justice knew it when he heard it. His head went back as his eyes closed and his mouth gaped open. He slumped back in his chair. A second justice reacted as well, lifting up his hands above the bench as if to reflect he was having a ‘eureka’ moment. The chief justice now had his chance to render an opinion that would be cited in cases of fraud and fraudulent intent. His ruling would set judicial precedents down through the ages. He had just heard a precedent-setting case, a case that pushed aside the notion that the Statute of Wills was inviolate, that will makers could use that statute to defraud innocents by falsely promising an inheritance in the face of clear testimonial evidence that there was no such intent. He recognized he’d been given the means to rule such conduct could not be so.

  Ben had laid out the groundwork of the matter clearly before his court. Of course! It was now all so clear to the court. The truth burst through decisively and suddenly, like it was wont to do in matters of convoluted logic that must be untangled. The chief justice knew from his old days as a judge’s clerk that one always had to look to the testimony and the conduct of the parties. His frustration with this case was lifted from his shoulders. He’d opened his eyes, literally, as Ben had removed the legal scales from them just seconds before. He appreciated legal genius, and he knew he’d just heard it from the little fat man who hardly ever won a case.

  Rarely before had Chief Justice Renlow shown any hint of his leanings. Lawyers who came before him referred to him as ‘Old Poker Face.’ Today was different.

  “Thank you for that eloquent elucidation, Counsel, and thank you for highlighting that item of testimony at trial. In matters of law, this court ordinarily does not seek to rule based upon interpretation of testimony, but in this case the testimony divides the proofs of the claims of contract and contract to make a will shielded by the Statute and the claim of fraud, thus we shall consider it. We will retire to chambers now. You will have your opinion after we finish deliberation.”

  Bob was in shock. He knew something significant had just happened, but he wasn’t sure he understood it. Tears streamed down his cheeks. A twelve-year legal ordeal had just passed a turning point. The justices were going to consider his case based upon testimony, something they just never did. But then again, they were the justices and they could do anything they wanted. He turned his head from side to side and looked far away, seeing his life telescoped before him into a moment he could only pray went well.

  Barbara took his hand and squeezed it. “You just won your case, Big Horse”

  Ben was more cautious and reserved, telling Bob later that he thought they did all right.

  On his way out of the courtroom, David passed by Barbara and put his face up close to hers. Then he hissed and stuck out his tongue at her as if he were some sort of snake. She later recounted the incident to Bob. “I thought for a minute there I was looking into the eyes of an evil snake.”

  “You were.” He no longer felt sympathy for David, the man’s pitiful childhood stories, the mastoids in his ears, his body odor problems, his sexual hang-ups about women, his ugly appearance, his homosexual needs, his tortured and distorted views about the inferiorities of women and other cultures, his lack of respect for authority and social rules—any and all of it. He was finally free of the monstrous sociopath. The oral argument by Ben awakened Bob from a long nightmare. The real David was just a sleazy scumbag and closet criminal, a pustule on the ass of social normalcy, a disgrace to his Levite namesake and ancestral king. He was just a pathetic sham of a man who played the Jew card whenever it suited him to gain sympathy. He was quick to allege his actions were being challenged because he was discriminated against because of his religion, when in fact his religion had nothing whatsoever to do with the charges brought against him. Bob was free of David at last.

  “Why do you think David did what he did?” Barbara wanted to understand what happened through Bob’s eyes.

  Bob started to explain his understanding of the factor that drove David to be the way he was as best he could. “Well, there is a certain subset of the tribe, those Jews who God created as an ingenious social invention. God saw the need for the goyim to be deceived into taking action they otherwise would not take. So in my case, he sent David as his agent to deceive me into building a firm that otherwise would never have been built. On a larger scale, he set up central banking to induce spending through the government to advance society faster than it otherwise would advance. You see, the goyim tend to take the bait of instant gratification and God knows that, so he sends his agents, the Lucifers, to issue the temptations to the goyim. The deal the Lucifers have with God is that they will tempt and promise and deceive, and God is okay with that because he wants to see if there will ever come a time when the human condition advances past the hatreds of the tribe against the goyim and the goyim against the tribe.

  “Meanwhile, there are sordid interplays of false promises, reactions, and hatred, and the tribe turning inward in reaction to the hatreds like the Holocaust and the reaction being the founding of Israel. It’s a cycle that is not unlike holding out candy to a child and then taking it away. The child and the goyim rea
ct and throw a temper tantrum—or a holocaust or pogrom, as the case may be. The parent—the tribe—hardens against the behavior it receives. The reaction of the tribe knits it closer together, but there are factions within the tribe that derive their power base by constantly reminding the members of their grievances. The goyim constantly hold suspicions about the tribe. There are some within each faction of tribe and goyim who seek to extract vengeance against the other, and they are championed by the power base factions. So the cycle goes on.”

  “But why do you believe God would create such a vicious dynamic?” Barbara sought a deeper understanding.

  “To move humanity forward, I suppose, but also to see if humanity will ever become secular and rise above the cycle. It’s not new. It’s an interplay you can pick up by reading ancient scriptures, like in the Book of Judges. The tribe goes astray from God, fights off a potential destroyer, and then it goes back to God.”

  “But wouldn’t rising above that dynamic eliminate the need for God? Could there be another reason?”

  “Yes, possibly. I think the ultimate reason for it all is God creates the interplay for his amusement. It makes for great human drama. Everybody loves amusement, even God.”

  “But everyone has a choice to sign on to the cycle or not, right?’

  “Yes. Everyone has free will. Everyone may make their own choice.”

  MISSING SHEEP

  Mothers like to believe their daughters will turn out well and have good lives. No mother gives birth to a daughter and wishes upon her child that she’ll grow up to become a prostitute or some kind of amoral nymphomaniac fuck-bunny, yet that’s what happened to Susan’s little Marty. Between the time she was Joseph’s little girl, bouncing on his knee, laughing, running about in the yard with her pinwheels, her bubble-blowing soaps, her little dolls, and her little pets, and the time when she was suddenly gone into a time warp and returned to Plaintown, something went terribly wrong.

  An older and wiser Susan sat alone in her office that afternoon, late into the day after the others had long gone home. What went wrong? Why did Marty turn out to be the adult she turned out to be? How could I have contributed to Marty’s life choices, and what’s to be done about it now?

  Susan reminisced over her countless days and nights with Marvin, how she immersed herself in his world while relegating Marty to second place for her attentions. She told herself, unconvincingly, that she did the best she could to raise her daughter. Marty always had the best of everything—the best clothes, the best schools, nice cars, plenty of money. Susan was frustrated in those years past. It would have all been so perfect if only she could’ve had Marty with her in a family life with Marvin, but try as she might, she saw she couldn’t become a Jewess and pry Marvin away from his wife.

  Eloweiss would have none of it. That bitch would ruin the business and her own husband just to spite Susan and Marvin if it took that to keep him, so a tacitly understood stalemate took hold between the two women. Susan could have him, bed him, fuck him in the office, the rental house, in Susan’s own house, and on their trips away, but she could not have him in Eloweiss’s house, or on Friday nights, or on Saturday Bar Mitzvah days, or on High Holy Days. Maybe she should have just broken it off with Marvin. Maybe the money wasn’t worth it. Susan hadn’t birthed those thoughts while Marvin lived, but now that he was gone the remorse of losing Marty had her second-guessing her life choices. Guilt haunted her and gave her no peace.

  Susan gazed at her suit jacket hanging behind her office door. She was deep in thought as her stare fixated upon the Monarch butterfly pin Marty gave her on her fiftieth birthday. Susan always wore the pin now, as a proud mother, regardless of the garment she wore. It was a striking piece of jewelry with golden orange mother of pearl wings, a line of deep red rubies making up the body of the pin, and ten white diamonds bordering the edges of each wingtip. The veins of its black wings were delicately hand-painted. When Marty first gifted the pin, Susan’s reaction was to gasp. With the mother of pearl, rubies, and diamonds, the piece had surely cost a fortune. It was a large pin, a good four inches across, and clearly custom-made.

  At first, Susan thought of the pin as merely a unique piece of spectacular jewelry, but the more she wore it, the more she wondered about her relationship with her daughter. Had Marty intended to make a subtle statement from daughter to mother with her gift? Was Marty trying to declare, in her muted painful way, that she could also earn big money by prostituting herself, just like her mother did?

  Susan remembered when she’d visited Marty during that last year of boarding school. As Marty was getting dressed, Susan was shocked to notice a tattoo. Marty sported a red and blue butterfly tattoo low over her backside, and there was another noticeable orange-winged Monarch butterfly one on the inside of her uppermost thighs. Although Susan only had a fleeting look at the tattoo which surrounded Marty’s vagina, she instantly realized it was her daughter’s declaration of uninhibited sexuality. Perhaps Marty’s message to her mother was simply that she had become just as good a whore as Susan, and the butterfly pin represented some sort of merit badge for her carnal leg-spreading achievements. Susan could now only wonder about Marty’s feelings toward her and ponder these thoughts within her own heart. Whatever Marty’s motive or message behind the gift, Susan now wore the butterfly with a deep sense of maternal love for its giver. Looking at the pin now, she felt the pain in Marty’s soul.

  Susan reflected on the previous time at the boarding school when Marty informed her in no uncertain terms that she intended to go through life putting her pleasures first. Perhaps she should have slapped her daughter, upbraided her and immediately taken her home to Colorado, but alas, how could she do that? Susan’s moral authority failed her. How could she have any credibility with Marty, any moral high ground, when she had put her own desires first all her own life?

  Later, when Marty worked as a prostitute out of the fund’s offices, why didn’t she try to put a stop to it? Could she have had any influence at that point with her grown daughter? Probably not, Susan reasoned at the time, and now she realized it was true. Marty would have just worked out of some other business. Only a mother can wonder about a daughter in such ways.

  At least with Marty at the fund, Susan could know whom she was seeing based on the expense and sales reports. When Carl’s wife made the news with her suicide and the murder of her children, it saddened Susan but it didn’t surprise her. Marty was capable of wreaking havoc in others’ marriages, and her daughter never shied from confrontations with hostile wives. Susan only hoped some crazed wife wouldn’t kill Marty or hire someone to do it for her. She told Marty to try to keep things on the light side and not to try to separate women from their husbands. She was never as brazen as her daughter. It was the only advice she could give at the time, but Marty paid her mother no heed.

  Maybe Marty felt she had to one-up her mother. Maybe that’s what sent Marty into the dark regions of malicious intents and her quest to wreck marriages. Maybe that’s what the daughter saw in her mother. Maybe the daughter figured out that her mother’s own behaviors drove Joseph to suicide, and the daughter wanted to prove to her mother that she could get someone to kill themselves over her behaviors as well. Those maddening thoughts came to Susan again and again until she was obsessed with them. Nothing she could do now could bring her Marty back, but perhaps she could finally be an honorable mother to her presumed-dead daughter. She could find out what happened to Marty and have some sense of honor and decency befitting her little girl, whom she loved so dearly and now so terribly missed.

  What happened to Marty? That question dogged Susan every day and sleepless night for the past year and a half. Even with their relationship strains, Marty always called Susan on her birthday and on Mother’s Day. She always sent a Christmas card, always called the week before to see if they could go together to the Mass of Saint Cecilia at Holy Spirit Church in downtown Plaintown. Despite her shortcomings as a mother, Susan knew her daughter loved her deeply, t
hat she always wanted to be closer to her than Susan would allow when Marty was a child, and those thoughts left her heartbroken. Marty was gone now, to some faraway place with her Savior, not away on some fling as David wanted everyone to believe.

  Susan had taken to prayers in these dark times, something she hadn’t done in years. She often sat in her office and prayed her Rosary. Now she prayed fervently. They were deeply felt and sincerely spoken now, with a conviction the rote prayers she’d recited as a child never had. But then, she reflected, what did children really know about life? How could a child or a young woman know the pitfalls, the trials, the sufferings, the pains of life? She prayed that Marty, in her final moments, had found some measure of peace. Marty was gone for good, likely dead; Susan knew that with certainty, deep within her gut.

  Now she sat waiting patiently for the silent blink under her desk, indicating the call on her private line, the line that no one knew she had. David was gone by now anyway. He left about an hour after the markets closed, at two o’clock Mountain time. John, her dutiful friend and trusted lover, told her the laboratory would call after five. They knew it was a delicate and confidential inquiry, and she was paying extra for the secrecy.

  When the light blinked, she lifted the receiver from under her desk. “This is she.”

  “This is your report,” said the caller.

  “And where are you calling from?”

  “It’s a local landline call, from the Cow and Steer Hotel’s Travel Agency.”

  “Verify the work order, please.”

  “It’s from Lab Termanspeil, Neumuehlequai, Zurich, 8006. Order 3PLR34.”

  “Take it to the UPS box in the basement of the Western Bank building. At exactly six o’clock, drop the envelope with the report in it on the floor in front of the box and leave without looking back.”