Carol’s lawyer compared her to a computer. The computer was lucky, he said. When it broke down, it simply ceased to function. All the information stored within its memory became, at once, useless and unusable. It had simply to be fixed. But when we break down, all the information we have received from our society about ourselves; about ourselves in relation to it; about ourselves in relation to others; all of that stirs, rises unbidden to the surface of our legally imposed civility and is at hand for us to use. When his client committed the horrible act for which she was now before the court, she had been temporarily insane. And it was precisely because she had broken down that she could perform most efficiently. Like those two white hunters being tried at this very moment in another courtroom…
The prosecutor jumped to his feet and objected. The judge sustained his objection. She asked Carol’s lawyer to stick to the matter at hand. And, in a calm voice, he did. Everything, he said, that his client had been programmed for, even before she was born, all the information that her society had transmitted over centuries to her, as its slave, its non-person, its fraction of a person, its inferior, despised and disparaged citizen, all that information about who she had been, was and could be, far from being useless and unusable at the moment of her mental breakdown, her temporary insanity, had simply been uncovered from where it lay, deep within the recesses of her mind, and put brilliantly, instinctively, to use. His client, he would show, was logical when she performed the horrible act for which she was being tried. She was logical, insane, like the society she belonged to. She was not guilty.
On the second day of the trial, I arrived early at the courthouse and sat in an unoccupied seat among Carol’s adversaries. I was unwilling to join the game that the people in the courtroom had set up for themselves. No one sat in the row I was sitting in until all the other rows were occupied. And no one, throughout that day, sat on the seats next to or immediately in front of and behind me.
For the rest of the trial, I decided by a flip of a coin where in the courtroom I would sit. The coin decided. I sat wherever it commanded me. I endured the angry stares of Carol’s adversaries when I sat among them. I accepted that her supporters, including the man with the short, curly white hair and beard, who had a gap in his upper canines, should now be less than friendly to me when the coin made me sit with them.
The trial lasted for two weeks. Carol’s lawyer’s strategy was to make his client a victim and a martyr.
“The prosecutor,” he said one day, midway through the trial, “has spoken of revenge. But revenge is deliberate. Revenge is premeditated. Revenge is planned and calculated. My client’s act was instinctive. Spontaneous. She did not know her victim. She had not sought out and stalked the child who had accidentally maimed her son while they played together in order to maim him. She had not waited for the right moment to smash his fingers. I, too,” he said, “had I been helpless and vulnerable enough, could have been her victim.
“Her act, bursting out from beneath our precarious civility, and exploding spectacularly for us to see, was a horrible act. We are repulsed by its ugliness. We swear it is unusual. We protest that it is an oddity. Thank God, we say, that the rest of us are not like that.
“But we are. Ask those hunters, convicted now, whom the prosecutor doesn’t want me to talk about. Given the right circumstances, we all are. As Americans. We cannot help but be. If we have to be thankful, it should not be to God, but to this woman sitting before the court for the lesson she has given us about our innate capacity to be, no matter how frighteningly, or how shockingly, our cultural selves.
“My client should never have married that South African,” the lawyer told the jury. I looked at Carol when he said this. I wanted to see how this strategy to save her would fit with her deep love for Jason. Her lawyer blamed her for marrying him. At the same time, he sought to show that her decision to marry Jason was not her choice alone, that, like a computer, she had already been preprogrammed to make it.
She had been a brilliant student of Romance Languages, a student, that is, of national and cultural psychology. She should have known the danger of marrying a man forced to flee his country in despair, who yet loved it so much that he refused to become citizen of the one that had welcomed him. She should have known the potential of such a man to make unhappy those who were close to him.
Yet she had married him. Surrounded at her prestigious university by so many talented Americans, she had reached out to that dissatisfied and necessarily unhappy exile, not as an exotic lover in an affair that would end sooner or later, but as a mate to spend the rest of her life with, to be the father of her children and her partner in the serious business of rearing responsible future American citizens.
She might have imagined she was in love. But, like Americans before her who had discarded their American names for African ones, who had changed their religions, styles of hair and modes of dress, who had clutched at symbols from another continent in order to draw attention to their alienation and marginality in their own, she had merely been sentimental. She imagined she had something in common with that African exile. She had behaved as if she saw in him a reflection of herself to which, like a caged bird, she was foolishly attracted. Foolishly, because, after he left her, she would never be the same again.
“I do not,” he said on the last day but one of the trial, “under the circumstances, blame this man for leaving his wife. I cannot fault him for being a patriot. I cannot hold it against him that he loved his wife, but loved duty and his country more.”
But after the South African left, the intelligent woman, the first of her family to attend university, who had been preparing herself to serve in her nation’s service, lost direction, became confused, found herself adrift without national purpose on a disturbed sea of private emotion.
She helped to organize anti-apartheid rallies. She helped stage events to raise money for anti-apartheid agencies. She fought with her fellow Americans intellectually, sometimes physically, at demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. Energies that she once devoted to her family and to preparing herself to serve her country, she now devoted to promoting actively another country’s affairs. Here, in this country, she behaved as if she belonged to another; as if American and living in America, she had become African.
She was not the first, nor would she be the last, to turn away from a brutal American reality and look towards another continent for solace. She was not the first, nor would she be the last who, when that distracting look abroad did nothing to solve problems at home, would react destructively to the reality she had sought to avert her eyes from. Even years later, whenever she applied for a job, her interviewers always questioned her closely. They thought her dangerous and subversive. She had to settle for positions for which she was more than qualified. The future, the life for which she had been preparing, became less and less open to her. She married again. Another foreigner. She divorced again. She dropped out of school. She had now two children to take care of.
One day, she returns home from an unsuccessful job interview and sees an ambulance in front of her apartment building. A playmate has slammed a door shut on her son’s fingers. They don’t, it turns out, have to be amputated. But his hand will never be normal again and for her, who had left him alone, it must have been a perpetual reproach. A week later, the first ones to arrive on the scene find the door still closed on her innocent victim’s fingers. The air is rent by his terrible screams. Carol is sitting on the steps before the brownstone house, her face in her hands.
Carol’s lawyer paused. He was perspiring. His face was red from his efforts to prove Carol a victim. He was a young fellow alumnus who had volunteered to defend her free of charge. From the second day of the trial, he had been protected by the police because people had threatened to kill him.
“My client was mad,” he continued, “when she performed that horrible act. Like an athlete, like a soldier, like those white hunters, crazed with drink, who shot their black countryman in the woods
, my client has merely reproduced, instinctively, a behaviour she learned and internalized over years of training. If we are shocked by what she has done, we should also admire it – as we would admire the daring, unexpected dropshot on the tennis court that startles us into applause; the leap on the concert stage that makes us gasp and hold our breath; the uppercut we hardly saw that fells a boxer like a log. None of us should assume the right to punish her!”
That night, it took me a long time to fall asleep. Early the next morning, I found myself standing before the courthouse, spinning my coin and dutifully taking my place, as it commanded me, among Carol’s adversaries.
“I cannot,” I heard Carol’s lawyer begin, “fault the patriotism, the courage and the honour of this man who abandoned his wife and child and gave up a career in America in order to fight to regain his country. I can only admire him. But,” he continued, “the consequences of his patriotism and of his extraordinary private sacrifice has been disastrous for my client. For it made possible her marriage to a beast.” And pointing to where I sat, surrounded by empty seats, he called me a parasite, a vulture, a predator of the worst kind. I had never loved Carol. I had wanted only to sleep with her.
His face was redder than I had ever seen it; his finger was accusatory. It was as if I, not Carol, had perpetrated the crime she was charged with. I began to squirm in my seat. What else had Carol told him about me? But, apparently, the well-trained advocate and diligent researcher had not relied only upon Carol’s information. Raising his voice even higher, he revealed to the court aspects of my life in England that only Sarah and Ekua, or their lovers, confidants and lawyers, could have known.
I was mortified.
The South African refugee, he repeated, was an honourable man. But I, he said, had abandoned my country. I had not been driven out either by war or by economic, social or political necessity. I was not persecuted, and my country, because it was undeveloped, could only have benefited from the services of a man trained as I was. I had given up a dignified life as a respected and responsible citizen in my native country and had accepted to become, because of a woman, a despised citizen of America.
The entire court seemed to gasp. I do not know whether it was because of the reference to Carol, or because of the notion, expressed in a court of law, that a citizen of America could be despised. From both sides of the aisle I heard shouts of “Shame!”, “Traitor!”, “Spy!” Someone screamed, “Go home!” Another, “America, love it or leave it!” The judge was gavelling furiously and policemen were scurrying about trying to restore order.
I sprang to my feet. I wanted to say that I had lusted after Carol and had betrayed Sarah and Ekua, but that I had not slammed the door on that innocent child’s fingers. Instead, I heard myself screaming as loudly as I could that I loved my country and that it was an honour and a privilege for me to belong to it. That all I wanted was to feel as loved by it as I loved it. To be, unambiguously, its loyal citizen.
“Your Honour, I admire the African’s patriotism. But I don’t want to feel, like him, that I must fight and possibly kill or be killed by my fellow countrymen, for the right to be our country’s full citizen.”
I felt myself grabbed from behind. I turned, prepared to fight. I saw the policemen’s uniforms and did not resist. One of them roughly pulled my hands behind my back and cuffed them.
The courtroom became orderly again. The judge ordered that I be brought to her. There was now a policeman on either side, one in front of, and another behind me. From her high seat, the judge asked why I had disrupted her court. I told her I had lost my head. I had been frightened by the shouts of “Spy”, “Traitor,” and “America, love it or leave it”. I had felt I threatened by every one sitting in the courtroom.
I said, “Those people…” and tried to point out both Carol’s supporters and adversaries and discovered that I couldn’t, and remembered that my hands were manacled behind my back. It seemed to me that I had finished the sentence, but that only the judge and the policemen guarding me heard what I had said. It was only when the judge spoke and I could barely hear her that I realized that the microphones were off and that whatever I said now was only among the judge, the policemen and myself.
I began to shout. I repeated what I had begun to say when the microphones went dead, “Those people up there who form their excluding groups…” I felt a hand clamped firmly over my mouth.
The judge said, “There’s no need to shout.”
And, indeed, there wasn’t. Her voice was loud and authoritative again. The microphones were on once more. The judge asked the policeman to remove his hand from over my mouth and asked me why I should not be charged with contempt of her court.
I said that my American son was maimed for life and I had been unable to prevent it. I had wanted a son who was whole but would have to be satisfied with one who was not. I broke down and began to cry. I saw the judge looking sympathetically at me. I seized the opportunity.
“Your Honour, what can my son do with his hands amputated at the wrists? He can never play the violin or the piano. He can never be a surgeon. He can never touch the face of the woman he loves.”
“Objection!” Carol’s lawyer shouted.
“Sustained,” the judge said.
Then, without answering my question, she gavelled and called for order, and promised to hold in contempt anyone who disrupted her court again. She asked the policeman to escort me back to my seat and told Carol’s lawyer he could continue. And calmly this time, and without pointing to where I was, back among the empty chairs, he said he had only this to say about me – that I had no morality, no ethics, no loyalty to anyone, group or country and that he was only sorry that his client had not known that she, like America itself, would have been better off without me.
I awoke from my dream then and realized that I had either not heard the alarm or had slept through it. I dressed and rushed to the courthouse. But the door was closed and the line of people waiting to enter stretched for more than a block. I never made it inside the courtroom on that last day. Carol escaped. Her lawyer had succeeded in making her a victim. I read the details in the papers the next day. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a mental institution.
I was not displeased with the verdict. For the first time since she had left me, I felt fully at ease, although she was not with me. Locked up in that institution, from which only those trained such as I was could free her, she was unavailable to me and to others. The walls of her asylum were as effective as a chastity belt. I could sleep now without jumping awake from punishing dreams in which I watched her stand against a wall, mouth agape with awe and wonder, while unknown men, their backs always to me, made marvellous love to her.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWELVE
The morning after Selwyn’s call about Red, I awoke tired and depressed. I had spent most of the night retracing my past as though news of Red’s death had opened a path for me reluctantly to follow. I finally fell asleep. At about four o’clock! It was eight forty-five now. Peggy hadn’t called, and I had missed my first patient. I phoned my office and asked Jennifer, my secretary, to cancel my next two appointments. Then I called the doorman on the intercom and asked to speak to my driver, Franz. I apologized to Franz for making him wait and asked him to come back for me in an hour.
Franz was an important part of my pact with America. He was an immigrant like myself and had come, in his forties, from somewhere in Eastern Europe – where exactly I didn’t know, since I made it a point not to be personal with him. He was now nearly seventy. His chest was still like a box; his hair, thick and white. His Caucasian nose – sharp, pointed – was the sort of nose once used to illustrate anthropology textbooks.
For years he had been my pilot in the city. I called upon him to drive me through it, and to and from its airports at all hours of day and night. He never complained. He and I had a very special relationship: because of him, I did not, for example, have to put up with taxi drivers
refusing me as a fare, and he paid no interest on the loan I gave him to buy his taxi cab company. When, after an hour I came to the lobby, he was talking to the doorman. I apologized again as he took my briefcase and we walked together to his taxi.
He said, “The strike is over, Doc. They announced it on the radio this morning. It will take a long time to clean up the mess.”
I had not heard this news; in the streets of the neighbourhood where I now lived, garbage was not permitted to accumulate. Those of us who lived there relied on our own private garbage collection service. But speaking of garbage reminded me again of Red’s “neighbourhood” and his funeral there tomorrow.
We got into the car and after we had gone a few yards I said, “Oh, by the way, Franz, I have a funeral to attend.”
“OK, Doc. Just tell me where and when.”
“Tomorrow at ten,” I said. “We’ll drive to the funeral home. You’ll wait for me. Then we’ll drive to the cemetery.”
I watched his face in the rear-view mirror. I hesitated, but when he caught my eye in the mirror, I told him where the funeral home was. He looked away from me, and down at the road. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll take you there, Doc, but I won’t wait for you. You know how it is. You listen to the news, too. Anyone else, I don’t even go in.”
He had not refused to take me anywhere before. It seemed it wasn’t so easy for him to refuse me now. His face was solemn, his eyes avoiding mine.
“Sorry, Doc. It’s not my fault. We both know how things are.”
“I don’t want to go there anymore than you do, Franz,” I said. “But it’s for a friend. A very old friend. It’s the least I can do.”
Prisnms Page 7