American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Yet you say that the weight of Mrs. McCullough’s body would ‘probably’ not have been sufficient to account for the trauma,” Ottinger said. “Which leaves the matter ambiguous, doesn’t it?”

  “Probability is ambiguous,” Frazier said. “It is ‘possible’ that the ceiling of this courtroom will collapse on us in the next few minutes, but it is not ‘probable.’”

  “It is then ‘possible’ that the weight of Mrs. McCullough’s body would not have been sufficient to account for the trauma, but is it ‘probable’?”

  Frazier said meanly, “It is both.”

  Ottinger asked, “But you say categorically that the trauma could not have been caused by an accident. Is this a scientific judgment or just your opinion?”

  “Since I am a scientist, it follows that my opinion is scientific.”

  In a tone of mild incredulity Ottinger asked, “Can you be absolutely certain, Dr. Frazier? Beyond a shadow of a doubt?”

  For the first time the witness hesitated, shifted his shoulders inside his coat, conceded, slowly, “One is never absolutely certain of anything one has not seen with his own eyes, of course. And even then . . .”—he paused so long it seemed he had stopped speaking; then added, as if the words held a mysterious meaning for him—“and, of course, beyond the ‘shadow’ of a doubt. . . .”

  Ottinger thanked him and stepped away. Ian was beginning to see that in the courtroom, as virtually everywhere, the trick is to behave as if you have won a point; in which case, perhaps, you have.

  BUT THE NEXT item of business was a highly visual and highly dramatic demonstration, staged by the prosecution, to bear out the charge that Glynnis McCullough must have been pushed, and had not simply fallen, into the plate-glass window: the testing of the strength of a sheet of plate glass, identical in size and thickness to the window that had shattered. Much was made by Lederer of the fact that this sheet of glass had been manufactured by the same company that had manufactured the sheet of glass in the McCullough’s dining room; it had even been purchased from the same store. A canvas sheet was laid on the courtroom floor and a makeshift shelter set up, to prevent glass from flying out into the courtroom; a faceless mannequin of the approximate size and weight of the deceased was pushed, shoved, thrown against the window, with increasing violence and frustration, until finally the glass cracked: but did not shatter. Ian watched in horror and lifted his hands to shield his eyes. How terrible, how terrible, he thought. He saw again Glynnis’s contorted face, the blur of motion that was her body and his, saw again the window careening toward them, and remembered it breaking so easily: as if it had already been broken, in readiness.

  Like the magnified X rays, the “window demonstration,” as it would be called in the press, made a powerful impression upon the courtroom; but Ottinger calmly and, it seemed, logically dismantled its underlying argument. He objected that no one in the courtroom, except possibly his client, could speak to the condition of the window that had broken: whether it had been previously cracked, for instance; whether it had been fitted in its frame to the degree to which the glass in the demonstration had been fitted in its frame; and so on and so forth. And it was surely erroneous, and a violation of common sense, to claim that a sheet of glass purchased in March 1988 was identical to a sheet of glass purchased as long ago as 1965, when the McCullough house had been built. . . .

  So Nick Ottinger rose to the occasion and, for all Ian knew, might have salvaged it. But the image of the mannequin thrown against the glass, and picked up, and thrown, and again picked up, and again thrown, with increasing force, and the simulation of rage, stayed with him. How terrible. How clearly I too deserve to die.

  THERE CAME, IN their turn, Police Detectives Wentz and Holleran, Ian’s old companions, who answered Lederer’s questions unhesitatingly and succinctly: there seemed to be no doubt in their minds that a crime had been committed; thus a criminal had committed it, though they did not quite say so in those words. To Ian’s embarrassment the lengthy, rambling, inconclusive interview of May 29, taped at Hazelton police headquarters, was played to the court: and seemed, like so much else that both did yet did not represent him, to make a significant impression upon the jurors.

  The voices of the several police detectives were distinct but the voice of Ian McCullough was indistinct: indeed, vague, evasive, and toneless. I don’t know. And: I don’t remember. As a consequence of Ottinger’s presence, Ian had at least managed to say nothing to incriminate himself: that, he knew; yet he squirmed in misery, hearing his voice so lacking in resonance and spirit, a dead man’s voice, the voice of a clearly guilty man. How unfair it was! How unjust! A voice on a tape, of necessity bodiless, lacking all the qualifications of the physical self’s condition, at that time and in that place: that morning, Ian recalled, of grief, exhaustion, despair.

  The tape ran, in its entirety, for over three hours; it was repetitive, circumlocutious, and spaced out by long silences yet exerted a curious spell, even a kind of slowly accumulating tension. For one waited—Ian found himself waiting!—for a break in the accused’s demeanor: a sudden admission of guilt, or a declaration of innocence.

  AFTERWARD IAN ASKED Ottinger why the prosecution had not edited or summarized this interminable tape, and Ottinger said, “To punish us, I suppose”; then, more seriously, “I wouldn’t have wanted it summarized, in any case.”

  “Why on earth not?” Ian asked.

  “Because it’s your voice on the tape, for one thing, which the court won’t otherwise hear,” Ottinger said. “Unless you change your mind, as I hope you will, and testify.” When Ian said nothing Ottinger added, “My instinct is, your existence must be established. It should seem after all more substantial than that of . . . the person whom you have been accused of killing.”

  Ian was struck by this remark, which he could not quite comprehend. “My existence? Has it been in doubt?”

  Ottinger smiled his ambiguous smile, in which, depending upon one’s mood, one could read sympathy or contempt. “Hasn’t it?”

  AND THEN CAME what Ian had long dreaded, the prosecution’s dogged pursuit and amplification of the “motive” for the crime: the matter of Sigrid Hunt, missing since the approximate date of the defendant’s arrest, on May 30, 1987.

  This aspect of the case was taken up with gusto by Lederer, who called Mrs. Elizabeth Kuhn to the witness stand, and Mrs. Roberta Grinnell, “intimate friends of the deceased”; and Mr. Horace K. Vick, caretaker for the rental property at 119 Tice Street, Poughkeepsie, where Sigrid Hunt had lived, at least intermittently, from September 1984 to May 1987. Elizabeth, whom Ian realized, with a sinking sensation, he had not seen in a very long time, gave almost verbatim the testimony she had given to the grand jury: handsome, white-haired, rather regal in responding to Lederer’s questions, and resisting when he tried to lead her where she would not be led—into acknowledging that there might be grounds for believing that Mrs. McCullough was correct in her assumption that Mr. McCullough was involved with another woman. Yet she made Ian uneasy by the sharpness with which she replied to Ottinger’s questions, as if she cared to make no distinction between him and Mr. Lederer. The carefully worded, very nice things she said about Ian McCullough—“One of our dearest most beloved most loyal friends”—sounded, to Ian’s ear, rather forced, as if rehearsed; and the smile Elizabeth directed toward him, as she stepped down, seemed to him forced as well. How she had aged, since Ian had seen her last. . . . Someone has broken her heart, Ian thought.

  And then came Roberta Grinnell, looking rather drawn and resistant, regarding Lederer with an expression of frank dislike, hands nervous in her lap, voice nearly inaudible, the streak of gold in her hair strangely dulled, as if by the opacity of the white winter sky beyond the window. (But why did she refuse to look at him? Had someone told her about Meika?) Her testimony was terse and ungiving; several times, Harmon instructed her to speak louder. It seemed clear that she was a hostile witness, which fact did not endear her, Ian suspected, to the co
urt.

  He had not spoken with her in weeks. He had intended to telephone her . . . but somehow he had not.

  Roberta was recounting her grand jury testimony, point by point: the telephone call to Glynnis McCullough; the startling conversation that followed; Glynnis’s distress, incoherence, anger; Glynnis’s conviction, which Roberta knew to be unfounded, that her husband was having an affair with another woman.

  “Did Mrs. McCullough tell you about a check she had found in her husband’s desk made out to ‘Sigrid Hunt,’ a mutual friend, for the sum of one thousand dollars?” Lederer asked.

  “Yes, she did,” Roberta said.

  “But still you thought her suspicions unfounded?” Lederer asked.

  “Yes I did,” Roberta said.

  “But why, given the apparent evidence?” Lederer asked.

  “It didn’t seem to me . . . that it was evidence,” Roberta said.

  “Mrs. McCullough was one of your closest friends, wasn’t she?” Lederer asked. “Yet you chose not to believe her.”

  “I didn’t ‘choose’ not to believe her,” Roberta said nervously, “it just seemed to me that she was exaggerating the situation, overreacting, as people sometimes do when they think they have been hurt.”

  “Was Mrs. McCullough in the habit of exaggerating?” Lederer asked.

  “She was an intelligent woman but she could be emotional; she had a temper; you could say she had a dramatic personality,” Roberta said.

  “And Mr. McCullough—”

  “Much quieter, much more in control.”

  “‘In control’? Of himself, or of others?”

  “Of himself. Ian was not in the habit of controlling, or trying to control, others.”

  “You knew them both well, you and your husband?”

  “I think I could say that, yes.”

  “And you found it absolutely impossible to believe that Mr. McCullough might have been involved with another woman?”

  “I found it unlikely.”

  “Because—?”

  “Because I knew him, and I knew Glynnis,” Roberta said, her voice rising. “Ian wasn’t the type.”

  “And of this you were absolutely certain?”

  “What can I say, except to repeat what I’ve already said?”

  “It is such an extraordinary thing, in your circle of acquaintances, that a husband might occasionally be unfaithful to his wife, or a wife to her husband, it simply cannot be believed?”

  “Of course not, you’re distorting my words.”

  “But in the McCulloughs’ case, it could not be believed? At least by you?”

  “In their case . . . yes.”

  “And you base this on your intimate acquaintance with them, and with their marriage?”

  “I base it on common sense.”

  “There were no marital difficulties that you knew of?”

  “There were no marital difficulties that I knew of.”

  “Had there been, do you think you would have known?”

  “Glynnis, or Ian, would have told us, I’m sure . . . would have told Denis or me. I’m sure. Or we would have known, the way friends know what is happening with one another.”

  “You would have known, you think, if there had been marital difficulties?”

  “Yes.”

  “You would have been told?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Yet on the day, when Mrs. McCullough called you—”

  “I called her.”

  “When you called her, and she tried to tell you about a crisis in her marriage, you didn’t believe her.”

  “You distort everything!” Roberta said sharply. “My primary motive that day was to calm Glynnis, to reason with her, not to make things worse. I knew she was probably exaggerating something very minor that Ian could explain, and I tried to tell her that. I tried to tell her that several times. And she got angry with me, and wouldn’t listen, and hung up on me; and that was that.”

  Later, when Ottinger questioned her, Roberta spoke more readily, even passionately, insisting that Ian and Glynnis had been a “perfectly happy couple,” “a perfectly matched couple”; that the McCullough family was “an ideal Hazelton family.” Watching her, Ian felt only a dim stirring of emotion, and that, mainly of regret, as if they were separated by a medium that was not quite transparent: badly scarified glass, for instance. Meika had interceded; Meika had made her claim; it was too late.

  The Grinnells were formally separated now: Denis had moved out of the house; Roberta had moved back in, but only temporarily, for the house was to be sold. Denis had explained the breakup as the consequence of “irreconcilable differences.” But what on earth does that mean? Ian asked, and Denis merely shrugged, saying, When a woman stops loving you that’s that; it’s like touching dead meat. And Ian had recoiled from his friend, who had never in their long acquaintance spoken so vulgarly, or in such despair.

  AT LAST, WITH a dramatic flourish, as if these items constituted absolute proof of the defendant’s guilt, Lederer introduced as evidence a facsimile of the check for $1,000, made out by Ian McCullough to Sigrid Hunt and dated February 20, 1987; and a record of the toll calls, eight in number, made from the McCullough’s telephone to Hunt’s Poughkeepsie number in the spring of that year. “Mr. McCullough has never explained the check to Hunt or the telephone calls,” Lederer said, with an air of pique, as if Ian had personally offended him. “When asked, he has refused to answer. The matter is a ‘private’ one, he says: ‘no one’s business but his own.’” Lederer regarded the court, in particular the jurors, with an expression of mild disbelief. How was it possible that any man, charged with murder, should be so arrogant? so defiant? so self-destructive?

  Ian squirmed in embarrassment and willed himself to retreat, to withdraw, to disappear into that space, whether in his soul or in his brain, where such indignities could not follow. For it seemed now publicly clear that Ian McCullough was not only a liar but that his longtime friends Mrs. Kuhn and Mrs. Grinnell were actively involved in lying on his behalf, or had been duped by him.

  But there came, next, as if for comic relief of a kind, Mr. Horace K. Vick, caretaker of the rental once occupied by Miss Sigrid Hunt: the very man Ian had inveigled into unlocking the apartment; though, on the witness stand, having sworn to tell the truth so help him God, he lied with extraordinary ease and an air of self-righteousness, claiming that he had resisted Dr. McCullough’s offer of a bribe. He wasn’t that type, he said. To snoop on tenants. Vick was wearing a shiny black suit, with a white shirt and a bowtie; his hair had been brutally trimmed for the occasion; his wizened, malicious face fairly lit up with pleasure as Lederer led him, with ever more insinuating questions, through his testimony. He pointed at Ian with an accusing forefinger, to identify him as the man he’d seen visit Sigrid Hunt several times, oh, three or four times it must have been, over the winter; maybe stayed the night, around Christmas; and, in the spring sometime, asked to be let into the apartment. ’Cause he was worried she’d been hurt or something, maybe killed. ’Cause she had other boyfriends too.

  Despite Lederer’s effort to rein him in, Vick began to embellish his story, adding extraneous details, smiling and grimacing, as if, with the attention of the court upon him, he were demonically inspired. He spoke of Dr. McCullough’s “fancy red sports car, some kind of Eyetalian make,” and Dr. McCullough’s fancy fur coat, “or maybe it was a coat with a fur collar—either way, you don’t see many men that’s normal men, I mean that go for women, with an outfit like that.” He spoke excitedly of wild parties in Sigrid Hunt’s apartment, and people from the college where she used to teach—“the college that used to be all women, you know, what’s it, Vassar”—cars parked in the driveway and music and noise and “some coloreds” on the scene too, though this was before McCullough showed up. Or somebody who looked like him.

  “Then there was this poor s.o.b., another one of them old enough to be her father, that turned up one night, knocking on my door and asking
for her . . . says he’s her brother. So I says to him, I says, ‘Yeh and I’m her brother too, there’s a whole long line of ‘em that’s her brother.’ And I says—”

  “Please, Mr. Vick. Stay with the line of questioning.”

  “You asked me, I’m telling you,” Vick said, flaring up in anger. “You want to know, or what?”

  So the witness discredited himself and drew a rebuke from Judge Harmon, and Lederer tried, with little success, to salvage what he could; but the damage had already been done. Under Ottinger’s skillful questioning—What sort of car did Dr. McCullough drive? What sort of coat did Dr. McCullough wear? How many times had Dr. McCullough visited Sigrid Hunt? And when had he visited? And when was the party? And who were the other guests?—Vick was made out to be not only a wholly unreliable witness but a malicious one. And when he stepped down, having been several times rebuked by Harmon and threatened with contempt of court, he could not resist making an ambiguous gesture in the direction of the judge’s bench, which of course prompted an immediate, and very angry, response and some minutes of courtroom flurry and suppressed merriment, when it looked as if Horace Vick might be carried out bodily by police and put into a detention cell.

  Ian smiled, with the others; it may have been his first smile in this terrible place. He could not, for the life of him, comprehend why Vick disliked him so; why, in all his rambling about Sigrid Hunt and her men, he had never once mentioned Fermi Sabri; why he had focused his venom upon Ian McCullough. Had $25 been too small a sum and, in retrospect, injurious to Vick’s pride? Or had he forgotten he’d been given any money at all?