A Statue for Jacob

by Peter Murphy

  ‘It’s going to be embarrassing for the family,’ Sam replied, ‘especially if they’ve got the Inquirer on my case.’

  ‘It’s a tempest in a teacup,’ I insisted. ‘If I know Judge Morrow, and I think I do, he isn’t going to give a damn about you making a movie. This case has nothing to do with what you do for a living. If anything, it’s more likely to turn him against Mary Bitch Perrins than against you. Judge Morrow’s only interested in one thing, and that’s what’s best for managing the case.’

  She sighed. ‘It’s just that I keep imagining Aunt Meg finding out about all this,’ she said quietly. ‘Have you watched it?’

  ‘No. I figured we would watch it together, you, me and Arlene.’

  ‘Do we have to?’

  ‘Yes. Judge Morrow is going to watch it, and we have to see what he sees.’

  I turned to Arlene.

  ‘Are the pizza and beer on the way?’

  ‘Any minute now, y’all.’

  Sam managed a smile.

  ‘You’ve ordered pizza and beer?’

  ‘Sure, hun,’ Arlene replied. ‘Kiah and I have ourselves a rule: we never watch porn without beer and pizza.’

  We laughed. Sam gave a deep sigh.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ she said. ‘There’s no actual sex taking place, nothing hardcore. I would never have done that. I shouldn’t have done this. I knew it was going to be trash. But it was before I had an agent, and I wasn’t working that much, and the company was in town one day and called auditions, and they were offering decent money, so…’

  She let her voice trail away.

  ‘Sounds like some of the stuff I had to do when I was starting out in practice,’ I said, and we laughed again.

  Revenge of the Zombie Cheerleaders wasn’t what you would call a classic. There wasn’t much of a plot. What there was seemed to consist of an endless series of biting attacks by the Zombie Cheerleaders (all of whom were female) on the members of a college football team while they were either partying, trying to catch some sleep after a party, or taking a shower in their frat house. The dialogue, accordingly, was pretty unimaginative. So it wasn’t surprising that the film didn’t bring out the best in the cast, of whom Sam – second senior Zombie Cheerleader under her then stage name of Sam de Zola – was one. The acting was pretty lame. But hardcore porn it wasn’t. As Sam had implied, it was the kind of low-budget soft porn you saw everywhere. Jordan must have known that. What was he thinking? He and I had watched more explicit stuff together on cable in the days when we were together and did such things.

  As we began to watch, Sam seemed mortified, though I thought the cast were about the only people involved in the movie who didn’t have much reason to be embarrassed. In particular, Sam hid her eyes whenever the camera caught her naked, which was pretty often and not always artistically, but I wished she would watch herself. She was beautiful, and she was achingly, disturbingly erotic. I’d never had a sexual reaction to the female body before that afternoon and haven’t since, but I did then, and although I never wanted to take it any further, it was a surprisingly pleasing and comfortable experience. I daresay a lot of men had felt the same way over the years about one or other of the cheerleaders, since that was the overriding goal of the film, and much as it pained me to admit it, I had to concede that the director’s creative efforts had not been entirely wasted.

  As the beer and pizza kicked in, we began to see that the film had another quality. It was one of those movies that was so bad that it was actually funny. Arlene was the first to crack. One of the cheerleaders (not Sam) was biting the quarterback in the shower to the accompaniment of canned music, apparently intended to be dramatic. The quarterback seemed powerless to resist her, and he was losing a lot more blood than the degree of biting suggested he should have. Arlene began to giggle. I tried not to get sucked in, but it was hopeless. As the cheerleaders were plotting the attack on their next victim – it turned out that they supported a nearby rival college and intended to take out the entire home team before the big game the following Saturday – I couldn’t stand it either. I gave in and giggled helplessly. Two scenes later, Sam became infected, and by the end of the movie we were laughing hysterically. It was the best therapy we could have had. By the time we searched for our shoes to go home, we felt rejuvenated. Sam had recovered her spirits and was back in the game.

  If Mary Jane Perrins had concluded from this movie – assuming she had actually watched it – that Sam was a porn star, she must have led a pretty sheltered life; and if Jordan thought it would make a difference to an experienced Claims Court judge, I was pretty sure he was on the wrong track. Our strategy was set. We would ignore Revenge of the Zombie Cheerleaders and carry on as if nothing had happened. If the Inquirer called, we would make no comment, and the same applied to the media generally and to any members of the family. As far as we were concerned, the incident was closed.

  Even better, this attempt to throw us off balance had given us a renewed energy. The bustle was back in the office for the first time since the Week, and it felt great.

  46

  I spent the next morning writing a brief, explaining to Judge Morrow as straightforwardly as I could why Mary Jane Perrins, and three other residents of Boston, Massachusetts, had failed to provide the court with any good reason why the class action would benefit from a change of lead plaintiff. Most of the brief was technical, but of course, I focused on the fact that we were facing a critical stage of the proceedings, for which the law firm of Schumer Berthold & Morris, and Jordan K. Leslie Esq. in particular, didn’t have a prayer of being prepared in the limited time available. Their intervention served no purpose except to distract counsel (me) from completing the discovery process and getting ready to renew the argument about the statute of limitations. In addition, I pointed out that contrary to the patronising assumption made by the moving parties and their lawyer, I was not running the litigation with minimal support. I had the very able support of two attorneys within the family, Jeff Carlsen of Salt Lake City, and Edwin van Eyck of Los Angeles. This was true. Both had made themselves available, and both had been generous with their time. Ed had done a couple of pieces of legal research for me, and I had developed the habit of sending any documents I drafted to Jeff, who with his keen editor’s eye and unerring feel for the use of language in a brief, had made some brilliant suggestions. My message to Judge Morrow, and to Jordan, was: we’re doing fine, thank you; get out of our way and let us do our job.

  I couldn’t quite leave it there, of course. As the subject had been raised with some fanfare, I had to say something about the Zombie Cheerleaders. I felt myself resenting the time I had to spend fighting off this crude and gratuitous attack on Sam. By way of retribution, I ended the brief with a few rather colourful observations about the tenuous grip on reality, not to mention the impoverished sex lives the moving parties and their lawyer must have, if they thought either (1) that Revenge of the Zombie Cheerleaders was pornographic; or (2) that even if it was, it had any relevance to a class action in the Claims Court for the recovery of a Revolutionary War Loan. I emailed the finished product to Jeff, who, as I had expected, returned it with a number of sensibly diplomatic amendments to the final section. With Jeff’s amendments the brief still made the point very clearly, and I gave it to Arlene to file as I left the office.

  It was a relief to get it done, but I was feeling frustrated. I wanted very much to rationalise my frustration by telling myself that it was about having to spend almost the whole day on Mary Jane Perrins when there were so many more useful things I could have been doing. But in my heart of hearts I knew that Mary Jane Perrins wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that there weren’t many more useful things I could have been doing. We were closing in on the discovery deadline, and we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. We had one lead, and one only, and Powalski and Sam were working it as hard as they could. But their many calls
to members of Samuel’s branch of the family had turned up nothing new, and I still wasn’t seeing whatever it was I was supposed to be seeing. That was the real frustration.

  Fortunately, the evening promised to be more rewarding. Arya had invited me for dinner.

  Dinner with Arya, in addition to being a delicious feast of Indian delicacies, is a kind of ritual, a ritual I’ve known and loved for many years. Whatever I know about Indian cooking I learned either from my mother or from Arya, but most of it I learned from Arya. My mother was a wonderful cook, but learning from her was a bit like trying to break into Fort Knox. She seemed to guard her recipes and techniques as if our national security depended on it. She would let me watch while she cooked, she would answer direct questions, and she would sometimes even allow me to do something to help her if I made enough of a nuisance of myself and refused to go away, but I always felt like an intruder in her kitchen. I found her hand-written book of recipes after her death, and I’ve tried to recreate some of them. The dishes taste fine, but there’s something missing, something I can’t quite pin down. With Arya, it couldn’t have been more different. Arya was not only happy to have me in her kitchen, she insisted on it – and not as a spectator. I may have been her guest, but I was also assigned a role as sous chef, and it wasn’t optional. Within five minutes of my arrival I was in the kitchen, barefoot and decked out in a huge white apron, ready for action. As we began, she invited me to get us both a drink from the fridge. This, too, was part of the ritual. Arya didn’t drink much alcohol, but she wasn’t averse to a beer while she was cooking. The beer was Cobra, from India.

  Arya’s kitchen was a paradise of colourful sights, sounds, and smells. She was frying fresh garlic, onion, and ginger in large pans. Even though it would have been much easier to use a commercial cooking oil, she insisted on cooking with ghee, the traditional Indian blend of oil and butter. She sometimes found it in the Indian quarter but if not, Arya would make it herself from a family recipe. Making ghee is a tricky and time-consuming process with no guarantee of success – trust me on this, I’ve tried and failed miserably many times – but this didn’t deter Arya at all. She also made her own chapattis from scratch. She had mastered the critical balance of flour and water, and one of my jobs was to cut the dough up, roll it out, and heat it in a dry heavy pan. I also ground the spices together for her, using a heavy ceramic pestle and mortar. Arya didn’t like blenders: in her mind, the preparation of spices, like everything else in the kitchen, was best done by hand. Besides, using a blender would have deprived me of an extraordinary sensual experience. As I measured the spices into the mortar, their aromas began to fill the space around me. Mingling with the garlic, onion and ginger that wafted in my direction from the stove, depending on what dishes she was preparing, there might be the trenchant aromas of turmeric and red chili powder, the more refined scent of cumin and coriander, the mundane feel of cloves and black pepper, or sometimes the exotic and sumptuous visual and olfactory assault of saffron. It was an intoxicating blend. Her signature dish is a chicken Jalfrezi that is to die for. Jalfrezi is a dish from Pakistan, but Arya’s recipe had been handed down to her from a time before there was a Pakistan, a time before Partition, a time in which Hindus and Muslims had lived in Punjab together, for the most part in peace.

  Once I had ground the spices and sifted them into different containers for different dishes – she never cooked less than three – she added chicken, vegetables or shrimp to the frying pans and after a minute or two, the spices. Everything happened very quickly from that point on, and although we chatted away quite happily most of the time while she was cooking, I learned to be quiet during this critical stage. There are so many moving parts to the machine, it has always seemed almost impossible that all of them should stop at the right place at the same time. To this day, I don’t really understand how Arya does that. My cooking is pretty respectable, I think, but the timing always gets me. I always seem to be waiting for some dish to be done while others are starting to get cold. But not Arya: for her, as if by magic, all the elements come together at exactly the right moment, and as often as she has tried to explain and talk me through the process, it’s the one thing I haven’t yet mastered. About which I’m perfectly content. I need to feel that there is still a little magic in the world.

  As we ate, I told her about the re-appearance of Mary Jane Perrins and Jordan K. Leslie Esq., both of them, I told her, about as welcome as Banquo’s ghost: except, she reminded me, because it was something I always tended to forget, that unlike Macbeth I had nothing to feel guilty about. Arya wasn’t much interested in the technical aspects of Jordan’s motion to replace Sam as lead plaintiff and me as lead counsel. Serious as that was, she assumed that I had the technical issues under control. But she was very interested in my reaction to being confronted by Jordan. As I related the encounter to her, she smiled and nodded, and as I concluded, she asked me how I felt about it.

  ‘I feel really good,’ I replied, truthfully. ‘I have no regrets, and he has no hold over me any more. I’ve moved on.’

  ‘Then I want you to remember this moment,’ she said, ‘and remember how different it is from other days you’ve spent with me when I asked you the same question.’

  I smiled. ‘I’ve come a long way, Arya, thanks to you.’

  ‘You’ve come a long way thanks to you,’ she replied.

  Then, as the meal was ending and we became quieter, I told her about my visit to Pennsylvania, and about standing in real time in the churchyard at Swedeburg in which I had stood in dream time. I told her about the elevated section of highway that explained the roar I had heard in my dream and had attributed fancifully to an aqueduct, and about the young woman called Isabel I had seen there and in the loan office in Philadelphia, who had, as I had dreamed, been an assistant and confidante to Jacob van Eyck. I shared with her the news about the document Isabel had written and entrusted to Joan until the right person could be found, and about Aunt Meg receiving it from Joan and entrusting it to Sam as the right person. Lastly, I told her about the huge weight of responsibility I felt on my shoulders to see what Isabel was trying to tell me, and about my inability to see it.

  I’m not sure how much of Isabel’s account I quoted to her – by that time I had read it so often that I could have recited almost the whole document from memory – but I certainly gave her the gist of it. She listened in total silence to all of this. Then she took my hands and held them between hers.

  ‘Do you have it with you?’ she asked.

  I nodded. I had taken my copy everywhere with me since returning from Merion Township.

  ‘If I may,’ she said, ‘I’d be interested to see it. Why don’t you make us some masala chai while I look at it?’

  47

  I willingly took myself off to the kitchen and boiled water in the electric kettle. I selected two large mugs, poured the sweet, spicy, aromatic masala chai into Arya’s ceramic black-and-white teapot, added water, and waited for two minutes to allow the chai time to brew. When it was ready, I poured it and added milk. Masala chai is another detail from home and from Arya’s house that has always stayed with me: the perfect end to any Indian meal, its gentle vapors calm the stomach and ease the last remains of the fiery peppers out of the sinuses. When I returned to the dining room, Arya was engrossed in my copy of Isabel Hardwick’s document. She had pushed some dishes aside and laid the pages out together under the pewter chandelier above the table. I didn’t interrupt. I left her chai a safe distance from her right hand and sat down opposite her to wait.

  She didn’t seem to move a muscle for two or three minutes. Then she looked up and took her mug of chai in both hands, almost as if she was using it to keep warm.

  ‘Kiah, you copied this exactly as written, right?’

  ‘Yes. We all made an exact copy – Sam, Arlene, Powalski and me.’

  ‘But exactly as written?’

  ‘Yes.’

&nbs
p; ‘And the original is where?’

  ‘Sam has it. Aunt Meg gave it to her. It’s hers now.’

  Arya nodded. ‘Would it be all right if I hold on to your copy for a day or two?’

  ‘No problem. Do you…?’

  I suddenly stood and made my way around the table.

  ‘Arya, I know that look. You’ve seen something, haven’t you? What have you seen?’

  She smiled. ‘I’m not sure yet. Don’t get excited. It may be nothing at all.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘There are one or two things about the way she writes that I find… interesting, and I’d like to follow them up.’

  ‘You’re seeing something, aren’t you?’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. Tell me, you’ve read this document how often? Quite a number of times by now, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’ve lost count of how many times.’

  ‘Don’t you think there’s something curious about the way she writes certain things?’

  I stared at the sheets of paper again, but nothing was jumping out at me. In all honesty, by then, I didn’t expect it. I guess I’d read it too often, and was too familiar with it, and with the pressure I’d put myself under to come up with something, I’d stopped using my critical faculties. At times I felt stupid, and sometimes it seemed that the sheets of paper in front of me were mocking me. It was not a good frame of mind in which to stand back and take another hard look.

  ‘You’re going to have to show me,’ I admitted.

  ‘Sit down here, beside me,’ she said. She pulled the sheets closer to us.

  ‘Look at this. There are three events she writes about for which she gives us not only the date, but also the place and the time. The first is her own birth: “I was born Isabel Johnstone on the fourth day of June in the year 1788, in the early evening, less than an hour after the sun had set, to Ezra and Mary Johnstone of Upper Merion Township in the State of Pennsylvania.”’