Chapter 8 No.8

Weariness had grown like an external pressure, the encroachment of a rising tide, the waters of darkness. Callista had supposed that when Cecil walked over there to cross-examine the tide might recede, even release her entirely. It had not, not entirely, but it might be no longer rising; maybe this was the turn. She had heard Cecil speak, and had listened. Listening, she had felt within the weariness that hint of inarticulate continuing surprise which is an element in any manifestation of love. It did not seem to her that she had actually understood what he said, or what the Sergeant said.

"Ann Doherty-killed herself." What? Oh-he was repeating what poor Herb had said to him. Herb could always be trusted to say something idiotic.

Important as testimony?-nobody thinks she killed herself. But the tide might very well be turning. Her eyes were no longer blurred. She could discover the thousand crow's-foot wrinkles in Cecil's face over yonder. Callista understood that she would not faint, nor collapse, nor die for some little time to come.

Threescore and ten is also a short time. Long enough to wear down a rugged boy's splendor to a burden of exhausted flesh-Cecil must have been a magnificent youth. Hardly long enough (Edith suggested once) to comprehend the pattern of a May-fly's wing, since for that you'd have to comprehend the protein molecule. When we can do that, Edith said, we shall still be ignorant, learning all new things with reluctance, initial rejection, stubborn retention of obsolete notions, superstitions, cruelties. Maybe, Edith said, the sickly bromide "at the last analysis" is the most arrogant verbalism human beings ever slung together.

What? Cecil's voice had spoken something more. With effort and a little panic, Callista recaptured it out of the counterpoint of thought. It was very simple. He said: "No further questions."

Edith had gone on to wonder how the coming centuries would handle their heretics. Burn and hang them like the seventeenth and earlier centuries? Listen to them a little, unwillingly, like the nineteenth, until revolution stiffened into respectability, congealed in half-truths? Wall them off, like the twentieth, with the soft barrier of democratic smugness or a steel barrier such as Marxian demonology? Maybe, Edith grumbled, the twenty-first century would return to punishing dissenters with open savagery: they'd be locked in delightful rooms with plastic food dispensers, ingenious mechanical attention to all the body's other needs (sure, all of 'em) and not a God-damned thing to do except watch television.

Cecil was coming back to her.

Cecil would agree with Edith; and in agreeing would not remind her how much farther his own life had ranged within the threescore and ten, how much of wonder and experience, speculation, pleasure, suffering had burgeoned in him during the half-century that spread between his age and her own: for he was kind.

Surely if now she cautiously turned her eyes toward the wall clock, the hands would have struggled a little nearer to five. The Old Man was sitting down by her, covering her hand briefly, his own heavy and hot. The clock hands had pushed a small weary way beyond two. "Are you all right, Cal? You don't look good."

"I'm all right. What's happening now?"

"Looks as if T.J. was going to try a bit of redirect. Sore too. Nothing makes a prosecutor madder than an impartial policeman."

To Callista the suave gentleman in the gray suit didn't look mad. "Sergeant, when you first saw Dr. Chalmers he was in a state of shock?"

"He appeared so. Color and breathing bad. Spoke brokenly, with difficulty. And as I said, later he mentioned a heart condition."

"In other words he was in a state where you'd hardly expect him to make a clear interpretation of anything he'd seen?"

"I can't answer that, sir, because I've noticed some people can think pretty straight in spite of a bad shock. I don't know Dr. Chalmers well enough to say whether he could or not."

She heard the Old Man exclaim under his breath: "Brother! good thing I didn't bother to object." But after Hunter's leading question Callista had seen the smooth jowls of juror Emma Beales bobbing with gratification at the way nice Mr. Hunter had gone straight to the point.

"Has Dr. Chalmers, in any later conversation with you, again brought up the theory that Mrs. Doherty might have committed suicide?"

"No, sir, he has not."

Hunter dropped it there. Callista was aware of the Sergeant rising, meeting her glance for an instant with something in his own not at all unkind. It was not understanding, perhaps not really compassion. He had never spoken to her. She thought she remembered his face among others at District Attorney Lamson's office during her worst time of questioning. He had said nothing then; would have given Mr. Lamson his information at some other time; maybe he had turned up there (if he really did) just to have a look at her. What she read in him now might be a simple adult refusal to condemn, by a busy man, not involved, not personally much excited or concerned, his thought and daily life filled with a thousand other matters. And now he was marching away. With nothing of the sarcasm that would have distorted the words if she had spoken aloud, Callista thought: Good-bye-nice to have known you.

The next witness, Sergeant Peterson the photographer, unwound his scrawniness from some part of the outer blur and strode into the arena to take the oath. Dark hair, a pallor as if bleached in his own hypo. Unexpectedly Callista's fingers itched for a pencil, to draw Peterson's lank face as an expanded kodak. She could ask Cecil for a pencil-no, he was getting up. Hunter had rather lovingly produced a big Manila folder, and now came Cecil's sonorous: "May it please the Court-"

Those would be the photographs of Ann Doherty dead, and Cecil would try to keep out the most lurid ones.

Over Callista swept a weight of memory. Even the smell of the District Attorney's office-tobacco, book leather, a peculiarly penetrating shaving-lotion stink. She saw again the half-star shape of a spot on the wall behind Mr. Lamson's shoulder, an imperfection in the paint like a chip flaked off the man's pinkish face; and the face itself in all detail, slightly ascetic in spite of that healthy glow, under carefully theatrical gray hair. She saw his manicured hand, womanish except for a scattering of black hairs, reaching across the desk to her, in a reek of too much hygiene and primping, presenting a Manila folder like the one Hunter now cherished, possibly the same one. "By the way, Miss Blake-" tone polite, fruity, luscious with some kind of enjoyment that perhaps the man himself did not recognize-"you might glance at this folder, if you will."

So I held her in my hand. Ann's arms reached upward in rigor out of the shadow of earth, for in that first photograph they had let the drowned girl lie on her back while the camera peered impersonally at wet skirt tumbled down from flexed thigh (the knee discolored), and soaked white underpants, the position pointlessly (accidentally?) erotic: Death, my lover. Accidental surely, for the camera had given a sharper focus to the bedabbled mouth, darkened cheeks, empty eyes. Why must the small breasts push up so urgently? Why, a happen-so: she was drifting face down, arms and bent knee probably holding her up a little from the pond's bottom, when rigor began-all right, I understand. The lifted hands were a blur, foreshortened, ghostly; innocently acquisitive hands transformed to shadows incapable of holding fast to anything, even pity.

The second picture was an enlargement of the face to life size, no detail spared. Drops of pond water blurred the eyes; a black twig was caught in water-soaked hair. Discoloration, and foam.

The third picture was one taken at the morgue, after rigor had passed off, and though the face was still a comment on the brevity, the insecurity of beauty and warmth, Ann's no longer vulnerable nakedness conveyed no great sorrow. It was just a portrait of death; apart from the drowned face, not unlovely. Callista remembered that in Mr. Lamson's office she had very nearly remarked aloud: "Never knew she'd had an appendectomy." The lividity, yes; but one could think of that as simply the shadow of death. This photograph, Callista supposed, would hardly go to the jury, for in the morgue nobody had bothered to toss a prudish towel over the innocent little triangle. Maybe they had fixed up another one for the purpose, that wouldn't distress the sensibilities of Mr. Emmet Hoag. Yes, granted, certainly, that Ann had been very pretty and desirable, a long time ago.

Callista recalled what it was she actually said aloud in Mr. Lamson's office: "I'd like to be sure I understand. If these pictures shock me, that's evidence of remorse, in other words guilt. If I don't display any shock, that means unnatural coldness; in other words, guilt. Is that correct?"

Someone behind the chair in Lamson's office where she sat facing the desk light had made a noise. Not T. J. Hunter; Sergeant Rankin maybe; or could it have been that young Sergeant, Samuel Arthur Shields? An indistinct word or suppressed grumble; not significant, but Mr. Lamson's cool gaze had flicked upward at the sound, not liking it. "No, Miss Blake, I don't think you have it quite correct. A girl of your intelligence and background ought not to be taking that world-is-all-against-me attitude. One expects it from common criminals-we look for it-but surely not from you."

"I've never thought the world was all against me. I used to think it was a place where you could get by fairly well by telling the truth, minding your own business, trying not to hurt anyone."

"You don't think so now?"

She herself had heard the wiry unpleasant note of pain in her voice: "No comment." And Mr. Lamson had heard it, and could not quite hide a brief flare of gratification, a thin spear of flame shooting up from an ember behind his eyes. Oh, he was doubtless a decent and respectable man, father of a family, pillar of the church. It would be only her sickened imagination that made him something with a whip out of Krafft-Ebing.

"Miss Blake, you ought to understand that what we are trying to do here is to discover the truth."

"What is truth?"

"No comment."

"Mr. Lamson, since she must have got the poison in my apartment, and since I shouldn't have had it there, I do feel remorse. But I am not breaking down and screaming at sight of these pictures, because that is not my way."

"Oh, now, the pictures aren't all that important, Miss Blake. No occasion to make such an issue of the pictures. I thought it might be to your interest to look at them, since a jury will. The whole point, my dear girl-the whole point is we just don't believe your story."

Cecil Warner came back from the side-bar discussion, looking rather blind. He murmured: "Couldn't do much, Cal. They're all going in. An open protest would just antagonize the jury."

"Does it really matter? She'd look the same whether she fell in or was pushed."

"Dear-I'll be saying that of course. But it assumes that twelve minds can respect logic."

Hunter and Sergeant Peterson were being immensely fair. Finished now with the portraits of death, they were showing a photograph of a blunt-toed shoe superimposed on another mark. Peterson was even wordy and boring, explaining unnecessarily how you could tell that the footprint was made later. Then came photographs of the disturbed areas at other parts of the bank, and of the flat rock by the water's edge that would take no sign.

The rock. Cecil ought not to be looking so distressed for her. Behind her hand she whispered: "Peterson must have held his camera right where I stood. If the moon hadn't come out of a cloud-I wonder, Cecil-would I have refused to understand she was there? It was a small cloud but deep, suddenly come, suddenly gone. The rock-I used to sit there for hours when I was a little girl, and dabble my feet. It was the first thing I saw, and suddenly, you understand?-because of the moon."

"The moon-"

"Yes, 'the moon, the inconstant moon'-don't you remember I told you? The way the light strengthened in that gap of the hemlocks, and there was my rock, and then the whiteness in the water. Her arm, or that blouse-no, her jacket hid the blouse, she was face down. It must have been her arm, that whiteness, don't you think?"

"I suppose. Cal, this isn't the time-"

"I know. Hunter will ask: 'Why didn't you go into the pond, if your story is true? Why, Callista? She might have been alive.'"

"We'll deal with that in direct examination."

"He'll come back to it, though. 'How could you know, Callista? How could you know she was dead?' And then I say: 'Sir, dead or not, she was so quiet I couldn't disturb her rest.'"

"Cal, please!"

"Are you going to cross-examine Sergeant Peterson?"

"I don't think so-nothing to gain."

"Ah, I was hoping you'd ask him why his damned silly face looks like a camera bellows."

"Hush! Shall I come to see you this evening?"

"Oh-no-no, I am unwell. I mean-that is, I would so like to have two candles, one for you and one for-I'm sorry ... I'm all right now. I'll be quiet. But don't come tonight-I did mean that. It's something-I can't explain it."

"All right, my dear. Maybe tomorrow evening."

"Yes, without fail. Let me tell you one thing more?"

"What?"

"I think I'm discovering that I want to live."