Affliction (20 page)

Wade was unused to sidewalks and made his way carefully from his car to the steps of the building, up the steps and in, where he passed a door that announced the presence of a women's health center, whatever the hell that was, and an
accountant's office, and walked to the back, where he entered a carpeted outer office and was greeted by a smart-looking young woman with a boy's haircut and one dangling earring and long thin arms. She looked up from her red typewriter and smiled at him.

He took off his cap and wished suddenly that he had changed his clothes before coming down from Lawford. Maybe he should have worn his sport coat and necktie and his dress pants. He felt huge and awkward in the room, all thick neck and wrists. Country.

The young woman raised her eyebrows, as if expecting him to tell her what he had come to repair. The furnace? A broken water pipe on the second floor?

“I… I got an appointment,” Wade said. “With Mr. Hand.”

“Your name?” She stopped smiling.

“Whitehouse.”

She checked a pad on the desk, punched a key on the phone and said into the receiver, “A Mr. Whitehouse to see you.” Then silence, and she hung up and got up from her desk and motioned for Wade to follow her.

She was tall, as tall as he, and wore a black-and-white-checked miniskirt and smoky stockings that made her legs look slender and firm. Wade followed her calves and the backs of her knees, and they led him into a second office. The woman told him to take off his coat and sit down and said that Mr. Hand would be right with him. She offered him a cup of coffee, but he declined, because he knew his hands were trembling. Then she left him, closing the door behind her.

There were two dark-green leather chairs and a matching sofa in the windowless room, and the walls were lined with the red and blue spines of thick books. There was a second door, in the far corner of the room, and Wade settled into the chair that faced it and waited. His toothache was clanging away, but he felt pretty good.

After a few seconds he began to hope that Mr. Hand, for unknown reasons, would not appear and that somehow Wade could sit right where he was forever, outside of time, safely beyond his past and just this side of his future. He was warm enough and comfortable enough, and there was an ashtray on the low table next to him, so he could smoke. Which he did.

He was halfway through the cigarette, when he heard a
click, and the door swung open and in, and to his astonishment a person in a wheelchair entered. It was a rubber-tired wheelchair with a tiny electric motor powering it, all chrome bars and spokes. The man driving the chair was slumped off to his left, flicking buttons on a control box with the fingers of his left hand. He brought the chair swiftly through the doorway, turned it abruptly, as if it were a remote-controlled toy car, toward Wade, then drove it forward to within a few feet of Wade's chair, where it stopped suddenly and parked.

The driver looked like a ventriloquist's dummy dressed in a dark pin-striped suit. His head was disproportionately large, and his face, in alarming contrast to the slumped inertness of his body, was bright and expressive. He had dark hair, gray at the temples, a square sharply defined forehead and brow and large pale-blue eyes. His skin was waxy white and taut, like paper-thin porcelain, the skin of a person who has long endured great pain, and when he smiled to greet Wade, it was almost a grimace, which seemed to require a mighty and consciously engaged physical exertion, as if he had to will his facial muscles to move one at a time.

But move they did, and when they did, his face lit up with intelligence and, Wade thought, humor. Maybe the man had deliberately prepared this surprise, had costumed and masked himself and sat in his wheelchair for hours behind that door waiting for Wade to arrive. Wade wanted to laugh out loud, to say, “Wow, hell of a getup there, Mr. Hand! Happy Halloween and trick-or-treat and all that, eh?” He wanted to reassure the man that the masquerade had worked, that he was indeed surprised, and he was scared too.

“Mr. Whitehouse,” the man in the wheelchair said. “Good to meet you.” It was the same voice Wade had heard on the phone, a deep baritone, smooth and cultivated.

Wade shifted his cigarette from his right hand to his left and started to extend the right, then plopped it back onto his knee. He swallowed and said, “Howdy.”

“I heard you had some serious snow up your way yesterday.”

Wade nodded, and the man went on. “There's practically two different climates between here and there. What is it, forty, forty-five, fifty miles, and when you get snow, we get rain. At least till mid-December. Then we both get snowed on. I think I prefer the snow, though, to this dreary rain,” he said.

“Yeah,” Wade said. “Yeah, I prefer the snow.” He lapsed into silence again.

“Do you ski?”

“No. I never did. I never did try that.”

“Well,” the lawyer said, suddenly looking serious. “Let's talk about this suit you're proposing, shall we?” With his right hand he wrestled a yellow legal pad from a slot on the side of his chair onto his lap, drew a pen from his shirt pocket and prepared to write.

But Wade was not ready to talk about Lillian and Jill yet; in fact, he had almost forgotten why he had driven down here in the first place. He wanted to know what was wrong with Hand, what injury or disease had made off with his body. He wanted to know what the man could and could not do, how he could work as a lawyer, for God's sake, or how he managed to drive a car, get dressed, cut his food. How he was with a woman.

He had never seen a man like this up close, and now he was about to hire him to do a very complex and mysterious job for him. Wade was about to place himself in a dependent relation to a man who said he preferred snow to rain but surely could not go out in the snow, a man who, even with his fancy rubber-tired battery-powered chair, could not get around in the stuff, but who nonetheless had built a huge vacation house on the side of a mountain where it snowed six months a year. He was a cripple who lived on a goddamned ski slope!

He suddenly thought of Evan Twombley, an overweight city fellow with his new gun up on Parker Mountain in the snow, hunting for a deer to kill and then getting killed himself. He thought of Jack Hewitt, lean and in all the necessary ways expert, moving swiftly, silently, through the drifts and brush and over the rock-strewn trails of the mountain, with the fat red-faced man struggling along behind. This man, J. Battle Hand, in the world of normal men and women, was like Twombley in the snowy woods, and Wade was like Jack somehow.

Maybe here, though, among these books, it was J. Battle Hand who was the lean mean expert, and Wade who was like Twombley, red-faced and puffing to keep up and, unless he was damned careful, likely to shoot himself. Or get shot. For less than a second, like a slide inexplicably shown out of order, Wade saw Jack Hewitt shoot Evan Twombley, a wash of falling
snow, the abrupt tilt of the hill, the fat man going over, blood against the white ground.

Then he was in Attorney Hand's office again, wondering how the man was able to plead cases in court. Actually, Wade thought, if I was sitting on a jury and this guy wheeled up in front of me and started defending his client, I would be inclined to believe whatever he said. It was hard to think that a man with so little use of his body, a man whose body was such an undeniable truth, could lie to you about anything. This man, J. Battle Hand, could say anything he wanted and be believed.

Wade brightened a little: Lillian would hire some slick gray-haired guy like that lawyer she hired for the divorce, tall and good-looking, smooth as a goddamn presidential candidate, and Attorney Hand would roll back and forth in front of the judge and make mincemeat of the guy. Not like last time, when Wade had entered the courtroom with Bob Chagnon from Littleton, all rumpled and nervously sweating and talking too fast in his north-country French-accented English, until even Wade felt embarrassed for him. Lillian had looked down and smiled. Wade had seen her and had suddenly wanted to tell his lawyer to shut the fuck up, for Christ's sake. Stop talking, now, before everyone in the room ends up believing what Wade himself already knew, that in this twice-destroyed marriage Lillian had been the smart and competent one, and Wade had been dumb and out of control, an uneducated irresponsible irrational man prone to violence and alcoholism. Look at his lawyer, for Christ's sake, look at the man he hires to represent him—a half-assed half-drunk Canuck who can barely talk English and ends up telling the judge that when Wade hit Lillian those times it was because she deserved it! “Your Honor, the woman egged him on,” Chagnon had said.

No wonder he lost everything. Wade was lucky the judge did not send him to jail, and the judge told him so.

Wade sat back in the green leather chair, crossed his legs and lit another cigarette and began explaining to his new attorney why he wanted to gain custody of his child. Lillian was turning Jill against him, he said, and, more and more, the woman was making it difficult for Wade to see Jill or for Jill to visit him. First she had moved to Concord, and now she was talking about moving even farther south, or out west, maybe, as soon as her new husband got himself transferred, and if that was tough for Wade, well, too bad. This was not exactly true,
but Wade figured it soon would be. She could move to Florida if she wanted to, and there was nothing he could do about it.

The lawyer said nothing and seemed to be waiting for Wade to continue.

But on the other hand, maybe he did not really need custody, Wade offered. Maybe all he needed were guarantees of regular visits with Jill during the school year and then summers and holidays. Maybe that would be enough. All he really wanted was to be a good father. He wanted to have a daughter, and he
had
one, by God, but the girl's mother was doing everything she could to deny that fact. Wade figured that if he asked for custody and offered Lillian regular visits and summers and holidays with Jill, the judge might be willing to do the opposite, to let Lillian keep custody and give
him
the regular visits and summers and holidays. What did Mr. Hand think of that strategy? he wondered.

“Not all that bad,” Hand said. “If you have a sympathetic judge. It's risky, though. You don't want to ask for the moon and then lose everything because of the asking. Sometimes you're better off asking for exactly what you want, instead of what you think you deserve. If you know what I mean. You're still unmarried, I take it. It would help if you were married and there were someone at home while you're at work.”

“Well, yeah. Now I am. Unmarried, I mean. But that's going to change,” Wade said. “Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Oh, by this spring anyhow. Probably before. There's this woman, she and I been talking about getting married for a long time. Nice woman,” he added.

“Good,” Hand said, and he wrote on his pad for a few seconds, using only his fingertips, the weight of his hand holding the pad flat against his leg.

Then he asked Wade about Lillian's character. Did she and her husband provide a good life for Jill? Did they have any alcohol or drug problems that he knew of? Any sexual problems or habits that might be upsetting to the child? “That sort of thing would help,” he said to Wade. “Especially if we're going for custody. In fact, without hard evidence of sexual misconduct or drug or alcohol abuse, we probably should not even ask for custody in this state. And even then, it would be an uphill fight. You understand,” he said.

Wade understood. In fact, he was starting to feel foolish
in this quest of his. What was it that kept him from making his anger and frustration understood? What kept him from finding the words and then the legal means to articulate the pain he felt at the loss of his child? That was all he really wanted. He wanted to be a good father; and he wanted everyone to know it.

No, he said, Lillian did not have any alcohol or drug problems that he knew of, and neither did her husband. And they took good care of Jill. He had to admit that. And he could not imagine any sexual misconduct that Lillian or her husband would be guilty of, at least nothing that would be harmful to a child. “It looks pretty hopeless, don't it?” he said.

“Well, no, not exactly. I need to see your divorce decree. We surely can try to have the father's visitation rights redrawn so that you can be assured of ample and regular access to your daughter. Jill is her name?”

“Yes.”

“Fine, then.” He bent his chest toward his hand and shoved the pen into his shirt pocket, then slid the legal pad into the carrier on the side of the chair, flicked a button on the box with the fingertips of his left hand and moved his chair back a few feet. The motor made a quiet humming sound as the chair moved and a click when it stopped. “You'll send me a copy of the divorce decree as soon as you get home?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“And I'll need a five-hundred-dollar retainer. You might enclose that,” he said.

“Jesus,” Wade said, and he knew he had begun to sweat. “How much,” he began, “how much will the whole thing cost?”

“Hard to say, exactly. If we go for custody, we'll have to take depositions, maybe even subpoena a few people as witnesses, hire a social worker and a child psychiatrist to examine Jill and visit your home and your ex-wife's home, and so on. It could add up. Ten or twelve thousand dollars. It could drag on. And then, even if we win, she might appeal. But you must understand that we can't go looking for custody without acting serious about it, even if what we expect is something much less. On the other hand, if we just want to get your visitation rights redrawn, assuming they're unduly restrictive at present, which the divorce decree will tell me, then it probably won't cost more than twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“Oh.” Wade felt dizzy and hot; his hands were trembling again, and he knew his toothache was about to return in full force.

“You're a workingman. A well driller, you mentioned.”