Redemption (22 page)

“They will not find you guilty,” Sarah said, tasting a spoonful of the soup. “Liz, for heaven's sake, taste the soup. An hour from now, Kilpatrick will be charging the jury, and he does not cherish Mr. Rudge.”

“Yes,” J. J. chimed in, “this is the best potato soup I ever tasted. My mama used to make soup like this, and she wasn't even Jewish.”

“I should think not,” Sarah said.

“How can you joke about it?” Liz pleaded.

“Because they love you, Liz,” I said. “You used to tell me about your guardian angel. She'll take care of you.”

“No, no, she's gone,” Liz said sadly.

“Do you know what Jerry Brown found out?” J. J. said.

“How do you know what Jerry Brown found out?” asked Sarah.

“Because he took me out last week.”

“Oh, J. J., you're dumber than I thought,” Sarah said.

“Maybe, but Jerry found out that Kilpatrick has a married daughter who divorced her husband five years ago because he struck her.”

“And you didn't tell me?” Sarah snapped.

“He said he'd mention it to you, but I guess he forgot or something.”

“‘Or something.'” And when we got back into the car, Sarah said to Brown, her voice cold and steely, “Why didn't you tell me about Kilpatrick's daughter?”

“I told you,” Brown protested.

“Like hell you did.”

“Sure I did. I told J. J.”

“This thing called the human race,” Sarah said to me, ‘‘you know how it's going to end, Ike? Not by atom bombs but by sheer stupidity.”

“Thank you, my love,” Jerry Brown said.

Then we were back at the courthouse.

When all was in order, Kilpatrick began by pointing out that this was the most serious charge, on the people's part, that any jury could face—murder in the first degree. “You have heard the people's case and the defense's case. The people's case is based on circumstantial evidence. No one saw Elizabeth Hopper leave Professor Goldman's apartment, no one saw her in transit, no one saw her enter or leave the Omnibus Building. But there are three pieces of very strong circumstantial evidence: the gun, the lipstick, and the previous relationship of the defendant and Mr. Hopper during their marriage—which goes to motive. Now, you must not only consider the evidence, you must
weigh
the evidence. You must decide what part of the circumstantial evidence or perhaps all of it might bring you to a conclusion of guilt or innocence.

“In any capital case, the law says that to bring in a verdict of guilty, the defendant must be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. You must consider this carefully, and if you find in your discussion and weighing of the evidence that there is a measure of reasonable doubt, you must bring in a verdict of not guilty.”

It was a short but very fair charge, and certainly not a reversible charge. The jury was escorted to the jury room, and the court was adjourned.

ELEVEN

T
HE
V
ERDICT

I
MADE ARRANGEMENTS
with Sarah that Liz and I would be at the apartment for the remainder of that first afternoon and evening of jury deliberation, and that she could call me there. After that, I had a beeper, and Sarah could find me wherever we were. Sarah assured me that there would be no verdict before the following day and probably not then, which would take us into the weekend. Jerry Brown picked us up in front of the courthouse and drove us home. Sarah and J. J. kissed Liz and said they would pray.

Liz, who had pulled herself together, said that we could have an omelet and salad for dinner, because all we needed was in the kitchen and she had no desire to leave the apartment and do grocery shopping. I agreed with her, being very tired, torn to shreds emotionally; and I said I would lie down and take a nap. I asked her whether she wanted to join me, but she said she preferred to sit at the window and look at the river, recalling the first time she had come here and how wonderful it had been.

I went into the bedroom and kicked off my shoes and sprawled out on the bed, but I couldn't sleep. I lay there thinking about how simple and normal my life had been before Liz entered it, an old widower living out his last peaceful and uninspired few years. Did I wish it had remained that way? I wondered about that. I had told Liz how lonely I was, but whether that was true or not I could not say at this point. I had a good many friends. The university where I had worked for so many years was only a short walk away; and when I lunched there, people always found me and shared my table.

My thoughts went back to that night on the bridge, when I had driven up from Rowan College in Glassboro, New Jersey. I had spent one of those rare evenings—dinner and cigars and brandy afterward—with Lewis Cohen, a physicist, and Frank Carter, a social psychologist, both of them faculty members at Rowan, a small but very respected college in South Jersey. It was one of those evenings that one treasures. My own intellectual hobby was physics, but though I read so many of the endless flow of books that appeared on the subject, I lacked the basic mathematics to understand it. Of course, their interest was contracts, and since to them I was a national authority on the subject, they kept pulling it in via the atom and its electrons as the basic contract in the universe. It was a thought I had never entertained before, although many times I had argued that contracts were basic to every system of law and order. Carter, the only one of the three of us who was not Jewish, argued that Judaism was based on a contract between man and God. A religion is always different and more esoteric to an outsider.

“I never thought of it that way,” I remember saying, and then Cohen put in that Jews never think much of their religion but identify themselves to themselves on a tribal basis. I pooh-poohed that, reminding him that this so-called tribal affiliation had ceased to exist more than two thousand years ago and that Jews had long forgotten it.

“On the other hand,” Carter said, “when your son was born, Ike, and when he was circumcised, he belonged to God and you had to buy him back into your family by a payment of pure gold to a priest of the temple class.”

“What!” I had exclaimed. “What an absolutely barbaric notion—the last thing in the world I would descend to.”

“Oh, but you did,” Cohen said. “I was teaching at Cooper Union then, and Lena asked me to come to the bris, the circumcision, because she had to have a Kohan, a priest, present. I am a Kohan, spelled Cohen in English, and if you were to go out to Long Island where three generations of my family are buried, you'd see two hands on the tombstone of each male, with the fingers spread and the thumbs touching each other. The Kohans go back to a time when the Windsors were not even a gleam in someone's eye. And that day, at your son's bris I mumbled something that had been written out for me in Hebrew, and Lena gave me her gold wedding ring, and then I returned it to her. Do you remember now?”

And to Carter, he said in the way of explanation, “Genesis, chapter one, verse twenty-two, God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son as a symbol of faith, and when Abraham agrees, God accepts the act of faith and allows the child to live. But the contract stands, that every firstborn son belongs to God and must be bought back by a Kohan with an offering of pure gold. There for Ike's profession is the first binding contract. You must remember the incident, Ike?”

And I did, but vaguely because I took no notice of it. Now, tired, emotionally bruised, and thinking of that night on the bridge, I said to myself that I had made a contract then, myself with Liz. Suddenly I was asking myself whether the contract held if Liz were guilty? Not if the verdict came in guilty, but if Liz had actually killed Hopper, regardless of what the verdict was? How I had come to this thought, I don't know. There are thoughts that reside somewhere deep in the mind; you know they are there—or at least a part of you knows that they are there—but they remain subliminal until some shock or event explodes them. Then they blow away every other thought.

I have spent most of my adult life as a teacher, but I am a lawyer—and I have lived, as I said, with a deep respect for the law. Lying on my bed in that curious haze between sleep and wakefulness, I thought again of what Frank Carter had said to me on that evening that now seemed a hundred years ago—and now I agreed with him. Contract law is the basis of all law because it is based on life itself. Everything is a contract, marriage is a contract. Criminal law is based on a contract between citizens and the state, and it is very ancient: Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, thy neighbor's goods. The deeper memory returned, that according to the most ancient Jewish law, your child belonged to God, and when you paid the price in gold, the child was yours because you made a contract. I remembered the tears in Lena's eyes when she put the gold wedding band back on her finger.

I was a Jew by birth, not by any sort of conviction, and most of my friends who were Jewish were also Jews by birth. When my wife was alive, we lit candles on Friday night, the beginning of the Sabbath. That was the extent of our devotion. We belonged to no synagogue and we prided ourselves on being freethinkers. With Lena gone, I no longer lit candles on Friday night, and as for all the other rites and observances of Orthodox Jews, I hardly knew them—indeed, somewhat resented them as medieval superstitions. But Liz, born a Catholic, not only observed the rites, she believed in them; and if she had killed Hopper, she would have confessed it to her priest.

Liz and I had our own contract, and one of the shreds of Talmudic Judaism that remained with me was the statement that he who saves a single life saves the whole world. But what of she who takes a life?

Sarah was a brilliant litigator, but while I could not even pretend to decent litigation, I was a good lawyer. The police were not fools. They were very good at what they did, and for all that it was circumstantial, they had motive that could easily be seen as damning. Why had I refused to see that? On the other hand, what could a jury do? Sarah had only one duty—to defend her client as best she could.

I tried desperately to return such thinking into the bit of my brain where it had lain hidden all these months, telling myself that it was a conclusion that I had no right even to contemplate. I thought instead of Liz's warmth, her gentleness, and her totally innocent and, for me, wonderful caring. To think for a moment of her as a coldblooded murderer was a deep flaw in my character.

In this mood, I dozed off, and was awakened by a soft kiss, followed by Liz's voice telling me that it was seven o'clock, and that I had been sleeping for two hours, that the eggs were ready to go into the pan, that the salad was made, and could I be ready in just three minutes?

Her tears of the afternoon were gone. Whatever she had been feeling at Klapper's, she had worked it out while I slept, and she was smiling at me. I washed my face, put on my slippers, and joined her at the table. The candles were lit, and the small supper she had prepared was delicious. I uncorked a bottle of wine, and opened a window so that we could look out at the river and watch the sun set without any reflection on the glass.

“Ike, dear Ike,” she said, “dear, loyal, wonderful Ike, it's cool enough for a fire and you must light one of those prefab logs, and after dinner, we will sit in front of the fireplace and you will tell me stories about your childhood in Oneonta, where your father was Justice of the Peace. You see, I'm all right now. I have made my peace, and if they come in with a guilty verdict, I'll face it. God will know what is right and what is wrong.”

“Thank God you feel that way.”

“I feel that a great load has been lifted from my shoulders.”

I ignited one of the prefab logs, and we sat on the couch and watched it burn and listened to Mozart—and I returned all my doubts and suspicions to that tiny spot in the back of my brain where they properly belonged. We sat with my arm around her, and when the sound of midnight came from a distant bell, we went to bed. Liz curled up next to me, warm and relaxed.

The next morning, we had coffee and toast, and then put on jeans and sweaters. With the beeper in my pocket, we walked downtown along Broadway, where on a sunny morning on a single block, half a dozen ethnic groups would be represented. Liz took no notice of the people who glanced at us curiously.

“There is no place in the whole world like the West Side here,” Liz decided.

“Oh, I'm sure there is, Liz. You've never been to London.”

“But someday we'll go there, won't we? If you have any money left after this trial. Poor Ike.”

“I'm not poor.”

“Why did I do this to you? You've spent over fifty thousand dollars on this trial, Ike. I don't know why you did it.”

“Because I love you.”

I suggested that we walk down Broadway to Zabar's, and Liz said that we'd be recognized. “But we're being recognized already, Liz. You see the way people look at us. This is something we're going to have to live with.”

“As long as I can live with you, Ike.”

She didn't mention marriage, and would not mention it until the verdict was in. The problem of being recognized lay in me, not in her. I was six feet and one inch tall, lean and craggy with a remnant of white hair. Liz, with flaxen hair, cut short and boyish now, could easily have passed without notice, but I was another matter. We altered our destination and walked over to Central Park West, where the sidewalk was almost empty at that hour, and eventually we returned to my apartment.

“Will it always be this way, Ike?”

“No. Americans remember nothing for much more than a week.” I told her about a discussion in class about the Sacco and Vanzetti case—brought up, as so many cases were, even though it had no direct connection with contracts—and only the student who raised the question had ever heard of it. “And these were law students,” I told her.