Redemption (23 page)

“I never heard of it either, Ike.”

“There you are.”

“But look at Jack the Ripper.”

“Hardly an apt comparison. What president of the United States Was accused of getting a girl pregnant while in office and, as gossip has it, was done in by his wife?”

“No, you're kidding.”

“Scout's honor.”

“I never heard of such a thing, and in college I had a year of American History and a year of Social Civics, as they called it then.”

“The answer is Harding.”

“I never heard of Harding. Who was he?”

“President of the United States, in the twenties.”

“Awesome,” Liz said.

“There's the great divide. Nothing was ‘awesome' when I was your age.”

“Because today everything is.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“What are you going to do now, Ike? This day is forever.”

“I'll read the
New York Times
.”

“How can you?”

“Because I know it's a sin not to.”

“Then I'll sin. I wish we had a piano.”

“I didn't know you played the piano, Liz. Why didn't you ever tell me?”

“Because I knew you'd run out and buy me one.”

“I will, I certainly will,” I assured her.

“You've spent enough money on me.”

“We had a piano, but I gave it to my son after Lena died. I sent it out to the valley of the chips.”

“No, no, you are not to buy me a piano. Absolutely not! What would I do with a piano in prison?”

“You're not going to prison. How many times must I tell you that?”

She threw her arms around me and wept, and the last bit of suspicion was removed from my mind. I held her and comforted her—and then the phone rang. It was Sarah, who told me that the jury had reached a decision.

“Kilpatrick will convene at two o'clock. That gives you an hour and fifteen minutes to get here. Take a cab. Is Liz with you?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“At Foley Square. I'll stay here and pray.”

“They've reached a decision,” I told Liz.

She dried her eyes and I phoned the doorman for a cab. We changed clothes, and in a few minutes we were on our way downtown. Liz huddled up against me and said not a word all during the ride. She managed to smile at me when I asked her whether she was all right. Sarah and J. J. were on the broad steps of the court building, surrounded by reporters, who were prodding Sarah for her guess on the verdict.

“I don't guess,” Sarah said. “We'll know soon enough.”

I don't know how such word gets around, but it does; and the courtroom was packed. Jerry Brown was already there, telling Sarah, “My car's ready if the dice roll seven.”

“You never told me what you're charging for all this goodwill,” Sarah snapped.

“On the house. Maybe it'll get me a date with you.”

“Maybe.”

At a few minutes before two o'clock, the twelve jurors and the four alternates filed into the box. I tried to read something from their faces, but they all shared the same straightforward expression. At precisely two, Kilpatrick entered, and the clerk called out, “All rise.” We all stood up, and then the judge seated himself and the audience relaxed into their seats. The forewoman of the jury, a middle-aged black woman—a registered nurse at St. Vincent's hospital—stood up.

“Madam forewoman, has the jury reached a decision?”

Both Rudge and Slater were rigid as stone. Sarah had reached out and taken Liz's hand. I had taken a seat next to Liz at the table, feeling that Kilpatrick would permit it now that the trial was over, and I took her other hand. J. J., her hands pressed together, prayed in a whisper. The court itself was silent as a tomb. “Will the defense and the people please stand,” the judge said.

The forewoman held a sheet of paper. The judge nodded at the clerk, who walked to the jury box, took the sheet of paper from the forewoman, and gave it to the judge, who looked at it for a long moment and then returned it to the clerk. The clerk gave it back to the forewoman.

“In the single count of murder in the first degree, how do you find?” Kilpatrick asked.

“We find the defendant, Elizabeth Hopper, not guilty.”

The judge asked Rudge whether he wanted the jury polled, but he shook his head. Then the judge thanked the jury for their service and dismissed them. He then told Liz that she was free to go.

Sarah folded Liz in her arms, and I folded both of them into my arms, and J. J. wept. I kissed Liz and I kissed Sarah, and the court broke into applause. J. J. kissed everyone. The sons and daughters of the media crowded around us, and I heard Sarah saying that it was a just verdict by a just jury, and Liz was saying that we must thank the jurors. We pushed through to the jurors and I lost sight of Liz for a moment. Sarah was saying, “Well, Professor, was I a good student?”

“The best, the very best.”

Jerry Brown appeared and asked me when I wanted him to run interference for us. “I knew it,” he said. “No surprise. That Sarah is something.”

It was fifteen minutes or so before we got out of the building, away from the TV cameras outside, and into Brown's big Cadillac. Liz kept asking Sarah whether she was really free.

“Really free. Free as a bird.”

“They can't get me back there?”

“Never. Never.”

Liz curled up in my arms, and J. J. sat on the jump seat and wept again. “Because I was so frightened,” she explained through her tears. “Oh, I was never so frightened in my life.” She had attached herself to Liz completely. “It was like a lynching,” J. J. said. “How could they even think that way about Liz?”

So it was over and Liz was free.

“When will the wedding be?” J. J. asked.

TWELVE

T
HE
Q
UESTION

Y
OUTH IS IMMORTAL
, which is why wars are made by old men and fought by children. But with the onset of middle age, immortality begins to crumble, and bit by bit, death begins to take shape as a reality. When you reach my age, you live with death. It becomes a close and constant companion. You may not think about it, but it is always there. Each time you lie down to sleep, a part of you is aware that you may not awaken in the morning.

When I was fourteen, walking with a friend on a dirt road on the outskirts of Oneonta, we heard a sound of a creature whimpering with pain. Poking into the brush we came upon a deer whose back had apparently been broken by an encounter with an automobile. It happened frequently enough as the deer herd increased, and we could see that the animal was in awful pain. Somehow it had dragged itself, or been hurled off the road, into the brush, and it was trying desperately to rise, moaning each time it made the effort. We knew that the only merciful thing to do was to kill it, but neither I nor my friend, whose name was Sam, had ever killed anything larger than a fish or a mosquito.

I had a hunting knife, which I carried whenever we hiked, and I thought I would take it out and cut the deer's throat. But thinking it and doing it were two different things, and after I had approached the deer—which had only two tiny velvety tips of antlers at that season—I handed the knife to Sam and told him, “You do it.”

He was no more capable of slicing the poor animal's throat than I was, and finally we decided that I would stay with the deer while he found a phone and called a state trooper. It was almost an hour before the state trooper arrived, and during that time, I stood near the dying animal and listened to its whimpers of pain. It was my first real encounter with death. I had been to funerals, but the ritualistic interment of a body in a coffin was as different from this as day and night. Finally the trooper showed up, drew his pistol, and shot the deer in its head. We helped him tie the animal onto his car, and when he asked if we wanted a ride back, we shook our heads. We knew we had to walk and think about the incident, and we did think about it but said nothing to each other.

When World War II came, I enlisted as a medic before my number was called. In the Normandy landing, I went in as a stretcher carrier with another friend of mine, a boy named Kaplan, and we were told that we were going in with the first wave. Kaplan, who was fluent with Yiddish, said to me, “
Kenst gehargit verin
,” which, loosely translated means “This can kill you.” It was a bitter and prophetic comment. Kaplan was a medic because, as he once told me, he could not kill—not even an insect. But he could die. He took a bullet in his belly while we were still in the surf. I had to enlist a GI to put him on the stretcher and get him to a landing ship. Kaplan died, and I was lucky enough to survive with only a bit of shrapnel in my shoulder.

All of this returned to me as I lay in bed with Liz the night of the verdict, and my resolve to put away the thoughts that had been burrowing in my brain the day before began to crumble. We had gone home to my apartment together, the five of us, Jerry Brown, Sarah, J. J., Liz, and myself; and we let the telephone ring and the answering machine pick up the messages. There was a call every five minutes or so, but I put the answering machine in a drawer and let the phone ring. It continued to ring until midnight.

Sarah sent Jerry Brown off with a list of prepared foods that he was to purchase, everything from spare-ribs to bagels and lox at Zabar's, plus four bottles of champagne at the wine shop. When he returned, Sarah spread the food on the dining-room table, and we sat around, talking and drinking and eating. Liz wanted to know how one thanked jurors, and Sarah assured her that she had already done so. Brown had picked up a late issue of the
Post
, with Sarah's picture, large, on the front page for the second time.

“Just look at that!” he chortled. “Lady, you are number one in the ofay's game. Just listen, ‘Sarah Morton, tall, beautiful, and self-possessed, dominated the courthouse. As for Michael Rudge, this is good-bye to his dreams of becoming DA in the next election. He lost his nerve and turned over the summation to his associate, Helen Slater, and while she made an earnest attempt, it could not compare to Sarah Morton's passionate closing.' Now that, my lady, is damn neat, coming from a white paper.”

“That wants black readers,” Sarah said. “I am sick to death of the media, and blacks and whites, and racists and liberals, and all the other deep shit this society is sinking into!”

“Right on! To hell with all of it!” Brown laughed. “Let's celebrate!”

We drank to the jury, and we drank a toast to Kilpatrick. “He gave us the verdict,” I said. “How on earth the DA's office didn't pick up on his daughter and force him to disqualify himself, I don't know.”

“Find a judge without a divorce in his family,” Brown put in, grinning.

“What I was afraid of,” Sarah said, “was that Rudge would not come in with cross-examination. That was the long chance I took. It sends shivers up my spine when I think about it. When Liz answered my single question, Rudge should have dropped it right there. But he was too eager. He opened the door, as the judge said, and we walked right in.”

The talk went on, and by eleven o'clock, we decided to watch the late news on television. Liz, demolished after three glasses of champagne, declared that she couldn't keep her eyes open, so I kissed her and sent her off to bed. As we expected, the sound bites were all for the verdict, contrasting this lovely and gentle woman with the brute that had been murdered. Sarah came on the tube, being asked why she had not used the battered-wife syndrome, and she answered, “Because my client is innocent.”

“Yes,” I agreed when we turned off the TV, “if every battered and brutalized wife killed her husband, we would be damn near depopulated.”

“What are you going to do, lady,” Brown asked Sarah, “open a fancy office in midtown? There's enough business on Sugar Hill alone to pay the rent.”

“I'm still a public defender on leave,” Sarah replied. “Now why don't you take J. J. home, Jerry; and if you want to buy me dinner next week, I might just be available.”

“Coming on top of the verdict, that's the best news I heard in a month of Sundays. Do you think you can walk, J. J.? And what about you, Sarah?”

“Ike and I have to talk. Take J. J. home. Can I have the spare room, Ike?”

“With my blessings.”

I shook hands with Brown and thanked him for all he had done, assuring him that when he sent in the bill, it would be paid promptly.

“You paid me enough, Professor. No bill for the taxi service. My pleasure.” At the door, he lowered his voice and said, “Do you suppose you could get me into Columbia Law School, Professor? I got three years of college credits.”

“We'll talk about it.”

“It might make a difference.” He nodded toward Sarah.

J. J., a fixed smile on her face, hung on his arm as he left. I closed the door and went back to the dining room.

“I need coffee, Ike. And let's go into the kitchen and talk. I'm more comfortable in the kitchen.”

“Keep you up if you drink coffee.”

“Not with me, Ike. It keeps me alive.”

I brewed a pot of strong coffee and filled my pipe. Sarah took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. She smoked rarely, but tonight she explained that she needed it. “I have been through my own personal small hell,” she admitted. “You shouldn't play three-card monte with lives.”

“You won.”

“Yes, I won. Life and death, and it's all a game, isn't it, Ike?”

“You called it theater.”

“I never played it before with the life of someone I love.”

“You love Liz?” I asked.

“She's a sweet, dear woman. And speaking of theater, Ike, what has this production cost you?”

“Close to a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Yes, I guessed as much, and forty thousand of it went to me. I don't need that much, Ike. You talked me into it, but I have no joy in seeing you pauperized.”