Sleeping Beauty (35 page)

Anne nodded. “Mr. Durant, on Dora's birthday, three months after you began living together, you gave her a necklace, an Egyptian royal scarab on a gold chain. With it, you gave her a note.” She unfolded a sheet of fine, handmade paper and read from it. “ ‘My dear one, the scarab is a symbol of the enduring human soul, and also of the daily rebirth of the sun—and therefore of life. This scarab, inscribed with the cartouche of the pharaoh Akhenaten, one of the few about whom we know enough to say he truly loved his wife, will be our symbol, for the life we will share together.' ”

Miller's face lengthened into deep melancholy. “I want to see that note.”

“So do I,” said Josh. “If I may—?” He held out his hand. When Anne gave it to him, he took a long time to read it. “Only three years ago,” he murmured. “I wasn't young enough to have written that.”

“That's not funny!” Dora cried.

“I meant it quite seriously.” He gazed at Anne, his eyes meditative. “This is a note written by a callow young man who thinks he not only sees the future, but also can control it. I was too old for that three years ago. Not because I was thirty-nine, but because I knew too much. I knew how formless the future is: how it can crack and shatter certainty; I knew how one event—a little one, an enormous one—can bend a life into a new direction and a new shape that can't be bent back. I knew all that then as well as I know it now. Of all people, an archaeologist knows first and foremost about change. If I were to try to understand why I wrote—”

“Josh, let me run with this,” said Miller. “I'd like to ask Miss Chatham a few questions.”

Dora looked startled. “What about? He's admitted everything.”

“A little short of that,” Miller said. “Miss Chatham, did Mr. Durant ever ask you to marry him?”

“You heard what he wrote! He said he wanted to share his life with me!”

“I heard it. I'll ask you again. Did he ever ask you to marry him?”

Dora's lips trembled. “No.”

“Did he ever say he would marry you?”

“No.”

“Did he say he wanted to marry you but some impediment prevented it?”

“No.”

“In fact, Miss Chatham, did Mr. Durant ever mention marriage to you at all?”

“No.”

“In three years of living together, he never brought up the idea of marriage. Why do you think he didn't?”

Tears came to Dora's eyes. “I guess . . . he didn't want to. I guess he just didn't love me enough. He never said that, though. He kept leading me on and making me feel like I was part of a . . . family, and in a little while, when he felt like it, he'd marry me. He made me think he loved me as much as I loved him and one of these days we'd get married, because that's what people do, isn't it, when they're in love and they're already like a family?”

Josh looked at Anne. She was watching Dora closely. Like a coach, Josh thought, or a director. An extraordinarily beautiful woman, but the coldest he had ever met. She was like a chiseled goddess in one of the great royal tombs of Egypt: flat, frozen, aloof from the human drama in which she played a crucial part. He wondered what had frozen Anne Garnett so that she was only a partial woman, and her beauty almost a mockery, suggesting passion but masking an icy emptiness. Empty, except for that sudden glimpse of pain in her eyes. He wondered what lay behind it. He wondered what it would take, besides pain, to wake her up.

“Well, that's very sad, Miss Chatham,” Miller was saying, “but we haven't seen any real evidence that Mr. Durant was leading you on. You might have been leading him on, for that matter, convincing him you weren't interested in marriage when in fact every bone in your body was aching for it.”

“Aching
, Fritz?” asked Anne.

He nodded. “I'd say so. Everywhere she went she slipped in cute little comments about marriage, like she wanted to trip him up when he was most relaxed—parties, that sort of thing—get him to say, ‘Sure, sweetie, we'll do it, just name the day.' He didn't because he didn't want to and he never pretended he did. Miss Chatham, when Mr. Durant didn't contradict you, all those times you dropped those little hints to everybody within shouting distance, from Cape Cod to your dressmaker, when he didn't contradict you, did you follow up? Did you say, ‘Okay, honey lamb, let's set a date; my dressmaker's ready with the silks and satins; our friend on Cape Cod wants to give us a bash; the New Year's guests
will give us a sendoff on an ocean of champagne.' Did you say that?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you say anything like it? Even close?”

“No, I—”

“Why not? If you really believed he wanted to marry you, why didn't you push him on it and pin him down?”

“Because nobody pushes Josh!” she flared. “He gets mean when he's pushed. And then I'd be afraid of him.”

“Afraid? What were you afraid of? That he'd beat you?”

“Well . . . maybe.”

“Had he ever beat you?”

“No, but . . .”

“Had he ever threatened to beat you?”

“No, but . . .”

“In fact, had he ever touched you with anything but affection?”

“No, but you never know, do you? When men get mad, how do you know what's going to happen?”

“Have you ever seen a man beat a woman, Miss Chatham?”

“No, but my . . . I've seen men be nasty to women and that's the first step. You wouldn't say that, because you're a man, but it's true.”

“My . . . what? What did you start to say, Miss Chatham? My lover? Is that it? You've had a lover, or more than one, who was nasty to you?”

Anne put out her hand. “Fritz, this has no place here.”

“It has as much a place as your talking about other women Josh might have known,” Miller said. “Your lover was nasty to you, Miss Chatham?”

“No,” she said.

“Not a lover? Then who was it? There wasn't anyone, was there? You just wanted to make us believe you were afraid of Josh Durant, but you had no reason to be, did you? So you made up a mythical man to compare him to, but there was no man, no one who'd been nasty enough to make you afraid—”

“My father!” Dora cried. “Damn you, I didn't make it up! I saw how he could get cold and mean and hurt someone . . .”

“Your mother?” Miller asked. “He struck your mother?”

Dora shook her head. “Of course not. He was just unpleasant. Mean.”

“And Mr. Durant reminded you of him?”

“Exactly. He's exactly like him.”

“Just a minute,” Anne said urgently. She wanted a minute of silence. For the first time, she was sure that Dora was lying. Until now, she had believed most of what she said. She had wanted to believe her; she had wanted to believe, even before she met Josh Durant, that a woman in the company of a charming, manipulative, arrogant man would be the victim.
That's what was wrong with me earlier. I was behaving like an angry fifteen-year-old instead of a professional.
But there was much more here than Dora was giving her. The whole picture, Fritz had said. And Dora was lying. Because Anne had seen enough of Josh Durant to know he bore no resemblance to Vince Chatham. She glanced at Josh and saw the contempt in his eyes as he looked at Dora.

“There were lots of things—” Dora said.

“Such as his being nasty?” Miller asked.

“No, not exactly—”

“Or frightening?”

“No, but—”

“Or mean?”

“He was mean, but not in exactly the same way.”

“Then what
exactly
were you worried about?”

She was silent. Tears came to her eyes. They welled up and clung to her lower lashes before falling slowly, like crystal drops, to her pale cheeks. “I was afraid he'd leave me,” she whispered. “I was afraid he'd get mad and impatient and go away and leave me alone after he'd promised to take care of me and be with me forever. And I couldn't stand that. I loved him so much . . .” She kept her head high and with a trembling finger, dabbed at the tears rolling down her cheeks.

A small grunt escaped Miller.

“Fritz,” Anne said. It would have been time to intervene in any event, but now she wanted to get the session over with. “I'd like to review what we've got, if you'll allow me to go through it.”

Miller nodded. “Let's hear it.”

She stood beside the window and still without looking at her notes, gave them the closing argument she would give if they were in court. She had done this in other cases; sometimes it led to a swift settlement. “We can trace several themes in the life Mr. Durant and Miss Chatham made together for three years: each is a separate kind of promise, or contract. One is the theme of cherishing, or protection. Mr. Durant brought Miss Chatham into his apartment and, in effect, turned over to her the management of his home. She hired the new housekeeper, paid the bills, organized entertainment, chose new china and glassware, and so on. He bought a house in Tamarack, Colorado, with her, and had the deed filed in both their names. He asked her to accompany him on trips to various parts of the world, and he paid all the expenses. There was, in other words, a general pattern of caring for Miss Chatham, of enfolding her within his protective embrace.”

She paused briefly. “Another theme is that of creating an atmosphere of assumptions, expectations, and assurances. Mr. Durant has told us he was the one who suggested they travel as Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Durant. He spoke of her this morning as his family—'I had no other family' were his words. In fact, he named her his beneficiary on his life insurance policy, a position almost always filled by a spouse or other close family members. And he told her he wanted her to be not an appendage but part of him.”

She walked to the other side of her desk and spoke to Josh and Miller across its broad surface. “This brings us to the last theme—closely entwined with those assumptions and expectations—the theme of promises. At a New Year's party, Mr. Durant heard Miss Chatham tell a friend that she planned to take care of him forever and keep him away from other women whom he might find attractive. He did not contradict her. He did not even say, ‘Well, maybe.' He let the
statement stand. As far as his listeners knew, since he was silent, he might well have been deeply pleased to know that Miss Chatham would take care of him forever. Similarly, he did not contradict her when she told her dressmaker, ‘One of these days I'll ask you to make my wedding dress, and a matching cummerbund for Josh's tux.' Again, he let the statement stand as if he agreed with it. And again, he was silent when, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, she responded ‘soon' to a question concerning the date of their wedding—hers and Mr. Durant's. Each time, Mr. Durant found it convenient to let Miss Chatham speak for both of them. So convenient that it's fair to wonder if he didn't like what she was saying, and agree with it. How do we know what his feelings were at the time she made those statements? He may have changed his mind later, but that would not alter the promise, the consent, he gave Miss Chatham through his silence. Mr. Durant is a scientist, a professor, a consultant to museums and to foreign governments in the preservation of their antiquities. Is it likely that such a man would let sloppy or incorrect statements slip by without correcting them? It would go completely against his character. To support this conclusion, to strongly support it, there is the birthday note that he wrote to Miss Chatham. We have only that one note, but we may suppose there were many, given the emotional nature of this one. It says, in part, referring to a birthday gift, ‘This will be our symbol, for the life we will share together.' Finally, we should remember that Mr. Durant himself has said, ‘The things I did probably sprang from some desire for family that I'd had for a long time and hadn't recognized.' ”

Anne returned to her chair. “I would add that the lifestyle Mr. Durant led, and asked Miss Chatham to share, was a fairly opulent one in a West Los Angeles high rise filled with possessions that endure. There is nothing temporary about a dining table set with Wedgwood and Baccarat. It speaks of permanence and tradition; it speaks of generations handing treasures to succeeding generations in a line through the ages that gets its strength from the expectation and assurance
of stability even in a world where much is always in flux.”

She paused to sip from a glass on her desk. “Those are the themes I have identified. And to repeat something I said earlier, Dora Chatham understood what those themes meant during her three years with Mr. Durant. She gave herself to a tender relationship, with all its hopes and dreams, and thought she was sharing it with someone whose hopes and dreams matched hers. You cannot expect her to be as callous as Mr. Durant now that he has grown tired of the life he formed with her; you cannot ask her to walk away from that tender relationship without a single backward glance or the demand—the
demand
—that she be awarded something from that relationship in which she believed, since she has been barred from the relationship itself. For her to walk away with nothing would send a message that casual promises, flip asides, and unthinking silences are acceptable behavior even in one who is claiming affection and need. For her to do that would make a mockery of trust and love. She should not do it. She must not do it.”

Dora gave a long sigh. Miller had made a peak of his fingers an inch from his nose and was concentrating on it with a deep scowl. Josh was watching Anne; he had watched her steadily through her long summing-up. His face was expressionless, but he knew he was in trouble. Together, these two women would defeat him in court. First, Dora would be a perfect witness. Her beauty was shallow, compared to Anne's, but, in testifying, she would come across as lovely and fragile. Her lower lip, possibly her most potent weapon, would tremble as it so often had when they lived together. He had come to detest Dora's lower lip with a fervor that amazed him. But to the judge it would be new, and as pathetic as a child's. Her large eyes would swim with tears and she would manage to force out, with new depths of choking sorrow,
He kept leading me on and making me feel like I was part of a family. I was afraid he'd leave me alone after he'd promised to take care of me and be with me forever
.