The Sabbathday River (41 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“They were both fighting,” he insisted a little fiercely. “Heather had her hands on Sue's arms. I saw
that
!” His voice was harsh.
“Well, isn't that where her hands would be if she was trying to hold off an attacker?” Judith asked innocently. “But you mentioned blood, I think.”
“Yes, there was blood.”
“On both parties? Or only on Heather?”
“I only saw Heather. I was taking care of Heather.”
“So you wouldn't know if Sue Deacon was even hurt at all in the confrontation she initiated.”
“I only saw Heather,” he said morosely. “She had blood coming off her cheek.”
“In fact,” considered Judith, “Heather wanted to report the assault to the police, didn't she?”
“That's right,” Stephen said. “She said that.”
“But you talked her out of it, didn't you?” Judith, it occurred to Naomi, was enjoying this.
“Yes. But I thought she'd behaved very badly herself. I thought she was disgraceful.”
“Really.”
Judith smiled. “That's odd. Because within an hour of this attack, you were with Heather at Naomi Roth's place of business, praising her work and her integrity as an employee. I wonder that you would recommend such a violent and dishonest person so highly to another employer.”
He looked studiously at the floor. He did not respond.
“Mr. Trask,” Judith pressed, “you were very supportive of Heather,
and helpful to her, even though you disapproved of her attachment to Ashley Deacon. Am I right in saying that?”
Stephen, for an instant, caught Naomi's eye. “I tried to help her.”
“Were you angry at her for involving herself with such an unsuitable person?”
“Well, not
angry
.”
“Were you upset with her for blowing her chance to go to college, coming home and getting herself pregnant by a man who wasn't going to take care of her?”
He nodded hard. “You bet.”
“When you saw her last summer, in the parking lot, and thought she might be pregnant for the second time, you must have been doubly disappointed.”
“I thought she was just throwing her life away,” said Stephen. “But she lied to me about being pregnant. She said she wasn't pregnant.”
“Did that make you angry?” asked Judith, and Naomi thought he would dismiss the idea, and quickly, but Stephen seemed to give it sober consideration.
“Yes,” he said quietly, and Naomi was taken aback. As if it had anything to do with him!
“I see,” Judith said. She walked to the front of her table and sat back against it. “Mr. Trask, Heather is an independent person, is she not?”
“Yes,” he said sadly, “I'd say she was.”
“Did she have supportive parents, for example?”
Stephen shook his head. “No parents. Heather's mother left her at home with her grandmother. I don't think the father was ever in the picture.”
“So Heather grew up alone with her grandmother?”
“That's correct. Until Pick‘s—that is, Polly's—death last year.”
“How old was Heather when that happened?”
“Oh …” he thought, “I'd say nineteen.”
“And since her grandmother's death, since the age of nineteen, Heather has been completely on her own, no family of any kind?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Any friends that you knew of?”
“She came to work with another employee, Martina Graves, for a while. But no, not many friends. If any,” he amended.
“So basically we're talking about a young woman with no family and very few friends, trying to bring up a daughter in virtual isolation?”
“Her life was very hard,” Stephen said. “I know it was.”
“In your opinion, was Heather a good mother to her daughter Polly?”
He glanced at Charter. “Well, I've heard some things I certainly disapprove of.”
“We've all
heard
things, Mr. Trask,” Judith cut him off, “but what I'm really interested in is what you actually observed.”
“She was a good mother.”
“She get much help from Ashley Deacon, the father of her child?”
“None I know of.”
“No financial support? No help around the house?”
Stephen looked down. “He was pretty uninvolved, as far as I'm aware.
“But he continued the affair, even after Polly's birth, didn't he?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, Mr. Trask, when—in your understanding—did the affair between my client and Mr. Deacon come to an end?”
He looked briefly at Heather. “That would have been last January. There was some kind of ruckus in the woods. I think they split up that night.”
“‘Some kind of ruckus,'” Judith considered. “Can you elaborate?”
“I can't really. I wasn't there, so I can't say what happened.”
“All right. But you're fairly certain that this ‘ruckus' coincided with the end of the affair.”
“Yes.” Again, he looked at Heather. “I went to see her the next day. It was the day after her grandmother died. I went over to the house. She told me it was finished between her and Ashley.”
“Hm.” Judith got up and walked over to where Stephen sat. She planted one elbow on the ledge by his shoulder and turned, so that they, conspiratorial almost, could consider Heather together.
“How did she feel about the breakup? Was she relieved it was over?”
He looked at Judith as if she was crazy. “No. She was … she was in terrible shape. She knew he wouldn't change his mind, but she was devastated.”
“Oh, so I infer, then, that the breakup was Ashley Deacon's idea?”
“Very much so,” Stephen said.
“The man she had devoted herself to, in spite of the fact that he had used her for sex, gotten her pregnant, and refused to take any financial or personal responsibility for his child, just one day decided he'd had enough of her and dropped her?”
“That's about it,” Stephen said cruelly. “What a prince, huh?”
“Objection!” Charter shouted. Judith suppressed a smile. Judge Hayes leaned over Stephen.
“You should just answer the question, Mr. Trask. No editorial comments, okay?”
“I'm sorry,” he said softly.
Judith picked it up again right away. “And, as you said before, Heather didn't have any family at all, and very few friends?”
“No.” He shook his head. To Naomi, he looked pained, as if this were all somehow his fault.
“And can you imagine how much worse this already terrible state of mind must have become when Heather discovered she was again pregnant?”
“She didn't have to lie to me!” he thundered. “She could have told me the truth when I asked her. I thought I had a right to know!”
“And why,” Judith seemed taken aback, “did you think that?”
He looked surprised himself by what he had said. He eyed all three of them—Judith, Naomi, Heather, in turn—and then glared at Charter, who glared back. Then he apologized, though for what Naomi couldn't quite work out, and Judith, as if in forgiveness, let him go.
Some Kind of Paragon
ASHLEY'S TESTIMONY WOULD WOUND HEATHER, whatever it consisted of. Naomi did not know what Judith said to prepare her client the following morning, but she hoped keenly that whatever it was, it would not make the situation worse. Naomi had noted her friend's disdain, her disapproval of Heather's heartfelt subjugation, of Heather's choices, even of Heather herself. Judith was not a soft person, that much was clear, though it did not deflect Naomi's love for her. She could not condemn a brittleness that came from admirable, unenviable things she herself had not endured, like a mother's wartime fortitude or a career of defending the indigent. Sometimes, she thought, finding her seat before the morning session began, Naomi felt herself a kind of human barrier between Heather's fragility and Judith's angry disbelief, loyal to both but never allowing herself to hope that there might at some point be a synergy, of understanding, of—oh, that elusive—sisterhood among the three of them, in spite of the fact that the world now viewed them in precisely this way: three witches over their cauldron, three crones busy at their blood-libel, their slaughter of
innocents. She crossed her legs, the pantyhose grating her skin; this, the second of her three-pack, already had a string-bean-length run at the ankle. She had seen Ashley out in the hallway, absorbed in
The Manchester Union Leader
, the paper folded back on itself into a neat wedge. He was reading an article about himself.
Heather began to cry immediately when he was brought in, but discreetly, as if she did not want to burden anyone with her unhappiness. As he walked, he looked past the frantic stare of the mother of two of his children to Naomi, whom he smiled at warmly and nodded to, as if they were meeting in the supermarket or the parking lot at the mill. “Hello,” he even mouthed, with that benign sweetness in his eyes. She thought again of the window he had broken and then wordlessly repaired, and turned away.
Amiably, he walked to the witness seat, and lifted his hands, and said the words of the oath with a kind of breathless wonder. He turned and sat, crossing his legs. His hair was back, but his habitual bandanna had been replaced by a discreet rubber band, and he wore a tan corduroy jacket over a white shirt buttoned up nearly to the top. Charter was flipping the pages of his legal pad, but Ashley waited calmly, his eyes over their heads to some unknowable point at the back of the room.
When the D.A. straightened at last, Ashley related for them all the points of his life: childhood and college, marriage and work. He had helped build the sports center in Goddard, then remained on call to maintain the plant. He had married Sue Locke in 1980, when they graduated from the University of Vermont. Now they had two children. It sounded so utterly unobjectionable, Naomi marveled, and indeed, Ashley sat easily in the witness chair, without even showing the physical discomfort Naomi knew it engendered, as if he feared nothing at all, regretted nothing at all. For the first time in her life, she understood that charm was not necessarily a positive attribute.
“Can you recall for me,” said Charter, “the circumstances of your first meeting with Miss Heather Pratt.”
Ashley pursed his lips. “I was working at the sports center,” he said evenly. “This was, oh, I guess November of '83. The place had only been going about half a year.”
“You were on staff at the sports center?”
“Well, on staff, no. But we had kind of an agreement. I mean, myself and Stephen Trask. He called me if there was anything to do, and there
was always something to do. The builder on the job wasn't very good, in my opinion.”
Charter spoke from his seat. “And did Mr. Trask introduce you to Heather Pratt?”
Ashley shook his head. “No. He never did. She came to me by herself.”
“Can you describe that meeting, Mr. Deacon?”
“Sure.” He nodded. “I was up a ladder. When I came down, there she was, looking up at me. She said she had something in her eye and she wanted me to help her get it out.”
Charter looked meaningfully at the jury.
“Something in her eye,” he said encouragingly.
“Just a speck.” Ashley shrugged. “Then she asked me for a lift home.”
“Did you think she only wanted a lift?” Charter leaned forward.
“Well, no.” He grinned. “I mean, she made herself clear.”
“And you gave her that lift?”
“I did,” he said.
“But you didn't take her straight home.”
“No. We went to the woods.”
“For what purpose did you go to the woods?” Charter asked.
Ashley gave him a look, incredulous, but not offended.
“To fool around,” he said. “Obviously.”
“Did you get the impression that Miss Pratt had done this sort of thing before?” Charter said innocently.
Judith got up, “Object, your honor. I don't think we need to hear Mr. Deacon's unsubstantiated impressions of my client's history.”
Judge Hayes nodded. “True. Sustained.”
Charter pursed his lips. “Let me ask that a different way. Did anything occur on that first occasion that led you to form an opinion of the defendant's history with men?”
Naomi looked at Judith expectantly, but this time she didn't rise. Ashley said, “Well, she said she wasn't a virgin. And she didn't
act
like a virgin, if that's what you're saying.”
“What, specifically, are you referring to when you say that?” said Charter.
“Oh …” He shrugged. “She was … I could just tell she'd been with lots of guys. The way she moved.
You
know. And then she came out and told me as much.”
“That she wasn't a virgin?”
Naomi winced. How many more times would he manage to get this said aloud?
“Yeah.”
“Did Heather actually name some of the other men she'd been with?”
“No. And I didn't ask.” He said this, Naomi decided, out of some kind of warped chivalry.
“Would you tell us,” Charter rose now and walked over to where Ashley was seated, “of the routine your affair with Heather fell into.”
“Sure.” He was affable. “Well, I would pick her up after work and we'd fool around. Then if she had an errand or something, I'd take her. She didn't have a car, and I felt sorry for her. Then I took her home.”
“You did this how often, would you say?”
“Oh, four, five times a week.”
“You did this despite the fact that you were a married man.”
Ashley rolled his eyes. “I didn't say I was proud of it, but it didn't feel like it was anybody else's business.”
“And Heather was aware that you were married.”
“Oh yeah.” He seemed animated for the first time. “Oh sure. From the beginning.”
Charter paused. He considered his witness. “Mr. Deacon, did you ever, at any time, tell Heather Pratt that you intended to leave your wife and live with her instead?”
Ashley shook his head vigorously. “No way. She knew I wasn't going to do that.”
“Just think for a minute. Is it at all possible that Heather might have got that impression, mistaken though it was, from something you said or did?”
“If she thought that,” he said fiercely, “she was dead wrong.”
“Because you were always open about your situation, weren't you?”
“Very much so,” Ashley agreed. “My marriage always came first.”
From the jury box, a snort of laughter, quickly stifled. Naomi caught it: the woman, middle-aged, in the back corner. An alternate. But even so, she felt a flurry of optimism.
Charter, too, stifled a reaction. “Did Heather ever tell you about the other men she was seeing?”
Jesus
, Naomi heard Judith mutter. She shot to her feet. “Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.”
“It certainly does, Mr. Charter,” Hayes said, visibly angry. He turned to the jury. “Please disregard the last question.”
But they wouldn't, Naomi saw. That was the point.
“Is it possible that Heather was seeing other men at the same time she was seeing you?”
Ashley nodded. “Sure. I mean, I was only with her for a little time each day, and not on the weekends at all. I have no idea what she did the rest of the time.”
“So when Heather told you she was pregnant, in the winter of 1984, you really had no way of knowing whether the baby was yours, did you?”
“Well.” He shrugged philosophically. “I figured it was Heather's baby. I mean, it was up to her what to do with it. Besides,” Ashley said, “I was having my own kid. I mean, my wife was.”
“Your wife was, in fact, pregnant at the same time Heather was pregnant with her daughter Polly.”
“Yeah. So, she knew what the priority was.”
“I see,” Charter said. “Let's move forward a bit, to August of 1984. Heather had given birth to her daughter. How did this event affect your relationship?”
Ashley frowned, remembering. “Well, it didn't much. I mean, she was at home more, with the baby, so I didn't see her as much. Actually,” he said brightly, “I kind of tried to end it.”
“You tried to end the relationship?”
“Yeah. I went to her house. I sort of hinted maybe we'd better stop.” He considered. “I gave her my car, you see. I said it was a present. Which it was,” he said defensively, as if he had been challenged on this point. “But I thought, see, that if she had her own car, she wouldn't need lifts from me.”
“And what was Heather's reaction to this?”
“Oh, she cried,” Ashley said. “She didn't want to stop seeing me. She did take the car, though.” This was said with an edge, as if it were some kind of vindication.
“So you kept on seeing her, then?”
“Yeah.”
“All that fall. The fall of 1984. You continued to meet with Heather?”
“Yeah. Maybe not as often. Two or three times a week.”
Charter mused, looking at Heather. “Always in the car?”
He nodded. “Always.”
“Now,” said Charter, “where was the baby while you were fooling around in your car? Did Heather leave the little baby home with her grandmother?”
Ashley shook his head. “No, we had her. She mostly slept.”
“You had the baby in the car?” he said again. “I want to be clear about this. Heather took the baby along in the car when the two of you were having sex?”
He shrugged. “I guess she thought it was all right.”
But the jury didn't. They glared, at Ashley, at Heather. Naomi's mouth was dry. She looked longingly at the full glass beside Ashley, which he hadn't touched.
“Were you aware, Mr. Deacon, that Heather considered you to be the father of her child?”
“I guess,” Ashley said. “She sort of implied.”
“Were you aware that she also implied this to others?”
He nodded. “Yeah. It kind of pissed me off, to tell you the truth.”
“Because you didn't think you were the father?”
“How the hell could I know?” he said, clearly, if briefly, angry. “I mean, I don't know what all was going on with her. It could have been mine, but it could have been somebody else's.”
Charter nodded sagely. “Would you say, by this time, your affair was cooling down?”
“Well, I can't speak for anyone else,” said Ashley, “but for me, yeah.”
Naomi wanted to touch Heather's back, which was near enough if she reached, and trembling. She had never seen this Ashley, and yet he was of a seamless part with the Ashley she did know, the Ashley of great good humor and small good turns. The Ashley of narrow, insinuating hips and generous hands.

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