The Sabbathday River (44 page)

Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River

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“Excuse me?”
Ashley said, furious, so Judith asked again, and he shook his head and said it was just fine. “She knew how to move, all right,” he added lasciviously.

“In your opinion.” Judith nodded. “That is, based on your expertise.”

Naomi, clasping and unclasping her hands, noted they were wet, and mashed her palms against the thighs of her pants.

“Now, when you testified earlier about your sexual relationship with
Heather, I don't remember your mentioning which method of birth control you were using,” Judith said, her voice studiously nonchalant.

He went dumb, struck motionless. Then he looked at her. “What do you mean, which method?”

“Is it a difficult question?” She frowned. “I'm sorry. I would have thought it was pretty straightforward.” She leaned forward and said it again, enunciating carefully and with abundant sarcasm. “Which method of birth control were you using when you took Heather Prattâwho was eighteen, and clearly smack in the middle of her fertile years âinto the woods, in your car, and had sex with her on top of the ropes and tools?”

“
I
don't know.” He shook his head, furious. “How'm
I
supposed to know?”

“So I infer from this that you yourself were not using a condom.”

What?
Naomi thought gaily.
And decrease my pleasure?

“Nope. Don't like them.”

“Then you must have been under the impression that Heather was using birth control, I guess.”

“It wasn't any of my business,” he said stoically.

“Really?” Judith said. “Well, if you have sex with somebody without using birth control and they get pregnant, aren't you the father? I mean, isn't that how it works?”

“Maybe she was using something, I don't know.”

“But you didn't ask.”

He glared at her, steady and baleful. “I didn't ask.”

“I see â¦” Judith nodded. “So there you are, having sex with an eighteen-year-old girl in the back of your car, without using birth control. Did you say, well, you know, if we're going to do this again, maybe we ought to get this birth-control thing sorted out? You know, just to make sure we don't have an unwanted pregnancy on our hands?”

“I didn't say that, no.”

“Oh. But you did make plans to see Heather again, didn't you?”

“She didn't have a car,” he said in explanation.

“No,” Judith repeated in her patient teacher voice. “But then again, she did manage to get herself to and from work before she met you, didn't she?”

He shrugged. “I suppose.”

“So it really wasn't about transporting Heather from work to home, was it? I mean, you were after something else, weren't you?”

“She wanted to.” Ashley scowled.

“I don't doubt it,” said Judith easily. “After all, she was deeply in love with you, wasn't she?”

To Naomi's surprise, Ashley didn't squabble over this point.

“She said so. Yeah.”

“She said so frequently, didn't she? Right from the beginning.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And how did you answer her when she said she loved you, Ashley?”

“She knew I was married!” He was sounding weaker, more petulant, and Judith let this linger for a moment before asking him how often he would take Heather to the woods. When he answered, the jury reacted with shaking heads.

“And you carried on this wayâpicking her up at work, making love in the back of your car, five days a weekâfor how long?”

He didn't know. He shrugged.

“More than a year and a half, is that right?”

“Must be,” he said, sardonic.

“You tell her you loved her?”

“No!” He sounded scandalized.

“But you were affectionate. You were kind to her. You did her favors, like driving her around if she had an errand to do, even if it inconvenienced you that you were seen together with her in public.”

“She didn't have a car,” Ashley said again.

“You gave her gifts.”

Now he looked uncomfortable. Briefly he glanced at Heather. “I might have. Nothing major, though.”

“You gave her jewelry.”

“It wasn't expensive,” Ashley protested. Naomi felt her stomach tighten in distaste. Judith went to her table, opened her briefcase, and took out a small plastic evidence bag. She held it up: a puddle of gold glinted in one corner of the plastic.

“You recognize this?” Judith said. Ashley gave a brief nod.

“I gave her a necklace once. So what?”

“This the one? Are you sure?”

She made him take it in his hands, but he held the bag pinched between thumb and forefinger, and barely looked at it.

“What is it, Ashley?”

“I said. A necklace. It has a little
H
on a chain.”

“H
for Heather.” It wasn't a question, and he did not feel compelled
to respond. “That was a sweet idea for a gift. Do you think Heather appreciated it?”

“Who knows,” Ashley said. “I don't know.”

Judith entered the necklace into evidence. Then she went back to her table and lifted her legal pad, squinting at it a little.

“You testified that when Heather told you she was pregnant, in the winter of 1984, you âhad no way of knowing' whether the baby was yours. Is that correct?”

“Sure,” Ashley said. “I didn't know.”

She gave him a supremely dubious look. “Ashley, are you going to tell this jury that you entertained serious doubts that the baby was yours?”

“I didn't know,” he said petulantly. “I'm not a doctor.”

“No,” she said carefully. “You were the man she was having sex with five times a week. You were the man she said was the father of her child. Either of these things alone would have been enough for you to at least consider the possibility, wouldn't you say?”

“I never said it wasn't possible,” he pointed out.

“No. But you implied that some phantom lover had sneaked in and impregnated the girl you happened to be having frequent unprotected sex with.”

“I just said I didn't
know.
I couldn't be
sure
.”

“But didn't you
want
to know? I mean, one way or the other? Somebody says they're having your baby and you're not even interested in finding out?”

“Not really,” he said, honestly enough.

“Did it occur to you to make any financial provision for Heather's baby?”

“She wasn't asking me for anything. And my wife was having a baby, too.”

“Well, in that case, were you interested in establishing that you were not the father of Heather's baby? I mean, what if Heather decided to come back to you one day and demand money that should have gone to your rightful heir; that is, the child you were having with your wife, Sue? Surely you know that, if you were the father of Heather's baby, then Polly had a legal right to some financial support from you.”

He shrugged. “I didn't really think about it, to tell you the truth.”

“It really wasn't that important to you,” Judith observed, “this child your girlfriend was pregnant with.”

“She wasn't my girlfriend.”

“Sorry. This child the woman you were having sex with five times a week was having. It wasn't very important to you.”

“Well no,” he affirmed. “I had other stuff on my mind. Like my own baby.”

“Right.” Judith smiled. “Little Joseph. Bouncing baby boy.”

He grinned: proud father.

“Did you stop having sex with Heather when she became pregnant?”

He blushed briefly. Naomi couldn't imagine why. He said no.

“You continued to have sex with her? In the car?”

“She wanted to,” he said.

“And you also wanted to, apparently,” Judith observed. “Until what point in her pregnancy did you continue to have sex with Heather?” Ashley was silent. “Five months? Six months?”

“I don't know.” He put up his hands. “She was pretty big the last time, I remember that.”

“So pretty much all the way to the end, right?”

“Maybe,” he said, offhand.

“And were you having sex with your wife at the same time?” Judith asked.

Ashley looked at her in horror. Charter objected loudly, and they went into a huddle at the sidebar again. Again, Naomi saw, Judith got what she wanted. She went back to her table and asked the question a second time.

“Sue didn't want to,” he said tightly. “She said it hurt.”

“So your wife didn't want to have sex during her pregnancy. But luckily for you, your gâOh”âshe grinnedâ“sorry again! But luckily
Heather
didn't seem to mind. So you got to keep having sex.”

“Was that a question?” Ashley said dryly. Judith smiled, almost fondly.

“Now, when Heather's baby, Polly Elizabeth Pratt, was born the following summer, did it occur to you then to wonder whether you were her father?”

“She looked like Heather,” he said.

“I'm sorry, is that an answer to my question?”

“She didn't look like me,” he said again.

Judith shook her head. “In other words, no. You didn't wonder whether you were her father, even then, because she didn't look like you. Is that right?”

He shrugged. “Right.”

“But even if the baby didn't look like you, in your opinion, the fact remained that your gâexcuse me, the woman you were having sex with five times a week, had a new baby she said was yours. Did you then feel moved to make some kind of contribution to this child's care?”

“You mean money?” Ashley frowned.

“Well, money, support. Diaper changing. I don't know. Something?”

“I gave her my car,” he said hotly.

“Yes, so you did. A curious baby gift.”

“It wasn't a baby gift. It was for her, because I wouldn't be that free anymore to give her lifts.”

“Or have sex with her.”

“No,” he agreed. “I was trying to break it off.”

“But it didn't work that way. In fact,” Judith said thoughtfully, “didn't you have sex with Heather on the very day you brought the car over to her house?”

He considered this. He looked away in disgust, and answered the question.

“So basically you weren't that committed to breaking it off, after all, were you?”

And on. The money he didn't give her, the toys he didn't buy, the doctor's appointments he didn't attend, the acknowledgment he didn't make, even as he proudly displayed his son Joseph to neighbors and acquaintances. Judith kept her disgust barely restrained. Ashley chaffed beneath her questions, but he never betrayed any sense that he had behaved at all badly. Polly might be his in the remotest sense, the logic seemed to go, but she was Heather's in actuality, and since nothing was asked of him, nothing was given. Judith got him to begrudge Heather's warmth as a mother, her love for Polly, her attentiveness to the baby's needs. She forced him to admit that even faced with the evidence of her fertility, he continued to have sex with her without using birth control. And finally, she hauled him through a narrative of that final night, their interrupted concord, in the back seat, atop the tools, in the winter forest. He didn't know how many people were out there, or who they were, most of them, because he had seen only Sue, and Sue's mother, who was barking that high, aggravating bark she made. There were flashlights, all aimed at him, and he was pissed, furious really. So yeah, he'd taken Heather's arm and they had gone away, the two of them, just to show them all that he wasn't going to knuckle under just because they said so and his wife bawled a little in front of strangers.

“You left your wife there,” Judith said, her voice newly soft. “You took Heather and you left your wife and the others.”

“Yup.” He nodded, smug.

“How that must have hurt Sue, to see you walking off like that with Heather.”

“Well, we're still married,” he said in his own defense.

“You didn't mind hurting Sue, in other words.”

He looked surprised at her obtuseness. “If she hadn't followed my car, she wouldn't have gotten hurt.”