The Sabbathday River (55 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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Judith, tersely, glanced at Naomi.
“We're getting there,” Naomi amended.
“They talk about me. Like I'm not here.” She turned her head to look at Naomi. “How can they talk about me like that? How can they talk about … my period? My body? I don't understand what it has to do with anything.”
“It doesn't have anything to do with it. You just have to hang on. Look,” she said, pressing Heather's shoulder. She wanted her to turn around, to see the women in the back row in their white shirts. And Heather did turn. Simone raised a white rose in salute.
“Who are they?” Heather said, uninterested.
“Women who support you.”
She leaned forward and put her head on the table. “I wish they'd go away,” she said, her voice barely audible. “I wish everyone would go away.”
“Me too,” Naomi said. “Come on, here's the judge.” She helped pull Heather back to a seated position, but the girl swayed. The slightest wind, Naomi thought, and she might blow away.
They began again. Charter produced his professor of hematology, a young guy, rapidly shedding his blond hair, at least on the top of his head. For this he evidently compensated his vanity with an untrimmed beard and a rather pathetic skimp of a ponytail. He had brought a visual aid, a chart of phenotypes arrayed in an alphabet soup of A's, B's, and O's. We each have two copies of genotype, he explained as the jury began—visibly, and from the outset—to glaze over. One from each parent. Some types are dominant: A and B trump 0, for example. Thus, if we receive an A from one parent and an 0 from the other, we have a blood type of A, but that recessive 0 hangs in there, waiting for a shot at the next generation, where it has a fifty-fifty chance of being passed
on. Indeed, though the O genotype knuckles under to A or B, this does not prevent blood type O from being the most common phenotype among white Americans. Thus the prism of possible outcomes, the professor went on, rising from his chair to scribble equations on a large sheet of paper, angled for the jury: genotype to phenotype—which was “blood type” to the layman, he said, offhand, in case anybody was still following him. AO crossed with BO might produce AO, AB, BO, or OO, yielding, in that order, blood types A, AB, B, or O. And so on.
Heather's blood, said the professor, was type A, with a genotype AO. Ashley's, as it happened, was the uncommon AB, as was Polly's. The baby from Heather's pond was A, with a genotype AA. The baby from the Sabbathday River, however, was OO.
What this meant, in the English which Charter eventually extracted from his expert, was that Ashley might well be Polly's father, and was just as likely to have been the father of the baby in Heather's pond. He could not possibly, however, have been the father of the Sabbathday River baby, if Heather was its mother. Heather's second lover—the elusive Christopher Flynn, presumably—would have to have had blood type O. This (helpfully for Charter, Naomi thought) placed Mr. Flynn snugly within the majority of white American men.
There was a brief interchange about the reliability of the testing, after which Charter got the witness to state his conclusions again. Then he sat down.
Judith moved quickly. “Dr. Leslie,” she said, walking over to the scramble of letters on the professor's work sheet, “can I just review some aspects of your findings for a moment?”
Polly, she wanted it clear, was Ashley's child.
“Yes,” the man said. “The blood types are consistent with that.”
And the pond baby. This infant was Ashley's, too?
“Certainly possible,” he said. “AA is a potential outcome of AA and AB.”
“But the other baby, as I understand it, does not fit into the family picture quite as easily.”
“No,” Professor Leslie said. “Mr. Deacon did not have an O to contribute to the Sabbathday River baby's genotype. So for the Sabbathday River baby to have been the child of this mother, who did possess an O, an additional source of genotype would be required. Someone who also possessed an O.”
“I see.” She stepped up close to the chart and peered at it; then she
straightened, as if taken by some radical new thought. She faced him. “Dr. Leslie, if you were to take away the notion of the second father—the second source of an O, as you put it—this chart really makes no sense, does it?”
He frowned. Perhaps, Naomi thought, Judith's choice of term “makes no sense” offended him in some way, but after a moment he shrugged. He had, after all, only been considering the notion.
“No. The additional source is necessary.”
“So, correct me if I'm wrong here—if you had to incorporate into your chart the information that this woman, the mother of the pond baby, had not had sexual contact with any other man but the father of the pond baby, what impact would that have on your conclusions?”
Again the frown. He peered at his scribbles. Then he spoke. “Well, if this woman had had sexual contact only with this man, it would be impossible for her to have produced the OO-genotype child.”
Judith nodded. “I see. So, in other words, this baby here”—she pointed to the Sabbathday River baby's genotype—“wou!d have to belong to an entirely different family, with other parents.”
“Yes.”
Judith paused. “Dr. Leslie,” she said, “as a geneticist, do you have any opinion on superfecundation?”
He considered. “I don't think so, since I don't know what it is.”
“Really? I thought superfecundation is an established medical event.”
He shrugged. “I'm sorry. It's not a term I'm familiar with.”
“Oh. Well, superfecundation is the conception of fraternal twins by different fathers.”
He broke into a smile. He had, Naomi could not help but notice, a very sweet smile. “You're kidding. Really?”
“Really,” Judith said, rolling her eyes for the jury's benefit.
“I've never heard of it before.”
“Dr. Leslie, when you analyzed the blood-type information in this case, were you aware that the prosecution contends that this baby”—she pointed to the Sabbathday River baby's genotype—“and this baby”—she pointed to the pond baby's genotype—“are fraternal twins, born to the same mother but fathered by different men?”
He was grinning widely now. He shook his head. “No, I didn't know. I was just asked to analyze the data. Wow.” He looked over at Charter, then quickly stopped smiling. “I only analyzed the data. I don't have any other information.”
She thanked him.
It was three o'clock.
Charter called his psychiatrist, a brittle woman with a flat, triangular face and a cap of tight gray curls who walked briskly to the witness chair, her little hips moving stiffly beneath a narrow tweed skirt.
Once she was sworn in, he began, in a loving, adulatory fashion, to recount her titles and degrees. (This, too, Naomi thought, was some kind of a stalling tactic, since Charter also evidently had his eye on the clock. But after the third honorary doctorate, Judith stipulated to the witness's expertise, and the district attorney had to move on.)
Her name was Roslyn Staple. She said that she had been asked to interview and examine the newly arrested Heather Pratt, and this she had done, in three sessions of one hour each, which had taken place in the Peytonville jail. The report of her findings, a document she held up helpfully, then placed in her lap, was bound in red covers. Heather, for her part, sat still in her seat, her hands folded before her on the tabletop as if she had been shut off or deactivated, but the psychiatrist did not look at her.
“What were your general impressions of Heather Pratt, Dr. Staple?” Charter said, folding his arms in anticipation of an essay-length answer.
Heather's emotional immaturity was the most striking element of her character, the psychiatrist went on. Under the circumstances, the defendant dwelt inappropriately on the topic of Ashley Deacon: her love for him, her sense of loss at no longer having access to him. She was also intensely narcissistic, showing no interest in others, apart from the aforementioned Ashley Deacon. She was withdrawn and noncommunicative. She refused to discuss one of the two infants—the pond baby—and showed a marked lack of interest in the other. She volunteered no information, asked no questions, and appeared generally to be without concern for either or both of the two infants who had died. From this it could be basically inferred that Heather possessed at least psychopathic tendencies, if not full-blown psychopathology.
“How would you characterize a psychopath, in layman's terms?”
As a person without conscience, the doctor said, and capable of violence. A person who would stop at nothing, including murder. “But I found, as I said, that the patient possessed psychopathic
tendencies.
I did not diagnose a full-blown psychopath. Rather, my diagnosis is of a personality disorder. To be specific, I concluded from my examination of Heather that she most closely resembles the profile of the Borderline
Personality Disorder, although she does show some features of the Avoidant, Narcissistic, and Histrionic Personality Disorders. Her character and mood experience rapid shifts between grandiosity—the belief that she is better than everyone else, a “special” person—and feelings of worthlessness, with very little in the way of middle ground between the two extremes. This is normally a problem of arrested development. Borderline personalities seldom evolve to the point where they can have meaningful relationships, in lieu of which they might form alliances with unsuitable or unavailable people.”
“Such as a married man?” Charter asked helpfully.
Such as a married man.
Instability of mood, she continued placidly, and relationships and self-image were marked by some of Heather's more notorious attributes: impulsiveness in self-damaging areas (such as sex and/or exhibitionism) and lack of long-term goals. There would also be, consistent with this disorder, a lack of control, such as Heather might have shown in her public fights with Sue Deacon in the sports center, or with Ann Chase on the porch at Tom and Whit's. Finally, the Borderline Personality's frantic efforts to avoid abandonment had significance as a motive for the murder of Heather's children. “She thought that killing them would bring her loved ones back,” Dr. Staple said.
“Could you clarify that for us, Doctor?”
“Certainly. These were naturally stressful circumstances, but I do not believe Heather experienced a psychotic break. In other words, there were not, suddenly, voices or visions instructing her to murder the infants. What I do believe is that her psychopathic tendencies came into play, and she made a non-rational bargain to regain what she had lost —specifically, her relationship with her boyfriend—by sacrificing what she now had—the two babies. Heather had, after all, confronted death twice in the recent past: the death of her grandmother and the death of her relationship. Now here, in the face of these deaths, were two new lives. She did not want the lives, she wanted the deaths they had replaced. Her acts against the babies can be seen as a somewhat confused and certainly callous attempt to exchange what she had for what she wanted.”
“But, at the same time, you are not calling this a mental illness.”
“No. Her grip on reality was intact. She was not, for example, delusional. She did not attack her children because an aural or optical delusion
instructed her to do so, as is sometimes the case in instances of postpartum psychosis.”
It was possible, she went on, for a person under stress—an ordinary person whose defenses might successfully sustain her under normal circumstances—to lose her judgment under sufficient assault. “There can, in other words, be an eruption of neurotic and psychopathic symptoms which are normally latent.”
“And that is what, in your expert opinion, occurred in this case and caused the death of Heather Pratt's two babies?”
She inclined her head with confident gravity. “Yes. That is my diagnosis and my opinion.”
Charter folded his arms and looked plaintively at the jury. “Dr. Staple, to most of us, the very notion of killing a child, let alone a newborn infant, is so reprehensible that we cannot even imagine it ever occurs. Have you worked with cases of infanticide previously?”
“I have. Several. And I have studied all the available literature on infanticide.”
“So you are well qualified to determine if and how Heather Pratt might fit into the profile of an infanticide?”
“I would consider myself well qualified, yes,” she said, her voice prim.
“And what, in your opinion, influences your decision to include Heather in this group?”
“Well, the diagnostic features I discussed a few moments ago, and in addition, the fact that, statistically, she does fit the profile of a mother who murders her infant child.”
And what profile was that? Charter prompted.
In her still, flat tone, Dr. Staple informed the courtroom that fully 20 percent of babies killed during the first year of life are killed on the first day of life. Moreover, those infants killed on the first day of life are almost exclusively killed by their mothers.

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