The Sabbathday River (63 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“Your honor,” Charter complained, “I really think Ms. Friedman has made her point by now.”
Judith was reading and didn't look up.
“Mrs. Friedman,” Hayes said, “do you think we can maybe move on?”
She still didn't look up. She was staring hard at the book in her hands, a look of rank disbelief on her face. Then, slowly, she began to shake her head.
“Mrs. Friedman?”
Judith roused herself. “What?”
“Can we move on, please?”
“Oh,” said Judith. “Certainly.” Briefly she leaned over and wrote something down on her legal pad. Then she closed the white book and walked across to the witness seat. “Here you are, Mr. Rena. Here is your pig book. And thank you for coming to do your civic duty today. I must say, you've added immeasurably to our understanding of the defendant. I know Mr. Charter thanks you, too.”
Then, waltzing back to her seat, she pushed the folded page of her legal pad deep into her pocket and gave Naomi a rather baffling wink. Mr. Rena slunk out, to the guffaws of Ella and her gleeful band. Charter, glum in his seat, closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Then he rested the prosecution case, and Judith leaped to her feet, infused with momentum from her running start.
David came in then, looking professorial in a clean gray suit. His yarmulke, Naomi saw as he passed, had been removed for the occasion. He nodded shortly to Naomi, but he was studiously indifferent to Judith as he made his way to the front of the room. He had been advised, she decided, not to seem too familiar with the woman who would question him.
David had many degrees and was the author of many books. These, complete with their long, technical titles, were recounted in loving detail, until the room seemed to reverberate with the heady language of science. He was past chairman of the Department of Biology at N.Y.U. and held teaching positions at a variety of New York medical schools. He was also a consultant to two major fertility clinics and had already written extensively on genetic issues arising from the new in-vitro technology as it was beginning to be practiced. In all, he made a marked contrast to the Peytonville obstetrician-gynecologist who had told the jury all they knew thus far about superfecundation.
“Dr. Keller,” Judith said, once his credentials had been, finally, exhausted, “can you tell us something about superfecundation?”
Now, abruptly, David grinned. “Superfecundation is the theoretical birth of twin children by different fathers. It's something of a medical fantasy. The idea has been around a long time, but frankly, even if it has ever occurred, its rate of occurrence must be so extraordinarily tiny that it simply has no statistical value.” He looked at the jury and then translated from his own English. “To build a case for superfecundation would be overwhelmingly difficult. Frankly, it makes much more sense to look for another explanation when you have one mother and two seemingly different babies. You have to bear in mind that human beings carry the record of many generations of forebears in their DNA. Even full siblings, which fraternal twins naturally are, can possess widely disparate DNA. They might look utterly different from each other. One might possess genetic abnormalities and diseases while the other is normal. But I can assure you that there are many explanations I could consider before I was desperate enough to consider superfecundation.”
Charter, predictably, objected to this. Judith did not even argue with him.
“But what about blood type, Dr. Keller? What if a baby's blood type indicated that, if it shared a mother with its supposed sibling, then there would have to have been a different father involved?”
“Again,” David said, “I would look for an entirely different set of parents. It's bordering on the preposterous to claim superfecundation.”
Judith looked at the jurors. “Dr. Keller, what was your reaction when you were informed that superfecundation was being suggested in a case of alleged double infanticide?”
He gave a short, involuntary bark of laughter. Then, recovering, he shook his head. “That somebody was off their rocker, to tell you the truth. This would be somewhat on a par with saying that Bigfoot came down out of the woods and clubbed your neighbor to death in his front yard, when it would be far less difficult to prove that the murderer was just a normal human being. To a biologist, it's simply that absurd.”
Judith thanked him, and gave him to Charter.
“Dr. Keller. You're aware, are you not, that superfecundation is a recognized biological event.”
David sighed. “I'm aware of no such thing. I can't recall the topic ever coming up in conversation with any other biologist I've ever known. Certainly there have been no major research papers or studies that I'm aware of. And I can assure you that obstetricians do not go around
warning their patients not to engage in sex with more than one man for fear of giving birth to superfecundated twins.”
“But it does exist in the medical literature, rare though it may be.”
“I know of no instances with what I would consider proper documentation, no.” David paused and seemed to consider. “That will change soon, however.”
Naomi frowned at him. Charter, eager for any scrap, seemed to rouse himself a bit. “Oh yes? And why is that?”
“Well, because of in-vitro fertilization. With in-vitro fertilization, there will be far greater potential for superfecundation. Because of human error. But for twins conceived naturally, I think we may all quite comfortably consider it next to impossible and leave it at that.”
Charter, in defeat, took this suggestion, and testimony ended for the morning.
Confessions
SHE ATE HER LUNCH OUTSIDE, ALONE ON THE bench: a tuna-fish sandwich and a can of diet Coke. The tuna fish tasted like wet sawdust, glued but otherwise unmodified by white mayonnaise, and she ate it without relish. Judith had gone back to see Heather, though “see”—Naomi knew—was a euphemism for coerce. Between attorney and client there had been little communication and even less agreement, but over no other subject did the two become as intractable as that of Heather's testimony. Judith had never wavered in her insistence that Heather must take the stand. All roads led to this, she argued, and despite the lip service juries paid to the notion that a defendant would not be penalized for declining to give testimony, everyone expected that a truly innocent person could not be held back from taking the stand in her own defense. Everything Judith had worked toward, both in her cross-examination of prosecution witnesses and in the witnesses she was herself presenting, led to this: to Heather getting up there and saying, flatly and without dissembling,
The Sabbathday River baby was not mine
and
My own baby was born dead
. Heather absolutely refused. Neither would she give a reason. In all, she showed
more forcefulness on this point than she had on her own behalf at any point since her arrest.
Judith had, of course, invited Naomi to attend this confrontation of wills (she continued to have an unrealistic appraisal of Naomi's influence on Heather), but Naomi had regretfully excused herself. Indeed, the confrontations of the days just past—with David and Joel, with Nelson, with Daniel—had left her little animation. Even the morning's reversals, the unexpected boon of Bob Rena and the more expected authority of David's expertise, had failed to lift her spirits. She sat now, drained and oddly bereft, gnawing her tasteless sandwich and looking out over the white tide of Heather's army.
Ella, in her element, led them on from the uppermost courthouse step, her strangely genderless form and beautifully angular head giving her a commanding height over the protesters. Sarah Copley's crowd, who had evidently not been informed of the dress code, were in their Sunday clothes, cacophonous in appearance but unified by their white placards. Naomi was mildly surprised to see many of her own employees present, including the Hodge sisters, who stood side by side, leaning slightly together—which was their way—sharing a single sign. And Mary Sully, whose sign belied the fact that she had never believed Heather to be anything but a murderer of babies. The mood had indeed turned, though the faces of the Goddard contingent were more grim than outraged, and Naomi wondered if what they actually felt was less love of Heather than that Heather was theirs, whatever she was. That she belonged finally to them and not to the wider world of
The Boston Globe
and Ms. magazine and the invisible senders of—by now—hundreds and hundreds of white roses.
The roses were no longer welcome in the jail block, so someone had taken it upon herself to pile them on the courthouse steps, and there they now sat—great piles of flowers, each wrapped in its own cone of green paper; each sporting a surrounding shawl of glassy green fern. They came from New Hampshire and Vermont, New York and California, and beyond, tumbling as from a cornucopia. The local flower shops had all long since been defoliated of roses, and
The Manchester Union Leader
reported in a sidebar to its trial coverage that truckloads of this suddenly sought-after bloom were en route from Boston and Hartford to Peytonville, where the two local florists anxiously awaited them.
All absurd. An outward spiraling of absurdity from a single, inexplicable
event. Just half an hour earlier a cry of wild laughter had gone through the crowd when a vendor arrived and unpacked his wares: white sweatshirts boldly imprinted with the legend: I AM CHRIS FLYNN. The men, seemingly in unison, reached into their pockets, and suddenly there was an army of Chris Flynns, the phantom second lover, the state's laughingstock linchpin, the sadly absent proof of Heather's infamy. Naomi shook her head. She could not even any longer wish it to end, because she could not imagine what direction her life would take if it did. She drained her can of soda and sighed.
At her ear, a low voice spoke. “Oh, come on. It isn't
that bad.
”
Naomi looked up. David was standing behind her.
“Thought you took off.”
“I'm leaving now. I wanted to say goodbye.” He stood hovering over her. She wondered, for an awkward moment, whether she ought to stand, too.
“Well, I enjoyed meeting you,” Naomi said, shifting a bit in lieu of getting up. “And thank you for what you did for Heather.”
“No, that was nothing. Poor kid. Whatever she did, it doesn't include having twin kids by different fathers.” He looked off at the crowd in front of the courthouse. “‘Course, once those folks get their teeth in her, it'll be another story. I just hope she doesn't read too much of her own press.”
“What do you mean?” Naomi said.
“You can't just elect a symbol and expect them to serve. I don't think the girl I saw in that courtroom wants what her fans want to give her.”
“No, you're right,” she agreed. “But that's a problem for tomorrow.”
“Your problem,” he said, with an understanding nod.
“Yes.”
He smiled at her, and she—guilty again about having ruined the Seder—smiled awkwardly back. “Listen, Naomi,” David said, “try not to think too badly of Joel for being a bit of a jerk. He takes these things very much to heart.”
She wasn't sure what to say. “That's all right.”
“He doesn't deal well with Rachel. With having Rachel around.”
Now she was surprised. “But Rachel is lovely!”
“Oh yes, absolutely. He loves her very much. But he finds her sadness intolerable. And Judith's, of course. And he can't fix it. Well,” David said, “that sounds absurd, but you understand.”
Naomi nodded, though of course she didn't. “This is about Rachel's son.”
“Yes. Simon. It's a very cruel thing, what he has. Because the baby looks completely normal at birth, and it does all the normal things for the first couple of months. It smiles on cue, and it grabs your finger. But then it stops smiling and it stops grabbing your finger. That's all gone. And there's your child. It's just an infant in a body that keeps growing for another couple of years before it dies. And you have to watch it die.” He was looking past her, past the crowd and the courthouse steps, past the visible.
“Does it have a name, this disease?” she asked, and then remembered something Judith had once said, offhand:
You've never heard of it.
“Sure. It's called Canavan's. It's part of a group of related diseases, all rare. All genetic, of course. This one's more or less confined to the Ashkenazi gene pool. Lucky us.” He smiled ruefully. “Another gift of a loving God.”
Your words, not mine, Naomi thought.
“Is it a brain disease?”
“Well, it affects the brain, but it's really a disease of the nervous system. These kids are lacking an enzyme which breaks down the fatty substances in the brain, and because the substances aren't broken down, they clog the neurons. It's like … you know how weeds can grow in a pond and choke it? You get stagnant water, then muck. It's like that. This stuff chokes the brain to death. When they autopsy Canavan's victims, the brains are like Swiss cheese.”
Naomi, stung with pity for Rachel, shook her head slowly. “And there isn't a cure?”
“A
cure?
” He gave her one of those looks scientists save for lay people. “There isn't even a treatment. There's barely a soul working on it, either, since it's so ridiculously rare. One day, when we get better at taking DNA apart, we might get lucky and find the gene, but the best we'll be able to do even then is test people to find carriers and try to dissuade them from having kids, since they've got a one in four chance of passing it on. Even that's not much in the way of progress.” He sighed. “You know, it's eating at all of them. But in a way, it's actually hardest on Joel, because Joel has the least to do. Rachel needs to take care of Simon, and Judith needs to take care of Rachel.”
“Poor …” Naomi began. But she couldn't pick among them.
“Yes, it's terrible. So forgive him. He's a guy whose instinct is to find the reasons for things, and this is a thing that can't be explained. Not really, even if they ever figure out the science. Sometimes I think he wants there to be a God because that would give him at least part of an explanation.” He smiled at her. “But that's no reason to believe in God.”
“Right,” she agreed sadly.
“So now I must leave you.” He straightened.
She stood, too, and kissed him lightly on the cheek, feeling the abrasion of his beard, and they parted.
When Naomi returned to the courtroom, she told Judith of the many Chris Flynns paying court on the steps outside, but instead of the laugh she expected, Judith merely groaned. “It's out of control.”
“It's almost over,” Naomi amended.
“Maybe, but I've still got a few miles to go before I sleep.”
Naomi nodded comfort. “Any luck with Heather?”
“It's like screaming at a wall. When you're done, it's still a wall. She says, ‘I can't, I can't.' She doesn't understand that whatever I've gained goes out the window if she doesn't testify. They go back in the jury room and the first thing they think is, Well, if she really didn't do it, she would have gotten up and said so.” She sighed. “I'll try again in the morning. It's got to be last thing before summations.”
“All right.” Naomi nodded encouragement, but it was false. The truth was that she no longer believed Heather could summon the poise to deliver her critical lines, to say with any authority at all that she was innocent, that she was not a murderer of infants. If they were to prevail, Naomi thought, it would be due to Judith alone and not to Heather, who could do little more for herself than offer her wounds for analysis. Naomi watched Judith write at her table, her dark head down, her hand frantic and fast. A few minutes later, when they got under way again, Judith called her own shrink, an expert in the phenomenon of false confessions. This was a cheerful, portly man named Theodore Harvey, who possessed a rolling Welsh accent and a ring of blond curls at about ear level, the rest of his head shiny, pink, and bare. Though something of a hired gun for defense attorneys, the man was nonetheless widely published, and in addition to four academic volumes comprising his work in the field he had produced a popular book of nonfiction called
Admitting a Lie
. This featured, on its bright red cover, an
As Seen on Donahue
sticker beside the author's name.
Why, Judith asked her witness, would someone confess to a crime they had not committed?
It was not a question of simple confession, Harvey explained. There tended to be a gradual progression from “I didn't do it” to “I don't remember doing it” to “I don't think I did it” to “I must have done it,” each step achieved through the subtle power of modern interrogation tactics, an insidious feeding of information to the suspect, who is after all distressed and fearful. The phenomenon, he said, was somewhat akin to that of false memories, another byproduct of forceful suggestion on a mind experiencing extreme stress.
“So the officers conducting such an interrogation would gradually introduce new information and incorporate it into their questioning?”
“Yes. They will subtly work in facts that only the perpetrator of the crime would know, so that when the subject of the interrogation responds in the affirmative to any part of the statement, it can be inferred that he or she is admitting to this specific information. They may also flatter the subject by implying that his help is needed to ‘clear up' a problem, and invite him to create a kind of hypothetical crime scenario—‘If you were going to do this crime, would you do it this way or that way?' And when this scenario fits the known facts about the crime, the subject receives the approval of the interrogator. ‘That's exactly right! That's just how it was done!'”

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