Beauty and the Beast

3

Benny Weiss is perhaps the best criminal lawyer in all Calusa. My partner Frank says that this is because Benny himself looks like a criminal. I don’t know what criminals are supposed to look like. I once thumbed through a psychological text in which there was a series of photographs, some of which were of schizophrenics, others of normal people like Frank and me. When these photos were shown to real-life schizophrenics who were asked to pick out the ones they preferred, they invariably picked out the pictures of schizophrenics like themselves. I don’t know what the test was supposed to prove.

But assuming Frank is correct about Benny looking like a criminal, then perhaps this accounts for the great number of criminals who seek his services when they run afoul of the law. I personally think Benny looks like a cocker spaniel. He is a smallish person — five feet eight inches at the outside, I would guess — slight of build, with a narrow face and soulful brown eyes and unruly brown hair that he rakes with his fingers every three or four minutes. He smokes incessantly. In his office that Wednesday morning at 10:30 A.M., he sat alternately smoking and raking his hair. He looked as if he had not slept much the night before. That was because I’d dragged him out of bed at 11:00 P.M. and asked him to meet me downtown, where a man named Luther Jackson — the fisherman who’d been anchored just off the Whisper Key beach on the night Michelle was murdered — had positively identified George Harper as the man he’d seen struggling with her. The identification had been made from a lineup of six men, all of them black, five of them policemen working for the Calusa PD The state’s attorney had questioned — or attempted to question — Harper soon after the identification was made. Both Benny and I had advised him to remain silent.

At nine this morning, I had accompanied Harper to court for what is known as a “first appearance hearing,” normally held on the morning after an arrest, to request bail for him. Ever since last November, when Florida’s Supreme Court had made its new ruling, even a person accused of a capital crime was entitled to bail. The ruling stated that before release on bail could be denied, proof of the crime had to be evident or presumption of the crime had to be great; it was the state’s attorney’s burden to oppose bail by showing that the evidence he possessed was legally sufficient to obtain a verdict of guilty. The court, in its sole discretion, had the right to grant or deny bail.

The County Court judge presiding over the hearing immediately informed me that I would have to take the matter before a Circuit Court judge who would later have trial jurisdiction. The Circuit Court judge hearing me could have set an impossible bail like half a million dollars, but he chose instead to deny bail completely, citing as his reason (not that he needed any) the particularly heinous nature of the crime. George Harper was taken to the Calusa County jail to await the grand jury’s decision as to whether it would indict or dismiss. The grand jury was scheduled to meet on the following Monday, November 23.

“Let me tell you something about the practice of criminal law,” Benny said, and dragged on his cigarette. “Criminal law involves guilt or innocence. You may argue that divorce also... or is that a touchy subject?”

“It is not a touchy subject,” I said.

“In which case, you may argue that divorce — at least in many states of the union — also involves guilt or innocence. But a man or a woman seeking a divorce, even if one or the other of them has broken the sacred vows of marriage...” (and here Benny, a confirmed bachelor, looked heavenward and smiled) “...is in no particular jeopardy, unless one considers onerous alimony a peril.”

“One might consider it a peril,” I said.

“Even so, however guilty one or the other party in a divorce action may be, neither is facing a prison term or death in the electric chair, which is the maximum penalty for first-degree murder in this state, which crime our friend George N. Harper has been charged with. What does the N stand for, do you know?”

“No,” I said.

“Now, Matthew,” Benny said, stubbing out his cigarette, and raking his right hand through his hair as though trying to remove the nicotine stains from his fingers, “I’m sure you’ll recall the Canons of Professional Ethics, which grant to a lawyer the right to undertake a defense regardless of his personal opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused... where did you go to law school?”

“Northwestern,” I said.

“Then I’m sure you’re familiar with the Canons.”

“I’m familiar with them.”

“And the professional right to undertake a defense even if you feel the accused is guilty.”

“Yes.”

“Otherwise, of course, an innocent person might be denied a proper defense, and then our entire judicial system would go to hell in a handbasket, and there’d be no more lawyers and no more law in this equitable land of ours. Where law ends, there tyranny begins, quote, unquote. Oliver Wendell Holmes, I believe.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Benny?”

He took another cigarette from the package on his desk, struck a match, held the flaming end to the tip, and exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke. As an afterthought, he blew out the match. “Now, Matthew,” he said, “if you do take on a client in a criminal case, whether or not you believe he’s guilty, then you are bound — and this is also in the Canons, Matthew — you are bound to present, by all fair and honorable means, every defense the law of the land permits, so that no person will be deprived of life or liberty except by due process. I believe that’s an exact quote, but I have the Canons here if you’d like to check them.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you saying, Benny?”

“Matthew, I appreciate your getting me out of bed last night, I truly do. I always enjoy going down to the police station at two in the morning—”

“It was only eleven.”

“It felt like two. But no matter, who needs sleep? I also enjoy listening to those assholes from the State’s Attorney’s Office, they really do give me great pleasure, Matthew. But, Matthew, whereas the Canons grant me the right to defend somebody I believe is guilty, they do not impose upon me the obligation to undertake such a defense. I believe George N. Harper is guilty. I have made it a policy over the years never to defend a person I believe is guilty. That’s why I’m such a good criminal lawyer. If I defend only the innocent, how can I help getting so many acquittals?”

“Benny—”

“I’ve also made it a policy never to defend a person I don’t like, even if I believe he’s innocent. I don’t particularly like George N. Harper, don’t ask me why. Therefore, ever grateful for the opportunity to get out of bed in the middle of the night and to go downtown without a shave, I must nonetheless decline your offer to represent Mr. Harper in this case.”

“Benny, he needs a good lawyer,” I said.

“You’re a good lawyer, Matthew.”

“I know very little about criminal law.”

“Then let the public defender handle it.”

“I think he’s innocent.”

“The Public Defender’s Office,” Benny said drily, “has also been known to believe in the innocence of an accused party.”

“That’s not the point. I know they’ve got some very good people up there, and I personally like Dick Jorgenson, but — damn it, Benny, they’ve got so many cases to handle, I’m afraid he’ll get lost in the shuffle.”

“Then defend him yourself,” Benny said simply.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Begin where the state’s attorney will begin,” Benny said, and stubbed out his cigarette. “He’s going to be building a case to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Harper did, in fact, murder his wife. He’s going to assemble whatever he can to show Harper had the means, the motive, and the opportunity. I don’t know when this thing will come to trial, the docket’s jammed right now, it might not be till early next year. So you’ll have plenty of time to assemble facts that will show he did not have the means, the motive, or the opportunity. If you believe he’s innocent, that’s what you’ll have to show, Matthew. And you’ll have to show it convincingly enough to keep your man out of the electric chair.”

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Then maybe you don’t believe in his innocence strongly enough.”

“I think I do, Benny.”

“Then take the case. Convince the jury.”

“You won’t help me?”

“I think he’s guilty,” Benny said simply, and put another cigarette in his mouth.

There were several very good reasons why I should not have undertaken the defense of George N. Harper.

To begin with, I was not a criminal lawyer, and I felt I might be doing him more harm than good. Section 782.04 of the F.S. reads: “The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated from a premeditated design to effect the death of the person killed... shall be murder in the first degree and shall constitute a capital felony, punishable as provided in s. 775.02.” The section defining the penalty referred to yet another section titled “Findings in Support of Sentence of Death,” and listing “aggravating circumstances” as one such supportive finding. Under a subheading that read “Aggravating circumstances shall be limited to the following,” there was a list that included “The capital felony was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel,” and lastly, “The capital felony was a homicide and was committed in a cold, calculated, and premeditated manner without any pretense of moral or legal justification.”

If the state’s attorney could prove that Harper had, in fact, bound his wife’s hands and feet with wire hangers before dousing her with gasoline and setting fire to her, there could be no question that the crime had been “cold, calculated, and premeditated,” and that it had also been “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.” Harper was facing death in the electric chair, and whereas he had specifically asked me to represent him, I wondered now if the better part of valor would not be to make a request to the court for an attorney more experienced in such matters.

Secondly, like Benny Weiss, I did not particularly like Harper. I tried to understand this unreasoning antipathy to the man. Was it caused by a lingering prejudice, the aftermath of a Chicago childhood that separated blacks and whites as effectively as a barbed-wire fence? I did not think so. I learned my first lesson in tolerance when I was seventeen and avidly chasing girls of any persuasion, color, or stripe. There was a gloriously beautiful black girl in my high-school English class, and I took her to the movies one night, and for ice-cream sodas later, and then led her into my father’s multipurpose Oldsmobile, and drove to a deserted stretch of road near the football field, and plied her with kisses and my ever-reliable “I love you” (her name was Ophelia Blair, “I love you, Ophelia,” my hand fumbling under her skirt), and then pleaded that she let me “do” it because I’d never in my life “done” it with a black girl.

Never mind that I’d never done it with a white girl, either. That was my supreme argument: she was black and I was white, and oh what a glorious adventure awaited us if only she’d allow me to lower her panties and spread her legs, a latter-day Stanley exploring Africa. It never occurred to me that I was reducing her to anonymity, denying her very Ophelianess, equating her with any other black girl in the world, expressing desire for her only because she was black and not merely herself, whoever that might have been, the person I had not taken the slightest amount of trouble to learn. I was baffled when she pulled down her skirt and tucked her breasts back into her brassiere, and buttoned her blouse, and asked me very softly to take her home, please. I asked her out a dozen times after that, and she always refused politely. I was learning. I have learned well over the years. I may not be color-blind (that would be too much to expect of any white man) but neither do I ever base my personal response to any man or woman on an accidental, at best, tinting of the flesh, preferring instead to seek out the person within the shell.

So why didn’t I like George N. Harper?

Maybe it was because he was so damn ugly. I have never won any beauty contests myself, but the size of Harper, the intimidating hulk of him, the gorilla-like slouch of him, the menace — yes, menace — inherent in his eyes and in his stance and in the huge hands that dangled at the ends of his powerful arms, the sheer primeval power of him, the frightening look of him caused me to back involuntarily away from him whenever we were in the same room together, as though I were convinced that he was capable of committing against me the very crime he’d been accused of committing against his wife. And yet if the color of his skin didn’t matter to me, then why should his physical appearance have constituted a handicap? Did due process apply only to the beautiful people in the world? Wasn’t Harper entitled to the same fair and honorable defense Robert Redford might have enjoyed? Or did I secretly believe he was guilty, and was I looking for excuses to avoid advocating his cause, depriving him beforehand of his life or liberty without benefit of the due process required by the laws of the land? No, he was innocent. I knew it with every fiber in my body. He was innocent, damn it. I should defend him, I would defend him.

But there was yet another reason why I should have told him no. Discounting my inexperience, discounting my aversion to the man, discounting even the selfishness of the last reason, it remained nonetheless a true and valid reason for begging off.

I had planned a vacation.

Selfish, yes, I admit it.

Or perhaps not quite so selfish when one considers that Dale had planned her own vacation for the same period of time, or that both our vacations coincided with Joanna’s Thanksgiving break, when all three of us planned to go to Mexico together.

We had been working on the trip for months, consulting the best travel agent in Calusa (no great shakes, but really the only game in town), and were scheduled to leave for Puerto Vallarta nine days from now, on Friday, November 27, to spend almost four days as guests of Samuel Thorn, a retired Calusa Circuit Court judge, in a villa he’d owned for the past year, after which we planned to go to Mexico City, flying back home again on Saturday, December 5. True enough, this would only be nine days. And assuming, as Benny had guessed, that we would not be coming to trial till after the new year, nine days of preparation would not be sorely missed.

Unless one considered the indisputable fact that the state’s attorney would be working during those days to compile the evidence he hoped would put Harper in the electric chair. I supposed Dale would take the news of a canceled vacation like the adult she was. But Joanna had just turned fourteen, and she had already planned a term paper on her “Mexican Adventure,” and had bought a new bikini to wear poolside at the Camino Real, where she planned to exhibit breasts that, after a prolonged delay, were at last maturing at an alarming rate — alarming at least to a father who would have beaten off with a stick any pimply faced teenager who dared openly ogle them. When she’d modeled the bikini for Dale and me, I commented mildly and with some embarrassment that it was, ah, a bit revealing, didn’t she think, for someone who was only fourteen? Joanna, with her customary candor, said, “You should see the one I didn’t buy, Dad.” End of argument. But how was I to tell her that I was thinking about canceling our Mexican trip in favor of defending a man I didn’t like, a man who’d been accused of murdering his wife in the most horrible manner, a man I “felt” was innocent (“Never feel,” Benny had told me just before I’d left his office. “Know!”) when all the signs indicated that he was guilty as hell?

By Friday of that week, I still hadn’t decided whether to represent George N. Harper (as he had asked me to do) or to advise him either to find another lawyer who would accept his case or request the public defender to appoint one for him. Joanna was supposed to be with her mother that weekend, but at the last minute my former wife called to ask if I would mind having her two weekends in a row because she, Susan, had been invited to attend the Tampa Bay Bucs football game that Saturday, and she and Arthur planned to spend the weekend up there, not returning till late Sunday night — so would I mind?

I never mind seeing my daughter two weekends in a row; I would like to see my daughter every day of my life. Neither do I mind Susan’s apparent need to tell me just which eligible bachelor she is currently seeing and presumably sleeping with. Earlier in the year, she had enjoyed a brief but doubtlessly torrid fling with a man named Georgie Poole, reputedly the richest man in all Calusa, a bachelor in his mid-forties who, it was rumored, had a penchant for television cuties in situation comedies, hence his frequent “business” trips to Los Angeles. The romance had cooled by March, at which time Susan promptly informed me that she had taken up with “a very dear man” named Arthur Butler, the one who would be taking her to Tampa this weekend.

In one of her brighter moments, Susan mentioned wittily that not only had the Butler done it, but he’d done it exceedingly well, and was, moreover, continuing to do it on a regular basis. I don’t know why Susan keeps reminding me that she’s a desirable woman; I knew she was desirable when I married her, and I even thought she was desirable when at last I divorced her. (I also don’t know why so many divorced women seem to drift into selling real estate, which was what my former wife now did.) I wish she would keep her various relationships to herself. So long as none of them is harmful to my daughter, so long as she doesn’t frighten the horses, so to speak, I really don’t care what she does with her own life. But I do object to hypocrisy.

Susan was poised to spend the weekend with Arthur Butler in Tampa, there to enjoy the football game and, I was certain, sundry indoor sports as well. On her block (as my partner Frank would put it), this was perfectly acceptable behavior. But the first words my daughter said to me when I picked her up after school that Friday were, “Mom won’t let me go to Mexico if Dale’s coming with us.”

I must tell you, first, that Joanna is blonde and blue-eyed and long legged and easily the most beautiful child in all Calusa, and perhaps the entire state of Florida, or maybe even the world. She is also a scientific genius. Or, at least, she gets As in biology and provides fierce B-plus competition for the boys in her geometry class, even though some unenlightened sexists would maintain that these subjects would best be left to the male of the species.

On the other hand, Joanna does very poorly in English, and she cannot boil an egg properly, and I have never caught her knitting or tatting or playing the harpsichord or doing any of the little feminine curtseying things that used to be considered the mark of a domesticated American female back when Abraham Lincoln was president.

Joanna wants to be a brain surgeon.

She read somewhere that a famous surgeon in Indianapolis used to practice tying one-handed knots inside a matchbox. Whenever Joanna and I dine out together, she prays that the matches on the table will not be of the book type, but rather of the box type. Often, she sits by the pool at the house I am renting, and ties knots inside a matchbox while simultaneously reading Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. She finds Freud “neat.”

The next thing you should know about Joanna is that she absolutely adores Dale. Her sudden infatuation came as a total surprise to me; before Dale, Joanna had been known to demolish in her tracks any lady I had the audacity to introduce. Her sotto voce nicknames for these hapless unsuspecting beauties were in themselves devastating: she secretly labeled one woman “Bubbles La Tour,” merely because she was as magnificently endowed as a burlesque queen; she privately called another “Houdini the Great” only because she had a not-unsurprising habit of vanishing whenever Joanna put in a surly appearance; she dubbed yet another “El Dopo,” because her name was Eleanor Daniels and she made the mistake one bleak October afternoon of wearing a sweater monogrammed with the initials E.D. (In all fairness to my daughter, Eleanor really wasn’t too terribly bright.) Joanna’s smoldering gaze could reduce to steaming ashes the strongest of suitors for her cherished father’s attention; she once grew extravagantly jealous of a twice-weekly cleaning woman who was in her sixties, and about whom I made an unfortunate and idle comment to the effect that she was “a nice person.” Electra had nothing on my daughter Joanna. But all that was before Dale; Joanna would walk through fire for Dale O’Brien.

So now she was telling me that my beloved former wife would not allow her to go to Mexico if Dale would be accompanying us.

“Why not?” I asked.

“She says she has custody.”

“I know she does. What’s that got to do—”

“She says she’s responsible for my moral rectitude.”

“That’s redundant.”

“Huh?”

“Rectitude means ‘moral uprightness.’ Is your mother saying she’s responsible for your moral moral uprightness?”

“Whatever. She won’t let me go, Dad.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been planning on this for months!”

“So have I. I’d better call her.”

“I think she’s already left for Tampa,” Joanna said.

“I’ll try her, anyway.”

She had not already left for Tampa. She was, in fact, still packing when I phoned her at the house I used to share with her.

“What is it?” she said. Her tone of voice was the one a mother might have used on a wayward child who’d just stamped into the kitchen while a soufflé was in the oven.

“You tell me,” I said.

“Oh, it’s riddle time, right?”

“No, it’s Q and A time. What’s this about Joanna?”

“What’s what about Joanna?”

“Did you tell her she can’t go to Mexico with me?”

“Oh, so that’s it.”

“Yes, that’s it, Susan.”

“If you have any questions about custody, I suggest you call my lawyer. I’m busy right now, and I—”

“I have no intention of calling that mealymouthed shyster you—”

“I’m sure Eliot McLaughlin would enjoy knowing you think of him as a mealymouthed shyster.”

“He already knows it. This has nothing to do with custody, Susan. You had Joanna for Easter, and you’ll have her again for Christmas. I get her for Thanksgiving. And I’m taking her to Mexico with me, period.”

“Not if the redhead goes with you.”

“If by the redhead—”

“You know exactly who I mean.”

“Are you referring to Dale O’Brien?”

“Oh, is that her name? And here I thought Dale was a man’s name.”

“Susan, cut it out.”

“Cut what out?”

“This bullshit about Dale.”

“I certainly hope you don’t use that kind of language in Joanna’s presence. It’s bad enough—”

“I’m trying to tell you there’s no legal way you can prevent me from taking her any damn place I want to take her!”

“No? How about corrupting the morals of a minor?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Taking a fourteen-year-old to Mexico, where you’ll be living in sin with—”

“Living in sin? Come on, Susan, this isn’t the Middle—”

“What do you call it, Matthew? You’ll be in the same house with Joanna and whatever her name is—”

“Her name is Dale O’Brien.”

“For four days, isn’t that what Joanna told me? Four days in Sam Thorn’s cozy little villa, with you in one bedroom screwing your brains out with the redhead while across the hall Joanna—”

“What I do in private has nothing to—”

“Public is more like it.”

“There are four bedrooms in the villa. Joanna will have her own—”

“How kind of Sam to provide such luxurious surroundings for you and your little bimbo.”

“This must be the Middle Ages! I haven’t heard the word bimbo since—”

“What would you prefer calling her, Matthew?”

“What do you call Arthur Butler?”

“Whatever I call Arthur is between—”

“Where will you be sleeping with him this weekend?”

“Wherever we’ll be sleeping is none of your business. And besides, Joanna won’t be with us.”

“Who says?”

“What?”

“I said who says Joanna won’t be with you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean I’m taking her home to you right this minute. Back to your custody, darling. So you can protect her rectitude.”

“What?”

“I said—”

“You told me she could stay with you this weekend.”

“That was before you started pulling all this stuff about Mexico. Will you be there for the next ten minutes or so? I wouldn’t want Joanna coming home to an empty house. Might not look too good when I challenge your custody.”

“What?”

“Let me spell it out for you, Susan. One, we’re divorced. I don’t like being dragged into your personal life, and I wish to hell you’d keep out of mine. Two, I don’t enjoy these screaming contests on the telephone. Anger is a form of intimacy, and I don’t want to be intimate with you. And lastly, you’ve got a choice. Either Joanna goes with me to Mexico next week, just as she’s supposed to, or else I take her back to you as soon as I hang up, and you can decide then whether you want to stay home this weekend or take her to Tampa with you, where you’ll be ‘living in sin,’ as you choose to call it, with a man named Arthur Butler, an act the courts might consider unfit behavior for a woman who has custody of a fourteen-year-old.”

“This is blackmail,” Susan said.

“Nonetheless, what’s your answer? Does she come to Mexico with me, or to Tampa with you? Or do you stay right here in Calusa this weekend? I’m sure your friend can find someone to take those football tickets off his—”

“You are a son of a bitch,” she said.

“Decide, Susan.”

“Take her to Mexico.”

“Thank you.”

“A rotten son of a bitch,” she said, and hung up.

I felt as if I’d just successfully pleaded a case before the Supreme Court of the land.

Oddly and surprisingly, it was my daughter Joanna who helped me make up my mind about George N. Harper. Her reaction to the news that her mother had “reconsidered” the stand she’d taken on Mexico was completely ecstatic, but she fell almost immediately into a blue funk that indicated to me she had something more important on her mind. I have learned over the years that it’s never wise to pry when Joanna is mulling a problem. If she wants to tell me about it, if she wants my advice or my solace, she’ll eventually spill it all out, often quite suddenly, as she did that night after dinner.

In Calusa, the temperatures at night sometimes drop alarmingly, even in the best of months. November is not one of the better months, although we’d been blessed these past few weeks with benign temperatures and sunny skies while my partner Frank’s pals back in New York were suffering through ten-below-zero temperatures. The house was chilly tonight. I had set fire to one of those fake logs you buy in a drugstore, and I was pouring myself a cognac when Joanna said, without preamble, “Do you think Heather is a slut?”

For a moment, I had difficulty remembering just who Heather was. Ever since Joanna first entered nursery school, there had been a constant parade of young girls in the house, all of them with chic, sophisticated names like Kim, Darcy, Greer, Alyce (with a y), Candace, Erica, Stacey, Crystal, and yes, Heather. I sometimes wondered what had happened to all those good old-fashioned names like Mary, Jean, Joan, Nancy, Alice (with an i), and Betty.

“Heather?” I said.

“Yeah, Heather.”

I dimly recalled a plump little girl with mousy brown hair and dark brown eyes who — at the age of six, anyway — had an alarming habit of bursting into tears whenever she was supposed to spend the night at our house. I could not reconcile this sobbing little tyke with the image Joanna’s word had conjured: a slut was somebody who stood on a street corner in Frank’s beloved New York City, swinging a satin handbag, skirt slit to her thigh, winking at passing strangers and asking them if they’d like to have a good time.

“Everybody’s saying she’s a slut,” Joanna said.

“Who’s everybody?”

“Everybody.”

In Joanna’s lexicon, “everybody” meant all the girls in the eighth grade.

“Do you think she is?” I asked.

“Well, she may be fooling around a little, but who cares? So’s everybody else.”

In Joanna’s lexicon, “fooling around” meant being intimate with a member of the opposite sex; “everybody else” meant a handful of girls who were precocious.

“Not me,” she said quickly, and grinned, and then became immediately sober again. “That’s not the point,” she said, “whether she is or she isn’t. I just don’t like them saying she is without knowing for sure, I mean.”

“Is she a close friend of yours?”

“No, not close.”

“But a friend?”

“Not even a friend, really. I mean, I know her to say hello to, that’s all. I mean, she’s not a very attractive person, Dad. She’s fat, and... well, she’s sort of dumb for a place like Saint Mark’s, which is pretty hard to get into, even if it isn’t Bedloe. And her language... well, she curses a lot, even more than any of the other girls do — that’s normal for Saint Mark’s, cursing a lot, the whole ‘shit, piss, cunt, fuck’ routine, you know? But Heather really goes over board with it, like she’s trying to prove how mature she is, you know what I mean?”

I was still reeling over the string of profanities my fourteen year-old daughter had casually dropped into the conversation.

“Dad?” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“You know what I mean?”

“Sure, she—”

“Sort of shows off, you know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But that doesn’t make her a slut, does it?”

“Not necessarily.”

“I mean, even if she is fooling around a little. Which nobody knows for sure.”

“What’s a little?”

“Well... with more than one boy. More than the boy you’re going steady with. Maybe two or three boys. Or maybe four.”

“Uh-huh.” I was afraid to ask what “a lot” might be.

“Dad? Are you okay?”

“Yes, fine,” I said.

“So everybody’s giving her the cold shoulder, as if she’s some kind of... pariah? Is that a word?”

“That’s a word.”

“Yeah, pariah. Which, even if she isn’t as gorgeous as some of the other kids, and curses a lot, or whatever, that’s no reason to treat her as if she doesn’t exist, is it? Or calling her a slut behind her back, even sometimes to her face? Garland called her a slut to her face today.”

“Garland.”

“Yeah, Garland McGregor. You know Garland, she slept over once.”

“Right, Garland.”

“Who, I mean, was only fooling around when she was thirteen. Garland, I mean. With this boy from Bedloe, even if he was stunning. I almost burst into tears when it happened today, when Garland called her a slut to her face. I mean, she’s got feelings, too, hasn’t she? Heather, I mean. Hasn’t she got feelings, too?”

“Yes, darling, she has feelings, too,” I said.

“I’m going to go up to her on Monday and tell her to ignore what all those assholes are saying.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Do you think that’s the right thing to do? I mean, Dad, I don’t even like her. And suppose... well... suppose she really is a slut, like everybody’s saying she is?”

“But you don’t know that for sure, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“And neither do the others.”

“No, they don’t know it for sure, Dad.”

“Then, yes, it’s the right thing to do.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Joanna said.

I had already decided I would try to defend George N. Harper.