Presumed innocent

Chapter 25

Three a.m. When I awake my heart is racing and cool traces of sweat are abrading my neck, so that in the idiocy of sleep I am trying to loosen my collar. I grope; then lie back. My breath is short, and my heartbeat thunders intermittently in the ear against the pillow. My dream is still clear to me: my mother's face in agony; that worn cadaverous image as she neared the end, and worse, her look of lost, unspeaking terror.

When my mother became sick, and quickly died, she was in the most peaceful period of her adult life. She and my father were no longer living together, although they still worked side by side each day in the bakery. He had moved in with a widow, Mrs. Bova, whose urgent bearing when she came into the shop I can remember even from the years before her husband died. For my mother, whose life with my father had been a dominion of fear, this arrangement became a kind of liberation. Her interest in the world outside her suddenly increased. She became one of the first of the regular callers on those listener-participation talk shows. Tell us what you think about interracial dating, legalizing marijuana, who killed Kennedy. She stacked the dining-room table with old newspapers and magazines, pads and index cards on which she made notations to herself, preparing for tomorrow's programs. My mother, who was phobic about venturing beyond our apartment building or the shop, who had to begin her preparations early in the morning if she was going to depart her home sometime that afternoon, who from the time I was eight sent me to the market so that she could avoid leaving the house-my mother became a local personality of sorts for her outspoken views about various worldly controversies. I could not reconcile this development with the accommodations I had made long before with myself to accept her wildly verging eccentricities, or the narrow margins of her former life.

She had been twenty-eight, four years my father's senior, when they were married, the sixth daughter of a Jewish union organizer and a lass from Cork. My father wed, I'm sure, for her savings, which allowed him to open up the shop. Nor was there ever any sign that my mother had married for love. She was an old maid and, I would guess, far too peculiar to gather other suitors. Her behavior, as I witnessed it, was apt to be excessive and ungovernable, with manic tours from pinnacles of rosy hilarity to hours of brooding looks. Sometimes she became frantic. She was forever running to ransack her crowded dresser drawers, rummaging in her sewing box as she made high-pitched excited noises. Because she seldom left home, her sisters made it a habit to look after her. This was a brave endeavor. When my aunts visited, my father would assail them in loud conversation with himself as busybodies, and he was not above actual threats of violence if they came when he was drunk. The two who ventured most often, my Aunts Flo and Sarah, were both bold, determined women, their father's daughters, and they were apt to control my father with stern looks and fearless demean or, not much different than if they were confronting some barking cur. They were undeterred in their unannounced mission to protect the meek-Rosie (my mother) and, especially, me. For me these sisters were a hovering presence throughout my childhood. They brought me candies; they took me for haircuts and bought my clothes. They supervised my upbringing in such routine fashion that I was in my twenties before I recognized their intentions-or their kindness. And somehow, without ever realizing it had happened, I grew to know there were two worlds, my mother's and the other one dwelled in by her sisters, the one to which I eventually recognized I, as well, belonged. It was a fixed star of my youth to think that my mother was not, as I put it to myself, regular; to know that my adoration of her was a purely private matter, unintelligible to others and beyond my power to explain.

Do I really care what she would think now? I suppose. What child would not? I am almost glad she did not live to witness this. In her last few months she was with us. We were still living in the city in a one-bedroom apartment, but Barbara refused to see my mother anywhere else. She slept on a daybed in the living room from which she seldom rose. Barbara, most of the time, sat on a hard wooden chair drawn close. Near the end, my mother spoke constantly to Barbara. Her head was laid on her pillow, her face sadly reduced by disease, her eyes narrowly focused, their light growing weak. Barbara held her hand. They murmured. I could not make out the words-but the sound was constant, like a running tap. Barbara Bernstein, daughter of a sleek suburban matron, and my mother, of roaming mind and indelibly sweet disposition, voyaged to one another, crossed the straits of loneliness, while I, as ever, was too full of private grief to make my own approach. I watched them from the door: for Barbara, the mother who made no demands; for Rosie, a child who would not disregard her. When I took Barbara's place, my mother held my hand. I had the decency to tell her often that I loved her; she smiled weakly, but seldom spoke. Near the end, it was Barbara who gave her the shots of Demerol. A few of the syringes are still downstairs in a box of odd keepsakes of my mother that Barbara maintains: antique bobbins and index cards; the gold-tipped Parker pen she used to make notes for her radio appearances.

I walk through the dark to find my slippers, slide my robe from the closet. In the living room, I sit, feet up, huddled in a rocking chair. Lately I have been thinking of taking up cigarettes again. I feel no cravings, but it would give me something to do in these abject hours in the dead of night when I am now so often awake.

A game I play with myself is called What Is the Worst Part? So many things seem trivial. I do not care much now about the way the women gape at me when I walk around in the village center. I do not worry about my reputation, or the fact that for the rest of my life, even if charges are dropped tomorrow, many people will cringe reflexively whenever they hear my name. I do not worry about how hard it will be for me to find work as an attorney if I am acquitted. But the steady emotional erosion, the sleeplessness, the manic anxiety I cannot pretend about or minimize. What is worst are these midnight wakings and the instants before I can gather myself, when I am sure that the terror is never going to end. It is like groping for the switch plate in the dark, but I am never certain-and here the terror is the worst-I am never sure that I will find it. As the search becomes more and more prolonged, the little bit of sense that holds forth in me erodes, gives way, bubbles off like a tablet dropped into water, and the wild blackness of some limitless and everlasting panic begins to swallow me.

That is what is worst; that and my worries about Nathaniel. On Sunday, we will put him on a train for Camp Okawaka near Skageon, where he is scheduled to remain for the three weeks the trial is projected to last. Recalling this, I quietly tread the stairs and stand in the dark hall outside his door. I listen until I can catch the rhythm of his breath, and then force my own breathing down to that same measure. As I watch Nat sleep, the weirdness of science overcomes me: I think of atoms and molecules, skin and veins, muscle and bones. I try to comprehend my son for an instant as a compilation of parts. But that fails. We cannot ever enlarge the realm of our final understanding. I know Nathaniel as the hot mass of my feelings for him; I behold him as something no smaller or more finite or reducible than my passions. He will not piece or parse. He is my boy, gentle and beautiful in sleep, and I am grateful, grateful so that my heart is sore and breaking, that in this rough life I have felt such tenderness.

If I am convicted, they will take me away from him. Even Larren Lyttle will send me to prison for many years, and the thought of missing the remainder of his young life shatters me, breaks me into pieces. Oddly, I feel little conscious fear of prison itself. I dread the exile and the separation. The thought of confinement can make me ill at ease. But the actual physical horrors I am sure to suffer are seldom in my mind, even when I pierce myself with the thought of the extreme consequences I may face.

And yet I know. I have spent days at Rudyard, the state pen, where every murderer is sent. I have been there usually to interview a witness, but the sights are chilling. The bars are heavy iron slats, painted flat black, two inches deep, one-half inch wide, and behind them are all these bastards who now-now it strikes you--are so much the same. The black guys chattering their manic raging stuff. The white guys in their rolled-up stocking caps. The Latinos who look out with pointy-eyed rage. They are collectively every man you have avoided in a hallway or a bus station, every kid you picked out in high school as destined to be a bum. They are the ones who always wore their deficits like scars, headed here almost as certainly as a skyward-shot arrow plunging back to earth. About this group it is no longer possible to harbor any kind of sentiment. I have heard every horror story. And I know that these grisly anecdotes are some of the unseen ink that blackens my dreams. For me this will not be far from torture. I know about the nighttime shivs, about the showers where blow jobs are given in the open. I know about Marcus Wheatley, one of the guys I tried to get to talk in Night Saints, who hosed somebody on a dope deal down there, and was laid on his back in the weight room, told to put up his hands, and then given a barbell with 250 pounds on each end, which asphyxiated him, even while it acted half like a guillotine. I know about the demographics of that neighborhood, 16 percent murderers, and more than half the inmates there for some form of violent crime. I know about the gray food. The four men in a cell. The odor of excrement that is overpowering on certain tiers. I know that every month there are areas where the gang control becomes so complete that the guards refuse to walk through for days. I know about the guards themselves and the eight of them who were convicted in the federal court for a New Year's party they threw in which they used shotguns to line up twelve black prisoners whom they took turns beating with flagstones and bricks.

I know about what happens to men like me there, because I know 'What happened to some I helped to send. I know about Marcy Lupino, who, whenever my thoughts loiter here, is the person most likely to come to mind. Marcello was a regular type, your basic hustling American, a C.P.A. who early in his career did a little work setting odds for some of the boys from his old neighborhood. Eventually Marcy's accounting practice prospered and he determined that he no longer required outside employment, at which time John Conte, one of the Boys, informed him that his was not the kind of job that he was free to quit. And that's the way it went. Marcy Lupino, respected CTA, PTA president, and member of the board of directors of two banks, a guy who wouldn't monkey with the books of his biggest client, left his office every afternoon at 3:30 p.m. sharp to set the spread on ball games, to tote the odds for tomorrow's ponies. All well and good, until one day when a federal snitch gave away a wire room. The IRS came through the door and found Marcy Lupino among half a dozen other people and three million dollars in betting slips. The feds wanted him to talk in the worst way. But Marcy was very good at arithmetic. Two years on a gambling beef, mail fraud, wire fraud, racketeering charges, whatever the feds could put to him, was not worth ten minutes of what John Conte and the Boys would do. They would cut out his testicles and feed them to him, make him chew. And this, Marcy Lupino knew, was not a figure of speech. So Mike Townsend from the Organized Crime Strike Force called me. He wanted to provide Marcy with incentives. We charged Marcy stateside, and when he was convicted he went to Rudyard instead of the federal overnight camp he had been counting on, a place with a salad bar and tennis courts, a place where he would teach bookkeeping to inmates working on college degrees and copulate with Mrs. Lupino every ninety days as part of the furlough program. Instead, we sent him off in manacles, chained to a man who had put out his infant daughter's eyes with his keys.

Six months later Townsend called and we took a trip north to see if Lupino had responded. We found him in a field with a hoe. He was scraping at the ground. We reintroduced ourselves, hardly a necessity. Marcy Lupino took his hoe, propped it under his arm, and leaned on it as he wept. He cried like I have never seen a man cry; he shook from head to toe, his face turned purple, and the water poured from his eyes, truly, as from a faucet. A little fat bald-headed forty-eight-year-old man, crying as hard as he could. But he would not talk. He said one thing to us: 'I got no teet'. Nothing else.

As we were walking back, the guard explained.

Big buck nigger, Drover, wanted Lupino as his babe. He's the kind, man, nobody says no, not even the Italians in this joint. He gets himself into Lupino's cell one night, takes out his dingus, and tells Lupino to suck. Lupino won't, so Drover takes Lupino's face and bangs it on the bunk rail until there is not a whole tooth left in Lupino's head; some aching roots, some pieces, but not one tooth. Warden's got a rule, the guard says. You get bandages for your wounds, we'll sew you up, but no special treatment unless you talk. Fuckin Lupino ain't getting his false teeth until he tells who did the tap dance on him. And fuckin Lupino, he ain't tellin, he knows what's good for him, nobody here is that dumb. No, the guard says, he ain't tellin. And ol' Drover, he is laughin, he says he done a real good job, and that his big Johnson goes in there now, smooth as silk; he says he been in many pussies that don't feel that good. The guard, a fine humanitarian, leaned on his shotgun and laughed. Crime, he reported to Townsend and me, sure don't pay.

Run, I think now as I sit in the dark contemplating Marcy Lupino. Run. The thought always comes that suddenly: run. As a prosecutor, I could never understand why they stayed around to let it fall, to face trial, sentencing, prison. But they remained for the most part, as I have. There is $1600 in my checking account and I have no other money in the world. If I looted Barbara's trust, I would have enough to go, but then I would probably lose the only real motive I have for freedom-the chance to see Nat. And even if I could spend summers with him in Rio or Uruguay or wherever it is that they do not extradite for murder, the powers of even a desperate fancy are too meager to imagine how I would survive without a language I know or a skill those cultures would recognize. I could simply disappear to the center of Cleveland or Detroit, become somebody different, and never see my son again. But the fact is that none of these are visions of what I recognize as life. Even in these lightless hours, I want the same things I wanted when I got off the bus at night in the village green in Nearing. We are so simple sometimes, and fortified so strangely. I sit here in the dark with my heels drawn against me, and as I shiver, I imagine the odor of the smoke of cigarettes.