Presumed innocent

Chapter 6

"Somehow, the boy, Wendell, became important," I said to Robinson. "To us, I mean. To me, at least. It's hard to explain. But somehow he was part of this thing with Carolyn."

He was an unusual child, big for his age, and he had the ambling clumsiness of some big children, a thick, almost oafish appearance. He was not so much slow as dulled. I asked one of the psychiatrists for an explanation, as if one is needed, and he said of this five-year-old, 'He's depressed.'

Wendell McGaffen, during the pendency of his mother's case, had been moved from the County Shelter to a foster home. He saw his father every day, but never his mother. After the usual disputes in court, Carolyn and I were given permission to speak with him. Actually, at first we did not talk to him at all. We sat in on sessions he had with the psychiatrists, who introduced us to Wendell. Wendell would play with the toys and figures that the shrink had around the room, and the shrink would ask Wendell whether he had any thoughts on different topics, which, almost inevitably, Wendell did not. The shrink, named Mattingly, said that Wendell had not in his weeks there asked once about his mother. And as a result they had not raised the subject.

Wendell liked Carolyn right from the start. He brought her the dolls. He made remarks to her. He directed her attention to birds, trucks, objects passing outside the window. On our third or fourth visit Carolyn told Wendell that she wanted to talk to him about his mother. The shrink appeared alarmed, but Wendell gripped his doll with both hands and asked, "What about?"

So it progressed, twenty, thirty minutes a day. The shrink was openly impressed and eventually asked Carolyn's permission to remain during their interviews, and over a period of weeks the story was told, in snatches and mumbled remarks, disordered offhand answers to questions Carolyn had asked, often days before. Wendell showed no real emotion other than his hesitation. Usually he would stand in front of Carolyn, with both his hands gripped hard around the midsection of a doll, at which he stared unflinchingly. Carolyn would repeat what he had told her and ask him more. Wendell would nod or shake his head or not answer at all. Now and then there were his explanations. 'It hurt.' 'I cried.' 'She set I shouldn't be quiet.'

"She wanted you to be quiet?"

"Yes. She set I shouldn't be quiet."

From another person the repetition, particularly, might have seemed cruel, but Carolyn somehow seemed to have a need to know that was in some measure selfless. Not long before the trial, Carolyn and the shrink decided that the county would not call Wendell to the witness stand unless it was an absolute necessity. The confrontation with his mother, she said, would be too much. But even with that decision made, Carolyn continued to meet with Wendell, to draw more and more from him.

"It's hard to explain," I told Robinson, "the way she looked at this kid. Into him almost. That intense. That earnest. I never figured her to be the type to have any kind of rapport with children. And when she did, I was astounded."

It made her mystery so much larger. She seemed like some Hindu goddess, containing all feelings in creation. Whatever wild, surging, libidinal rivers Carolyn undammed in me by her manner and appearance, there was something about the tender attention she showed this needy child that drew me over the brink, that gave my emotions a melting, yearning quality that I took to be far more significant than all my priapic heat. When she took on the quiet, earnest tone and leaned toward dear, slow, hurting Wendell, I was, whatever my regrets, full of love for her.

A wild love. Desperate and obsessive and willfully blind. Love, as love at its truest is, with no sense of the future, love beguiled by the present and unable to derive the meaning of signs.

One day I talked to Mattingly about the way Carolyn had worked with the boy. It was extraordinary, wasn't it? I asked. Amazing. Inexplicable. I wanted to hear him praise her. But Mattingly took my comments instead as a clinical inquiry, as if I was asking what could account for this phenomenon. He drew meditatively on his pipe. 'I've thought about that,' he said. Then his look became troubled, recognizing, I suppose, that he was liable to give offense or be misjudged himself. But he went on. 'And I believe,' he said, 'that in some small way she must remind him of his mother.'

The trial went well. Mrs. McGaffen was represented by Alejandro Stern-Sandy, outside the courtroom-an Argentinian Jew, a Spanish gentleman, courtly combed and perfect with his soft accent and his manicure. He is a mannerly, fastidious trial lawyer, and we decided to follow his low-key approach. We putt in our physical evidence, the doctors' testimony and their test results; then we offered the fruits of the search. With that, the county rested. Sandy called a psychiatrist who described Colleen McGaffen's gentle nature. Then he showed how good a lawyer he was by reversing the usual order of presentation. The defendant testified first, denying everything; then her husband came to the stand, weeping unbearably as he described the death of his first child; Wendell's fall, which he insisted he had witnessed; and his wife's devotion to their son. A fine trial lawyer always has a latent message to the jury, too prejudicial or improper to speak aloud, whether it's a racist appeal when black victims identify white defendants or the no-big-deal manner that a lawyer like Stern takes when the crime is only an attempt. In this case, Sandy wanted the jury to know that her husband forgave Colleen McGaffen, and if he could, why couldn't they do that, too? In a kind of professional salvation, I found that in the courtroom I could almost wall myself from Carolyn; I enjoyed extended periods of concentration and would wake to her presence beside me, and to the grip of my obsession, almost with surprise. But this work of will came at a heavy price. Outside, I was largely useless. To perform the most routine tasks-talking to witnesses, gathering exhibits required that all my energies be directed to a frozen inattention: Do not think about her, please do not think about her now. I did. I moved about in a spaced-out reality, vacillating among various lurid fantasies and moments of intense self-rebuke and instants when she was present in which I simply helplessly gawked.

"Finally," I told Robinson, "we were there one night, working in her office." The defense case was nearly over. Darryl had begun his testimony, and the pathos of this man's feckless inability to deal with anything that had happened was, in truth, terribly moving. Carolyn was going to do the cross-examination, and she was high. The courtroom was full of reporters; there were stories about the case on a couple of the TV stations most nights. And the cross itself was exciting because it required a kind of surgical skill: Darryl had to be destroyed as a witness but not as a human being. The jury's sympathy would never leave him, for he was, in the end, not doing anything less than most of us would do, trying to save what was left of his family. So Carolyn was lingering over this cross, practicing it, modulating it, talking it out, flashing in front of me like a coin turning in the air. She was in her stocking feet, and a full skirt that twirled slightly around her whenever she pivoted in the narrow space; she was pacing briskly as she worked through the tone and the questions. "And there are wrappers from our fast-food dinner on the desk, and a scatter of various records: Darryl's time and attendance sheets from work to show that he's too busy to know what is up at home; medical reports on the child; statements from his teachers and an aunt. And we are setting up each question. 'No, no, softer, softer. "Mr. McGaffen, you couldn't know that Wendell showed his bruises at school?" Like that. Maybe three questions: "Do you know Beverley Morrison? Well, would it refresh your recollection to know that she was Wendell's teacher? Did you know that Ms. Morrison discussed Wendell's physical condition with your wife on the evening of November 7 of last year?"

"Softly," she says.

"Softly, right," I say. "Don't come too close to him. And don't move too much in the courtroom. You don't want to seem angry."

And Carolyn is excited and she reaches across the desk, very high, and grabs both my hands.

"It's going to be so good," she says, and then her eyes, which are quite green, stay on me a little longer, just enough so that I know we've suddenly left the trial, and I say-and I have never said a word out loud up to that moment-I just say, as hollow and pathetic as I feel, "What the hell is going on, Carolyn?" and she smiles, for the fleetest instant, but with a stunning radiance, and says, "Not now," and goes right back to talking out the cross.

'Not now.' Not now. I caught the last bus back to Nearing that night and sat in the dark pondering as we flashed under the streetlights. Not now. I haven't decided? I have. It's good. It's bad. I'm uncertain. I want to let you down easy.

But at least there was something. I gradually recognized the significance of our communication. I was not mad. I was not caught up with something imaginary; something was happening. We had been talking about something. And that turbulent, lost unease of mine began to change. There in the bus, as I sat in the rear, in a pit of darkness, my obsessions now took on a sabering quality, and knowing that I had entered the region of the real, I began to feel, simply, fear.