The Judgment

Seven

The voice of the doctor was speaking his name, but I was looking at the face of someone I did not know. It had been twelve years, but the changes I saw had not been produced by time alone.

The Elliott Winston I knew had been quick, alert, easygoing, and always affable; the man standing in front of me waiting for Dr.

Friedman to unlock the heavy gauge wire screen was tense, expectant, impatient. He was wearing an old suit that was too tight for him. Buttoned in front, the lapels bowed out from his chest.

A solid-color tie was off center at his throat, and one of the collar points of his soiled white shirt bent up. His hands were clasped behind his back and his feet were spread the width of his shoulders. Though I was just a few feet away from him, he stared straight ahead as if there was no one else around.

We stepped inside, and Friedman rolled the gate shut behind us. Elliott did not move. He stood there, erect, immobile, locked in that rigid stare.

“Elliott,” Friedman said in a calm, unhurried voice, “you remember Joseph Antonelli, don’t you?”

There was no reaction, no movement of any kind, not even a slight flutter of the lashes over his eyes. I wondered if he had slipped into a catatonic state where he could not hear anything.

“He does this sometimes,” Friedman explained. “When he’s thinking about something.” With a hopeless shrug, he added, “I’ve seen him do it for hours. When it happens, I’m afraid there really isn’t-”

He never finished. Elliott had turned toward me and extended his hand. “Joseph Antonelli. I knew you’d come one day.”

I took his hand, and then, when I saw his face, had to force myself not to let go. He was looking at me with such enormous concentration that I thought his eyes would burn right through me. There was a power about him that was extraordinary.

“It was good of you to bring Mr. Antonelli,” he said, looking over my shoulder. “Thank you, Dr. Friedman.”

He said it the way someone might address a subordinate, not with a tone of command, but with that benevolence which underscores the distance between the one who bestows it and the one who receives it. No doubt used to the strange eccentricities of his patient, Friedman seemed not to mind. He signaled a white-coated orderly who was standing at the far end of the large, open ward.

“Mr. Antonelli will be visiting with Elliott for a while,” he said when the orderly drew near. “Make sure he has anything he needs.”

After Friedman had gone, Elliott and I sat down at a square wooden table in front of a wire-covered window at the side of the room. Farther down, in the corner, three patients, dressed in white short-sleeve V-neck tops and baggy drawstring trousers, were sitting in a semicircle on plastic chairs. One of them, one leg folded under the other, held a magazine in his hands, turning it around and around, upside down, then right side up, over and over again. Another one, short, balding, with thick, stubby fingers, kept throwing out one or the other of his hands, clutching at the air, and then, bringing it back in, slowly opening his fist to see what he had caught. The third scarcely moved at all. He slumped forward, eyes glazed, mumbling to himself.

Elliott caught me looking. “Watch this,” he whispered.

“Chester!” The mumbling stopped, and the third man lifted his head, a bewildered expression on his face.

“What is 3,182 times 5,997?”

The third man blinked, then answered, “19,082,454,” and then blinked again.

“I’ll ask him something difficult this time,” Winston remarked under his breath. “Chester,” he called out. “What is 8.105698

times 10.00787?”

Chester blinked. “81.120771.” And then blinked once more.

“Chester, who is the president of the United States?”

This time he did not blink. He smiled, a foolish, heartbreak-ing smile. “George Washington.”

“Very good,” Elliott remarked with a glance of approval. “Now, if Lincoln freed the slaves, what did Washington do?”

“Freed the cherry trees,” he answered with a childlike grin.

“Thank you, Chester,” Elliott said in the same supremely confident voice with which he had dismissed Dr. Friedman.

“Chester was a high school history teacher,” he explained. “In the other world.”

“The other world? You mean, before he was sick, in the real world?”

This last phrase seemed to bother him. A dark look swept across his visage. “The other world,” he insisted. His mood switched again. “And I think that is the way he taught it, too,”

he said, laughing. Abruptly, the laughter stopped. “That’s not true.

In the other world he taught history the way they all teach history, and he could not balance his checkbook. Then, when he became sane, he forgot all the names and dates and all the other unimportant things they cram their heads full of, and as soon as his mind was clear he knew everything about numbers.”

He looked at me for a moment. “You don’t believe me. Go ahead, ask him anything you want, any combination, any calculation. He can do it in his head instantaneously. I should know.

I’ve been trying to catch him in a mistake for years.”

“How would you know if he did?” I asked without thinking.

He felt sorry for me. “Didn’t you notice? He only makes a mistake when he doesn’t blink.”

I was wrong. He did not feel sorry for me, not the way I had thought. He was playing with me. I could see it in his eyes.

“It’s true though, isn’t it?” he asked. “Whenever the answer is right, he blinks before he gives it. Isn’t that a perfect example of reasoning from effect back to cause?”

I did not know what to say. There really was nothing I could say. I tried to change the subject. “You’ve changed a lot, Elliott.

I’m not sure I would have recognized you.”

A smile passed quickly over his face. “You didn’t recognize me.

You thought I was someone else.” He seemed to be enjoying some small private joke. “It must be the mustache. I didn’t have one when you knew me. I had a beard, too,” he admitted with what I thought was a rueful expression. “And my hair was long. I’m afraid there were people in here who began to think I looked a little like Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ! Can you imagine! Then the next thing you know, some of these people started to think I was Jesus Christ. That might not have been too bad. At least that way I could have saved Christianity from itself. But there was someone here-not right here, but over in one of the other wards-who really believed he was Jesus Christ. He might have been for all I know,” he added, his eyes feverish with delight. “I did not want anyone to have to start questioning his own identity because of me, so I got rid of it-the beard-cut my hair short, and almost got rid of the mustache, too, but I changed my mind-or my mind changed me. Either way, I kept it. How have you been?”

It was difficult to know whether to be more astonished at the rapid-fire lucidity of his speech or the manner in which he had just brought it to a dead stop.

“I’ve been very well myself,” he said before I could think of what to say or how, now that I was finally face-to-face with him, I should say it. He seemed to sense every doubt, every hesitation, every slight uncertainty. “I mean it,” he continued, speaking now in a quiet, smooth-flowing voice. “I’m much better off here.”

My eyes darted around the drab-colored room, taking in the cheap furniture, and the dull finished floor, and the painted pipes that hung on metal braces as they passed under the ceiling; the sleepy-eyed orderly reading an out-of-date magazine; the three patients at the other table, barely aware of each other’s existence, a fourth inmate I had not noticed before moving like a sleepwalker down the corridor that connected the day room to the rest of the ward.

His eyes were waiting for me. “I wrote you a letter once. A long time ago.”

“I never got it.”

“I never sent it. I knew what I wanted to say. I had finally understood what had happened-all of it-everything. My mind was thinking quite clearly, more clearly than it ever had. In an instant I could see all there was to see. I could take it all in, all of it, all of the relationships, all the subtle nuances, every shade of meaning,” he explained. His eyes were glistening. “But then, when I sat down and started to write, it all disappeared-everything-

and all I could remember was that I had lost something I had thought was unforgettable. This was not the last time this happened. Finally, I gave up trying to write anything down. Nothing ever sounded the way I meant it, or was really what I wanted to say.”

As I listened I began to smile. He was describing what I had so often experienced myself: the inability to connect the thought with the word.

“But that isn’t-” I blurted out before I realized what I was saying.

“Isn’t a sign of insanity?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “What is?” The wry expression that had taken possession of his features faded away. “In any event, I could not write it the way I wanted to write it.”

“What did you want to write me about?”

His eyes seemed to lose a little of their intensity, as if he were turning inward on himself. When I repeated the question, he became even more introspective, staring down at the table with the troubled aspect of someone searching for the answer to a riddle.

Finally, he lifted his head, but instead of looking at me, he stared straight ahead.

“When I tried to kill…” His mouth hung open and his body began to tense. Then it started, a shrill, staccato stutter, one word rushing after the other in a mindless, rhyming speech. “Kill…

thrill… will… ill…” His face became rigid, and then began to quiver as if it was on the verge of blowing itself apart. His eyes became enormous hollow black voids. “… chill… till…

dill… quill.” He gasped the words, each one requiring more effort than the one before. Then, as if it had never happened, the life came back into his eyes, the expression returned to his face.

“I wanted to write to you about the time I tried to kill you,” he said in a voice completely normal.

Whether he was unaware of what he had just done, or had become so accustomed to it that he assumed it was taken for granted by everyone with whom he came in contact, he mistook my silence as a sign that I was not entirely comfortable with the subject of my own attempted murder. That is what he had been charged with, and that was the reason he had been sent here, to the forensic ward of the state hospital, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, clearly a danger to others and probably a danger to himself.

“I would have, too, if you hadn’t wrestled the gun away from me.” He said it with a kind of gay indifference, the way someone might explain how they would have won the last set of a tennis match if you had not made a ridiculously lucky return of serve right at the end.

I had been waiting for a long time to tell him he was wrong.

“I don’t believe you ever intended to kill me or anyone else. You were sick, Elliott. You didn’t know what you were doing. You came into the building that day, started walking up and down the hallways, screaming all those unintelligible threats no one could understand. Then you came into my office and you started waving that gun around. The truth is, if I had just talked to you, calmed you down, instead of going after the gun, it never would have gone off and I wouldn’t have been hit in the leg and we could have gotten you the help you needed. Listen to me. I had never had anyone point a gun at me before. It scared me, more than I had ever been scared in my life. I didn’t think, I just reacted. I should have known better, and I’m sorry for that. I know you never meant to hurt me.”

I had put off saying this for twelve years, even though I had known at some level of my subconscious mind that it would lift a great weight off my shoulders when I did. Elliott reached across the table and, as if he wanted to console me for what I had been through, laid his hand on my shoulder. A moment later, he pulled it away. “You were sleeping with my wife,” he said, his eyes flashing.

“I hardly knew your wife,” I sputtered, suddenly defensive.

“Whatever made you think…? Who made you think…?”

A detached, faintly ironic smile on his lips, he watched me, amused at the vehemence with which I denied something I had never done.

“I know you weren’t,” he said, nodding his assurance of the truth of it. “But I thought so then, and it was a long time before I realized I had been wrong. Even after the divorce, I didn’t know what had really been going on. What else was she going to do?

I was in here. You couldn’t expect her to stay married to a lunatic-a criminal lunatic-could you? It was only after she re-married that things fell into place. It was only then, at the very end, so to speak, that I understood what had happened, all of it, even the beginning. I’m not saying that they planned it all out,”

he added, with a quick, rueful glance. “They couldn’t have known what would happen to me. Though it would not have made any difference to them if they had.”

His head sunk down between his shoulders and his eyes focused on a spot just below my chin. “You warned me about him.

Do you remember?”

“Jeffries?”

His eyes narrowed even more. “I used to think he was evil. I was wrong. He was just indecent. People who are evil do interesting things. There wasn’t anything interesting about Jeffries.”

Slowly, without any movement of his head, his eyes climbed up my face until they met my own.

“Did you know Jeffries was dead?” I asked.

He raised his head and his eyes flared open. “Death and betrayal, the fortunate circumstances of my life.”

“The fortunate circumstances of your life?” I asked, confused.

With a quick movement of his hand, and a strange, triumphant look in his eyes, he started to wave my question away.

“I can’t really explain. All I can tell you is that sometimes the only way you can deal with what happens to you is not just to accept it, but make it your own.”

He seemed to regret that he had said as much as he had, though he had not said nearly enough to make his meaning-if there was a meaning-intelligible to me.

“I don’t have any interest in thinking of myself as a victim,”

he said. His eyes darted across to the other table. “Will you stop turning that damn magazine around!” he demanded in a high-pitched scream that set my teeth on edge. Without so much as a glance to see where the shouting had come from, the inmate stopped the constant rotation and held the magazine perfectly still, directly in front of his eyes. It was upside down.

“So Jeffries is dead!” he remarked in a civil tone, looking at me as if he had never in his life so much as thought about raising his voice.

It had all happened so quickly, and had been so isolated from what he had been like just before and then immediately after, that I was forced again to wonder whether he was himself always aware of what he was doing.

“How did he die?”

“You really don’t know? It was the front-page story in the newspapers for weeks.”

“I let my subscription lapse,” he said dryly.

He might not have access to the papers, but a television set, sitting on a plywood platform halfway up the wall, was flickering in the far corner of the day room.

“I never watch,” he said, surprised that anyone might ever think he would. “Tell me how he died,” he insisted with avid curiosity.

“He was murdered, stabbed to death, late at night, outside his office, on his way to his car.”

Nodding thoughtfully, he asked, “Have they changed the definition of homicide? The unlawful killing of a human being?”

“No, it’s always been that.”

“Then it wasn’t a homicide, it was not a murder.” He said it as if I would immediately understand and could not possibly disagree with his conclusion.

“You mean,” I suggested tentatively, “that it wasn’t unlawful because there must have been some form of justification? Self-defense, for example?”

“No, I mean it can’t have been a homicide because homicide’s the unlawful killing of a human being and whatever else Calvin Jeffries might have been, he was certainly not a human being.

No, it was not murder.”

I did not know what to say, or even, for that matter, what to think.

“Shall I tell you what they did, the late lamented Calvin Jeffries and my always blameless wife, Jean?”

He turned his head, as if he had just heard someone call out to him. “Jeffries is dead,” he said to no one. The corners of his mouth pulled back until the tendons of his neck were stretched taut. Then it started again, that insane rhythmic repetition, like the harsh clang of a rusty bell rung from the belfry of a distant church. “Jeffries is dead… wed… bed… fed.” He was staring straight ahead, his eyes as vacant as the conscious mind behind them. “Red… bled… med.” He was choking on the words, as if he had lost the instinct for taking a breath, and in the confusion of his panic had thought he was supposed to push it out instead of bring it in.

It stopped and the memory of it stopped as well. “Jeffries is dead,” he said, each syllable pronounced with glittering clarity.

“Murdered. And they say there are no happy endings. Shall I tell you what they did to me, the great judge and the loving wife?”

He glanced away, a wistful expression in his deep-set eyes, the look sometimes seen on the face of men much older than Elliott Winston, the look they get when they begin to think back, not just to their vanished youth, but to the way they saw the world when they were still that young.

“I believed in him. I believed in them both. I worshipped Jeffries. It was an honor to be in the same room with him. He knew everything. He could do anything. There was nothing about the law he did not know.” He looked at me, an eager glint in his eye. “Do you know that he wrote most of the procedural law we use?” Again he turned away. “He told me how he did that and why and he told me a lot of other things that had happened when he was a young lawyer like I was, trying to make a name for himself. We used to spend long evenings, sometimes the four of us-Jeffries, his wife, Adele, Jean, and me-but more often just the three of us. His wife was an invalid.” A strange, almost sinister smile crawled over his mouth. “An invalid! She was an addict.”

I had met Adele Jeffries only on the rare occasion when I happened to run into her husband at some social event. She was supposed to be five or six years older and she looked every bit of it.

Instead of hiding, makeup seemed to heighten the effect of the deep lines that crossed her forehead and creased the sagging skin on her cheeks. Her eyes, however, were lively and alert, the somewhat amused observer of her own sad deterioration. There had been rumors about her for years, the kind of soft-spoken, gently insinuated suggestion that became an indelible part of the way everyone thought about her. No one could actually explain what it was she was supposed to have done, but everyone knew that she was not quite right, and that besides drinking too much she required fairly constant medication.

“Poor Adele,” Elliott was saying. “I’ll bet there wasn’t a doctor in Portland who didn’t at one time or another get one of her famous phone calls. I kind of liked her,” he added as an aside,

“even though I knew she had to be crazy.” Catching the irony of what had just slipped out, his eyes darted away and then darted back, while he shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands.

“She really was,” he insisted, growing more serious. “She’d go right down the Yellow Pages-under ‘Physicians.’ I saw her do it one day. She sat on a stool in the kitchen, moving that wrinkled finger down the list, crunching up her eyes to make the name come into focus. As soon as someone answered the phone, she’d clear her throat and with as much formality, as much solemnity as if she were introducing the president of the United States, announce that ‘Mrs. Judge Jeffries’-that’s what she called herself-

was calling for Dr. Dolittle or Dr. Whomever. They’d always put her through. And then she would do it again, announce she was Mrs. Judge Jeffries and ask if the doctor would kindly be good enough to order a refill of her prescription for Percodan or Demerol or any one of the other two dozen pain-killing, mind-numbing, nerve-deadening, brain-altering, mood-elevating, awareness-closing pharmaceuticals she was taking by the handful morning, noon, and long into the literal and proverbial night.”

Elliott was panting hard, glaring at me as if the addiction of Mrs. Judge Jeffries had been somehow my fault. Then, suddenly, his head snapped back and he started to laugh. “There was nothing wrong with her. There never was. She had some minor ail-ment, twisted her ankle, something like that, years before. She told me once, during one of her brief interludes of sobriety. After that, every time she had a pain somewhere, just a twinge of dis-comfort, Jeffries would give her something, just for the pain. Eventually, she was hooked-couldn’t live without her pills, that and the booze. Jeffries didn’t mind. He encouraged her. Why deal with pain? It was a way of getting rid of her. She was always there, but she wasn’t there at all. He married her for her money. Now she’s in a nursing home somewhere. She probably doesn’t know where she is. Jeffries worked everything out. He had her declared incompetent while they were still married, put everything of hers in a trust, and named himself trustee. I told you he knew everything about the law.”

Elliott opened his eyes wide and took a deep breath, and then let it out, a look of disgust on his face. “You know who he had draw up the papers? You know who he asked to handle the whole thing?”

I did not want to believe it and I knew it had to be true. “You did that?”

“I didn’t want to. I really didn’t. I told him I thought she was all right, that perhaps if she saw a doctor he could get her to stop drinking, to stop taking all that pain medication. He told me every doctor he talked to told him the same thing, that it was too late, that the damage was permanent, that she needed constant round-the-clock care.

“It still didn’t seem right to me. He insisted he knew a lot more about his wife than I did and that he was surprised and, yes, disappointed-more disappointed than he could say-that I would refuse the favor he had asked. Had I forgotten all the favors he had done for me, the way he had actually broken the law when I had missed a filing deadline or needed extra time to finish something? Then he told me what he had never told me before. He told me that he had sometimes ruled on motions in my favor just because he believed I always wanted to do the right thing, and that if anyone ever found out, if he ever let slip what he had done, he’d be in a lot of trouble and so would I. We had to trust each other, he said. Surely, I didn’t believe that he could possibly want to do anything that wasn’t in the best interest of his own wife? I couldn’t possibly know how painful this was for him, and how the only way he thought he could get through it was knowing it was being taken care of by someone that both of them, he and Adele, had come to think of as a son.”

He gritted his teeth and his eyes fairly started out of their sock-ets. “At the hearing, she sat next to me, docile, unprotesting, until the very end. She leaned over, that vacant smile still on her face, and as clear as a bell said to me, ‘You helped him get rid of me, but I’m not the only one he wants to get rid of!’ And then she started to laugh, this hideous, bloodcurdling laugh that rolled on and on, louder and louder, till I had to put my hands over my ears, for fear that ghastly sound would crack my head.

Sometimes, if I’m not careful, I see her face in my sleep and I hear that voice again, that dismal warning I failed to heed. At the time, of course, all I did was watch them take her away, that awful laughter shrieking through the courthouse. The only thought I had was that Jeffries had been right after all, that there was too much damage, that there was nothing to be done but put her away in a place where she could get the constant care she needed.

“She had tried to warn me, but even then I still believed in Jeffries. How could I not?” he asked with a shrewd glance. “I had just helped him get rid of his wife. Everyone wants to believe that what they’re doing has a justification. I’m sure Jeffries thought he was justified.”

Elliott was quick, preternaturally so, and he caught immediately the slight glimmer of doubt in my eyes.

“Of course he did. At each step, over all the years he had lived with her. Think of it! She has a slight accident; she’s in pain; the medication works. She stops complaining. He would have noticed that right away. Finally! Relief from her constant, and for him, mindless talk. After that, every time she mentioned pain-

the medication. He could always get it. He knew people. He knew doctors. He knew-oh, yes, how well he knew-the doctor who ran the hospital where my dear, loving, loyal wife, Jean, was working.

“That’s how they met. That’s how it all began. Innocent at first. It usually is, isn’t it? Innocent, I mean. For all the loath-some, filthy thoughts that began to creep into their minds, like worms eating away at a corpse, or, more likely, the spiral-shaped vermin that infest the syphilitic, they were on the outside nothing but a couple of civilized, compassionate people, concerned, both of them, with the welfare of the great man’s wife. I didn’t notice it at the time,” he added confidentially, “but thinking back on it I’m almost certain there was a peculiar odor-a kind of stench-whenever I was with the two of them together.” He paused. “You think I’m making that up, that it’s just my imagination?” he asked with a stern sideways glance. “Don’t they say that when two people are attracted to each other there is a certain chemistry between them? Didn’t you ever mix chemicals together when you were a child to see what the worst smell was you could make?

“But you’re right,” he admitted, waving his hand back and forth in front of his face. “At the time, I noticed nothing.” There was a slightly astonished look on his face. “There was nothing to notice. We were always talking about the law, and she was always asking about his wife. The first time I noticed anything was one night when we were having dinner, the three of us. His wife was-well, you know-’not feeling well.’ Jean had to leave before we had coffee. She had the late shift at the hospital. After she was gone, Jeffries seemed to draw into himself, as if there was something that was bothering him. Finally, after I urged him to speak, he asked if Jean was working some kind of double shift.

When I told him she was not, that she was working nights all week, he looked distressed. He had been out at the hospital that afternoon, he explained, to visit his friend, the doctor who ran the place. He had seen Jean walking down a corridor too far away for him either to catch her eye or say hello, but he was certain it was she.

“I dismissed it as best I could. ‘She was probably called in for some kind of emergency. That happens once in a while.’ He pretended to agree, but I could see he did not believe it.”

Elliott bent his head forward and rubbed the back of his neck.

“It’s a fairly shrewd tactic, don’t you think? Suggest to someone that his wife may be up to something improper? You become the last person he’ll ever suspect as the one she’s doing it with. Jeffries was, after all, a truly brilliant man.” He hesitated before he added, “At least I thought so then.” His eyes sparkled with malice. “I was thirty-three years old when I came here, the same age as Christ when he died. Do you know the best thing ever said about Christ?” For a brief moment he was seized by a look of uncertainty. “Said about him, or did I make it up? It doesn’t matter.” His face brightened. ” ‘If Christ had lived, he would have changed his mind.’ That’s what happened to me, you see. I lived, and I changed my mind. I believed in him, I thought he could do nothing wrong. Then, when I realized what he had done, how utterly corrupt he was, I understood how my own life had been nothing but a lie.” His eyes flashed, and a smile darted across his mouth. “There are certain advantages in losing your mind.”