After he was convicted, he asked me to help with the appeal. I went over to the jail, and when I saw him in the orange jumpsuit, I couldn’t help myself. I asked the question I had vowed not to: Why? Why, Clifton? Why with all his good fortune, why this? He looked at me solemnly and said, ‘That’s how it is, that’s how it’s always been, and it’s our turn. It’s our turn.’
I knew if I talked to Sherm Crowthers, I’d hear something similar. The tone would be angrier, he’d be more disparaging, telling me I was a fool for believing life would ever be any other way. But in the end his explanation would be rooted in the unfairness of being asked to behave better than the generations of white men who’d wielded the same authority he did and had used it to feather their nests.
There was a logic there, I suppose. But I couldn’t believe it when Clifton had offered that answer. I couldn’t believe that Clifton Bering, wise and wonderful, would turn against every other value I knew him to adhere to so that he could, almost out of duty, exercise a privilege long denied others like him. He didn’t even fully understand the white men he thought he was imitating. The Brendan Tuoheys of the world had bagmen and intervenors and a thousand layers of protection; they never showed up in person so they could catch a piece on the side. They were wily and arrogant, but not brazen. How could he not recognize that his picture of white power was a grotesque cartoon? But so he saw it. Just as I had never recognized how isolated he felt—and no doubt often was—notwithstanding all his great talents. Our true continental divide, the one between black and white, fell open, leaving us, friends of thirty years, on either side, watching as Clifton and all the good he’d been destined to do disappeared inside.
And now Sherman had dived into the same chasm. He had sounded proud and happy, even as he plummeted. And most painful of all, he was entirely unaware that he’d actually been pushed over the edge, driven by the very forces he’d long boasted he alone had understood and mastered.
27
DESPITE THE INTERMITTENT SUCCESSES OF the Project, Robbie’s mood was swinging noticeably lower, plainly out of concern over Lorraine. The day after his encounter with Crowthers, he received a distressed call from his wife in the middle of the afternoon and told Evon he was headed home. Even for this reason, she wouldn’t let him out of sight, and she descended with him to the garage and the Mercedes.
Rainey’s deterioration now seemed to be picking up speed. Last month, as her ability to swallow had begun to disappear, she had been hospitalized for the insertion of something called a PEG, a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy, a little plastic button that allowed a liquid diet to be fed directly into her stomach four times a day. It was a simple procedure, but she had never seemed to recover the same energy. By now, many functions had gone from impaired to nonexistent.
Her speech had slid to the point that neither Robbie nor Elba could make sense of it. Rainey had briefly made do with a letter board, using her right hand, in which she still had good movement, to pick out the words she was trying to say. Finally, last week, they’d made the transition to the computer voice synthesizer. Lorraine had quickly mastered the software, which spoke the words she selected from various vocabulary trees, but the hardware had been balky. The replacement module, which had arrived over the weekend, functioned well, but had a male voice. It had been an unexpected blow to find that Rainey’s speech was not restored but essentially gone, transmogrified into the atonal bleat of a masculine android. The deliberate pace of the machine with its blank tone had made her feel more thwarted, not less.
“And in the middle of this shitstorm, my mother-in-law arrives,” Robbie told Evon in the car. “She flew in from Florida for the weekend, and you know, you’d think family would make it better, but we just can’t wait for her to leave. Betty walks through the door and she’s crying and she doesn’t stop for two days. She hangs on me and says, ‘Robert, Robert, I want to help, but this tears me up so bad, I just can’t stand to see it.’ She’s that kind. If she’s not lookin, it’ll go away. Christ.”
When they reached the house, Robbie turned to Evon.
“Just come inside for one second, will you? Tell her the voice box sounds good. Do you mind? Betty went to pieces every time Rainey tried to talk to her.”
Evon was less frightened than last time. But the sense of the breach between this house and the rest of the world remained appalling. Once over the threshold, you dived off the edge of a cliff. Far above, in the daylight, the healthy danced to the tune of their small delights, but down here, amid darkness and sewer smells, the base, dogged game of survival was being played out with every breath its own struggle.
“Touch her,” Robbie whispered before they entered the room. “She likes to be touched. Take her hand when you say hi.”
At the thought, Evon felt a stricken quiver. She was already worried that her presence might provoke another sad scene between Robbie and his wife, but he had plunged around the corner into the equipment-crowded room where Rainey was attended by her caregiver.
“Say hello, boys and girls.” He kissed his wife. He was a song-and-dance man now, bright as a new penny.
These days, Rainey slept in a water bed, where she rested more comfortably. Beside it roosted a mess of pill bottles—antispasmodics, sleep aids—and an electric Barcalounger that she used as a day chair. She looked drained among her bedcovers, which remained oddly undisturbed over her. Evon approached slowly and gripped Rainey’s cold hand. There was a desiccated feel to the skin. The flesh had almost no tone; she could squeeze to the bones amid the softness.
“How. Are. You?” said the boy robot who was Rainey Feaver now.
Evon carried on. What a great improvement! Things would be so much easier. But there was no mistaking what had gone on here over the weekend, and it was neither machinery nor even the appearance of Rainey’s inept mother that had caused the disruption. The end was beginning. When Evon had met Rainey, less than three months ago, she could not imagine how a human being could get any worse, but Lorraine had. You could somehow see vitality withdrawing from this body, as from a fallen leaf. Robbie’s increasingly frank remarks had given Evon an intimation of the hugeness of what lay ahead. Rainey’s upper body was losing strength with alarming speed. She had only three fingers that moved on her left hand. Far worse, the muscles that supported her breathing would soon no longer function.
Some ALS patients let go at that point. But ventilation was an option. A machine could inflate Rainey’s lungs for her; there was even a portable device that could be carried on her wheelchair so she would not be immobilized. But it remained a momentous decision. Once Rainey was ventilated, there was no logical stopping point. She could go on for quite some time, awaiting the opportunistic infection that eventually claimed most ventilated patients, living beyond the time when even the remotest voluntary impulses could stir her body. ALS patients had been known to end up entirely inert, with gauze patches over their unblinking eyes and attendants applying wetting solution every five minutes, to prevent the agony that would result if the tender membranes of the cornea became air-dried. These people existed—seeing, smelling, hearing, suffering—with no means of communication of any kind.
Rainey and Robbie had agreed to take it a step at a time. He had asked her to live; he wanted her life to continue and said so plainly, so emphatically that no one could imagine it as some ultimate chivalry meant to remove from her the burden of clinging selfishly to life. At some point soon she would have to decide whether she was willing to oblige him.
For the present, Robbie characteristically accentuated the positive.
“She can talk on the phone. She hasn’t been able to talk on the phone for more than a month. Who’d you call?”
“Tired,” the voice answered. “Too. Tired. My Mother. Wore Me Out.”
“Yeah,” Robbie said.
They spoke about the spring, now arriving. Evon leaned Rainey’s way to take in the apple tree visible from her window, a pillowy mass of pinkish blooms. Yet Rainey was clea
rly exhausted, and even after a few minutes, Evon felt she’d overstayed. Rainey lifted the fingers on the one hand that freely moved as a goodbye.
“I’m going to show Evon out. Then we can do your massage, and maybe get through Act IV.” On the winding stairs, Robbie explained that he rubbed down Rainey every night as a matter of ritual, then read to her, sometimes for hours. “When I pick, I like plays. You know. I get to ham it up. Read all the parts. Right now, we’re nearly done with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then she’ll choose something.”
“Isn’t that Shakespeare?” asked Evon.
“You don’t think there’s room for Shakespeare in my common little mind?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes you did. Hey, listen, we’ve done all the classic comedies in the last year. Tartuffe. The Importance of Being Earnest. The Man Who Came to Dinner. We’re having a great time. You know, sometimes she likes a break, so I’ll read her a novel. She likes all the law guys.” He showed her the next one they’d take up, Mitigating Circumstances, which was on a table downstairs. His mother-in-law, with her fatal touch, had brought a number of books that neither Rainey nor he much cared for, self-help guides, even a couple of picture books of far-off places written for juveniles.
“I just wish she wasn’t such a dip. I mean, I like Betty. Not a mean bone in her body. Just this poor girl from the South End who thought she’d like the fast life and married this complete loser who happens to be Lorraine’s father. Now, this guy. J, e, r, k. His picture’s in the dictionary next to the word. Really. He’s got a boat. Supposedly, he sells real estate. But his whole life is this fucking boat. The fish he caught, the dames he screwed there, the six days straight he was drunk at sea. If it doesn’t happen on water, it doesn’t count with him.
“Anyway, he marries Betty cause it’s the kind of girl his mom wanted him to bring home. And then, you know, he drinks. Well, she drinks, too. They drink together. Picture the house: it reeks of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. They have the kid. And he says, This ain’t for me. Betty eventually remarries. Which is good. But Lorraine sort of gets lost in the shuffle. She’s living with three other kids, but the stepdad doesn’t like to ante up for anything. He wants Neptune to come ashore and pay a bill now and then. So there’s a lot of tension and crap. I don’t know. Betty did her best. She says she did, anyway. Isn’t that what they always say? Not that it did much for her daughter.
“Rainey was actually sort of in trouble when I met her,” Robbie said. They had reached the foyer. There was an enormous chandelier above the circular stairs, five feet across, with a million baubles. The floor was Carrara marble, the walls were mirrored. The affected grandeur seemed almost painful at the moment, in its sheer inadequacy to make any real difference.
“I mean, I didn’t know it at first. It was back in the days. I’m living it up on the Street of Dreams. Morty’s been married since childhood and I’m like, They’ll never catch me. Ho, ho, ho. I dig the routine. I work my ass off. I try cases. Then I go down there and get slightly sloshed every night and, the general trend, laid. It’s A-OK. I see one girl. I see another girl. I’m thirty-four or what, and you can’t say I’ve really been steady with anybody, not more than three or four months’ worth, since junior high.
“And Lorraine’s just one of them. Well, great-looking. Super-great. She’s so damn beautiful she actually seemed to glow. But I’ve known some beautiful girls. Anyway, those days, I was in my snowman phase. Well, everybody was. It’s the standard good time. ‘Hey, baby, come on back to my place, we’ll do a couple lines.’ Which we do. And I really like this girl. Sense of humor. Very smart. She’s a computer geek, before most people even know there’s such a thing. You know, she sells computer systems, inventory software. And she’s so bright, such great company, that it takes me a while to catch on. But when I’m with her, I can feel she’s nervous. Laughs too loud. All the wrong places. Very edgy thing scraping along underneath. Well, I know nervous people, too. A lot of women have that sort of frantic, tight-ass thing, am I perfect enough, and boy, this girl looked perfect, so that made some sense. Sometimes I’d flatter myself and think, It’s sexual tension, she can’t wait to get back to my boudoir to do the deed. And it was some mind-numbingly, unbelievably, sky-high fanfuckingtastic sex. And that seemed to be the only time she was really relaxed. But that’s not what it was, either. I don’t know how I caught on. But when you’re connecting with somebody, you just do. And suddenly one night, we’re lying there on my silk sheets—geez, I was a terrible lounge lizard—and I get it: she didn’t come here for my charm or company, or even to get her brains fucked out. She’s here for the dope.
“I’m devastated. Kind of amazing. Because when you’re living that life, it’s endless, frankly, the stuff you just don’t know about somebody. I mean, you can be semi-serious with a woman, keeping fairly regular company, and you come to pick her up one night and there’s a note taped to the mailbox: ‘Moved to Tucson.’ Laugh all you want. I laughed myself. But that kind of stuff happened to me. So I’ve had a lot of practice saying, Hey, what the hell.
“But this time, I go around crying in my beer, ‘Damn this bim, she only wanted the dope,’ and guys are yukking it up. I mean, really. Always the last to know. Mersing, you met Mersing, he gives it to me real good. ‘For Chrissake, Robbie. You didn’t know the nickname? Cocaine Lorraine? The Snow Queen? But hey,’ guy says. ‘Great tits, right? You weren’t exactly there for a sleigh ride either.’
“Snow Queen. I guess I’d heard it. But I figured it was because she was, you know, not warm, let’s say. I took it for a challenge. That’s the kind of asshole I am.
“Man, and I don’t know what got into me. But I just thought, Shit, this isn’t right. This person has got too much on the ball to be shagging every creep with a connect because she’s too scared to go out and cop on her own, and that, frankly, was about the size of it. So I confront her. ‘What the hell is wrong with you? A beautiful, brilliant person like you?’ First she’s shocked. Then she’s pissed. But when I pulled out the nickname, it’s boohoo. Man, Niagara Falls. She was so goddamned ashamed. ‘I’m gonna help you beat this,’ I say like I had any idea what that meant. But I checked her into Forest Hills. I paid the bill, too. And six months later we got married.
“That was the best thing I ever did for her. I’m the man who saved her life. That’s what she called me.” He opened the door then and finally looked Evon’s way. “Until, of course, I became the guy who ruined it.”
28
WHEN PATRICE IS OUT OF TOWN ON A PROJECT, I tend to make camp in the den off the kitchen, everything I need spread out in reach of the comfortable chair where I spend the late evenings. I was there when my doorbell rang near ten-thirty, several nights after Robbie’s visit to Crowthers. Through the door-eye, I saw Sennett kicking my stoop. McManis was beside him, in his suit coat but no tie, shaking out a long umbrella. This could only be disaster, I knew. Ordinarily, Stan would never have risked a meeting where the three of us could be seen together. I slid back the dead bolt. I have seen executioners who looked more lighthearted.
Is it bad? I asked first thing.
“Terrible,” Stan answered.
Had Feaver screwed something up?
“No,” Stan said. “Well, yes. Only ‘screwup’ isn’t enough. George, for Chrissake,” he said then, “let us in.”
Even anger had been unable to fulfill its usual function of holding Stan aloft from despair. His suit had gone limp in the rain. McManis, on the other hand, looked scattered. He managed a soft smile when he came through the doorway, but stood still there, baffled. Both said okay when I offered a drink.
Stan swished his scotch around in the tumbler. “Why don’t you just show him?” he told Jim. McManis handed over a red expandable folder and I removed a file. He said it was a run of the Roll of Attorneys-at-Law in this state, all those whose last names began with ‘F.’
“Look for your client,” Stan instructed.
Not
there. Didn’t pay his dues? I suggested.
Stan delivered a look hotter than magma. He took it I was being a defense lawyer, as I was, instinctively seeking excuses.
“He’s Not A Lawyer,” Stan shouted.
I laughed, naturally. It was ridiculous. Perhaps Robbie had been admitted under a stage name or a different spelling, or maybe in another state. There was an explanation. Walking through the streets of the courthouse triangle with Robbie, as I occasionally did these days, I’d been introduced to half a dozen attorneys with whom he’d gone to law school.
McManis directed me to the other items in the folder, but Sennelt had no patience.
“He attended Blackstone,” Sennett said. “He’s in the law school yearbook. But he’s never been licensed to practice law. Not in this state or any other we can find. We’ve been on the phone all day.”
After the panic over Carmody, they’d begun to wonder how easily Jim could be discovered. That had caused them to check the Roll of Attorneys. One thing had led to another.
I was still too stunned to figure out what this meant.
“What it means?” asked Stan. “It means that every day for almost two decades Robbie Feaver has committed an ongoing fraud—on his clients, on the courts, on you, and on me. It means every letter he’s signed, every motion, every business card he’s handed out has been a lie. It means every nickel he’s earned as an attorney is ill-gotten. And it means that every fucking thing we’ve done on Petros is probably out the window, since Rule One from UCORC was no fraud on innocent bystanders. And now it turns out we’ve left a one-man fraud wave in place for the better part of a year.