It started the moment the three of them stepped out onto George Karras’s porch and stood blinking in the late-afternoon sun—after Karras had told them, and Chief Bastokovitch had confirmed by phone, that his wife, Cecilia, had been a patient at Silvercrest in Elgin, a private hospital for the mentally ill, for the past four years. That he, George, was essentially a single parent of their only son—Sam, Cecil’s child from her previous marriage, whom George had legally adopted not long after his own marriage to her, seven years ago.
Beth had tried, and to an extent had been successful, to make a blur of the moment George Karras said that, to blot out the remembrance of her nausea when the vein in Pat’s forehead began to flutter, and sweat beaded at the neck of his shirt. “Legally adopted?” he’d said softly, dangerously, that I’ll-break-anything-here Vincent-look in his eyes. “Legally adopted?”
Candy urging, “Pat, wait….”
And George continuing, fervently, anxiously, “No, no, it’s fine, it’s okay. You can check. I got the legal document right in my safe. With his birth certificate. Go ahead. Let’s clear this up, okay?”
Jimmy showing up in the living room then, and he and Candy leading a rigid Pat outside, while Bastokovitch flipped open a steno pad and sat down heavily on George’s couch, asking, in low tones, if Mr. Karras would like an attorney present before he answered some questions. Sighing, as he began, while even outside, Pat, Beth, and Candy could still hear George’s voice piping up, “You just got to look at the papers. That’s all. He’s my son. He’s my wife’s child. It’s a mixup. Just let me get them.”
Outside the door, Candy had turned to Beth and Pat abruptly. “Please, please,” she said, for the first time of what would turn out to be dozens, as it began to break over all of them, the thing that had somehow actually happened, and gone on happening, for long years, two blocks from the Cappadoras’ front porch. “Please forgive me.”
“What?” Beth cried. “Forgive you? What?”
“Please, please…No, don’t forgive me. This is the worst fucking abortion in history. He was here all the time. I don’t deserve you to forgive me.”
And even Pat, ashen, raised his head and told her, “Candy, no. You couldn’t have known….”
But Candy would not be stopped. For the first time since Beth had known her, the ever-composed Candy indulged, those early days, in a virtual orgy of emotionalism—berating herself with curses even more fluent than her usual fare as fact after fact emerged.
It was Jimmy who told Beth how Candy slammed down her office phone and pulled a window shade off its cord when she heard that Cecil had cooperated fully with officers in an interview at her parents’ house, just months after the kidnapping, even cracking a bedroom door so they could peek at her sleeping son, whom she described as four years old, not much older than Ben. “That,” she had told Jimmy, “will make me wake up screaming the rest of my life.” And after Candy learned that a clear set of Cecil’s fingerprints, taken during a mass arrest at a nuclear-weapons demonstration in Champaign-Urbana years before, existed in FBI files, she’d run up three flights to shout into the phone at Bender that she didn’t care if the fucking bungling dirtbag lived in Budapest now, that Bender had better find him, because the Cappadoras were going to sue the government for millions; it was going to cost the government millions of bucks because some asshole FBI tech had been given prints on rubber, for Christ’s sake, on the bottom of Ben’s second tennis shoe, prints probably as clear as the dummy sets they gave you to study in the academy, and still managed to screw up lifting them. “And you guys had a matched set!” Candy screamed. “Cecil Lockhart did everything but call you on a bullhorn on the night of the second reunion—‘I’m still here! I did it!’ This could have been five fucking years ago!…Yeah, the kid is okay. Well, maybe he’s okay. We don’t know everything yet…. Does that justify it, Bob? All’s well that ends well? And if I find out that this kid was touched, that a hair on his head was harmed, I’ll personally get you then, Bob. Take it to the bank.”
Beth had listened, terrified, then ventured helplessly, “You’re taking too much on yourself, you’re too close.”
“Oh, really, Beth?” Candy snapped. “How about the fact that even I fucking spaced the Minneapolis connection? She only moved back and forth about fifty times.” She stopped, then, and apologized for her sarcasm.
But even long afterward, when the whole sorry unraveling of nine years of near misses and sheer mishaps was pieced together as best it could be without the keystone information that only Cecil herself could have provided, Beth could not accept the intensity of Candy’s guilt, the determination with which she turned away all of their comfort, their thanks. “You found him,” she told Beth a dozen times. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t earn it.” That the media, and almost every other official source connected with the case, seemed determined to laud her anyway (she was, if anything, even more elegant and glamorous than she’d been nine years before, even more irresistible as copy)—this only deepened Candy’s frustrations. She told Beth, one night the following fall, that the only forgiving moment of the whole spring had been on the night of the “arrest,” which had, of course, quickly turned out to be nothing of the sort—the moment when she and Jimmy had the chance to see Pat see Ben.
Beth was able to summon that part herself, entire, play it back almost like a time-lapse film of a rose opening: All of them standing outside the emergency foster-care home in Wheaton, aware of two kids hanging out a second-story window to try to see them under the roof of the porch; George, his eyes and nose reddened, but his handkerchief neatly folded in his sport-coat pocket, arriving with Bastokovitch in the chief’s car, passing the Cappadoras with a silent gesture, elbows in, palms up, something midway between a shrug and a plea, as he went inside. Then more waiting, Vincent plowing the soft dirt of a flowerbed with his toe, Kerry sitting on the ground, holding the whining, squirming Beowulf on his lead, Beth wondering why she’d given in when Kerry insisted on bringing the dog. Waiting for impossible minutes as the curtains on the inner door were drawn back, then dropped again; George finally emerging, blowing his nose, then the foster mother, gray and formidable even in a fuchsia sweat suit, already protective of her charge, flicking on the outside light in the gathering dusk. She’d come out onto the step and stood to one side, holding the screen door open behind her.
And then Ben.
It was Pat’s gathered energy Beth could still feel when she thought of that instant—his coil; she thought he would leap up onto the step, leaving her behind, numbed, her arms hanging thick and useless. He had, instead, raked his hair, once, and then walked up to the step slowly, cautiously, the way a field biologist would approach a newborn antelope, and extended his palm, made as if to shake hands. And when the child only stared at him, as Beth held her breath, Pat had lifted his hand, run one thumb down the side of Ben’s face, from his hairline to his chin, and asked, “How are you?”
“I’m good,” the boy had answered automatically, and then, “Dad…?” And when both George and Pat answered him, Beth began first to cry, then to breathe. Behind her, she could hear an enormous chorus of coughing and shuffling, as assembled masses of Parkside and state officers, who’d materialized from nowhere, let go. It was she who leapt onto the steps then, she and Kerry and Beowulf, Beth inhaling his smell as eagerly as the dog did, engulfing the child, nearly knocking him down as he stiffened and finally backed away, reaching for George.
“I know,” the foster mother said then, freighting the two words with supreme kindness. “But he’s just stunned.”
Pat had told Ben, then, to get some sleep. George, calling Ben “Spiro,” which Beth learned later was George’s Greek name for Sam, hugged him and propelled him back inside.
And that was when Candy said again, “I’m so sorry.”
But Pat had turned to her, his face smoothed, flushed, the shortstop’s face Beth had yearned for a hundred summers ago, and said, “Sorry? Candy, this is the best day of my life.”<
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And to underline it, Pat, for whom working at Wedding was respiration, had barely gone in to work over the next few weeks. Between supervised hour-long visits, every other day, with the child they soon learned to call “Sam,” Pat and Beth consumed dozens of quarts of coffee and absorbed the information in reports Candy brought them, almost daily, of police interviews with Cecil at Silvercrest, interviews that hardly merited the name. Michele Perrault, the little lawyer George had hired, had almost gotten in trouble at the arraignment, Candy told them, when Judge Sakura asked whether the defendant had chosen to stand mute, and Perrault shot back, “Your Honor, that’s the only way she can stand.”
But it was dead accurate. The diagnosis, in lay terms, was catatonic depression. When she entered Silvercrest, years before, Cecil had, Candy said, showed some animation—spoken occasionally in the trained, spheric actor’s voice that took the staff by surprise, especially when what she said was senseless. Now she was still as a well, making no noise even when she yawned or scraped her leg on a piece of furniture. At Silvercrest, in Cecil’s room, in the dayroom, in her supervising physician’s office, Candy and, after her, Robert Bender, Calvin Taylor, others, had spent hours with Cecil.
They had shown Cecil pictures, pictures that George, in a fumbling open gesture that made Pat cry, had duplicated for the Cappadoras—pictures of Cecil on her mother’s porch with Ben on a brand-new red bike with training wheels, pictures of George with Ben sitting on his shoulders on a mountain path. A picture of Ben on Santa’s lap, with his hair still dyed Vincent-brown, no more than six months after…How had she dared? Beth thought, and then thought, Of course, what else would she have done—was Cecil, after all, stupid or just crazy? That picture, the one that attracted Beth most, had to have been taken the fall after the police interviewed Cecil, after she had moved back to Chicago from Minneapolis. Candy said Cecil’s mother had confirmed the move, that Cecil had showed up with a grandson Mrs. Lockhart had never even met before. Beth pressed Candy: Why had Mrs. Lockhart believed Cecil? Didn’t she connect the sudden grandson with Ben’s much-publicized loss?
“If she did, she’s not saying,” Candy replied.
In the meantime, after the Ben pictures failed, the police, with the help of Cecil’s psychiatrist, had tried evoking responses with other stimuli: hippie music from high-school times—Cream and Jimi Hendrix and Donovan. They had brought her mints, which her nurses said Cecil loved, and watched Cecil reach out and gobble them, the only movement she ever made voluntarily. They had brought in a videotape machine and showed Cecil long excerpts of herself in the Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Major Barbara. They had brought in a big poster of Cecil, her platinum hair upswept in a magnificent Gibson pouf, in her one-woman show Jane Addams of Hull House, the performance that had won her the Grace Dory Arts Achievement Award just the summer before the reunion. They brought out front pages, old headlines (“Mom Blasts Kidnapper: You Heartless Bastard!”).
And, as her doctor predicted up front, they had elicited…nothing. Less than nothing. Cecil was more than vacant, Candy told Beth; she was bottomless. She ate her mints; she got up when her angel-faced nurse, Mary, put pressure on her elbow. Whatever she knew, if she any longer knew anything at all, walked in her alone.
George was pitifully eager to help fill in blanks. He came to the Cappadoras’ house more than once, unbidden, and then chafed miserably at their kitchen table, his eyes drawn again and again to the baby pictures of Ben on the walls. He brought his son’s growth charts from the pediatrician, his dental records; the description of the broken wrist Sam had suffered in a soccer match at age nine. Beth brought him coffee, with cloth napkins she had to go upstairs into a dresser to find, brought cream in a pitcher, things she never did, to soothe him.
And finally, one night, when Ben was still in transitional care, George had blurted, “You guys probably think I should feel more guilty. And I do feel guilty. I do. But how can I blame myself? It’s probably impossible for you to believe how little I knew about any of this. All I know is my boy—God forgive me, he’s my boy, too. I mean, Beth, Pat, look at it from his point of view. He’s already a kid whose mother’s in the loony bin. God bless her. Poor Cecilia, she was the most gorgeous…You know, Beth, when I met her, I didn’t think she was a day over twenty-five, and she was really in her mid-thirties by then. She was so delicate and so sweet, like a flower.” George tapped his chest. “We were running this promotion deal; you got tickets to that theater out there by the airport. She had just moved back from Minneapolis, and she was in My Fair Lady. And here am I, this dummy who builds decks. That she would look at me…that woman, this girl, would look at me…I couldn’t believe it.”
He sipped his coffee, his pinkie delicately extended. “And then, you know all this, there was the boy. He was—well, Beth, he was just like…like he is still, even now. So happy and game. So smart and strong. I fell in love with him as much as Cecilia. It was Cecilia who wanted to get married, right away, almost like she could tell she was going to…oh, Jesus God. Before she was hospitalized the last time, she…she got his hair cut all short, in a buzz, not an eighth of an inch long. And it grew in all reddish. Brownish red. I noticed. God, I thought, kids change. I never knew the father. Irish, I thought. I build garages. Pat, I just build decks and garages. He’s my boy. I adopted him as my own boy. But even before that, he was my boy.”
George ran his hands though his perfect hair—Was it whiter, in only weeks? thought Beth. Was this just a myth, or did it actually happen to people? George said, “I figured, of course, Cecilia and me, we’d have more; but she got so sick, so fast, and then I found out she really wasn’t so young. And Jesus, the shock treatments. Times I’d come there, they’d have her bound up in belts. She’d bite at the…And then, later, when she didn’t even know me anymore. Didn’t even know her mother or the boy. But I had Sam. My Spiro. I had my little all-star. See?”
Beth could feel the dampness at her neck; her shirt collar was soaking with unwiped tears. Her nose was running; she’d hadn’t even been aware she’d cried. “George,” she said. “You don’t have to tell us.”
Despite the ache of sympathy they felt, Pat and Beth agreed to stand firm. Whatever George would be to Sam, he was not going to be another father. And yet, they never turned him away—he was their only window into the cocoon from which Ben had emerged Sam.
Charges were issued. The state of Illinois had charged Cecilia Lockhart Karras with aggravated kidnapping and stood prepared, depending on what was learned about the conditions under which Ben had lived for nine years, to tack on everything except the abduction of Patty Hearst: false imprisonment, child abuse and endangerment, interference with custody, secreting a child, civil rights violations. Candy smiled when she read the complaint: “They left out forgery and possession with intent….”
But Candy knew, as everyone knew, as Beth knew, from the first moments of dawning comprehension in George’s living room, that the whole legal process would turn out to be mostly theater, an elaborate pantomime intended for no purpose but completion, like binding up the newspapers, corner to corner, with twine, and setting them at the curb. All the hearing would accomplish, Candy predicted, would be to make a public witnessing of tying that knot, securing it, snipping the cord.
Cecil would be led down the steps of the courthouse at Twenty-seventh and California just as she would come up, with lights she probably didn’t see panning her face, and words she didn’t hear burbling in her ears, go back to Silvercrest as free a woman as she had been when she was taken to Cook County Jail in the hospital van. She would go back to the room no one knew for sure whether she recognized, to be ministered to by rough or gentle hands no one could tell whether she felt; to stare at television if it was turned on in front of her; to sit with her fingers interlaced until someone took her hand and raised her to her feet; to soil herself raw without any apparent discomfort. Sending Cecil to prison would be redundant; no one had any lust for it, Beth, even Pat, least of all. r />
Reese
CHAPTER 24
June 1994
All five of them in the social worker’s office felt like a crowd. Nobody knew where to go. Reese finally flopped on one end of the couch—one of those nubbly orange numbers that show up in places Reese had frequented, public-bucks places, like school social workers’ offices. Tom, now, Reese thought, Tom wouldn’t have put a couch like this one in his garage. He concentrated on watching a spider pick delicately in and out of the canyons of the acoustical tile. The murmur of his parents’ voices blended with the social worker’s drone, until, if he tried, Reese could pretend he could hear a fly buzzing, running from the spider through miles of tiles.
He swung his feet down and stood up.
The kid was staring out the window, with his back to Beth and Pat.
“…certain adjustments,” said the social worker, looking up, startled, at Reese. His parents were staring at him, Dad looking particularly annoyed, but the social worker was prepared to go right on, apparently even if Reese stood on his head and peed on the floor. “We have a list of agencies, here, and you can choose to access—”
“Can I go outside?” Reese asked then, and thought, Damn, I sound like Mommy’s little boy. “I’m going outside. It’s getting hot in here.”
“I can open a window,” the social worker suggested thinly.
“It’s all right,” said Pat. “There’s no real reason that…they…”
“Of course not,” said the social worker.
“Wanta go?” Reese asked the kid, who blinked as if he wasn’t sure he got the dialect. “Wanta go outside?”
The kid shrugged. Reese opened the door. There was a kind of playground outside, with a couple of basketball courts; some other disadvantaged deefs were swinging on the swings or kicking around an old tetherball, still on its string. Wonder what they’re in for, Reese thought, holding the door open for the kid, who passed through quickly, head down, fists jammed in his jeans pockets.