At least, he figured she just thought that. Or did girls know exactly what you were doing, too? And just pretend they had no idea? And she was like, “Reese, you’re sweet,” afterward, instead of looking like she wanted to belt him, which was okay, too, as long as it lasted.
But this. Shit. When they got there, the parking lot at Wedding and the street in front looked like the biggest concession for used Eldorados in Chicago.
They managed to get through another press gang, and went inside. It never failed; Reese was always surprised at the sheer goofy magnificence of Wedding, every time he walked in. This time, he got a kind of kick out of watching Sam, who’d never seen it before—watching him look up and take in the stained-glass rose windows and the replica women (even Reese thought they were beautiful, although nuts), Juliet and Santa Lucia and the one he always thought of as the Tuscan Goddess of Sexual Intercourse. He had no idea why there were women in balconies in the eaves of Wedding in the Old Neighborhood, and he always thought it made the place kind of look like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World; but everyone seemed to either love them or get a chuckle out of them, or both. He followed the kid around the banks of linen-covered tables, as Sam goggled the frescoes, stopping particularly long in front of the Gian Carlo Menotti one—was it possible that he actually recognized his own face? And then Reese took Sam by the arm and brought him out to the bar area, where the model of the Fontana di Trevi gushed Champagne out of a jug in the arms of the sea god. They got Scottie to give them a glass and each had a sip. It was cheapie stuff—Angelo always insisted that he wasn’t going to run Moët et Chandon through plastic pipes. But Sam seemed to like it.
And then, of course, Mom caught up and nabbed the glass, and then they sort of hung around the cloak room while ten thousand relatives streamed past. The place was all set up as if it were the “big” night at Wedding, Saturday night, when people brought their out-of-town relatives to visit the restaurant. There was usually just one bride and groom, but today there were two: the sweet, pretty bride, who looked like his cousin Moira would look when she grew up, and the hot one, who looked like she belonged in the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. He remembered that one’s name, Claudia. There were two others, but he could never keep them straight. He was fairly certain that two of the three grooms were gay—one was a dancer, even—but they were all great-looking and big. The two here today, one was the one Grandpa Angelo called “the Nazi” behind his back, because the guy looked like something out of The Sound of Music.
By the time Mom actually got herself calmed down enough to walk into the banquet room, the tables were all filled. People were eating.
“Vincent,” she said, “come over here. I want us all to walk in together.” Big production, Mom, Reese thought. Shit. Oh well. He looked behind him for Sam, who was goofing around running under the coat racks with Kerry. His size fooled you: he was only this little twelve-year old. Reese’s stomach felt another tug of pity.
When they came out of the bar area into the room, the band leader caught sight of them and struck up that old song about “I’ll be loving you always,” which Reese thought was intended for nothing except to get everyone chewing on their sausage to start bawling; even Father Cleary was in tears.
What it did, though, was make everyone stand up, and as soon as they stood up, they started to applaud. And once they started to applaud, it seemed like they would never stop.
Sam sort of hid his head against Mom’s shoulder, and Reese tried unobtrusively to move over a little so that he was shielding Sam from most of the faces in the crowd. But everybody kept on applauding and yelling for about six hours, and the band kept playing cheesy songs, like “Danny Boy,” and everybody cried harder. Reese thought he was going to puke. Even he felt like he might start bawling.
But at last, the bandleader, Billy, got everybody to quiet down and said, just, “Welcome home.” Not the name, thank God. Nobody really knew exactly what to call Sam. And Sam kind of waved, and everybody clapped a little more then, and finally they sat down to eat. Which was good, because Reese, who normally didn’t eat much of anything, was starving. And Sam was eating like they were going to outlaw ravioli tomorrow.
By the time they set up the table with tiramisu and cannoli, the busboys were moving the front tables back a little to clear the dance floor—boy, thought Reese, they’re going to do the whole deal. The first bride, the one who looked like his cousin, had bustled the back of her dress and was getting ready to dance with the fag groom. What they did first, on a regular night at Wedding, was dim all the lights and have the bride and groom dance to “Sunrise, Sunset,” usually with Grandpa Angelo cutting in at some point to represent the father. Reese’s dad even cut in sometimes, even though he didn’t like to dance. So they did that now, and then the lights came up, and the bride picked up her skirts. The sweet bride just picked them up a little; but Claudia, Reese recalled, hiked them up way high, so you could see her garter on her thigh—tough luck it wasn’t her. He knew then that they were going to do the tarantella, and sure enough, pretty soon half the joint was up dancing, too.
It always killed Reese to see people who weren’t Italian do the tarantella; it was like watching people who weren’t really Polish or married to Polish wives trying to polka. They thought all you had to do was stand there and kick your feet, one after the other—boomba boomba boomba boom—when in fact there were steps to it. Vincent knew them, had since he was a kid, but would rather have been burned at the stake than actually do them. To his surprise, though, his father got out there and put his hands palms-up on the back of his hips, the way you were supposed to, instead of just putting your hands on your waist, the way Grandma Rosie did when she was mad—which was the way people usually did it. Back when the place first started, in fact, Grandpa had to demote a really beautiful bride to waitress because she couldn’t get the hang of doing the tarantella like what Grandpa called “a real madonna.”
Today, though, the Cousin Moira bride was in top form, her satin shoes flying like little pistons, and when everybody was out of breath, the band started playing it faster, and Dad started motioning for Sam to get up and dance too. Reese thought he’d pee from shame for the kid. But Sam, affable the way he was, he got up, and he started talking to Dad, and Dad motioned to the bandleader. Billy stopped right away. “My son doesn’t know the tarantella, but he knows the miserlu.” He stopped and bent down to hear what Sam was saying. “The sertu—it means ‘the tail.’ Do you know that?”
“But of course.” Billy smiled, and he started playing, real slow, “Never on Sunday.” Grandpa Angelo came over and gave Sam one of his great big linen handkerchiefs with the A and the C embroidered on them in red. Reese figured this was part of the dance; he’d seen it once, at a Greek wedding on TV. Sam stood there, holding the handkerchief and looking around him, until—My God, Reese thought, no way—Mom got up and walked over and put out her hand. And Sam started to show her the steps, which were slow, right foot over left, then behind, then a little hop and a turn. Mom wasn’t much of a dancer, but she looked dreamy, like she was drunk; she looked almost beautiful. And then Dad took Mom’s hand, and Sam pointed out how you had to hold your arm up, in an arch, and Grandpa Bill got Grandma Rosie up…it was enough to gag you.
In a while, his mom had the hang of it. She was weaving and dipping gracefully, her shoulders swaying, smiling up at his dad, and there must have been fifty people in concentric rings, Sam right at the middle, still leading, still holding the handkerchief, kind of laughing even, his reddish hair a little plastered up with sweat. He caught Reese watching and rolled his eyes.
Oh, Ben, Reese thought. He looked away from the kid and up, away from the kid, at the frescoes on the walls. At Ben’s face, the wise and wondering angel face of a little crippled boy seeing God, and then at himself, his face proud and probably better-looking than he actually was, but painted to represent some bastard whose biggest contribution to history was getting some pretty Japanese chick to
off herself.
He went out to the bar to see if Scottie could be talked into letting him have another glass of Champagne.
Beth
CHAPTER 28
Even after the nurse and the bailiff brought Cecilia in and settled her in the enclosure beside her attorneys, Beth forgot to sit down.
She felt Pat pulling on her arm and twitched her wrist away in irritation, only then recognizing that the press, the officers, and Judge Sakura were already seated. A young Asian man, the judge was regarding her with a waiting glance, an endless and mild dispassion. Beth sat down then with a thud, wincing as she knocked her tailbone on the edge of the bench, aware of the zipping sound of a seam in her skirt splitting.
If she craned her neck slightly, though, she could still see the angelic wide face of the nurse, and just beyond her, Cecil. Had she not had the foreknowledge of Cecil’s identity, Beth would have picked her out only because she wore jail-orange cottons, like a doctor’s scrub suit, the only person in the courtroom not dressed in Sunday-like finery.
Cecil was not only changed. She was buried.
Crammed into the pants and tunic, the swanlike girl Beth remembered now was frankly fat, packed with rolls of flesh, odd protuberances where the skin was simply pushed beyond containing. You could still spot, in the point of her chin, in her wrists, the tiny, still-perfect bones. Cecil looked like a funhouse mirror image, a stuffed-toy Cecil, watching her nurse with rapt attention.
Beth had half-expected to feel a spurt of pity for Cecil, or rage, or something. She felt only a ravening curiosity. She wanted to crack Cecil open like a matrushka doll, opening shell after shell, searching for the woman who had stolen her baby, and beneath that the talented, patrician, disdainful teenage hotbox, and then the sharp-elbowed neighbor kid always glomming onto Ellen.
But Cecil’s attorney, Michele Perrault, stood up now—small as a child, with feathers of short dark hair, dressed in jewelly colors like a medieval troubadour—and so did the DA, both with words slung on their hips like six-guns. It was the chief deputy DA, Candy pointed out, only because this was the Ben Cappadora case, and press from Boston to Brisbane were sardined into the courtroom, watching on closed circuit in two other rooms down the hall, and flowing down the steps outside, onto the curbs, onto the lawns, a human waterfall in the hazy summer sunlight.
“Your Honor,” began Michele Perrault, “I have done this work for a very long time….”
Judge Sakura smiled. “We are all aware of your longevity as a litigator, Ms. Perrault,” he said with immense sweetness.
Perrault softened then, too, and glanced around her almost girlishly, as if suddenly aware of all the cameras and poised pens, the sketch artists busily drawing.
“I’ve done this work for a very long time, relatively speaking,” Perrault began again. “And I have spent many hours with my client, Mrs. Karras, over many days.”
“And?” asked Sakura, scribbling.
“And I have been able to get nothing, nothing out of her that gives me reason to believe that my client can understand the charges she faces. I have the gravest doubts about whether she can assist in her own defense. Usually I can get some kind of response from virtually anyone, no matter how impaired. But my client shows no indication she knows there is someone talking to her at all.”
“While I can understand your conviction, Counsel,” Sakura said, “I’d like to know if you have any documentation about Mrs. Karras’s mental-health history that can support your opinion.”
“I do, Your Honor,” Perrault said quickly. “May I approach?” The judge nodded, and Perrault brought him a sheaf of papers. “These were obtained from the psychiatrists who have treated Mrs. Karras at Silvercrest.”
“For the past four years?”
“And previously, Your Honor. Mrs. Karras has been hospitalized on eight occasions, for periods of several days to several months, and has undergone a wide range of drug treatments and other therapies intended to address her condition.”
“Which is?”
The DA spoke up then, as if, Candy would tell Beth later, he simply needed to pee on the tree and prove he’d been there. “With all due respect to Ms. Perrault, Your Honor, she is not a medical doctor, and not qualified to describe—”
“It’s all in the documents, sir,” Perrault told him. “In lay terms, Mrs. Karras is catatonic.”
Perrault read from her copy. “Mrs. Karras has a long history of mood disorders, going back to her teens, and immobilizing depression that has persisted, off and on, for the past six years, becoming total four years ago. She has not”—Perrault waved at Cecil’s blank presence—“been any better or worse than this since then.”
“I need to study these records, of course,” Sakura said. “I’m sorry if I interrupted you, Ms. Perrault. Did I? But I need to know if the attending physician is present today, and if he can explain to us Mrs. Karras’s condition at the time the alleged abduction took place.”
“He is,” Perrault said. “But he was not treating Mrs. Karras at that time. Her physician at that time was a psychotherapist in Minneapolis, where Mrs. Karras lived on and off before her marriage to Mr. Karras, after her divorce from Mr.—” she sprinted back to her files and consulted a clipboard—“from Adam Samuel Hill, a theatrical writer, to whom Mrs. Karras was married for…well, a total of three years. That therapist was a woman in her sixties, and died two years ago, Your Honor. Mrs. Karras was not hospitalized during that period of her second marriage. And Mrs. Karras’s former husband—”
“Is he here?”
“Mr. Hill is disabled, he suffers from multiple sclerosis, Your Honor. But I have a sworn affidavit from him about Cecilia’s intransigent emotional problems during their marriage. He is extremely apologetic that his condition makes it very difficult for him to travel.”
“Do we have other—?”
“Mrs. Karras’s mother, Sarah Lockhart, is here today. With your permission, I’d like to ask her to describe her daughter’s emotional state at the time of the kidnapping.”
Sakura nodded at the DA. “Is this okay with you?”
“Again, sir,” the DA said, “I have to point out that I am not aware that Cecilia Lockhart Karras’s mother has any credentials that qualify her as an expert medical witness.”
“You know that this court is not going to regard her as such.”
“Thank you, sir. The state is appreciative.”
“Not at all.” The judge nodded to Perrault, who asked to call Sarah Lockhart.
As the trim older woman walked rapidly and silently from the back rows of the huge room, the bailiff Beth had heard Candy call “Elvis,” though his bronze tag said something else, turned to the clerk for the swearing-in. They didn’t use a Bible, Beth noticed. She supposed that was out of fashion.
She still recognized Mrs. Lockhart; she had not seen her in twenty years. Beth studied the older woman’s face carefully as Perrault explained how cooperative Sarah had been, how shocked, how horrified she had been to learn that her grandson was another family’s purloined child. How she had helped, as Cecil’s legal guardian, to obtain medical histories from Cecil’s hospitalization. How bitterly sorry she felt for the Cappadoras—
“We all understand,” the DA put in, with a tick of annoyance, “how Mrs. Lockhart must feel.”
Perrault then burrowed right in, asking Mrs. Lockhart how well she knew the little boy known as Sam Karras.
“Very well indeed,” the old woman whispered. “He was my grandson.” And she looked point-blank into Beth’s eyes, Beth thinking, This is how Cecil would have looked one day—sweetly rounded and Yankee and just the least bit arty, like a matron who’d started the town’s most active book group—had Cecil been spared the hot injection of madness. Sarah Lockhart’s eyes begged Beth. “I never had any idea that he wasn’t Cecilia’s child. Cecilia’s own child by birth.”
“But you were not present for the birth of the child your daughter presented to you as your grandson.”
; “No. She and I…Cecilia had a great deal of difficulty in her relationships with her father and me. When she was little, we considered her high-strung…She had tantrums and then blackouts…we thought, an artistic temperament…”
It was not until Sarah Lockhart’s recitation actually began—told Rosie-fashion, with whorls and wings of wee, irrelevant detail—that Beth realized it: There was to be no flash of illumination. Ever.
Over the long summer of the investigation, Beth had herself come to know Cecil as well as the family who had raised her.
That is to say…not at all.
So, half-lulled by the heat of the hundreds of bodies around her in the room, Beth listened to the scant facts of Cecil’s life as her mother, the D.A., and Perrault understood them: her first three marriages, all to theater types, none of which lasted longer than two years. And the pitiful truth that, of all those husbands, the Lockharts had actually met only one: George.
Beth heard about the friends the police had tried to find from Cecil’s flighty periods in Minneapolis, California, and New York. Friends? None of them had ever even shared a meal with Cecil, though a few apartment neighbors in Minneapolis thought they remembered seeing Cecil with a little boy. They seemed to remember that she referred to him as her “nephew.” The one true hope, a designer Cecil had stayed in touch with since college, had died the previous year from AIDS, as had his lover.
Beth could barely rouse herself even when Mrs. Lockhart began to cry, as she described Cecil’s reaction when Adam Hill—“a drama critic, quite well-respected, much older”—abruptly took up with a younger woman, a dancer.
“It was one of the few times that I felt Cecilia really opened up to me,” said Sarah Lockhart. “She was heartbroken. She said she felt used up. Adam never wanted her to grow old, or even to grow up, and she wasn’t even thirty at the time. Of course everyone thought she was years younger.” Mrs. Lockhart began to frankly sob. “And I tried to comfort her, assured her that there were compensations for getting older. She would find a good man and have a child…but of course, she couldn’t.” She looked suddenly at Beth and Pat and said slowly, “We were talking about it last night, her father and I. I’m the only one who can understand Charles very well since the stroke, and we realized that was why she did it, because of the miscarriage…”