“Maybe around the university I can find something.”
“Whatever. I’ll quit if something better comes up. Mother, I’m not trained to do a thing. I’m useless. I have classes toward four different majors besides psychology, and I don’t know how to do anything a boss with a brain would pay me for.”
“Do you want to go back to school?” Suzanne asked helplessly.
“If I do, I’ll go in the evening. If you can get me a deal. Not otherwise. And I haven’t the faintest goddamn idea what I’d study, anyhow. I seem to have no interest in life beyond fucking everything up.”
“Elena, you’ve been very good since the…disaster. I know you don’t want to hurt Marta more. I know she doesn’t want to hurt you. You’ve shown real strength. I believe in you now more than I ever did. I want you to know that.”
Elena shrugged, not knowing how to respond. It was a compliment for sure, but she had always been poor at receiving compliments on anything besides her looks. That’s what she had always been admired for—by men. She was used to her mother trying to guilt trip her, run her life, give her moldy advice, warn her about dire consequences. She was not used to praise. It embarrassed her, and it also made her feel squishy, as if she might snivel. “So how’s your boyfriend these days? I haven’t seen him around. He didn’t bail out, did he?”
Elena was going over her wardrobe, sewing on buttons, catching up an unraveled hem. Monday she started her new job, and she found dealing with her clothes soothing. Then she heard the key in the lock and went into the living room, startled. It was 9:20. It was that young guy, Jaime, who worked as her mother’s assistant. “You have a key?” Yeah, he’d been at Passover.
“Sure, for when she needs me to fetch. She needs her other glasses. Appeals court starts at ten-forty today, so I have to hustle.”
“You’re her errand boy?” Elena gave him a smile with her dig. She had never really spent time with him. He was almost beautiful.
“I’m whatever it takes.” He sauntered into Suzanne’s office and found her glasses beside her computer. “She hardly ever forgets anything. This is a first.” He looked sideways at Elena. “Have you ever watched your mother in action?”
“Mother? No. Why?”
“Aren’t you curious? She’s good. She told me you’re starting your new…career…Monday, so why not come along with me today?”
“Wouldn’t she be pissed if I barged in?”
“She won’t even notice. She’s focused, Elena, very focused. Why don’t you come and watch?”
She was suddenly ashamed that she had so little interest in what her mother did for a living, plus she was also a little intrigued by Jaime. He reeked confidence for a kid two years younger than herself. He had her mother’s car and he drove it with assurance. Her mother didn’t lend her the car without a big fuss, while here he was acting as if he owned it. For a moment she had a pang of jealousy. Who was this kid that her mother trusted him so much?
“You keep looking at me. Interested in what you see?”
“Mildly,” she said with a grin. “I thought you were gay.”
“I don’t rule anybody out because of age, sex, or race. I’m an equal opportunity fuck…. Actually I’m straight. Interested?”
She just smiled. He really was cute. She had never been involved with anyone younger. She would be in control: maybe she would like that for a change. Maybe after she moved out of her mother’s house, she would look him up. Men did not tend to forget her, and she doubted if she would forget Jaime.
The building was located on a narrower plaza off the bleak windswept wasteland of City Hall Plaza. The crescent-shaped building that divided this plaza from the street was new, but the courthouse was not. The lobby was shabby, and after they passed through the metal detector and into the old elevator, it only got worse. Cops all around, people shuffling along, suits rushing past. It was a dreary building badly kept up, full of dirty corridors and crowded offices that hadn’t been painted for thirty years. It smelled of old smoke and damp boots and decaying paper, seedy upholstery, the stench of anxiety and fear.
However, the courtroom where the appeals were being heard was a different world. This room was clean and well lit. The ceiling was high; blue velvet curtains hung behind the dais, where three big empty black leather chairs faced microphones. Behind the chairs was a bookcase of shiny law books, resplendent on display. The same blue velvet curtains hung on three high narrow windows. The room was wood paneled, with portraits of old guys in black robes hung on both walls. Jaime went up to her mother, who was sitting in the front row of benches outside the dividing waist-high wall. Suzanne took the glasses and shoved them on her nose. She did not even notice Elena. She could spy on her mother without having to explain, for it did not seem that Jaime was going to tip her mother to her presence.
Jaime handed Suzanne a brief, a trial transcript (all things she had often seen around the house since she was a baby), and a yellow pad covered with Suzanne’s scrawl. Then he took his seat in the back row with Elena. They sat around for twenty minutes, while Jaime entertained her with commentary on what would happen and pointed out the reporters to her. Then the judges, three old guys wearing black robes just like on TV, came in, and everybody bounced to their feet. A woman intoned, “Hear ye, hear ye” and gave this archaic-sounding announcement of the court being in session for citizens to present their pleas. But she didn’t see any ordinary citizens, only defense lawyers and prosecutors, officers of the court and judges. Marta was sitting in the front row of the benches. Some reporters were taking notes, yawning, taking more notes. Jaime told her they weren’t usually present, but they had come in because of Maxine’s notoriety.
She supposed she expected Perry Mason, but Suzanne stood almost on tiptoe in front of the podium facing the judges and most of what she said Elena could not follow. “Point three in my brief.” “On page one hundred and twelve of the transcript.” “On the top of page one hundred and eighty-nine.” “Point four of my brief.” Cases. One of the judges rose at one point and consulted one of the shiny-looking law books in the bookcase that stood between the blue velvet ceiling-to-floor draperies behind the dais. There was no jury. Nobody talked about guilt or innocence. It was weird. One judge looked half asleep. The other was leaning way back in his chair, although he nodded or grunted occasionally. The other was talkative, addressing her mother as Suzanne and quoting case citings. Her mother spoke for fifteen minutes and was interrupted seven or eight times. Suzanne looked so little and cute up there talking fast, taking what they could hand her, that Elena thought for the first time that what her mother did was actually hard, it was a constant battle.
Then she sat down and a woman prosecutor in a gray suit stood at the podium. The judges were very nice to her. Elena took a particular dislike to the one in the middle, who had asked her mother only one question but who seemed to coo over the young prosecutor. The prosecutor might have been his tall thin blond daughter, slightly horsey faced with an accent Elena had heard in the restaurant, that she supposed they learned in prep school—because she doubted anybody naturally spoke that way. The prosecutor was maybe fifteen years younger than her mother. They were being so sweet to her, all of them awake now. They did not ask her the same kind of tough questions they stuck Suzanne with. Elena wanted to kick the judges. Who would ever guess this was supposed to be a hot case? She was convinced, still, that Suzanne had won, because she had been so together, so fierce, so positive. She had answered every hard one they had thrown at her.
“There won’t be an opinion for months,” Jaime hissed as the prosecutor sat down and the next lawyer came to the podium.
“How do you think it went?”
“Not so good. I know Suzanne’s disappointed.”
Elena stood. “I’ll take the MBTA home.”
“Don’t you want a ride?”
“Not really. See you.” She would tell her mother later that she had sat in, but she felt she had intruded enough. If she could not say tha
t she understood any better what Suzanne did, at least she knew now where it happened. That was something. It gave her a picture in her head.
36
Suzanne
The Friday before Suzanne was finally to argue Maxine’s appeal, Miles wanted to see her in his office.
Miles, who was acting as Marta’s lawyer, repeated patiently, “He was trying to invoke the domestic abuse statute.”
“Bastard!” Suzanne said. “We both worked for that. There’s even some language in the statute that Marta wrote. How can he call walking in on your husband humping a younger woman in your bed and reacting, domestic abuse.”
“Assault with a dangerous weapon with the aim of doing malicious harm, as between two partners in a domestic arrangement. But Elena saved Marta’s ass. She insisted that Marta never intended more than a symbolic act. The row of bullet holes far up the wall proves that, so the prosecutor told Jim he doesn’t have a case.”
“It’s a miracle she didn’t lose the baby.”
“It looks as if we’re out of the woods, at least until he starts bringing it up in the divorce proceedings.” Miles rose from behind his desk and went around to the other side, resting his behind on the edge just in front of her. “So, when’s your court date on the day care case appeal?”
“Next Thursday. I’ve been at the rehab center so much, everything else is going to hell. I have to get my act together.”
“Marta too. Your lives have been a bad soap opera, Suzanne. Now Jim’s determined to make trouble. I want you to keep that in mind and make that daughter of yours understand too. It hasn’t to do with custody of Adam, because after all he’s twenty, but the unborn girl…. Now I have to know from you, Jim doesn’t want a divorce. Does Marta, really? What’s your take on this. Is she reacting out of spite? Will she regret it after the baby’s born?”
“I have to sit down and talk to her.”
“No kidding. Well, get on it and tell me. I don’t want her to divorce him while she’s pregnant with his child unless she’s damned sure that’s the path she wants to take—not for right now, but for next year and the next two decades.”
Driving to school, she thought about the question Miles had posed her. She had not been able to forgive Sam for his infidelity, but their marriage had dried up by then. She had not felt she required a husband strongly enough to have one who preferred another woman. She had been stung, betrayed, with an almost physical sense of despisal. But Marta might still love Jim; she was, after all, bearing his child. If she herself could forgive Elena, perhaps Marta could forgive Jim. She had been with Beverly so much, she had neglected the support she should be offering Marta. They were supposed to be together in court Thursday for Maxine’s appeal.
Suzanne gave over the visiting of Beverly to Elena for the weekend to review her brief and once again go over the videotapes of the children’s testimony and the records of the two therapists and assistant prosecutor with the children. This was a case she found herself caring about intensely. The more her friends argued with her and colleagues and acquaintances attacked her for taking it on, the more she studied the records, the more determined she was to secure justice for Maxine and get her out of Framingham. Marta told her she’d be present. Marta knew how much Suzanne cared about this case and how controversial it was, so she would lend her moral support.
When they walked into the courtroom Thursday, there was a stir among the court personnel. Marta sighed. “Here I come, the one woman parade. I should have worn red. I think everybody in Boston has heard what happened.”
In the car, she had discovered she’d forgotten the glasses that did not slide down her nose and sent Jaime back for them. “Lawyers are terrible gossips.”
“Sex and violence. Pregnancy and betrayal. I hate feeling like such a patsy.”
The three judges entered and they rose. She began to focus. She ran over the basic arguments in her head. The children’s testimony had been rehearsed, coerced, and heavily edited. The defendant had never been permitted to confront her accusers. There was no cross-examination, no chance to test the coherence of the stories. Maxine had not been granted her full rights by law. Further, evidence of the child witnesses had been tainted by the process by which it had been obtained—repeated questioning, which amounted to coaching and suborning of their testimony.
If the conviction was overturned, the state would appeal; if the conviction was not overturned, she would appeal. Either way, it was going to be a long process. She would be living with this uncomfortable case for the next year or two. Well, Maxine had been living with it a lot longer, ever since she had first been accused by the parents of one of the children in her day care center, of sexual abuse of their son.
As the oldest judge Laplaine had a private conversation with the clerk of the court, she mustered her concentration. She owed Maxine that. Distraction was the antithesis of the focus required to win. She had drawn a judge who was new to the district court of appeals, a man in his early sixties from the North Shore who had been a prosecutor before being elevated to the bench. Then there was Judge Corrigan, just turned seventy. Suzanne had pleaded before him several times. He had the reputation of being fair and learned, but with the disconcerting habit of pulling cases from nowhere. Suzanne had never been caught unprepared, but she knew Marta had once been slapped with a defeat because Judge Corrigan cited a case Marta had never heard of and could not argue. The oldest and chief justice was Laplaine, a little deaf, fair if he followed you but known to space out. Sometimes he dozed with his eyes open. Other times he was sharp, the most conservative of the three, although she did not know how that would affect this case. He was strict in his interpretations. He had given her a hard time with Phoebe, but in the end she had won.
At her cue, Suzanne rose. She had her fifteen minutes. “Good morning. May it please the court, I am Suzanne Blume representing Maxine Rodriguez. I’d like to reserve three minutes for rebuttal….”
Suzanne and Marta sat at a corner table in a seafood restaurant in Fan-ueil Hall. They both ordered broiled salmon, a salad, and a glass of Evian water.
“So, how do you think it went?” she asked Marta.
“I thought Corrigan was with you. I saw him nod once. He didn’t hit you with one of his obscure case citations. He seemed interested.” Marta frowned, considering.
“I wasn’t sure about Laplaine. I couldn’t tell if he was even listening until he asked that question about my interpretation of the rules of evidence. I felt he was iffy. What did you think about the new guy, Beamer?”
“I can’t read him yet. I’ve never argued before him. He was a tough prosecutor and I thought he might be leaning to their side.” Marta rubbed her eyes. “It always takes a while to figure out a new judge. Yes, he was a prosecutor, but some judges with that background are harder on prosecutors who haven’t done a sterling job. Until Beamer has a track record, how can we read him?”
“Well, we’ll find out in a few months. They’re considering the appeal, but they’re not letting Maxine out in the meantime. I was hoping she could recover her health.” Suzanne sighed. “Do you think I did a decent job for her?”
“I thought you were superb. It’s partly political, you know. The AG put his weight behind this case.”
She considered Marta’s answer and her stomach clenched. Marta did not think she had won. What could she have done differently? Had she not been prepared enough? She did not know how much more prison time Maxine could endure. Had her life gotten in the way of her case?
Marta was saying, “I was surprised to see Elena in court.”
“Elena? Are you sure?”
“You didn’t notice? She was sitting with Jaime in back.”
“How strange. I’ll have to ask her tonight. Marta, we have to talk about what happened.” Suzanne propped her chin into her cupped hand. “I don’t know where to start. You’re my best friend. Elena I love dearly as you know, but she has this talent for creating dangerous messy dramas.”
Marta gr
oaned. She pulled at her gray-blond hair that was always elegant, like the color of furniture in Beverly’s apartment in the fifties—Hollywood oak, she thought it had been called. Bleached oak, just that silvery ash blond. “Jim is older and is supposed to know better.”
“Marta, don’t you really think I should take Elena and clear out?”
“I don’t want Jim to fuck up my life more than he has. And I don’t want anybody downstairs but you. While I’m not ready to forgive and forget, I feel less angry with Elena because of how she dealt with the police. That saved me a lot of grief, and I appreciate it.”
“Elena’s not seeing him, you know. She’s not even talking with him. She’s bitterly disillusioned.”
“Good. Let’s hope it stays that way.”
“The worst thing is, Marta, I suspected this maybe two months ago and I confronted Elena. She persuaded me I was crazy. I kept watching them together and I couldn’t see any sign that something might be going on.”
“I never caught on myself. But it’s nice to know I wasn’t abnormally dense.”
They both picked at their food. Then they walked together, slowly. It was a clear sunny day, one of those cool glassy days of October in Boston. The sky seemed infinite over them. The air was fresh and almost squeaked in the lungs. Only her life, she thought, was full of disorder and murky with the odor of unsolved problems. Suzanne took Marta’s arm. “So how are you feeling about being pregnant?”
“Am I still cool with it? Well, I admit I had second thoughts right afterward—”
“It’s late but not impossible to do something about it. It still seems to be a pretty risky business, having a baby at our age.”
“No! She’s my baby. I’ve always wanted a daughter. I still do.”
Suzanne nodded, tightening her grip on Marta’s arm. The baby who had died had been a girl. Then came the miscarriages. “But do you really want to raise this baby alone?”