(1969) The Seven Minutes (91 page)

‘Maybe,’ said Barrett with an answering smile. ‘We’ll explore that when we’re on a couch together. Okay, Sheri’s bed a welcome mat. George went first. Token resistance. But no problem. He and Sheri made out. Then Jerry’s turn. We didn’t get it all from the stand, Maggie. What actually took place?’

Maggie resumed slowly. Listening, Barrett closed his eyes, and her recital was transformed into a series of vivid stereopticon slides inside his head.

Well, Mike…

Maggie’s low voice, and the colorful slides.

Jerry had gone into Sheri’s bedroom after George had left it, and he had undressed and crawled into bed with her. But it had not been Jerry who entered her. He had been incapable, impotent. And Sheri, brainless child of hedonism, at first amused, was soon challenged. She’d had her boys and men, and this had never happened to her before. When they got on Sheri, they got it big. They always made it big with Sheri, because Sheri was a femme fatale. Jerry wasn’t making it at all, and this was a rebuke to her own ego and talents. She worked on Jerry, a circus of foreplay, with no result. And soon there was no longer challenge for the girl, only impatience, irritation, annoyance, and finally anger. This was a put-down to her sexuality. This was the ultimate insult. Perhaps she thought the failure was primarily her own, not his, and she would not have it. She had begun to tease him, to mock him, to ridicule him.

Blinded by rage and tears, Jerry had tried to escape, to dress and escape. She would not let him off so easily. She had followed him from the bed, and he had tried to push her away, be rid of her, until her taunts had become filthy and vicious. When he’d tried to answer back, she had struck at him, and missed, and slipped on the throw rug, and fallen, and her head had gone down against the knifing corner of the table and it had cracked her skull like an eggshell, and she was unconscious. Jerry had wanted to summon help, but George Perkins had wanted them to have no part of that mess.

Shortly afterward, Darlene Nelson had come back to the apartment, to find her roommate struggling briefly to hold on to consciousness. Darlene had kneeled over Sheri, trying to discover what had happened. Sheri had whispered the truth, but begged for only one thing. Her father must not know of her behavior, how she was with the boys. Tell them anything, Darlene, anything, she had pleaded, tell them rape. And when the police came and the ambulance came and Howard Moore came, Darlene had told them rape.

Then there was Jerry, caught and arrested. There was the code. No squealing on friends, especially a friend like George who had balls. And rape, yes, rape was a way to hide the ultimate shame of exposure and disgrace, and escape the laughter of all you knew. Forcible entry had a manly ring to it. It was one way to prove you could get an erection, make it big. There was even black humor in it, the sick joke: rape is assault with a friendly weapon. At least a weapon, a potent weapon. With rape you were a criminal, but you were a man. With the truth, you were sentenced to impotence and ridicule forever.

Mike Barrett had opened his eyes, and the slides had disappeared, and there was Maggie speaking.

‘So it was rape,’ she was saying.

‘And suddenly it was the book that made him do it,’ Barrett interrupted. ‘Overnight, The Seven Minutes was the criminal. But one fact never came out in court, Maggie. Where did Jerry get the book?’

She did not reply. She looked down at her fingers.

‘Well, Maggie?’

‘Is it important now?’

‘I want to know,’ he said firmly. ‘Where did he get the book?’

‘From me.’

His eyes widened. From me. Zap. Had he heard her right? ‘From you, Maggie?’

She held her head high. ‘Yes. I bought it for myself, because I wanted to read it, and I bought it for Aunt Ethel also, because I knew she’d wanted to read it.’

He listened incredulously, then less so as Maggie went on.

Maggie had learned that Aunt Ethel liked those novels, actually craved them, found a world in them that she had never been permitted to know. So the game was always that Maggie acquired the books for her own reading, and then, when Uncle Frank was not home, she passed them on to Aunt Ethel to read.

But Aunt Ethel had never got to read The Seven Minutes, because once Maggie had read it she had passed it on to Jerry instead. He had said that he had no interest in the book, but Maggie had insisted that he read it. She knew Jerry’s problem, since she had been to San Francisco with him, and she had wanted him to know that others who had suffered the same problem had been helped and had even been able to write about it openly and frankly. For, in the fiction, as Cathleen lay on her bed enjoying the man inside her, she thought of many men, but mostly of three men in her life.

‘Remember how it was in the book, Mike?’ Maggie asked. ‘If you remember, you’ll understand why I gave it to Jerry.’

He took a moment to remember, and then he did.

There was Jadway’s Cathleen, lying there, recollecting her adventures with the three men who wanted her, and trying to imagine what it would be like to belong to each one. The first man, she knew, was spoiled and self-centered, yet a great lover, a Casanova, skilled and experienced, promising a memorable life of the flesh. The second man was, she knew, a conservative lover, Everyman, who would devote more time to achieving success in his work than to his woman, but who promised a comfortable material life. The third man was, she knew, a temporarily impotent lover, but he was a man of much sensitivity, creative, understanding, promising intellectual and spiritual fascination. And to one of these she had finally given herself completely, but which one it was Jadway did not disclose until the last page of the book. And in the end the reader learned that it was the third man with whom she had been living these seven memorable minutes. Through her own warmth and tenderness, she had made him a man, and in making him a man she had found her greatest fulfillment as a woman. Of course the third man was Jadway himself. It had been so obviously autobiographical. And that was what Maggie had wanted Jerry to read.

‘Then you actually got Jerry to read it?’ Barrett asked.

I did. He read it not once but twice. And while a good deal of the novel made him uneasy, it shook him and gave him some understanding of women and some hope for himself. Yet that wasn’t enough. Without the guidance of an analyst, or the author himself, there was no way Jerry could translate Jadway’s experience in the book to serve his own purposes. Jadway could do little for him. Jadway gave him some words, helpful ones, but Jerry needed more from the author, and the author was dead. So what was left? To emulate someone living, someone successful with women. Namely, his friend George Perkins. So he lamely followed George to Sheri Moore on her bed. But Jerry wasn’t George. Jerry was Jadway’s impotent hero, only Sheri wasn’t Jadway’s Cathleen.’

‘I see,’ said Barrett. ‘Jerry took credit for George’s semen in the victim, and he opted for rape. And then he was caught, and then the book …’

It was becoming clearer now.

The book - Maggie’s copy - had been found where she’d hidden it from Frank Griffith in the trunk of the car that she and Jerry shared. And, believing the book to be the real culprit (or wanting to believe it), and prodded by Elmo Duncan and Luther Yerkes, Frank Griffith had immediately railed against the book for corrupting his son. Yes, it was becoming clearer. And Jerry, not daring to contradict his father, afraid to contradict the law, perhaps wanting to believe it was the book so he could plead extenuating circumstances to his supposed crime, went along, picked up the chant, made his confession, appeared in court.

‘Maggie, what about Jerry’s second suicide attempt?’ Barrett wanted to know. ‘What was behind it?’

‘He’d been depressed about Sheri’s condition in the hospital. That really bothered him. And he wanted a few kinds words from George and a chance to meet Sheri’s roommate, not to reveal the whole truth but simply a chance to explain to her that Sheri’s head injury had honestly been an accident. And so he got out of the house and went hunting for George in that club on Melrose, but as you saw for yourself, George wanted nothing to do with him, wanted no part of the trouble. So in order to get rid of Jerry, friend George pointed out Darlene Nelson. You saw Jerry try to speak to her. He just wanted to plead accident, beg forgiveness, derive some relief through expiation, but instead, well, she stunned him by lashing out at turn with her knowledge of his impotence. It was callous, unfeeling, but -‘ Maggie shrugged - ‘I guess all of us can be vicious sometimes. Darlene - she taunted Jerry with that old Irish goodbye, “God stiffen you.” Jerry just came apart, unraveled. He was sure that the whole world now knew or soon would know his condition. He couldn’t face that. So he tried to kill himself. You can see how he would want to, can’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Barrett.

‘It was this same fear, Mike, that made him continually threaten to commit suicide to avoid testifying in court. It was not Duncan that he was afraid of. Nor even you personally. It was the weapon you possessed - the meanness of the crossexamination, the chilling panic that he would crack under hostile questioning and that the truth of his impotence would be divulged to everyone on earth.’

Another unanswered question nagged Barrett, and now he posed it. ‘Maggie, if you knew all along about Jerry’s sexual problem, why didn’t you come forward right away to save him from the charge of rape?’ He posed the question again, more forcefully. ‘If you knew he was incapable of rape, why in the devil didn’t you say so?’

‘Because I wasn’t that certain that Jerry had been impotent the night of the so-called rape. I only knew for certain what his condition had been before that night. But then I thought -I don’t know - maybe out of some kind of ill desperation he had attempted rape, and the stimulation of trying to violate a girl, the way many men are supposed to become potent only if their victim resists - well, I thought maybe that kind of excitement had given Jerry his first erection and a kind of dreadful success.’

Barrett nodded. ‘Yes, it makes sense.’

‘But yesterday, Mike, after Sheri Moore died, the truth suddenly seemed to dawn on me. I guess there were certain things that happened, or rather, didn’t happen. Like Howard Moore. In such grief, he should have been in a murderous rage against Jerry yet, in the radio and television interviews he gave right after his daughter died, there was not one word spoken by him against Jerry or against The Seven Minutes. So, knowing what I knew of Jerry, I began to suspect that something else had happened on the night Jerry was with Sheri Moore. Then I recalled another thing. When I gave The Seven Minutes to Jerry, and after he read it, he had said he wished the author, Jadway, were still alive so that he could talk to him. Why ? Because Jadway might be the only man on earth who would understand Jerry’s problem and be sympathetic. Jerry wouldn’t tell me more at the time, wouldn’t tell me what he wished he could say to Jadway. I guess he felt that he had already told me too much, and that I secretly did not respect him because of his problem. I even suspect that he believed the prowess his rape had proved had regained him some of the respect he’d lost in my eyes - warped, but anyway - anyway, he wouldn’t tell me more about how he felt. It was only to another human being who had been through what he had, one like Jadway, that Jerry felt he might be able to pour out the whole story of his failure that night with Sheri Moore. And then -‘

She paused, thinking, and finally Barrett prompted her. “Then what, Maggie?’

‘Then there was the news from you that Jadway was alive, actually alive. And after you phoned from Washington that you’d seen Senator Bain bridge, and he’d told you Jadway would not cooperate, well, that’s when I determined to see Senator Bainbridge and plead with him to bring the living Jadway and the dying Jerry together. Right after, when I phoned Washington myself and learned that Bainbridge was on his way to Chicago - to Chicago, where you’d found Cassie McGraw - that was when the niggling thought in the back of my head came forward as a certainty. I was sure - deduction, intuition, dumb guesswork - that Bainbridge was going to Chicago to see Cassie McGraw, and that he was going to see Cassie because he himself was J J Jadway. Mike, did you suspect the possibility?’

‘It crossed my mind. But I couldn’t accept it, because Bainbridge didn’t fit my image of Jadway. And as to Jerry, of course, I had no idea of his - his problem.’

‘You couldn’t have, because you didn’t know what I knew about Jerry. Now let me tell you what happened when Jerry came to your apartment yesterday morning.’

Barrett listened intently, as Maggie went on.

Jerry had come to see her yesterday before submitting to imprisonment. After his arrival, she had taken the reckless chance of pretending to Jerry that she knew the truth about his night with Sheri Moore. She pretended that she had learned it from Sheri’s father. With this she had finally harpooned the truth. Jerry had broken down and confessed his lie. She had pleaded with him to make the truth public, to save himself from jail, from jail immediately and perhaps for the rest of his life. Jerry had refused to do this. Jail for rape he might endure, but public knowledge of his final fiasco he could never survive. Then it was that Maggie had told him that J J Jadway was alive. The news had seemed to have a remarkable effect on Jerry. If only he could speak to Jadway. And Maggie had told him she would try to arrange it.

She had meant to see Howard Moore originally, to learn whether he knew as truth what she had only suspected. But when she did see Moore, she told him the truth that she had tricked Jerry into confessing. Sadly he had confirmed it. Immediately after his daughter’s death, her roommate, Darlene Nelson, had broken down and he had heard from her of his daughter’s last words. Yes, he knew it had been his girl’s fault. His poor lost baby. Yes, her fault and not Jerry’s. No, he would not make the truth public if the boy didn’t want to make it public. But if Jerry was ready to change his testimony, he would back up the boy in court.

And so, for Maggie, the resolution hinged on one person.