Midwives (13 page)

Although Stephen’s murder, rape, and drug trials garnered the most ink, he had also defended a bank president who had doctored his institution’s reported assets and liabilities, an entrepreneur who had stolen from her investors, and a pair of Vermont officials who had accepted bribes from a construction company bidding on a state office complex. Vermont rarely endures more than a dozen murders a year, and most of those are the sorts of drug-related homicides or domestic nightmares that wind up with the public defender. Consequently, it was only natural that a firm like Stephen’s—and Stephen himself—would handle all sorts of less visible (and less grisly) white-collar crime as well.

While Stephen may have rarely wound up in the Orleans County Courthouse in Newport, he still knew the county’s state’s attorney fairly well. Vermont is a small state, and Stephen and Bill Tanner ran into each other at formal bar association functions in Montpelier, and informal receptions at the law school in Royalton. They had mutual friends in Burlington and Bennington, and once spent a Saturday skiing together at Stowe, when they ran into each other in a lift line early that day.

Consequently, the scene I inadvertently witnessed one morning during the trial shouldn’t have surprised me. But of course it did. I viewed Bill Tanner as an almost psychotic sort of villain, a fellow bent upon the destruction of my mother and my family for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom. He was, in my mind, especially menacing because he was so unfailingly mannered.

In any case, one morning before the trial began for the day, I was standing outside the two lacquered wooden doors that led from the courthouse hallway into the courtroom itself. It was still very early, but through the porthole glass windows I could see that Stephen and Tanner and Judge Dorset were already inside. Dorset wasn’t wearing his robe, and his necktie hung loose around his neck like a scarf: He had not even begun to tie it.

Tanner was eating a banana and Stephen was munching on dry cereal, his whole hand and part of his arm disappearing periodically inside the large cardboard box. The three men were hovering around the defense table, and Tanner was actually sitting in the chair that usually belonged to my mother. The jury had not yet been brought in, nor had the bailiff or the court reporter arrived. The newspaper writers hadn’t struggled in, nor had most of the other spectators who filled the courtroom during the trial: my mother’s friends and supporters, curious members of the State Medical Board, and Charlotte Bedford’s family—a small group at once inconsolably sad and unmollifiably angry. The only two people I saw in the gallery that moment were the two young adults who—based upon the thick books of state statutes they were reading, and the yellow markers they used to highlight passages in their dense law journals—I assumed were law students.

My mother was in the women’s room on another floor of the building at that moment, and my father was with her—probably pacing the corridor just outside the bathroom.

Something about the sight of the two lawyers and the judge together prevented me from plowing into the courtroom as planned. The acoustics in the courtroom were sound, and through the thin crack between the double doors I could hear their conversation.

“Oh, God, I almost laughed out loud when I saw the paper this morning,” Tanner was saying, chuckling just the tiniest bit.

“Was Meehan at the same trial we were?” Stephen said, and it took me a moment to remember why I knew the name Meehan. And then it clicked: He was the gaunt, blond fellow covering the trial for the
Montpelier Sentinel
, the man who always looked so tired.

“I just had no idea it was going so damn well, Stephen,” Tanner continued, pressing the yellow and black peel from his banana into an empty Styrofoam coffee cup.

“Meehan’s an idiot,” Dorset said. “You both know that.”

“Maybe. But if the jury has seen it so far the way he has, I have really screwed up here,” Stephen said.

“No one sees things the way Meehan does,” Dorset said.

“I hope so. Otherwise, it’s going to be a very long couple of days for my friend Sibyl,” Stephen said, shaking his head with mock drama.

“But a very short deliberation,” Tanner quickly added, and he punched Stephen lightly on the arm.

I think what distressed me most at that moment wasn’t the idea that Stephen feared the trial was going badly, although I’m sure that contributed to the queasiness I felt most of the morning. It may not even have been the way the attorney who was supposed to protect my mother and preserve my family was fraternizing with the enemy that I found so disturbing.

No, looking back, what I believe upset me the most that day was the casual, lighthearted way the three men were bantering. This trial had become everything for my family, it was our lives; it was in our minds every moment we were awake, and I can’t imagine my mother escaped it in her dreams. I know I didn’t. The penalty for involuntary manslaughter was one to fifteen years in prison, and Tanner’s relentless attacks on my mother had made it clear to us all that should she be found guilty, the State would press hard for the maximum penalty. (I had done the math instantly the morning the charges were brought against my mother: If she was found guilty and sent to prison for a decade and a half, I would be twenty-nine years old by the time she got out, and my mother would be close to fifty.)

For Stephen Hastings and Bill Tanner, however, for Judge Howard Dorset, this trial was merely their job. It was, in fact, just one of the many jobs they would have in their lives. One more house for a home builder. One more flight for an airline pilot. One more baby for an obstetrician or a midwife. The stakes may have been high for my family, but for the men arguing about my mother’s character and capabilities, it was just another morning out of the office, another afternoon in court.

I didn’t have a crush on Stephen Hastings, but it would have been understandable if I had. I imagine a lot of girls in my situation would have fallen madly in love with the fellow, given the fact that he was about as close as our family was going to get to having a white knight or cavalry officer ride into our lives and rescue us. And, of course, my hormones were the chemical mess that everyone’s are at thirteen and fourteen years old, an explosive combination of elements with a tendency to combust—at least here in Vermont—in the damnedest places. A pickup truck with a pile of clothes or old blankets tossed casually in the bed. The mossy, hidden crevices that dot the rivers as they switchback through the woods. Cemeteries.

Perhaps because so much granite is pulled from quarries in Barre and Proctor, a lot of teenage boys in Vermont come to believe adamantly (albeit mistakenly) that graveyards and tombstones affect teenage girls like aphrodisiacs.

Rollie often teased me that I had a crush on Stephen, but I think that was because she herself was so attracted to the man. That didn’t surprise me then; it doesn’t surprise me now.

Stephen was my father’s age the summer and fall he defended my mother, and two years older than Sibyl. The men around me that year were thirty-six, the woman who was my world was thirty-four.

I didn’t read newspapers much before my mother’s name started to appear in them on a regular basis, so I had never heard of Stephen before he entered our family’s life, but I realized quickly that most adults around me had. If they didn’t know his name, often they recognized his face once they met him. He was photographed frequently. Back then cameras weren’t allowed into courtrooms when trials were in progress, so the typical Stephen Hastings pictures were what he once referred to around me as either “grip and grins” with a defendant on the courthouse steps after he had won, or “solo frowns of righteous indignation” when he was announcing the inevitable appeal after a defeat.

His hair was just beginning to gray along his temples and across the pair of graceful boomerangs that served as eyebrows. It was more black than brown, and he kept it combed and trimmed with the discipline one might expect from an air force veteran. Small wrinkles had begun to wave from the corners of his mouth, but otherwise his face was lean and sharp. Since I saw him most of the time in the late afternoon or evenings, he always had a shadow of stubble, a dark and natural makeup that in my memories suggests he was especially hardworking and wise.

He was about my father’s height, an inch or so short of six feet, and he was slightly heavier—not fat, not even meaty, but he’d never lost the muscles he’d found while training for Vietnam.

He was recently divorced when he met my mother and father, but the marriage hadn’t lasted very long or led to any children. My mother said that when he was especially preoccupied, he sometimes rolled the thumb and index finger on his right hand around the finger on his left where he had once worn a wedding band, but I never saw him do it myself.

Perhaps because I was a teen with a fairly predictable interest in clothing, I noticed that Stephen always seemed to be dressed slightly better than the men around him: If he was surrounded by attorneys in blazers and slacks at a Tuesday-morning deposition, he would be wearing a suit; if the gentlemen around him at a Saturday-night cocktail party were wearing khaki pants, his slacks would be gray; even one Sunday at a picnic that summer, before which the adults must have decided en masse that they would all appear in blue jeans, he alone chose to wear chinos—twilled, yes, but ironed and crisp and beige.

“One click above,” he explained that day to my father and me, rolling his eyes and laughing at himself, after my father had made some comment about his habit of always dressing a tad better than the world around him. “To win at what I do—and let’s face it, charge what I charge—demands dressing exactly one click above everyone else. Not two clicks, because then I look like an idiot. One. One click makes me look pricey. And, I hope, worth it.”

“I hope so, too,” my father agreed, the tone belying a tension otherwise veiled by his words.

Stephen never treated me like a child, which at that age meant a great deal to me. Twice he brought me punk albums from a record store in Burlington that wouldn’t find their way to the Northeast Kingdom for months. Once after he heard Tom Corts expressing an interest in the American West, he brought him a paperback monograph of Ansel Adams prints. He always seemed enormously interested in my father’s work, and I think by the time the trial began he knew so much about home birth he could have delivered a breech in a bedroom by himself.

I know that sometimes my father felt Stephen had become too much a part of our family’s life, but that seemed to me a reasonable price to secure my mother’s acquittal. Looking back, I think Stephen simply decided that—or as in actuality these things tend to work—
discovered
that he cared for my mother, and he wanted to be around us all as much as he could. His gifts, in my mind, were always genuine, his embraces avuncular and sincere.

Barely forty-eight hours would slip by between the Saturday my parents met Stephen Hastings in Burlington and the Monday evening he appeared at our home in Reddington with a photographer, and I was introduced to him. Apparently my parents had taken an immediate liking to Stephen the day they had met, and he’d agreed on the spot to represent my mother if—as he said to them—it proved necessary. And while we all held out hope as the State conducted its investigation throughout March that Bill Tanner would decide not to prosecute, Stephen was adamant that my parents should prepare for the worst: a charge of involuntary manslaughter stemming from my mother’s recklessness or extreme negligence.

“Bill may even make some noise about it being intentional,” Stephen had warned that Saturday afternoon.

“What does that mean?” my father had asked.

“In actuality it will mean nothing. But as the State’s top gun in Orleans, Bill needs to act like he’s one tough cowboy,” Stephen began, before turning in his chair to address my mother directly. “If he suggests you acted intentionally, it means he believes he can win with a charge of voluntary manslaughter, not merely involuntary. Maybe even second-degree murder.”

My mother simply nodded in silence, my father told me much later, and he said he couldn’t think of anything to say. And so he just reached over and covered her hand with his.

Fortunately Stephen continued quickly, “Of course, it won’t come to that. I don’t think Bill could find a precedent for such a thing on God’s green earth. I’m just warning you he might make noise to that effect early on.”

Stephen wanted to take steps right away to begin building a defense—just in case—and my parents agreed. He wanted photographs of the scrapes and bruises my mother had received on the ice that Friday morning in Lawson, and the sprained ankle upon which she was hobbling. He wanted to examine Charlotte Bedford’s prenatal records with a physician, and he said he’d probably bring on board an investigator right away. And he gave my mother some advice: “Don’t talk to anybody about this, not a soul. Don’t tell anybody anything—and don’t tell me everything. I’ll ask you what I need to know as we move along. And try not to worry. I know you will, but you shouldn’t. In my opinion, the State should damn well be giving you a medal for saving that baby’s life, not threatening you like a gang of legal thugs.”