No Book but the World: A Novel (8 page)

Then I am free. The car leaps forward; all four wheels land on asphalt. I touch the brake, put it in park, get out to thank the man. From the thighs down he’s Jackson Pollocked with reddish-orange mud.

“Oh, sorry!” I say. “Thanks for everything, for stopping—
really
thanks, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Can I give you something for your trouble, at least to get your pants cleaned—?”

He waves me off. His eyeglasses are speckled with rain. He returns my handshake with a hard, brief, sopping grip that nevertheless communicates bashfulness, refusing my characterization of his help as anything noteworthy. “Take care, now,” he says as I get back in my car. His speech has the same flattened-vowel syndrome that marks Bayard Charles’s and Mrs. Tremblay’s, only now it seems less an affliction than a winsome fillip. “Have a safe rest of your trip.”

C
RITERION HAS
nickel-an-hour parking meters and an oblong town green with a painted cannon in the center, beside a peeling flagpole. The law office, according to the notes I penciled on the back of an envelope, is above the Ready Barber Shop, which I spot across the green by its spiral pole. The rain has stopped and the air has gone crackly, as if any residual moisture in it has contracted into unseen veins of ice. I put two nickels in the meter, then inspect the side of my car. It looks clawed, but I don’t see any major dents and it drove fine, the twenty-odd miles from Perdu. I’d like to talk with Dennis, and I see my phone’s getting four bars, but its clock tells me I’d better postpone calling till after I meet with the lawyer.

Next to the barbershop there’s a pizza place and I remember how hunger is part of what propelled me from the guest room at Mrs. Tremblay’s, but even if my mishap with the car hadn’t left me with no time to eat, I realize I no longer want to. A grinding anxiety has supplanted the empty rumblings. I cross the street, double-check the number on the door, go inside. The narrow stairwell leading to the second floor is darkly paneled and smells of bananas.

Three doors lead off the landing. One is featureless. Another has an oval plaque bearing the numeral 2. The third holds a pane of frosted glass on which is stenciled
Bayard Charles, Esq
. I knock once, try the handle. Inside, a young woman sits behind a cluttered desk reading a paperback. She looks up with minor curiosity.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Charles?”

“Oh. I’ll tell him.” She stands and, bringing the book along, her finger holding the place, goes to a door behind her desk. There she turns, remembering. “Your name?” I can see the book’s cover has a picture of a pouty brunette in a nurse’s uniform from yesteryear, with one of those starched little caps and an apron.

“Ava Manseau.”

She disappears through the door but leaves it partly open, and I can hear when she says, “Something like a Miss Minso is here?”

Almost everything in the office is, like the stairwell, darkly wooden: the uncarpeted floor, the paneling, the desk and various area tables and chairs, none of which, other than the secretary’s recent perch, is available for its usual purpose, each being already overwhelmed by Pisa-esque towers of books, folders, binders, notepads and general flotsam. The chair nearest me holds a partly used ream of copy paper, a car charger, and a white paper bag emblazoned
JABLONSKI & BROS. PHARMACY
. Beneath all the clutter, the shapes of more substantial items declare themselves mutedly: a row of wooden filing cabinets, a huge old photocopy machine, a treadmill evidently not in regular use—stacks of fat file folders are piled on the belt.

This, then, is the rest of the cavalry. My nose has started to run. I grope in my coat pocket for a tissue, to no avail.

“You can go on in.” The young woman has returned. She smiles a little this time, her doughy cheeks showing pretty, thumbprint dimples, and resumes reading her book even before she has finished lowering herself back into the chair. I make my way toward the communicating door, high-stepping over various books and boxes.

The inner office smells more intensely of bananas, and something syrupy, too, like cough medicine. The man behind the desk is impressively tall. He’s older than I expected; his domed head and large face are mottled with age. Standing, he reaches across the desk. His handshake is strong. “Mrs. Minso,” he says. His voice has the resonance of an old-time radio announcer’s. I imagine him promoting Brylcreem, Jell-O pudding, Chesterfield cigarettes. “Bayard Charles.”

“Hi. I’m Ava—
Man
seau, actually.”

He squints at me with a faintly quizzical smile, as if he’s either dubious about what I said or else deprecating himself for being slow to place me. His eyes are small and bright beneath the heavy folds of his lids; when he squints the little chinks of blue all but disappear.

“Fred’s sister,” I add.

“Yes . . .”—he stretches the words out as if evaluating their veracity even as he utters them—“you’re Frederick Robbins’s sister.” And he emits a sigh so gusting, so devoid of restraint that I want Kitty to be here so she can poke me, and I can poke her, and we can hold back giggles together. Instead I sniff and rummage again for a tissue, with no greater success than before. “Have a seat,” he offers. I sit. “And you came up here from—?”

“Freyburg.” I wipe my nose with my fingers. “Down in Putnam County? About eight hours.”

“Nice,” he says, courteously if without giving the impression of having heard of either.

“I spoke with you Monday?”

“Monday, yes . . .” He sorts among some papers on his desk, shuffles through an alternate pile, then swivels to a side table and moves about more loose sheets. “Monday, Monday . . .”

“Mr. Charles, have you seen Fred yet?”

He swivels his chair back to face me and gives a delicate grimace. “No, not yet. Haven’t had a chance. I expected to get over there today, but something came up. An emergency, really, bank foreclosing on a dairy farm. Over in Rudolf. Tough. Been in the family four generations. Very tough. He’s in Afghanistan, she’s here taking care of three children and a mom who had a stroke.”

His words pave the way for an expression of sympathy, but I find myself unable to come up with one. Of course the contours of the story he described sound terrible, yet I feel nothing in relation to it, feel incapable of sympathy or even clear thought, conscious of nothing save the visceral sensation of slipping, falling, my feet fumbling over disintegrating ground. Some reasonable part of me advises that an expression of sympathy for the family in question might show him we are not monsters, Fred and me, that we, too, are worthy of his consideration, and yet: “A foreclosure,” is all I am able to say, dumbly, working to sort out the meaning of this. “But you’re a defense lawyer.”

“Oh, well, I do some criminal defense, sure, along with some civil suits, some real estate, some estate planning. Trusts, wills. Divorce settlements. The gamut. Practice like this, we get to do it all.” He smiles and the bags pouch up under his eyes in a way that seems designed to appeal, a bid for my sympathy. “We get a cross section,” he adds, spreading his mottled hands in the air before him, as if the spirit of helpfulness dictates he ought to demonstrate the size of the cross section. Apparently it is the size of a bread box.

“But you are a public defender?”

“Well,” he says, in his impressive rumble, “I’m in the assigned counsel program—that’s how it works up this way—and I do what I can for ’em, take what cases I can. Get an awful lot of them, to tell the truth. We’re overrun.” He places a palm on one of the high stacks of paper before him.

“Oh.” The air hangs dense with odors of banana and cough medicine and I’m still in my coat, my coat still damp, my nose still runny. I must look badly dismayed because the lawyer reddens slightly.

“We do what we can,” he reiterates encouragingly, leaning forward. “Those of us in the program. It’s voluntary, so. I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t believe in it. Fourteenth Amendment. Equal justice under the law. Regardless of means. That’s not the founding fathers, you know, that’s Pericles. Cradle of civilization. Problem is, the caseload doesn’t allow for me to meet with every indigent client in advance of court dates. The resources simply aren’t there.”

On a mechanical level my hearing is operating fine; the phonemes and everything are coming through, but I seem to be processing their meaning at an awfully slow rate. Now I repeat the word, “indigent,” for example, sampling it with my own mouth. It fairly cuts my palate. I cast my eye at the great litter of paper, all the ruffle-edged legal pads, gaping manila folders, dusty black binders and sheaves of photocopies, newspapers, warped magazines and yellowing journals; also at the framed photographs on his desk, their blank backs turned to me so that I can only imagine the clean, congenial faces of his relatives posed in obliging semicircles at family gatherings; also at a little row of prescription bottles up high on a shelf, and a bottle that looks like aftershave, and another of Pepto-Bismol, unmistakably pink. The single, narrow window reveals a lowering, smoky darkness, through which the lights of shops across the green shine as faint and small as the ends of cigarettes.

A telephone warbles in the outer office, not an electronic sound but a real old clapper-and-bell:
brrrrring brrrring
. Mr. Charles glances toward the door. I touch the inside of my wrist to my forehead and rest my eyelids. When next I open them, Mr. Charles has produced a box of tissues and positioned it at the edge of the desk close to me. I take one, only to clutch it in my hand and say—surprised at how rapidly and with what honest strength the words emerge—“I came to see my brother, Mr. Charles, and I haven’t been able to do that yet, and also I came to see if I could help, I thought you were helping him, and that maybe it would be good if I could explain certain things to you, things that would help you help him, you know, and I’m not at all good at this but now I don’t even know if you are helping him, but maybe, if not, you could help me at least, because I don’t even know how to get in to see him, and I’ve been here since yesterday. And I haven’t seen him in so long.”

“Oh.” He gives a single, condoling cluck of his tongue. “Mrs. Manseau.”

“It’s Ava.”

He acknowledges this with the slightest of nods. “The particulars of the case, your brother’s case, let me be honest, are pretty tough. On paper, of course,” he qualifies, as if anticipating my interjection. “But, ah,
on
paper, I’ll be straight with you, they’re tough. We may do worse than consider a plea.”

“A plea?” Such a shy little pansy of a word. A plea, please. Please is the magic word, even Dilly knows that. It sounds like it should signal hopefulness, but I can tell from the excessively gentle way he says it that it is, in fact, a blow.

“Yes, well, I haven’t yet had a chance to assess the particulars . . .” He gets to rummaging again, this time standing up to check through yet another stack of folders on a different table, eventually striding over to stick his head through the doorway. “Lisa, honey, do you by any chance have the Frederick Robbins folder out here?”

At last—an anticipatory current of relief. Now he is getting the folder. Now he is going to do something, tell me something, make things clear. I notice the tissue still crumpled in my fist and use it on my nose.

In the doorway, Mr. Charles says, “Thanks, sweetheart,” returns to his desk with a not very fat manila folder, and sits down again, spreading it flat before him. I don’t like his calling his secretary honey and sweetheart, don’t like having to make my appeal to a man who thinks that’s the way to address women, but I tell myself it’s just cultural, that if I’d grown up in his time and place, I wouldn’t think anything of it. The truth is, I am a foreigner here. When in Perdu, etc. So long as I don’t judge his ways, perhaps he won’t judge mine. I concentrate on engendering goodwill toward him, even as I hope for his in return.

But he opens the folder and when I crane to see its contents I spot, amid the photocopies and forms, newspaper clippings, and then my earlobes burn because I know what all the articles say, what kind of story they tell about Fred and how far short they fall of engendering anything like goodwill. They use the words “drifter” and “vagrant.” And “drawn.” As in “drawn to young children.”

“Let’s see now,” Mr. Charles says in his deep, silty voice as he leafs through the papers and then finds the one he wants: the charges, he explains, and begins to read aloud slowly as if he himself is discovering for the first time what they are.

“Weren’t you—I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m confused. Doesn’t a lawyer have to be present when someone’s being charged?”

“Hm?” He squints up at me, deepening the creases around his eyes until they recede so far into the folds of skin they are like caraway seeds tucked into a bun. “Well, it looks like they brought in someone from the Public Defender’s Office. Ideally, I’d have been there, but I didn’t hear from O.A.R. until after arraignment.”

“O.A.R.?”

“Offender Aid and Restoration. They provide the affidavit of indigency. Then they fax it down to the guy who runs the whole assigned counsel program, and he gets in touch with me.” His tone conveys both his own easy familiarity with the system and his expectation that whether or not I follow every bit of it precisely does not really matter. It makes me think of Dennis explaining something about soffits or joists—the way we both know, as he speaks, that I am going to absorb it only superficially, and also that it’s not necessary for me to understand it any more than that.

I wrap my arms around myself and nod: go on.

He resumes reading aloud, presenting the charges and explaining after each count what it means: unlawful imprisonment in the first degree, kidnapping in the second, unauthorized use of a vehicle in the third.

“Unauthorized use—?”

“The Toyota pickup,” translates Mr. Charles. “Registered to a Mr. Ronald Ferebee. Maternal grandfather of the deceased. Reported stolen the morning of November ninth.”

He speaks of class E and B felonies, and a class A misdemeanor, of minimums and maximums and priors and mandatories and my bones have become glass tubes, my veins brittle pipettes, they are all shivering cold as if a fierce wind is whistling through them and I imagine I am emitting a kind of thinly audible vibrato. I am wretched. Wretched against the backdrop of Bayard Charles’s mellifluous recitation, which continues, his tone unmistakably businesslike; he is using what are for him workaday terms, and I grasp finally what I have been stupid not to understand: that his only idea of me—his only possible idea—is as the sister of a person who has been linked to contemptible acts. I am, to him, surely nothing more or less than a member and product of the household that formed Fred.

Those picture frames on his desk, the contents of whose photos I cannot see, only their impersonal, impenetrable backs tilted toward me on their little hinged stands—they contain the people Mr. Charles recognizes and cares for, the individuals whose histories, entwined with his, render them comprehensible, worthy not simply of sympathy but the status of full-fledged humanity. Those clients he started to tell me about, the ones whose farm is being foreclosed on, those people, whether or not he’s even met them in person—the father in Afghanistan, the mother taking care of all the little children and the ailing grandmother—they, too, are worthy of his sympathy. Their story comes handsomely wrapped in the American flag, and in the flaggy tropes of farm and family. And the secretary, the one he calls sweetheart, sitting out there engrossed once more in her paperback novel—she, too, has his . . . what, affection? It isn’t affection; it’s something more substantial, more practical. She has legitimacy to him. She works for him and he pays her and they are part of the same system, the same portrait; they uphold each other’s roles and standing in the community. They help ensure each other’s worth and so she, too, is safe with him, enjoys a kind of safety within his penumbra. If her brother were in trouble, Mr. Charles would know exactly where that file was kept, would drop everything to help in any way he could, would afford the brother every benefit of the doubt. I am jealous of her, the dimpled young woman with her nurse romance—what did he call her? Lisa. I wish I could make myself Lisa. I wish I were a plump, good-natured girl who’d grown up passing out paper cups of water at the Memorial Day parade and living in a house that hung bunting every July Fourth and walking with my family to church every Sunday and doing all the correct things, all the sanctioned things. I wish it for Fred. Oh, Freddy.