One True Thing (30 page)

“I’m serious.”

“I know, it just sounded so much like a cheap television tabloid show. Ellen, I’m sixty-three years old. I’ve been teaching for thirty-two years and I’ve been at Langhorne for twenty. I’ve been asked a hundred times why I don’t get a job at the college and I’ve always had the same answer—”

“That George Gulden wouldn’t hire you.”

“That may be true. I suspect your father would think I’d irreparably sullied myself by teaching slow fifteen-year-olds. But I like teaching slow fifteen-year-olds. They need me more than the A.P. kids do, who think they’ve invented the sexual undercurrents in violence when they read
Macbeth
or start writing poetry without capitals, and, in most cases, without meaning, after they’ve read cummings.”

“You’ve just described Ellen Gulden, class of eighty-five.”

“Yes, I have, and if that was all I remembered about Ellen Gulden, class of eighty-five, she wouldn’t be here.”

“The girl named Ellen in the story is a snotty bitch.”

“True, but reductive. I remember meeting your parents at an open school night when you were a sophomore, that year you were taking senior A.P. English and we were trying to figure out how to keep you occupied for the next two years. And I suddenly understood the pressure you must be under, trying to emulate this extraordinarily cerebral and remote man on the one hand
and this extraordinarily warm and nurturing woman on the other.”

“It never occurred to me to emulate her.”

“Then what have you been doing for the last six months?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Oh, that answer is really beneath you. You know exactly what you’ve been doing. You’ve been doing the right thing at enormous personal cost. And now at the end to somehow be blamed for it—it’s a Goddamn outrage and I’ll tell anyone who asks me. They say that no girl becomes a woman until her mother dies, but all this is ridiculous.”

“In my case it should be father.”

“Well, father then. Your father’s dead to you, isn’t he? You never see him. You never talk to him. Wasn’t your image of your father always just …” she looked up, narrowing her eyes, as though she was searching for the word on the wall of the living room that held a print of Andrew Wyeth’s
Christina’s World
, the attentuated arms and yearning posture always reminding me of how my mother had looked that day when we’d had our picnic above the college. “Wasn’t your image of your father always just refracted through your mother’s belief in what he was? Wasn’t he really just her creation?”

“He has a very strong personality,” I said.

“Does he? He has very broad mannerisms, I’ll agree, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a strong personality.”

“I feel like I’m in analysis,” I said.

“Self-analysis,” Mrs. Forburg said.

“You still didn’t answer my question about your job.”

“Sure I did. I said the best part of my job is dealing with the kids who need me most. And I’m eligible for Social Security. And if some of the parents of this town are dumb enough to boot me because a twerp like Ed Murphy wants to see empathy as a sexual perversion, they don’t deserve me. And you’ve avoided my observations about your family.”

“My father is not dead. He’s in my head all the time. He’s a running commentary, that voice of his, like subtitles.”

“And your mother?”

“Her, too, but no commentary. Just a presence. Like God. There’s not a whole lot of room for me in there.”

“Oh, honey,” said Mrs. Forburg, and she sounded just like Jules. “That
is
you.”

T
he Montgomery County Courthouse was past its prime. It sat just beyond the green, up a small hill, behind a narrow swath of parkland planted with flowering fruit trees where people often ate their lunches in the warmer months. The library stood across upper Main Street from it, an old red-brick mansion with big square rooms that made for a rabbit warren of reference books, old texts, current bestsellers, and heavily used children’s classics. The courthouse was white-gray, with columns along its front, a heavy urnlike light fixture suspended from chains above its ornamented doors, and at the cornice line, just below the front roof, a quote from Shakespeare,
BE JUST, AND FEAR NOT
.

The courthouse had been built at the turn of the century, and looked not unlike the building in which the Langhorne English department was housed; the same architect had designed them both. The smaller houses around it had been transmogrified into law offices and tide companies. But all the time we’d lived in Langhorne there had been constant complaints about the old courthouse, that the courtrooms were difficult to heat and
air-condition, that the judge’s chambers were not large enough. Most of all there were complaints that the old courthouse was too great a distance from the offices of the prosecutor and the police, built some years before in one of the commercial developments that had insinuated themselves amid the corn and bean fields and stretches of undevelopable stony land far from Langhorne proper.

The courthouse looked like the sort of courthouse habitually used in movies, and there had been a huge uproar when I was in junior high school and a television production company had come to town to film a pivotal scene in a true-crime drama on the shallow steps that led up to its columns and front door. The
Tribune
had run stories on page one about the movie, about the leading actor, about the use of Langhorne locals as extras. It had been one of the biggest stories I could remember, but not bigger than my own.

But still there were complaints about the old building, although those who had lived in Langhorne all their lives held out against change, even when Ed Best was elected district attorney and made the construction of a new, more modern facility the linchpin of his campaign, along with more DWI crackdowns. His chief opponent was the assignment judge, a forty-year veteran of the bench named James P. Hallorhan who lived two blocks from the courthouse and had the biggest office in the building, a corner one with mahogany paneling and a small ornamental fireplace.

After he died his fight was carried on by his widow, a deceptively fragile-looking woman named Alice who took her exercise each day by walking to the courthouse, roving the halls greeting old acquaintances, some of them judges in the middle of hearing a case, and then walking home. But Ed Best, dim as he sometimes seemed, dreamed up a way to get Alice Hallorhan on his side, and that was how the county came to break ground, the year before my mother died, for the James P. Hallorhan County Justice Building on a cul de sac off the highway, a cube of glass
and stone that would hold prosecutors, police, and all court functions.

It was only half done, having run into all manner of construction troubles, from the ventilation to the substructure, and so on the day I testified before the grand jury charged with deciding whether I had killed my mother, I did it in the old courthouse, which was as easy and familiar as almost any building in Langhorne to me. In tenth grade we had had a kind of rudimentary moot court competition on the death penalty, and I had been the judge. I had sentenced the defendant to life without parole after usurping the privilege of the Supreme Court from the bench and ruling the death penalty unconstitutional. I liked the view from up there. I liked the power.

Thank God no one had remembered, or, remembering, told the newspaper and television people. The day I testified before the grand jury the
Tribune
ran a profile of me which began on page one and was spread over a full page inside. They used my high school graduation picture, a photograph taken in the statehouse the day I won the essay contest in which I held my certificate to my chest in much the same manner I had held the ID board when my mug shots were taken, and, of course, the picture taken as I left the courthouse after I’d been bailed out.
GOLDEN GIRL
, said the headline, and below it in smaller type
A LIFE OF STELLAR ACCOMPLISHMENT ENDS IN A MURDER CHARGE
.

“Ends?” I said to Jeff that morning on the phone. “Ends? I’m not dead. I’m not even indicted yet.”

“Count your blessings,” he said. “There’s not a single Angel of Death reference in the whole thing.”

The truth was that it wasn’t a bad piece. It was accurate as far as that went, except that it said that my mother’s parents had emigrated from Germany and that my father’s had operated a resort in the mountains, an error that made me conjure up my grandfather Gulden in a sun visor and plaid Bermudas instead of overalls. It quoted from the same sections of my mercy killing essay that Bob Greenstein had picked out in his office, and from my graduation
speech: “Authority must earn the right to lead, and we owe ourselves the right to refuse to follow if they do not.” “Oh, shit,” I said, but even though I could remember standing at the podium on the lawn of Langhorne High School pontificating in a high voice, more frightened than I would ever have admitted, my mother’s eyes hidden by her sunglasses, my father’s eyebrows raised so slightly only someone who knew him as well as I did could have seen it, I could not remember speaking those words. But they sounded like me.

They’d talked to Jonathan’s father, who said that he was confident that the jury would understand what I’d done and take into account how worn down I’d been by caring for my mother—“insanity defense” I said aloud—and to several of the Minnies, who talked of how tired I’d looked the day we decorated the tree. They’d talked to Halley McPherson, who showed them the crib with tears in her eyes and recounted my words “It’ll all be over soon” when she visited before my mother’s death. They talked to several anonymous nurses at the hospital, who said that I seemed unusually well-versed in medical techniques. They talked to high school classmates who did not like me, and high school classmates who said they liked me but could understand if others did not. There was a sophomoric poem I had submitted to the literary magazine, which had held up publication for several weeks while it was decided at the highest levels whether the word “fuck” could be rendered as F### or whether the poem would have to be removed. “We all knew Ellen would have made a fuss about that,” said my P.E. teacher Mrs. Schultz, who for some reason had been on the faculty board of the student publications.

God, it was a bad poem. And the
Tribune
rendered it as (expletive deleted).

Julie Heinlein, she of the soft-voiced phone messages, had written the story in a workmanlike fashion. But she had not talked to Jeff or my father, to Jules or Teresa, to Mrs. Forburg or Ed Best. When I read the profile all I could think of was what I had told
Bob Greenstein about people wanting their little stories neat, tied up with a ribbon. The newspaper article was accurate, as far as it went; it just wasn’t exactly true, from the air of lugubriousness that seemed to hang over recollections of our family life to its rendering of me as a woman of steel, with neither qualms nor conscience.

“She didn’t do it,” said Bob Greenstein, in the third paragraph of the story. “That’s all you need to know.”

“I’ve known Ellen since she was reading the Nancy Drew mysteries,” said Isabel Duane, if Julie Heinlein’s description was to be believed, with some asperity, “and it has never for a minute occurred to me that she would have hurt Kate in any way. She loved her so much. If you could have seen her pushing her wheelchair when they came in here—nobody who saw them could believe it.”

It was a lovely thing for Mrs. Duane to do, except that I’d always hated the Nancy Drew books.

Bob was furious about it when he came to pick me up that morning in the low-slung red sports car that he drove, I was convinced, only to prove he was capable of getting out of it. “Why do you think it’s in there this morning?” he said. “Best leaked them the date of your appearance. It’s bad enough you insist on doing this, without a whole mess of reporters and photographers there when you do it.”

“But I thought the grand jury proceedings were all secret,” I said.

“In theory they are, my friend, but in practice I would not put it past that shit to up his public profile with a well-placed word to someone from the
Tribune
at the Kiwanis.” He shot a glance at me sideways. “Do us both a favor,” he said. “Don’t smile this time.”

“Don’t worry,” I said.

When we got to the courthouse—
BE JUST, AND FEAR NOT
, I read aloud, and Bob just sighed—he swung around to a back entrance and tapped on a steel door, tried the knob, tapped again. A guard
opened the door a crack, spoke to him, looked from him to me, and shook his head.

“We’ve got to go in the front,” Bob said. “Don’t answer any questions.”

As we came up the steps I shivered. I was wearing the blue suit I’d worn for the funeral; Jeff had brought it from the house. My hair hung long and loose around my face, and for the first time since Thanksgiving I was wearing makeup.

The reporters were in the lobby, in the circular rotunda with its mosaic floor laid in the pattern of an enormous bronze and gold sun. One of them, a radio reporter with a tape recorder tucked under his arm, saw us first, and a kind of muted cry went up, and then like some grotesque animal they all moved together, cameras, notebooks, pens, and microphones held high like weapons. I could not pick out one question from another: Why have you decided to testify? What are your plans? What do you want them to know about what happened?

We pushed through but they moved with us to a bank of elevators at the back of the building, the elevators Bob had hoped to catch in the basement instead of on the lobby floor when he knocked at the door outside. Some of the questions were for him: Why did you decide to have her testify? Will she testify at the trial? I looked down at the toes of my pumps, which my mother had bought for me. We’d worn the same size shoes. I thought there was a little mud around the edge of the soles from the last time I’d worn them.

Bob guided me into the elevator and then stood in the doorway so no one else could get in. He held the door and leaned forward, his square bulk blocking me from their sight. “You tell Ed Best he could lose his license for a stunt like this,” he hissed, and there was an infinitesimal moment of complete silence, and in it I heard the voice of someone, faintly, as though from far away, asking plaintively, “Well, who is it?” And the doors closed.