One True Thing (31 page)

“That was smart,” I said, “the way you did that.”

“Yeah? Tell me why it was smart.”

“Because now instead of focusing on me testifying, they’ll focus on you threatening Ed Best,” I said.

“You’re smart, too,” he said. “Just remember that smart helped get you into this mess and smart isn’t going to get you out. You’ve reached the limits of smart.”

“I know,” I said.

I remembered from the day of the moot court competition in high school that the courtrooms had long narrow windows and burnished paneling like fine furniture around the bench, the jury box, along the walls. The courtroom ceilings had been high, and the symmetry of justice had been written in the seating arrangements, the judge above it all, the jury to one side, looking on, passing judgment.

The grand-jury room was nothing at all like that. It was less than half the size of one of those courtrooms, with two small windows along one wall that let in so little light that someone had put on the overhead fixture, a rectangular fluorescent light that flickered every now and then. Bob had told me that there were twenty-three jurors, but he had not told me that we would all sit in such close quarters that I only recognized the prosecutor, an assistant in Mr. Best’s office, because he was the one wearing the suit and tie. The others were in less formal dress, ranged on hard chairs in a loose semicircle around a small table. In the beginning I tried not to look at them, as though eye contact would put them on the spot. I was sworn and I found something soothing about it, as though I had said a prayer for my own soul. I intended to tell the truth, although perhaps not all of it, depending on the questions.

But as the prosecutor began to ask me how I came to nurse my mother and how she had deteriorated and who had been alone with her the last day of her life I began to look, not at him, a man perhaps ten years older than I with a shaggy haircut and a shirt collar at least a half-size too small, as though he was finding it difficult to move past the person he’d been at twenty-five. I began to look at the people ranged around me.

Part of it was that I wanted them to understand what had happened, but part was simply curiosity. It was difficult for me to believe that there were nearly two dozen people in Montgomery County I didn’t know by name, hadn’t been served by at the five-and-ten or the luncheonette, hadn’t seen in the parking lot of the supermarket with one of my classmates in the car.

The truth was that several of them looked familiar, not familiar enough to put a name to but familiar enough to know that I’d looked across the pumps at the gas station, perhaps, and seen him pumping gas into his truck, or walked by the beauty parlor that stood across the street from Sammy’s and seen her under the dryer, bought tomatoes at a roadside stand from this one or seen that one shoveling a walk in front of some house across town from my own.

But there was one woman I thought I knew from the moment I first looked at her, although the longer I stayed in that room—and it was a long time, almost two hours, if you counted those times when I was sent out and invited back in again, the prosecutor with his lips pressed together over slightly protruding teeth—the more I realized I didn’t know her so much as apprehend her, perhaps understand her. She was in that middle ground between aging and elderly, a thin woman with silver hair worn handsomely in a short bob swept to one side, eschewing the fuzzy permanents of her kind. She wore a medium-blue knit suit with a skirt that just covered her knees, and she held her hands clasped in her lap, narrow white hands dappled with the dark spots of age. From time to time she turned the two rings atop each other on her left hand. I could imagine her living in one of the pretty small houses just to the south of ours, the widow of a middle manager or even a Langhorne administrator.

But it was her posture that made me tell everything, after a while, to her and her alone, the face in the audience an actor chooses to emote to. She sat very straight but she seemed to yearn forward just a little bit, her shoulders ahead of her hips, and she looked into my face with a searching look in her blue eyes, as
though she was waiting for me to solve the puzzle she’d been working slowly these many weeks, to tell her what really happened.

“Miss Gulden,” said the prosecutor, whose name was Peters, “I’d like you to read something.” He handed me a copy of the essay I’d written for the essay contest—the original copy, it appeared, for it was stamped with a date six years before and the
e
in the words was slightly lifted, something my electric typewriter had always done after I’d knocked it off my desk one day.

“You wrote this?” he said after I’d read it aloud.

“I did,” I said.

“And won first prize in the annual state Young Writers’ Competition?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still agree with the sentiments in that essay?”

“Yes,” I said, “as far as they go.”

“What do you mean by ‘as far as they go’?”

“I still believe that people are kept alive long past the time when life is of any use to them. But when I wrote that essay, I knew nothing about the subject firsthand.”

They were all looking at me now, except for a young man, almost a boy, really, who was staring conspicuously out one of the windows.

“And now you do.”

“Yes.”

“From your mother’s illness and death.”

“Yes.”

“Did your mother agree with the sentiments expressed here?”

“We never discussed it,” I said.

“Not when you won the contest?” he asked.

“No.”

“Not when you were caring for her, doing the things you’ve described, watching her deteriorate, in your opinion.”

“No.”

“Miss Gulden,” he said, tapping the palm of his hand with a
pencil in a gesture so reminiscent of a movie gesture that I almost smiled, except that I heard Bob Greenstein’s voice saying, “Don’t smile, don’t smile.”

“Miss Gulden,” he said, “did you believe that your mother’s life in her final days was worth living?”

“That’s not how I would put it.”

“In your words?”

“I think my mother had lost her dignity, her place, all the things that made her life happy. She was wearing diapers. She was sleeping almost constantly. And for a woman like her, who’d always been so capable, so full of life, so lively—it was a terrible thing. It was terrible for her and it was terrible for me.”

“Miss Gulden, did you tell police officers Brown and Patterson that if they had seen your mother they would have thought she was better off dead?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell Jonathan Beltzer that if you were a good daughter you would put a pillow over her face and suffocate her?”

“I don’t remember if those were my exact words. I said something like that.”

“Had you been drinking?”

“No.”

“Did you know what constituted an overdose of your mother’s morphine tablets?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that if you crushed or broke those tablets they would become even more toxic than they already were?”

“Yes.”

The woman in the blue suit was leaning toward me, as though she wanted to say something, to ask me her own questions, perhaps to stop me.

“Do you recall what your mother’s last meal was?”

It was the first time I had stopped during my testimony. I frowned and looked down at my hands in my lap and saw again
his hand, elegant, graceful, with the silver spoon held in its fingers, up, down, and over, up, down, and over.

“I don’t remember.”

“No idea?”

“I hadn’t had any sleep for several days. It was probably one of several things, either some cream soup, some applesauce, some pudding, maybe some yogurt. She couldn’t eat anything that wasn’t the consistency of baby food.”

“You would have fed her.”

“Sometimes she fed herself. It didn’t go very well. I had to change the top sheet.”

“Did that annoy you?”

“I was well past being annoyed, Mr. Peters.”

That was a mistake. “How far past, Miss Gulden?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question.

“At the risk of repeating myself,” he continued, “I want to go back. You believe that there are times when someone’s quality of life is so compromised that death, whether natural or assisted, would be preferable.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You believe that your mother’s quality of life was horribly impaired at the end of her life?”

“Yes.”

“And did you give her a fatal overdose of morphine?”

“No.”

“Given what else you’ve said, I’ve got to ask—why not?”

“Why not what?”

“If you believe in what you wrote and you believe in what you’ve said, it would be logical for you to have given your mother an overdose. You even told the police that that’s what they would have done.”

“Let me try to explain,” I began, trying not to let my voice rise or harden, and I looked right at the woman in the blue suit, who was sitting perfectly still. “Maybe it’s the difference between saying you’re for capital punishment and being willing to sit there
and pull the switch on the electric chair. In theory, I meant these things. But when it’s real, when it’s a real person—it’s different. I was so busy keeping her clean and making her food and making sure she had her medicine, I never stopped to think about anything bigger than how we were going to get through the next hour. Maybe it was like having a baby in that respect. Everyone talks about how wonderful it is, how fulfilling, but I’ve always thought it seems like one little piece of drudgery after another, a feeding, a changing, a bath, and maybe it’s only afterward that it seems wonderful. I didn’t have time to think about anything more than all those little things, taking care of my mother. It’s so much easier to know just how you feel about things, what you believe, when you’re writing it on paper than when you really have to do anything about it or live with it.”

“Could you have done it if you wanted, Miss Gulden?” he said.

“Yes. But I didn’t.”

He was finished with me, but she wasn’t, I’m sure. They sent me out into the hallway where Bob sat, looking through some files. He looked at me over the half-moons of his reading glasses but neither of us spoke as I stood outside the door that said
GRAND JURY
in faded gold stenciling. It was a thick wood door, some narrow-grained wood, and no sound came from the other side. After a few minutes I heard noises from the end of the corridor, and looking down it I saw my father come around the bend and stop. He lifted his hand and waved, and it was when I saw him that I remembered how I had looked at them both that last night.

“Go take a rest, Ellen,” I said to Bob Greenstein, and I started to shake.

“What?” he said, still looking down the hall.

“You asked me about her last words. She said ‘Go take a rest, Ellen.’ She wanted to be alone with him.”

“Your father?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Did they ask you about that inside?”

“No.” I wrapped my arms around myself, and he put an arm around my shoulder.

“She sent me away,” I said.

“He blew you a kiss,” Bob said.

“What?”

“Your father,” he said. “He just blew you a kiss.”

“He waved.”

“Looked like a kiss to me,” Bob said.

The door opened. “Ms. Gulden,” the prosecutor said. His hair was ruffled, as though he had been running his hand through it, and as I followed him back into the grand-jury room and sat down he turned his back on me.

“Miss Gulden, I have one last question. Did you love your mother?”

It was not what I had expected. When I had looked at her and she had looked back at me, the woman in the blue suit, with a question in her eyes, I had thought that question was the one which would most require me to lie. I had waited the two hours, in this wooden chair with curving arms, to be asked whether I had any idea who had done it. But to this question I could tell the truth if only I knew how to do it. “Jesus, kid,” I could almost hear Bob saying, “the answer is yes. Simple. Elegant. Yes. Nobody needs poetry here.”

But she was looking at me so fixedly, almost as if she’d asked the question herself. Bob had told me that any of them could tell the prosecutor they wanted a question asked, and that he was obliged to ask it unless he could dissuade them, that in theory he was there only as the jurors’ agent. I looked at her and I was sure that the prosecutor had not wanted to ask the question, that it was she who had made him ask it.

“The easy answer is yes. But it’s too easy just to say that when you’re talking about your mother. It’s so much more than love—it’s, it’s everything, isn’t it?” as though somehow they would all nod. “When someone asks you where you come from, the answer
is your mother.” My hands were crossed on my chest now, and the woman in the blue suit turned her rings. “When your mother’s gone, you’ve lost your past. It’s so much more than love. Even when there’s no love, it’s so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn’t know how much until she was gone.”

“Did you kill her?” the prosecutor asked.

“No I did not,” I said. “I couldn’t do it.”

I
guess, if the movies are to be believed, that when a jury is ready to tell you what they’ve decided you’ve done, or didn’t do, you get to your feet in front of them and they tell you plainly, publicly, with the kind of ceremony that, in most of our lives, is reserved for confirmations or weddings. In the old days they executed you that way, too, but no more.

I was on my way home from the Safeway, from buying cubed meat, carrots, and tiny onions for a stew, from buying yeast and wheat flour for bread and shortening and pureed pumpkin for pie, when I turned on an all-news radio station and discovered that the grand jury had decided not to indict Ellen M. Gulden for the death of Katherine B. Gulden. Frozen in stone still, both of them were: the Harvard honors graduate, the wife of the chairman of the Langhorne English department. We had been distilled to our component parts long ago, Mama and me. Like the last veteran of some old war, I felt as if I was the only one left who knew us as we used to be, as we really were.