Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) (34 page)

A sociopath, I thought.

“She never said,” Malcolm answered.

Mr. Singleton paused for a moment, his gaze sweeping over to the jury, where he kept it briefly before returning his attention to the witness.

“When did Mrs. Madison tell you that she planned to ‘tell the truth' to her husband?” he asked.

“The night of November the fourteenth.”

“November the fourteenth,” Mr. Singleton repeated. “Which was the night Mrs. Madison . . . died?”

Malcolm nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“So there were no more plans,” Mr. Singleton added softly, like a man in mourning. For a moment he simply stood silently, his hands folded almost in prayer before him. At last, he said, “Mr. Esterman, did Sandrine ever indicate to you what she wanted at the end of her life?”

Ah, I thought, the moment had at last come for Mr. Singleton to demonstrate that he is now on familiar terms with my wife, free to use her first name.

“Wanted?” Malcolm asked.

“Yes.”

“She wanted her husband and her daughter to find good lives,” Malcolm answered. “It was as simple as that. She would like to have been able to look into the future and know that they had made good lives. But only fiction can look into the future, she told me. Only fiction could, as she put it, ‘crack the old verities of time and space,' and show what lies ahead.” He paused a moment, then added, “But if Sandrine had been able to see a good future for her husband and daughter, then I think she would have been at rest.” He smiled softly. “She even had a painting of what she thought that rest would look like.”

“Did she show you this painting?”

“Yes, she did,” Malcolm answered.

Mr. Singleton walked over to his desk, picked up a large book, and handed it to his witness. “Could you turn to the marked page, please?” he asked.

Malcolm did.

“Is that the painting Sandrine showed you?”

“Yes, it is.”

“What did Sandrine say about this painting?” Mr. Singleton asked.

“That she had first seen it with her husband,” Malcolm told the court,
“In a little French town called Albi. It was by a painter named Antonio Mancini. It was called
Resting
.”

Then, quite suddenly, I knew.

It had not been in the cathedral, the moment that had so seared itself into Sandrine's mind and heart, but in a small gallery off the town's central square. Not even a gallery, really, but simply a shop that sold reproductions of famous paintings. The walls had been hung with other reproductions, everything from the Dutch masters to Picasso with no sense of order as to either the era during which they'd been painted or the style in which they'd been painted, or in fact anything else that might have indicated the owner of the shop knew the slightest bit about the history of art.

Yet within all this chaos Sandrine's gaze had been drawn to
Resting,
and she'd stood before it for a long time, as I did, the two of us quite transfixed not by its technical expertise, nor by our knowing anything about the painter or his school, but simply by what hung before us on that mock canvas: a woman lying in her bed, partially covered by white sheets, her eyes open, her lips parted, a small table beside the bed, and on this table several glass jars, all of them reflecting the glow of a candle that alone illuminates the woman's face and hair and porcelain white upper body and finally the rose she holds just below her single, exposed breast.

We stood silently before this painting for a long time. Then, still ineffably moved by it, I said, “Strange, but I really care about the woman in this painting.”

Sandrine nodded. “I'm sure you do, Sam.”

“It makes me want to sweep into the room and lie down beside her and just . . . hold her.”

“Yes,” Sandrine said, then looked up at me and smiled. “That's what a knight in shining armor really is.”

And that is precisely what I had failed to be in Sandrine's darkest hour, the moment when my noble, noble wife had most been in need of me.

On that recognition it struck me that if, at some moment in a man's life, he suddenly realizes just how low and selfish and, yes, sociopathic he is, then at that moment, wrenchingly and in silent anguish, he will accept the just verdict that his head should roll.

There were other questions after that, and more answers, a drone of voices, ghostly and distant, but I no longer heard what was being said until they abruptly stopped.

“The state rests, Your Honor,” Mr. Singleton said.

Morty began to rise, but I grabbed his arm. “So does the defense,” I told him.

Morty looked at me, stunned by what I'd just said, but not in the least doubting that I meant it.

“Rest my case,” I told him resolutely. “Rest it now or you're fired.”

“Sam, please.”

I shook my head. “Either you do it or I will.”

“Sam . . .”

“No!”

Morty nodded, then lifted himself from the chair.

“Your Honor, my client has come to a decision,” he said. He paused and for a moment I thought he would stop, turn to me, argue against the choice I'd made. In fact, he did glance at me, saw that I was absolutely firm, then returned his attention to the judge. “The defense rests,” he said.

And so, at last, it seemed to me, did the clearly guilty defendant in Sandrine's case.

Verdict

“Ready?” Alexandria asked as I came toward her early on what would surely be the last day of my trial. She was standing at the door and had already opened it.

I nodded. “I truly am,” I told her.

“Just remember, Dad,” she added. “Whatever happens, we'll deal with it.”

I smiled. “Yes, we will.”

During the past two days, while we'd awaited the jury's verdict, it had become clear to me that Alexandria had come to the conclusion that I wasn't guilty of the charge, that Sandrine's death had been a final, desperate effort to save my life by waking me up to what I was and would forever be if not shocked into a change.

Like a warrior prepared to charge, Alexandria said now, “Let's do it.”

On the way to the courthouse we passed directly through the town, the people opening their shops, the usual traffic, a town whose quiet lanes and modest university Sandrine had accepted in lieu of that far more idealistic dream of building a school in some remote corner of the earth, one never specified but which, as a vision for us, our lives, our work, she had never entirely abandoned.

“What are you thinking, Dad?” Alexandria asked.

“It's always about your mother,” I told her. “This time, it was how she could be quite a stickler for grammar and an elegant structure, the way she insisted on using phrases like ‘into which' and ‘about which' and ‘according to whom,' because they made thoughts flow so beautifully and seamlessly, one into the other. She taught me all of that.”

“She taught me that, too,” Alexandria said. “And I've tried to pass it on to some of the writers at
sleeplesseye.com
, but they never seem that interested in learning the old lessons.”

Morty stood waiting at the top of the courthouse steps, still unhappy that I'd ordered him not to defend me and now peering at me with just the sort of stern look that could, as P. G. Wodehouse had once said, open an oyster at forty feet.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked when I reached him. “There might still be some way that I could . . .”

I shook my head.

“All right, then,” Morty said. “Let's go.”

The members of the jury appeared quite somber as they filed into the courtroom, all of them peering either at some distant point in the room or toward the judge or in the general direction of where Mr. Singleton sat in the same suit he'd worn on the first day of my trial, though now the serpentine fold that had slithered across the back of his neck was less visible when he sat.

Once seated, the members of the jury continued to either face solemnly forward or glance at their hands or follow the dance of some imaginary light around the room, twelve citizens, good and true, who suddenly seemed exactly that to me, not the hate-filled provincials of Morty's perfervid imagination but simple, decent people with a job to do and who had done it as best they could.

“Mr. Foreman, have you reached a verdict?” Judge Rutledge asked.

“We have, Your Honor,” the foreman said.

The hinge that swings us toward calamity rarely squeaks, I thought as the jury foreman rose to deliver the verdict in my case. Life should fill our ears with warnings, but it falls silent at our infant cry.

“Would you hand it to the bailiff, please,” Judge Rutledge said.

He did so, then sat down and watched as the bailiff carried the jury's verdict to the court reporter.

“Would you please read the verdict,” the judge instructed.

The court reporter rose and read.

“We, the jury, in the above entitled action, find the defendant, Samuel Joseph Madison, not guilty.”

To my surprise, there was not a sound in the courtroom, not one ripple of discontent. A few reporters scribbled in their notebooks but, beyond those small movements, the world seemed very still.

The judge turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for rendering a service our democracy requires,” he said. “You are dismissed.”

Morty glanced at me and whispered, “You're one lucky bastard, Sam.”

Perhaps so, I thought, or perhaps the twelve men and women of the jury had simply decided that, though I may well have murdered my wife, there was scant evidence to prove it. They had been charged by the judge to be fair and scrupulous and to adhere to the laws of evidence in my case, and that is exactly what they had done, and in response to which these people of Coburn, who no doubt still despised everything I believed and everything I was, had set me free.

Now, as they rose, I rose, too, and in that gesture of respect returned to them all I could.

Mr. Singleton came over to Morty as the last of the jurors exited the court. He smiled and offered his hand. Morty took it, smiled back, then each exchanged the sort of look that said,
Well, the jury has spoken, and a good thing, too. T
hen, to my astonishment, Mr. Singleton offered his hand to me, and I saw that he really had believed I'd killed Sandrine, though now he seemed less sure.

“I felt the evidence compelled me to make a case,” he told me. “But I knew I never had a strong one.” With that, he nodded politely, turned, and left.

“What an asshole,” Morty muttered.

Was he? I no longer knew. Sandrine had thought Montaigne the soul of wisdom for the simple reason that, in answer to so many conflicting matters, he had responded only with “I withhold judgment.”

Which is what I now did upon Mr. Singleton, and upon all the witnesses against me, upon my colleagues at the college, too, and at last upon all the Coburnites of this world.

“So what now?” Morty asked as we made our way out of the courtroom.

“I don't know,” I admitted, which was true.

At the top of the stairs, he shook my hand. “Stay in touch,” he said, but I knew he didn't mean it.

“I will,” I said, and didn't mean it either.

Alexandria took my arm and smiled. “You can drive us home, Dad,” she said.

And so I did, back through the town, through the life I'd shared with Sandrine, back into those many memories, aware of how they seemed to sprout like flowers in every open space.

At the house, Alexandria rushed in to call Jenna and let her know the verdict. I headed for the mailbox, where I found nothing but the usual bills and advertisements. I was already halfway back to the house when I heard again footsteps behind me, though this time, when I turned, it wasn't April I found standing there.

“Clayton,” I said.

He drew the pistol from his jacket, his grandfather's dueling pistol, I saw immediately, probably the very one he had mentioned to me on the afternoon I'd gone to his house.

How appropriate a weapon, I thought, with which to kill a scoundrel.

“My grandfather defended his wife's honor with this pistol,” Clayton said. “I'm going to do the same.”

I nodded, and for a moment I wondered why I was not afraid, why I felt it quite in keeping that I should die this way, shot by Clayton Blankenship after being freed by a Coburn jury, the fact that many of my fellow townspeople would certainly feel that no matter how much they disapproved of such vigilante justice it was, in fact, justice that had been served, and Clayton the perfect man to have served it. Morty would doubtless get him off.

“She was just a silly girl to you,” Clayton said. “I'm sure that's how you thought of April, that she was just a silly girl you could toy with.”

I nodded. “Yes, that's exactly how I thought of her,” I told him.

Clayton pressed the pistol toward me slightly. “Don't move,” he said.

“I won't,” I assured him, and never had I felt more certain of anything in my life.

“I want you to know that I plan to go with you,” Clayton said. “As soon as this is done.”

“There's no need for that,” I told him, then forced a small sad smile. “You'll be acquitted, Clayton. I myself would find you not guilty.”