The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (32 page)

Ned, Nana, and Cassidy all volunteer to join Mother and Father at the attorney’s office for the upcoming meeting. Each is eager to join his memories with the others’ in constructing my essence. But D’Woulfe forbids it, telling Father by phone it would sully their case if he met with any potential witnesses other than those who brought the case, namely, Mother and him. He will hear what the others have to say about me, but that will occur when the defense deposes them, or at trial if they are called as witnesses. “You can tell me anything at all about Jessica and her family, but I have to hear it from you right now, not from them. Ask them for reminiscences that seem to make Jessica . . . special.” The word drips out of the phone like drool. “That’s going to be the key to unlock the case. Jessica, one of a kind. Unique. Unmatched in all of God’s creation. Remember her that way, bring her to life that way, and we all win. We win it all. A special, special child.”

*

I ask Him, bluntly, just how many more tapes must I see? I rattle the canister holding the tape He’s come to collect, realizing how similar all His tapes are to my lost echocardiograms. I rattle it louder. If the point is that life goes on, that people linked together in love can heal their hearts, He has shown me more than enough. Cassidy is sober. He suffers his sadness over my death without the intinction of anger or vengeance, and the purity of his pain has spread to his past. More and more he can miss his child and wife, suffer that loss, without the need to bury his mother in blame. More and more he comes to believe he erred in not making peace with her. There had been so much love among them all, he sees clearly now, it was almost alive, a living thing, that love. He sees now that his blind, unforgiving anger toward his mother accomplished nothing less than the death of whatever love remained after their passing.

He often hears the words Father Larrie spoke the morning after my death. They come at odd times—frying hamburgers at the stove, dropping cans in the trash, searching for matches in kitchen drawers: cherish her memory.

Don’t let guilt and blame tarnish it.

That will only sever your connection to her and to those who keep her alive in their memory and love.

He thinks it the most sensible thing he’s ever heard a priest say.

Cassidy is sober and sad and full of memory and hope. But my parents’ anger demands the compensation of justice. Though it seems their right, I would rather they had no need of justice over my death. Still, what they do seems the proper venting of their justifiable emotion. Their anger unsettles me, but justice will vent that anger, be their vengeance, and they will go on, and away from Brandon D’Woulfe’s complex maze of malpractice law.

I see all this clearly in the tapes. How many more must I watch? I ask Him this. No, I demand it of Him with my double voice, my throat and fingers, pitched and poked. He carries a book in His hands. I recognize the Catechism. “Who is man,” He asks pompously. The tone of His voice— very Moses the Prophet—at first suggests there will be phrases to follow, to complete the question. I expect something like, “Who is man that he should eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life?” Or some such pronouncement. But, no, He rests his Charlton Heston voice a moment and then repeats, “Who is man?” He waves the Catechism. It is His subtle hint that His question and its answer reside there, known to me.

“Man is a being created in the image and likeness of God,” I mouth. It is the third question in the book, I know full well.

“And so
should
it be,” He intones seriously. The Catechism becomes a tape. Then the Assembler mimics me, rattling His tape like a box of unused bones.

There are days—and weeks and entire months—when B. A. D’Woulfe, Sr. thinks his only son would have made a better used-car salesman than personal injury lawyer. It’s not in the way he dresses—no, he has the lawyerly look down pat, from the width of his pants cuffs to the width of his suspenders to the brief whiff of his cologne. And it’s not in his work habits, for the Badger is known to burn the midnight oil, to cut no corners. And it’s not in his intellect, for he knows the law and how to use it uncannily well. No, sadly, it’s in his face, for he has that
erasable
look, a “now you see it, now you don’t” sneer, which emanates from his rodent eyes and pointy chin. You look at his visage and
expect
a lie. Or if not a lie, at least a shaded half truth.

He says with his face, every car on his lot is cherry. Garage-kept. One owner, little old schoolteacher. Never driven over fifty miles an hour. He preys on hope. The hope to believe. So the senior partner thinks, What’s he got on his Etch-A-Sketch mind about the Jackson case? It’s a case made in heaven. Clear-cut negligence, medical fraud, readily apparent injury. Hell, the death of a child. What more could Badger want from it? More money? Well, more money is
always
nice, but they’re rolling in money already. Last year alone, verdicts and settlements of over seventy-five million. So no big deal if the kid’s not bright and wasn’t going to go to Harvard, and they have to pare back their economics. All right, three mill instead of four, the settlement value. That’s one point two mill to them. For what, sixty hours of work between getting the complaint filed and sitting in on six, seven depositions? That’s two grand an hour compensation. He thinks of his own father, David D’Woulfe, making pastrami sandwiches in the deli he owned in Brooklyn. A dollar ninety-nine, including a whole dill pickle. The old man was happy to clear two bits on each transaction. Two grand an hour now for me, he thinks, not so bad.

If not money, what then, more fame? Hardly. The firm’s already the best on the East Coast. Badger could never improve on that with a single wrongful death case. So if not money or fame, what then for the Badger? Chutzpah? Ego? His coming of age? Yeah, well, maybe. Trying to show the old man what the kid’s really made of. Could be. But who was that guy who flew too high, got too close to the sun? Daedalus, he thinks. Remind the Badger about Daedalus. He makes a note on his legal pad and leaves his office for the meeting at Clyde’s Restaurant.

They order the same lunch out of habit, cheeseburgers and fries and a side salad. Badger will attack with ketchup, his father with mustard and mayonnaise. They drink black coffee before, during, and after the meal. NutraSweet for the elder, sugar for the younger. Neither will touch the salad.

The senior D’Woulfe flaps three packets of sweetener to settle their contents before he rips them open with his teeth and adds the powder to his cup. He stirs with the folded empty paper packets. “So. What’s going on with the Jackson matter? You mentioned wrinkles. I don’t like wrinkles.”

“I don’t either. But maybe the kid was less educable than I heard at the first interview. I’m thinking she must have been, with her deafness and speech impediment and all. Parents are back Friday for an extended interview and they’re bringing her stuff from school and whatnot. But I’m thinking it’s not so much a wrinkle as an opportunity.” He lets that sink in as he gulps his coffee. He’s gone over this pitch eight, nine times since the idea crystallized yesterday evening. He
knows
he can sell the idea. His father’s face is, as always, a poker stare. “So I think this. We
embrace
her limitations. We
embellish
her imperfections. She becomes not the next brilliant architect or lawyer who happens to have a handicap—come on, they’re a dime a dozen these days. Instead, she’s this barely human being, this sort of thalidomide
creature
with claw hands and no voice and megaphone ears and no friends and hardly a life to speak of.” He pauses a second before saying it.
“But she’s loved.”
He lets the words sink in, find their way through the hard shell on his father’s heart.

“By her family, see, she’s loved.
Hell, everyone loves her.” He flips both hands in the air to suggest a world of love. “She’s as lovable as a sheepdog. Why? Because she really
is human.
Sometimes, it’s what barely breaks the surface that we see most clearly. And she does. Break the surface. Of humanness. But barely, like a fish half coming out of the water. Weak, wretched, repulsive, ugly, deaf, mute, hands like the creature from the black lagoon, an almost monster, but people love her anyway, just like a full human. Especially her family. Those good simple folk, our clients.” He raises his cup to drink. Poker face has become “you’re bluffing,” the slight rise of his gray brows and the display of a little more cloudy eyeball. “So. You’re thinking, all right, why? Why go the dumb-dumb route?”

“Should I be?”

Badger nods affirmatively. “Here’s why. If we make her a scary sea monkey but one who
feels
this love of people, here’s what we arouse.” He waits while the waitress refills their cups. He notes with satisfaction that the old man doesn’t grab for the sweetener right away. He thinks, I got him. Then he thinks, NutraSweet, bladder cancer. Then he remembers a fact from his undergraduate study of psychology: behind the fear is the wish. His father coughs into his napkin and Badger continues. “We arouse pity. Pity. We arouse the jury’s goddamn, monstrous, sweet pity.” He tings the rim of his water glass with the nail of his thumb. “Pity,” he repeats. The fading ring of the glass sounds like the bell at the end of a round of boxing.

The food arrives. The old man scans the table for mustard. His hands go out into the air, palms up, in a gesture that wordlessly says to the young waitress, “Can you spare it?” after he utters the single-word sentence, “Mustard?” His face is screwed into a sour scowl, a face like mustard itself.

“Right away, sir,” she says.

Badger notes she’s young, a college kid trying to make a buck. And pretty. Sort of Italian face, dark brown hair, nice body, good legs. A runner, probably, he thinks.

“And what does pity get us? Now that it’s
aroused,
what does it
provide?”

Badger pauses until the waitress gets to the table with the Gulden’s. “Twenty million dollars,” he says. His father is looking into the cleft between the top and bottom of his hamburger bun, assaying the thickness and melt of the cheese. Badger looks up to the young woman and smiles. “Forty percent for us.” She smiles back.

“And just how does pity get us twenty million?”

Badger squirts ketchup from the squeeze bottle into his bun’s interior, and smiles again at the waitress. Her name tag says “Angela.” “Thanks, Angela,” Badger says. Then he looks into the face of his father. Gone now are all the veneers. He sees an old man with an old man’s face, saggy and gray and covetous as Midas. “That, Father, is the beauty of this all. Pity is guilt’s one and only offspring and protector. It is pity that guards the guilt in people, and it is guilt, Father, that guards the gilt.” He rubs his thumb against his index and middle fingers. “Twenty million in gilt.” The ketchup bottle sucks air after Badger replaces it on the table. The sound is like a roar from the crowd. A knockdown, he thinks.

The senior D’Woulfe chews his burger. “Inflame the jury’s pity and in so doing stoke their guilt?”

“Exactly.”

“Their guilt over what? That is the missing part for me, Badger. They pity the girl with the basement humanity, that I get. But of what are they guilty?” He wipes the corner of his mouth and studies the yellow stain on his white napkin.

“Her death. They are guilty of her death.”

“Not if they’re not named in the suit, they’re not.”

“Universal guilt is what they’ve got. The guilt of everyone, all people, when they’re put before the Jessica Jacksons of the world. The urge to turn away in disgust and revulsion over her very monstrousness. Turn their backs on her, on those like her, out of primal clannishness that is always separating the ‘us’ from the ‘them,’ the worthy from the un, the beauty from the beast. Dad, when I get done with the folks on the jury, they’ll know that in their hearts they are just as guilty, just as heartless, as the folks who killed her, the defendant doctors and hospital. And Dad, in punishing these medical sacrificial lambs, they will be
expiating
their
own
guilt. Don’t you get it? They crucify the docs to make up for their own sins. Twenty. Twenty million and not a penny less for their absolution.” Badger hangs his head in reverence to the act of forgiveness he proffers the jury.

The senior D’Woulfe chews and thinks. His son sits across the table apparently deep in meditation. With his head bowed, he doesn’t look quite as rat-like. There is a center of solid gold in what the kid has said, he thinks. The docs, those heartless bastards, just turned their backs on the kid preferring to see the monster in her rather than the little girl. Maybe the same reaction the jurors already have had in their own lives, or would have had if little Miss Thumbless had gone to school with their darling little brats. Get them to acknowledge their own prejudice and then wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, it’s a twenty million payout. He does some quick math. Six thousand six hundred sixty-six dollars an hour. 6666, he sees on his retinas. It’s beautiful. “Badger, I got to admit. It’s a good approach. But are you sure the kid was
that
bad off? I mean, she was in second grade, for Christ’s sake. A lot’s riding on you making her pitiable. A second grader, public school, I don’t know. You sure you can dumb her down like you say?”

“Dad, trust me on this. I’ve met the parents. Not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Postal worker dad. Stay-at-home mom. I can get them to help me put this kid together so she’s as stunted and ugly and stupid as a wombat. But lovable and sweet and a girl child. It’s all in how you arrange the pieces.

“And Dad, here’s the best part. I saved it for last. You’re gonna love this. The defense is going to be our strongest ally in doing what we have to do to this girl.” The old man purses his lips as if he’s not buying it all of a sudden. He knows defense attorneys are no fools. “Listen. We write up the complaint leaning heavy on the lost wages angle. Get our health economist from Jersey to plug in some pretty big numbers figuring the kid’s an architect or an accountant. They say she was good at numbers and puzzles. Whatever. So we go heavy on that end of the damages, and it forces the defense to cut her off at the knees, make her look as defective, as retarded as they can. As
we want.
And, see, what we do is we let them. During the discovery phase, we let them make her into a monkey’s ... aunt. We tell the family to go easy on her abilities when they get deposed. That we’ll make it up with their trial testimony. But the thing is, at trial we don’t. On my direct, I talk only about the events of the night she died. Just the night of her death. And that I make come out like the death of Christ Almighty Himself. A death of one weak and innocent and a death that’s unmerited and full of love and heartbreak. Then the family’s scapegoating at the hands of the guilty ones. Oh, man, this’ll be fun!