Timebends (95 page)

As appalling as any other part of this nightmare was the acceptance of the “confession” by a judge, and the muting, once the court had spoken, of any real criticism of the proceedings by the local or national press, despite the crude brainwashing that glared out of it.

I ended by spending days and then weeks at a time over the next five years trying to help solve this case and extricate Peter. Only by the dogged efforts of two men—James Conway, a private investigator working most of the time with no pay and little gratitude, and T. F. Gilroy Daly, a lawyer I located with the help of the same law firm that had been representing me since the late forties—was it finally proved that Peter had been five miles from his home at the very moment his mother was murdered. Moreover, the eyewitnesses who had seen him were a local policeman and his wife. Their affidavit, of which the state police had to have been aware, was discovered in the files of the prosecutor after he suddenly died of a heart attack. The new prosecutor, presenting it in court, blew the case apart, and Peter was completely exonerated.

In short, with full knowledge of Peter's innocence a prosecutor had gone ahead and convicted him, and the state police had sewn it all up. Incredibly, even after the exculpatory evidence had been revealed, the state police department would try to rescue honor by
presenting yet another stupefying “theory” that was so absurd as to be simply thrown out of court. In the end, State Police Chief Fussenich, retired by then, would take himself over to Peter's house to apologize, admitting that mistakes had been made.

The Oedipus complex may or may not operate universally, but the sheer animal reflex of bureaucracy in stonewalling against embarrassing truths surely does, and no less so here than in Russia or China or anywhere else. The vital difference is our right of appeal from its decisions, but appeals are expensive and depend too often on sheer good luck. There is a lawyer in almost all my plays, perhaps because man is what man is, nature's denial machine. In the course of the Reilly case I grew to treasure the law as our last defense against ourselves.

Peter's story was a moving one, but I found it impossible to write about despite having been closer to its center than anyone except Conway and Daly. I was uneasy with the idea of using this attempt to right a wrong to my own advantage and possibly adding to Peter's suffering. But in time I sensed another reason for my absence of creative enthusiasm. It is still difficult to describe with any precision, but I think I was oppressed by a certain brute repetitiveness in the spectacle of the Reilly prosecution. It was simple enough to understand that the police, once locked onto Peter, could not relent lest they endanger their professional reputations. Quickly the question changed from who murdered Barbara Gibbons and might still be walking around loose to who was impugning the state police. But as simple as the explanation was, it offered a vision of man so appallingly unredeemable as to dry up the pen. Except for the intervention of private citizens, a young man, physically slight and in many ways still psychologically a boy, would have been tossed to the wolves in the state penitentiary and eaten alive. The very absence of any racist motive helped to push the mind beyond sociology; indeed, Peter had from childhood idolized the police and was thus set up to believe a state policeman telling him that he had murdered his mom even though he had no memory of doing so.

The mystery was not how it had happened but that the motives for so grand an injustice should be so paltry. Who would have objected if the state police had admitted a mistake after Peter's arrest? It all seemed to bespeak an evil transcending any commensurate gain or motive, as one understands gain and motive, and I could not escape the feeling that I was watching a shadow play of mindless men dumbly miming roles of very ancient authorship, rather than a spontaneously new and real event. It was not an
honest mistake but a dishonest one, and it was the labor of Hercules to break through the armor of a bureaucracy that extended right into the office of the liberal governor Ella Grasso, who for too long was loath to take action against her own officers. It was the mystery of all the senseless and profitless conflicts I had known, and to write about yet another was beyond me.

If the long months of the Reilly case left a darkened picture of man, it was no less perplexing for being accompanied by the most unlikely examples of courage and goodness, of people rising to the occasion when there was little reason to expect they would.

Once I had become involved in Peter's defense, I was soon convinced that he would need a new lawyer. There was an unforgettable interview with T. F. Gilroy Daly in the dining room of an elegant Connecticut country club. On first sight I felt uncertain that he was the right man for the task ahead, but he seemed interested despite my warning that there would be little money in it. In short, I persuaded both of us that he should take the case.

My doubts about Daly sprang from a belief that Peter's first lawyer had been too high-minded a civil liberties type when it was a tough criminal attorney who was needed here. Daly had had some experience as a young staff member of the New York federal prosecutor's office, but my initial impression was of a fashionable, very tall, blue-eyed horseman in a tweed jacket, a suburban lawyer who seemed restless and unhappy with himself; it even crossed my mind that he might not be overwhelmed with work at the moment. Out of Yale and the culture of toleration and wealth, he struck me as an unlikely gutter fighter—and I sensed that the gutter was where this case was going to be fought out in the end. With no idea that the proof of Peter's innocence was already in the prosecutor's safe, I knew that a new attorney would have to butt heads with some hard types in and out of uniform before it was all over.

I watched Daly grow remarkably during the largely unpaid months and years of the case. His patina of horsey-set sophistication fell away; there built up in him a cold personal outrage at what had been done to justice in his state, a gutsy shrewdness sharpened his mind, and his spirit took joy in an enlivening, almost palpable focus upon a loving task. He won brilliantly and in the process, I think, changed his own life, for he became a federal judge of great distinction.

Daly, Jim Conway, and I spent many evenings together at my place or around the Gibbons house, a former roadside hamburger
stand turned into a grungy little home, the three of us trying to piece together what had happened on the fatal night. I got the aged Dr. Milton Helpern, perhaps the greatest criminal pathologist in the country, to examine the evidence, from which he concluded that Peter could not have done this murder and come away without a spot of blood on his clothes or his body, as even the police admitted he had. I located a New York physician, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a noted specialist in hypnosis, who examined Peter and gave testimony in the second trial that helped mightily in clinching the acquittal. I also managed to bring the
New York Times
up to watch the formerly ignored court proceedings, which put the judge and prosecution on their mettle. But it was Daly and Conway's incredibly subtle reconstruction of the night of the murder, along with Daly's concentrated outwitting of the prosecution, that finally freed Peter Reilly.

I should have exulted in this victory and I did, but the truer voice was sounded in a play completed during the struggle to free Peter,
The Creation of the World and Other Business.
Like
The Price,
written in the sixties during the war,
Creation,
reconsidering Genesis, is essentially the fratricidal enigma, but seen now as a given of man's nature. In the setting of the original family, shorn of societal influence, the play seeks in fratricide, the first dilemma and the Bible's opening event, for a sign of hope for man. The fundamental competition between brothers for a mother's—and therefore God's—love is discovered with amazed perplexity for the first time. The purely loving and practical Adam and Eve, looking down in disbelief at the murdered Abel and the unrepentant Cain, can only fear for their lives under a God who not only permits such monstrous acts but has apparently designed mankind so as to perpetuate them. In this play the catastrophe is built into man's primal nature; in his very brotherhood he first tastes the murder of his own kind. Against that ticking bomb within us the defense, if there is a defense, is hardly more than Adam's imprecation to his wife and remaining son—to an Eve filled with hatred for a defiant Cain: “Ask her pardon! Cain, we are surrounded by the beasts! And God's not coming anymore! Boy, we are all that's left responsible—ask her pardon!” Cain, smiling and justified, walks adamantly away into his exile, leaving his father to call after him on his darkening desert, “Mercy!” But Adam's outcry is also integral to man.

It was only in college that I discovered the Bible, but as a man-made collection of fascinating literatures by different authors. I asked wise-guy questions in the margins, like: Where'd the folks
come from to whose company Cain was exiled? Was this a slip? Had the author of Genesis forgotten there were not yet supposed to be other people besides Adam and Eve in Paradise? Or was “God” so old when he “wrote” the Bible that his mind wandered?

Slowly, however, it began to matter less that humans had authored the Bible, for what remained was hypnotic. I wondered why. The stories are told with the spareness of electrical diagrams, perhaps that's part of the fascination—you are left to fill things in, to create what has been omitted. Over the years the question of whether God
exists
gave way to another mystery—why are men, generation after generation, pressed to invent Him again? I more or less settled for the idea that God certainly is
always about to exist,
and this gives a legitimacy to jumping the gun somewhat and saying He already does. He may show up tomorrow, for all we know. Meantime, people have a ready vessel into which to pour their longings for the sacred, for transcendence, for oversight by a good guardian, for a reprimander and cautionary voice, and at best, for the concept of their having the obligation to make choices against evildoing, which is what helps keep the good alive. For the inventor of God, He is as animate as for the believer, maybe even more so, because he can never tear his invention out of his heart and set Him in stone, where He can be evaded if need be. It was the imperishability of this procedure that went into
The Creation of the World and Other Business,
a play that asks, among other questions, what sort of psychological situation must have given rise to the creation of God in the first place. And in the second place, right now.

The ironies would roll on through the seventies and right down to the present moment. In 1986, along with fifteen other writers and scientists from America and Europe and Africa, I found myself standing in the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, looking down into the witty eyes of Mikhail Gorbachev as he shook my hand and said, “I know all your plays.”

I was tempted to say, “Not all,” for it was now eighteen years since I had been blacklisted on Soviet stages, for one thing because violent exception had been taken to
In Russia,
the first of three books Inge and I had jointly produced (her photographs, my text). One picture, of Comrade Ekaterina Furtseva, then minister of culture, had offended that lady, what with the deep lines of worry
and exhaustion on her face, impossible to conceal short of airbrushing. (She had had a hard life; ousted as Khrushchev's favorite some years before, she had cut her wrists.) But more than her vanity was involved; at about the same time, as international president of PEN, the writers' organization, I had begun annoying the Soviets with protests against their treatment of writers and of course their anti-Semitism. To all this they had responded by closing down Galina Volchek's production of
Incident at Vichy.
I was sure it was not coincidental that the play dealt with the Nazi roundups of Jews during the war. And it probably didn't help that one of the characters is a Communist quite as deluded about the rationality of Marxism as the bourgeois victims are about their own ideologies.

I had traveled a long and twisting road to this moment at the very apex of Soviet power, and the changes in direction had left me not so much disillusioned as smiling, painfully sometimes. For the political world, I have come to believe, is fundamentally beyond anyone's control, yet we all go on as though it were a kind of vehicle that only needs a change of drivers in order to steer it away from its frequent hair-raising visits to the edge of the cliff. The immediate circumstances behind the meeting with Gorbachev were especially curious yet somehow logical in terms of my life.

Almost a year earlier I had gone with the greatest reluctance to a meeting of American and Soviet writers in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the vigorous urging of my good friend Harrison Salisbury, a co-leader of our delegation, who has a vast knowledge of the Soviet Union. Our group was varied, including Louis Auchincloss, Allen Ginsberg, William Gaddis, William Gass, and Charles Fuller. These periodic conferences among intellectuals from both sides were nearly all that was left of the promise of of détente. If such seminars had ever been politically significant, I had regretfully come to regard them as routine and finally got thoroughly fed up with being a sitting duck for Soviet attacks while having to observe the constraints of American politeness. In Vilnius, in 1985,1 had blown the cork when, conforming to the agreed-on plan, the Americans around the table talked about their lives and work only to find the Soviets, most of whom were critics, journalists, and officials of the Writers Union rather than creative writers, picking off the American Black Problem, the American Indian Problem, Pornography in American Literature, and so on. We had traveled too far to be set up like this; irritated by the futility of it all, I pulled out a PEN dossier on the persecution of the poet Irina Ratushinskaya, ill at the time and in prison for some poems she had written, and read it off.