We Were Beautiful Once (6 page)

“All things happen for a reason, Julie.  Happenings are really signs.”

“Father, I take things as they unfold, don't question much, maybe don't even see the signs.”  She fiddled with her hat, wondering if it smelled musty, like the bedroom where it had laid untouched for years.

The priest rolled the newspaper into a hollow tube, tapping it on his palm, putting it to his eye, and looking through it like a telescope.

“From the time you were a little girl at St. Pat's Grammar, you charted your own course.”

She could not tell if he was teasing or serious. She clutched her purse and squeezed her knees tight to avoid touching him.  Then she looked over and smiled without cracking her lips.   “I can't put no finer point on it than that, Father.  Guess I learned early in life not to reach for the next moment when it wasn't time.”

Julie looked out the window.  “But I wonder, wonder if the Lord always gives us a sign. You know, that it's coming.”  She heard the buzzer signaling the driver to pull over at the next stop.  The bus changed lanes and slowed down.

Ryan twisted the rolled up newspaper with both hands.  “He always gives us a sign, Julie.  Sometimes like a message inside a bottle bobbing its way to shore, and sometimes it comes like the ocean itself, pounding the rocks in the throes of a storm.  We have to want to see the sign.”

Julie rose grabbing the overhead strap as the bus crawled to her stop.  She smiled at the priest, this time showing the fullness of her perfectly straight teeth.  “You've made me self-conscious of the bus pulling on me while it slows.”

“Yes,”  he said waving goodbye (or giving benediction? she wondered).  “We go through life mostly unaware of what's happening to us, but if we have faith, we'll surely see the signs.”

Julie gingerly stepped from the bus one foot at a time and walked to the courthouse, where the doors were still locked. She sat on a bench in a courtyard lined with zinnias and black-eyed Susans.  It reminded her of a secret garden she'd once had.  She pulled her diary from her purse and wrote:

Father Ryan thinks hidden forces move us through the simplest and most complex parts of life, birth canals, hospital beds, graves, purgatory and maybe hell.  These are signs.  Maybe today's bus takes me to the place where those hidden forces connect the part of me left behind to the part of me that I see in the mirror every day.
 

Julie waited until a Federal Marshal unlocked the outer glass doors.  “Sir, can you tell me where the trials are held?” she asked.  The Marshal lifted his thick arm and pointed down an empty hall.  She walked down the wide granite corridor, her low heels making a sharp, tapping sound that echoed off the walls.  She stopped at a brown cork bulletin board next to the clerk's office. And she gasped when she saw
his
name:
Roger Girardin versus the U.S. Army—Courtroom 6, 10:00 a.m.  
She hadn't seen it typed out since she saw the notice from the Army in the Girardin family living room thirty-three years ago.  It was eerie to see the name posted, impersonal, not like she saw it, written out in his handwriting on Christmas or birthday cards, on letters tucked into the shoe box she had kept in the back of her closet in a bed of silvery dust balls.  In that same place, she kept her high school graduation pumps, next to the galoshes she wore to the beach the day she and Roger whispered goodbyes, the week after he unbuttoned her dress in a New Haven hotel, the same dress hanging over the collection of footwear.

 

 

 

WITH NO EYEWITNESS TO GIRARDIN'S ULTIMATE disappearance, Nick had little choice but to reconstruct, through three or four witnesses, the events that took place from 1951 through 1953, in POW Camp 13.  Together, he and Kathy were putting the final touches on the brief that would support Art's claim for damages while Mitch organized and copied the exhibits Nick would introduce into evidence.  It was close to quitting time and Nick and Mitch were wrapping it up for the week, but Kathy, with her elbows planted on the desk opposite Nick, wasn't quite ready to leave.

“Nick, what's our approach anyway? How do you think you can overturn the Army Board's decision that Roger was MIA.”

“Good question. We know that the Board has jurisdiction in these cases, but
no agency
can just wave their hand like some Omnipotent, and without the slightest attempt to carry out their Constitutional mandate— you know due process and all that— proclaim such and such without some legitimate basis.”

“But they didn't Nick.  Girardin petitioned, gave them what he had, the Army investigated and the Board decided that the record didn't support a finding that the man was a POW.  Case closed.  Sounds like he got his day in court.”

“Yeah, but, if they'd called those witnesses in, if they'd heard them live, with Art there to exam, cross examine, create a
real
record for Christ's sake, and then said ‘sorry Artie,' his goose'd be cooked.  But they didn't, didn't give him the time of
day
, he didn't get to examine one single witness, treated him like he was some
crazy
.  He's
got
to be given an opportunity to be heard, plain and simple.”

Mitch stood up and stretched his arms. “Isn't the judge going to reach the same conclusion?  He's bound, after all, only by the thin evidence the Board worked with.  The Board was the...  the fact finder, and he's stuck with those facts. That's Agency Law 101. The witnesses, if they can still remember, won't say much more than what they told the interrogators at Panmunjom, thirty years ago, when it was fresh.  How much better will it sound now, thirty years later?”

“Right, Mitch, but that's where this gets interesting.  We're asking for a trial
de novo
, in other words we want the judge to assume the role not of an appeals court, which looks at only the facts developed below, but as a trial court, developing its own evidence.  And the dilemma for the government and the beauty of all this is that for the judge to determine if the Board was arbitrary and capricious, he has to hear all the evidence we present, old and new.  Now, if— and it's a big if—
if
he accepts the proposition that the evidence we bring to him
was available
to the Board, but they ignored it, in the process of this consideration, he'll have given us the trial
de novo
we're looking for.”

Mitch sat back down.  “So, we are claiming ‘arbitrary and capricious' and we're allowed to prove it by presenting evidence the Board did not look at?”

“And if after the judge hears the ‘new evidence' and decides, hopefully, the Board was unfair, then what?  He'll remand it to the Board for further consideration?” asked Kathy.

Nick thought about what Kathy had said, because that also had occurred to him.  “Maybe, but I doubt it.  I think with all the evidence before him, he'll just rule on his own, and it's over.”

“Unless the government wants to run this up to the Second Circuit,” Mitch added.

“That's always a possibility,”  Nick conceded.

***

The morning of the trial Nick carried the boxes of evidence to his car, but before he even reached it the white, starched shirt his wife had pressed the evening before had gray sweat spots around his armpits and a wide wet line down the middle of his back.  As he walked up the courthouse steps, Kathy materialized at his elbow, carrying a large leather trial brief case in one hand and a coffee in the other.  

“Good morning, Nick. Ready?”

 He snapped out of his daze and smiled, comforted that he wasn't walking into court all by himself.  “Kathy, you surprised me.  Yeah, I'm ready.  Let's take no prisoners.”

One of the two guards checking IDs at the entrance waved Nick and Kathy by, a courtesy extended to the attorneys he'd come to recognize by their black briefcases, pinstriped suits and swagger.  Unlike Nick's other forays into this forum of nonphysical violence, today, dozens of people lined up along the hallway, calling to mind boxing fans with cheap tickets waiting for the main event.  Marshal Picolillo, a man who in his younger days fought Joey Pepe to a draw in the Bridgeport Athenaeum, saw Nick struggling with his bags.  He rushed to hold open the twelve-foot door that led to the ring where men fired off words in lieu of jabs, where round by round standings would advance on the blows of proffered evidence, where truth would battle the deception of grudges, and unsportsmanlike conduct.  

“Morning, Marshal.  The heat never keeps the gadflies away, does it?”

“That's right, Mr. Castalano, heard they drove in from New York and Boston.”

Among the spectators were the national press and plainclothes functionaries from the army and the CIA.  Most of those assembled had been sitting quietly for at least a half-hour before Nick's 9:30 a.m. arrival.

Castalano shouldered people aside with his leather bags as he moved to open the gate to the well. Huffing, he dropped his bags with a resounding thud next to Art Girardin.  Art had already hung his sport jacket over the back of his chair and put his beefy freckled hand on the long, oak table in front of him.  He was nervously leaning his chair back to reveal light spots at the knees of wrinkled pants, an un-starched white shirt with sleeves barely above his wrists, and a red-plaid, clip-on tie fixed to a tight collar around a bull neck.

“Mornin', Nick,” Art said, looking away.

At a table of the exact dimensions, style and quality as Nick's, U.S. Attorney Bertram Harris rubbed his delicate, nearly see through hands.  From a distance, Harris's overweight mass looked off-balance, because his completely bald, smallish head seemed oddly attached to his large shoulders.  Harris wore a three-piece pinstriped suit, complete with a chain strung from a buttonhole on his vest to a pocket watch he would lift from his trousers to check the time every fifteen minutes.  In addition to Foster, the Pentagon had assigned another JAG Captain, Jeffery Townsend to help Harris.  He wore Army dress greens to court.  Nick walked over, hand extended.

“Bertram, I see you've got some help.”

The lawyer ignored Nick's hand, “Nick. This is Captain Townsend and you know Foster.”  The two sandy-haired, crew-cut Germanic men did not budge, but almost on cue, they pursed their lips.

“You guys gonna appear before the court?”

“No, these men are just assisting.”

Harris did not tell Nick that in executing their official duties, the captains, helpers or lawyers would report to Russell at the Pentagon several times a day. In turn, Russell would report to an interested constituent, one who would take the matter under careful consideration.

Walking back to his table, Nick nodded to Amy Dusseldorf, a reporter with the
Bridgeport Post,
who sat in the open jury box— since a judge, not a jury, would be hearing the case. She proudly sported the crabby newsroom scowl that comes with working a deadline until the wee hours of the morning. For weeks leading up to the trial, she'd fed information to veterans organizations interested in MIA/POW issues who in turn fueled national interest in the first-ever POW-MIA trial.  Today, plain white blouse, gray knotted hair, she disappeared between two television reporters. Sitting at the far end of Amy's row were media artists from three national TV networks.

“Hear ye, hear ye, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, the Honorable Joseph Lindquist presiding.”

“All rise.”

The echo from the marshal hadn't died down before Federal Judge Lindquist entered from a door behind the bench.  At sixty-two, he had grown into a large, robust (his doctor would say overweight) body.  His longish white hair accentuated his naturally tanned skin, giving him the appearance of a royal Spanish magistrate, but one that clipped his words like a Vermont Yankee and hinted at French Canadian
when he let his guard down.

The raised platform and black robes gave Lindquist a larger-than-life appearance. Nevertheless, the first impression of those who stood before his Eminence was that of a wizard with a disdain for toadying lawyers.  He surveyed the place where the polity obeyed his rules and paid rapt attention to what he said, how he said it, and where he fixed his flinty eyes.  A place where, without pity or passion, men were vindicated or punished according to the law and the predilections of the man who appeared to see, hear and, eventually, came to know all.  His eyes fell on Nick for several seconds.

Lindquist sat down and addressed the occupants as if he were master of ceremonies.  “Ladies and gentlemen, air conditioning does not seem to be workin' today, so occasionally I may ask the marshal t'open the doors in the rear of the courtroom.  His gaze fell on Nick a second time.  Nick folded his lips between his teeth and pulled his cuffs out from his jacket sleeves.  Sweat poured down his chest, further sweat soaking the shirt that hadn't dried from the walk to the courthouse.

“Counsel, are you ready?”

The judge already knew the contours of the case, so the attorneys did not need to make opening statements.  Lindquist wanted to see how Nick would prove his bizarre claim that Roger hadn't been MIA, but the victim of a stubborn Army bureaucracy that refused to acknowledge him as a POW.  And that he might still be alive after thirty years.  

Nick picked up a pad from the table and fumbled with it.  “Yes, your Honor.”  

“Call your first witness!”  Lindquist bellowed.

Art Girardin lumbered to the witness stand tugging on his lapels.  He turned toward the assembly of busybodies that waited to be entertained by the telling of tragic events.  The clerk shuffled over to Art and completed the first of many steps in the ritual of testifying, asking him in a high voice to swear to tell the truth.  Art nodded, “Yes sir, I do.”