“They were good for each other,” he mumbled. “They pooled their strengths. They grew with each other.”
And then the litany. Loving mother, faithful wife, steward of five years’ standing at the local Pentecostal, corporate VP knocking on the glass ceiling, et cetera, et cetera, until Brooks asked a question Neil didn’t expect, a puzzling and nerve-jangling question.
“And she’s had an affair with your brother how long?”
He tried to hide, to shelter, to disappear into the warm fuzzy ball of his own myopia, but he knew he couldn’t. Nor could he fudge the facts, not with Justice Nash staring at him like a kindly old grandfather. He couldn’t understand the tactic, why Brooks should paint a portrait of Barbara as Our Fair American Every-woman only to slash that portrait with the courtroom equivalent of a Turkish thrust.
“I should think a year,” stuttered Neil.
“And considering the nature of what they are to each other, is it not possible your brother might have killed Paul Gatt? Has Craig ever suggested to you or to anybody else that he might have killed Paul Gatt?”
Neil stared. Hadn’t they agreed not to talk about Craig’s strong backhand? Before he could even begin to formulate a response, the esteemed colleague from the district attorney’s office rocketed to the bench. The three conferred again, cooed again, more obstreperously this time, an arcane examination, so far as Neil could interpret, of the difference between a character witness and a hostile witness. The cooing went on for some time. Neil again slipped on his glasses. Glanced at Barbara. She looked happy. How could she be happy? Neil wanted to go home. He perspired, and whenever he perspired he feared people might make remarks about his weight.
“Go ahead, Mr. Fuller,” said Justice Nash. “Answer the question.”
Neil stared straight ahead. He had an odd taste in his mouth, like camphor, only worse. He had a dizzying sensation in the middle of his head. He remembered the marsh, how, at the age of twenty-two, his third year at art college, he had taken Craig, a boy of eleven, already the best sprinter in school, to see the bulrushes, the beaver hutch, and the great blue heron. Now the water in the marsh was low. Disappearing. The beavers had abandoned their hutch. And the great blue heron was gone. That made him sad. The same way Brooks’s question made him sad.
“He told me he killed Paul,” said Neil.
Rough words, unpoetic words, but true words. His tongue tripped over the miserably hard consonant four times, sounding like four Turkish thrusts, damning his brother once and for all, letting the world know that Craig had indeed delivered the said quartet of stab wounds with the perfect backhand he was so famous for.
Later, with the girl in her bed and the dishwasher humming in the kitchen, and the anchorfool on the late local news telling the good burghers of Manhattan that the jury would deliberate on Barbara Gatt’s guilt or innocence tomorrow, Neil pondered the nature of truth. He wasn’t a man predisposed to dyspepsia, yet now he suffered from it constantly. Wondered about his compulsion to tell the truth no matter what the cost. Even a bit of low-cal cottage cheese and caraway seed could rankle his stomach. He questioned the sagacity of his own moral code. He was perplexed by the nature of truth. He lifted the TV remote and zapped the anchorfool. Was the truth inviolate, never to be shaped or softened according to need? He wondered how he could so easily savage Barbara’s character in front of all those people, then, with a single stuttered sentence, turn his brother into a murderer. Though no longer a practicing Catholic, lapsed in early youth like so many other casualties of the Sexual Revolution, he felt, at least in this case, that he must define himself by one of the New Testament’s more famous mythological contexts, that of Judas.
He got up and ambled down the hall toward the loft stairs. He checked the girl.
He was surprised to see her sitting up in bed, the glow from the theater sign across the street lighting her face, her hands clutching her blankets to her collarbones, her dark eyes staring at a wayward maple leaf stuck to the rain-soaked window pane. He had never seen such a woeful child.
“You’re not tired?” he asked.
She turned to him, her intelligent but plain face quickly crumbling into an agonized visage of hopelessness, her thick dark eyebrows pinching toward the bridge of her big nose, her lower lip curling toward her chin in a rictus of grief. She began to cry. The bleak and piteous sobs of a twelve-year-old child who had no father, who might lose her mother, whose grandmother had succumbed to malignant melanoma in Ohio. Neil didn’t know what to do. What new territory was this? He approached the bed cautiously, keeping his eyes on the sobbing child, afraid she might behave with the unpredictability of a wild animal. What was a temporary parent to do in an emergency like this? He sat on the edge of her bed. He put his hand on her shoulder. He was surprised, even alarmed, when she clung to him. Her sobbing intensified, as miserable and desperate a sound as Neil had ever heard.
“You should try to sleep,” he said, not knowing what else to say, putting his arm around her, rocking her. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“I’ll never feel better,” she said.
Then she cried some more. She pressed her head against his chest. He stared at his Second Empire armoire with carved ivory handles against the wall, wondering what he could say to make her feel better, but finally thought, as the rain came down outside, that he shouldn’t say anything at all. No one had ever clung to him like this before. Her girlish muscles squeezed him with bitter strength.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He stopped rocking her. Stopped because it was as if, with this unexpected apology to her father, Christine had given him a magic looking glass; and in that looking glass he at last saw the truth, understood, with a startling and even frightening clarity, who, exactly, had killed Paul Gatt. By peering into this looking glass he knew how a young girl like Christine might feel if she were hoisted over her father’s shoulder and told she would never see her mother again. He understood her outrage, and the indomitable will of her ego, an ego as strong as her father’s. He could easily understand how, carried over Paul’s shoulder like that, she might make a grab for the Wiltshire Staysharp on the counter, and how she could readily muster the strength, especially in her terror, to swing low and deep, like Jersey Devil at the mad bomber. Was she not, like her father, a force, with a personality as compelling as a thunderstorm? Was she not, like her father, the center of the universe, and willing to challenge anyone — including her father — who threatened the equilibrium of her own personal cosmos? Not a Turkish thrust at all. In the looking glass, Neil saw overhead thrusts, but overhead thrusts from a girl hanging upside down over her father’s capacious back.
In the looking glass, Neil saw a sad little episode of patricide.
Christine’s bag sat packed by the door. She waited in Craig’s car with Runamok, the dog she loved so much. She was happy because the suppertime anchorfool had told the good burghers of Manhattan in his best anchorfool voice that her mother would be acquitted; the jury couldn’t in good conscience hand down a guilty verdict when new evidence, namely Craig’s confession, pointed toward another possible suspect. Any doubt was reasonable as far as an American jury was concerned.
Neil and Craig stood in the living room. Neil’s TV was just a TV again, not the nocturnal battleground for Jersey Devil and the mad bomber. The bed in the spare room was just a bed again, not the stage for a young girl’s remorse. And Craig was just his brother again, kind, affable, sensitive, but still changed, still afflicted, transformed forever by the violent death of another human being.