"Your experiences would hardly seem to lead to a theory of such rapture."
"We didn't find the way, that's all."
"Oh for God's sake. That's romantic claptrap, Alex. Do you know what's real? Stone is real. That's all. You're burying yourself in intellectual quicksand, Alex, you're destroying yourself inside your skull. Don't do it." She put a hand over his. "The kind of love we were taught to believe in doesn't exist," she said softly. "And that hurt us both. It wasn't either of our faults. I am fond of you, Alex, even if you can't understand the simplicity of that."
Bauer placed his other hand atop Ursula's. "Then, in the spirit of camaraderie, why don't you come and spend a friendly night with me."
Ursula pulled away. "You can be detestable."
"It was a joke. My brave smile into the face of horror. Inside, is a man who weeps." He said it with self mockery the only way Ursula would tolerate it, but it was fairly true.
He listened to music and drank too much, he smoked his lungs raw and wondered at his lack of reaction. He went to bed and fell asleep.
In the morning he was profoundly depressed. The senselessness of life collapsed upon him like a wall and buried him beneath its rubble. He clung to the image of his sons; they required no raison d'"etre, he refused to break them upon the rack of enquiry.
He could not accept Ursula's vision. It demanded a lobotomy of the spirit, something t which he'd have submitted in many moments of his life, and with joy, if he'd known how. Maybe, he thought, I am insane.
They'd married young, and had both been happy in the early years. They were people of activity and decision, little reflection. Bauer had some ruminative capacity. He'd never exercised it much, having occupied himself with immediacies, but he'd preserved it, thinking that someday, like a hobby, he'd have time for it. He thought it would be a part of his life with Ursula, but she equated it with daydreaming, a childish pursuit, and he discovered that she'd armored her inner being so strongly that she could no longer perceive its existence, and he resigned himself with sadness, but only a little, because their life was full and busy and they did enjoy each other and he found her a good and strong person, and he was reasonable enough to love her reality rather than turn from her because she couldn't measure to his fancy.
They had the children late and it was in them, particularly Jeff, the youngest, that Bauer experienced his deepest gratification. It was more intense than he'd ever imagined anything could be; he immersed himself with neither reservation nor apprehension into another human being. The rivulet of his contemplation began to flow.
Simultaneously, he was reaching an age in which he was accomplishing much of what he'd strived for through his youth, and was beginning to see the limits of his life, could fairly well predict its progression to the end. As he moved through his early thirties he underwent, with surprise and initial incomprehension, the spiritual climacteric that grips most men to some degree at that time, and it took him strongly.
It became increasingly a need to explain his existence, to position himself in the puzzle of the cosmos, to say something more than that he'd been born, had bred, and would die, and he and Ursula began to drift apart. It was barely perceptible at first, but painfully evident as the months accumulated. She could not or would not join with him in this thing. His old diversions became hollow, the hurrah of his work, which had consumed him before, meaningless; he and Ursula had come to know as much about the other as each was capable of knowing; a certain listlessness settled over them; and Ursula was deciding that the earth did not shake nor the heavens tremble, there were no rhapsodies, that those were lies handed down through generations simply to facilitate the continuance of the species, and she felt betrayed, and resented it.
The DiGiovanni case exploded in this period. Bauer had been preparing a series on paramilitary groups. He'd built trust and had been privy to volatile and dangerous information. He'd been pressured by Federal and state agencies to turn over that information, and had refused.
Then, after a week of racial fighting in Newark high schools, two black teenagers were shoved into a car at gunpoint, taken out of town to a salt marsh and shot to death. Anthony DiGiovanni, a construction contractor and founder of the American Defenders, was arrested with two of his men. But their alibis were strong, and though the district attorney succeeded in getting an indictment, his evidence was circumstantial and conviction was in doubt. Bauer had written at length on the Defenders.
He was subpoenaed to testify.
He dropped into a private hell. He'd been questioned about the Defenders before-once in an arson case, once when a militant headquarters had been shot up and a black man wounded. He'd known the Defenders were guilty, but he'd learned that in confidence, and both times he'd kept his silence, though jail was threatened. Because of this, DiGiovanni and the Defenders considered him trustworthy and one of their own at heart. In the week between the murders and the arrests, Bauer had been in DiGiovanni's paneled basement with some of the Defenders. DiGiovanni was expansive and slurry-tongued after half a case of beer. "Well shit, friend," he said. " Just who do you think put dram blackaboos under? No one else had the balls to stop 'em from burnin' the schools the goddamn bleeding hearts built for 'em to learn how to tear the country apart."
"Tony!" someone warned.
But DiGiovanni was too full of himself and didn't care. "That was me and Martha, friend, with a little help from Carl and Bill." Tony's favorite gun was an unregistered Army.45 he'd brought home from Korea.
He liked to refer to himself and the gun as Me and Martha. "You just look up the police report if you don't believe me. Those bucks were downed with dumdums But they didn't run that in the papers, so how else would I know, huh? I ask you that."
It was a conundrum of moral responsibility. Law and government were the fabrications of men, valuative judgments that mutated, doubled back, reversed and even contradicted themselves through the continuum of history.
Yesterday's heroes were today's monsters, tomorrow's dullards; nothing was fixed; he had given his word, the only absolute he could cleave to; alone, he was being asked to render moral conclusion and consequently dictate the future of three human beings. What did he owe the dead, the living, the law, himself? The prosecutor swore jail for silence.
The paper pledged support. Anonymous letters threatened death either way. Ursula was infuriated by his anguished vacillation, she said it was insane, an infliction of self-torment. He could not find solution, and didn't know what to do, even to the moment he was called to the witness stand.
Sweating, he stepped forward, took the oath, and heard himself in the voice of a stranger answer the questions put to him, repeat DiGiovanni's words and name the location of the arms cache, which the Defenders had not been aware that he knew. DiGiovanni's Martha was in court the next day, his fingerprints on it, the rifling matched to one of the recovered slugs.
Santo DiGiovanni, Anthony's elderly father, a frail man in a pressed inexpensive suit who had attended the trial in expressionless silence, turned and looked into Bauer's face. A tear ran down the old man's cheek.
He rose and walked from the room with stiff, arthritic steps, his head bowed. And the impulse of Bauer's-for it wasn't a decision but a conditioned response to social obligation, a synaptic cultural agreement that murder should be punished-became an act of physical effect, it was done.
But Bauer had answered no question, his will and spirit remained paralyzed, entrapment waited behind every turn. He was damned by all, had satisfied none. The external world was scarcely real anymore. The division between him and Ursula widened. In a little while she asked for a trial separation. He tried to dissuade her. He couldn't, and what remained of his vitality went from him. She wanted to take the children away from the metastasizing cancer of the city. She went back to Covington, where she had been raised, where there were relatives and old friends, and a decent job for her.