'What kind of things?'
He folded his hands in his lap. I have always loved my father's hands, big and thick, rough in any season.
'Last year I was seeing someone else, Nat.'
The words would not go through at first.
'You mean a woman? You were seeing another woman?' "Seeing someone else" made it sound almost innocuous.
'That's right.' I could tell my dad was trying to be courageous, refusing to look away.
'Did Mom know?'
'I never told her.'
'God, Dad.'
'I'm sorry, Nat. I won't even try to explain.'
'No, don't,' I said. My heart was banging and I was flushed, even while I thought, Why in the fuck am I embarrassed? 'Jesus, Dad. Who was it?'
'That really doesn't matter, does it? She's quite a bit younger. I'm sure a shrink would say I was chasing my youth. It was over and done for a long time before your mother died.'
'Anyone I know?'
He rotated his head emphatically.
'Jesus,' I said again. I've never been a quick study. I arrive at my views, whatever they are, only after things have boiled inside me for a long time, and I realized I was going to have to thrash around with this one for quite a while. All I knew for sure was that this was not cool at all, and I wanted to leave. I stood up and said the first thing in my head. 'I mean, Jesus Christ, Dad. Why didn't you buy a fucking sports car?'
His eyes rose to me and then went down. I could tell he was sort of counting to ten. My father and I have always had trouble about his disapproval. He thinks he is stoic and unreadable, but I inevitably see his brow shrink, if only by micrometers, and the way his pupils darken. And the effect on me is always as harsh as a lash. Even now, when I knew I had every right to be angry, I was abashed by what I had just said.
Finally, he spoke quietly.
'Because I guess I didn't want a fucking sports car,' he said.
I had a paper napkin balled in my fist and threw it on the table.
'One more thing, Nat.'
I was too messed up by now to talk.
'I didn't kill your mother. You'll have to wait to understand everything that's going on, but this case is old wine in new bottles. It's just a lot of rancid crap from a compulsive guy who never figured out how to give up.' My father, usually the soul of moderation, looked taken aback by permitting this blunt evaluation of the prosecutor. 'But I'm telling you this. I've never killed anyone. And God knows, not your mother. I didn't kill her, Nat.' His blue eyes had come back up to mine.
I stood over the table wanting nothing more than to get away, so I simply blurted out, 'I know,' before I left.
Marta Stern's head hangs outside the courtroom door. She has a kind of wind-sprung do of reddish curls and long arty earrings with colored glass, and the slightly dried-out look of a formerly fat person who got thin by exercising like mad. Throughout the trial, she's sort of been in charge of me, halfway between guardian angel and chaperone.
"They're ready." As I shuffle in beside her, she grips my arm and whispers, "Yee didn't change his ruling."
I shrug. As with so many other things, I'm not sure if I'm relieved I won't have to sit there pretending not to care while I listen in public to the details of my father's affair, or if instead I would have preferred to do the cross-examination myself. I say what I've felt so often since this whole stupid thing began.
"Let's just get it over with."
I take my seat in the front row at the same time the jurors are returning. Tommy Molto is already standing in front of my dad, a little like a boxer off his stool before the bell sounds. Beside my father, the projection screen the PAs have been using to show the jury computer slides of various documents admitted in evidence has been opened again.
"Proceed, Mr. Molto," Judge Yee says when the sixteen jurors-four alternates-are back in the fancy wooden armchairs in the jury box.
"Judge Sabich," says Molto.
"Mr. Molto." My dad gives this little nod as if he's known for a thousand years the two of them were going to find themselves here.
"Mr. Stern asked you on direct examination if you'd heard the testimony of the prosecution witnesses."
"I recall."
"And I want to ask you some more about the testimony you heard and the way you understood it."
"Certainly," says my dad. As a witness in this case, I can't be one of my dad's lawyers, but I help carry things back to the Sterns' office after court. Now that I've done my thing for the prosecution, I tend to hang around there until Anna is ready to meet me after work. The last three nights, my dad's legal team has practiced his cross-examination in a moot courtroom at Stern amp; Stern. Ray Horgan has been there to grill my dad, and Stern and Marta and Ray and the jury consultant they've employed, Mina Oberlander, have examined a videotape afterward, giving my dad pointers. For the most part, he's been directed to answer briefly and directly and to try to disagree, when he does, without appearing uncooperative. When it comes to cross-examination, especially of the defendant, apparently it's all about looking as though you have nothing to hide.
"You heard the testimony of John Harnason?"
"I did."
"And is it true, Judge, that in a conversation between just the two of you, you indicated to Mr. Harnason he was going to lose his appeal?"
"That is true," says my dad, with the kind of clipped, unhesitating response he has been practicing. I have known this fact since last November, but my father's confirmation is news in the courtroom and there is a stir, including in the jury box, where I'm sure many members took John Harnason as too weird to be believed. Across the way, Tommy Molto's thin lips are pursed in apparent surprise. With Mel Tooley as a witness in reserve, Molto must have expected to batter my dad when he denied telling Harnason.
"You heard Judge Mason's testimony in the prosecution case that doing that violated several rules of judicial behavior, didn't you?"
"I heard his testimony."
"Do you disagree with him?"
"I do not."
"It was improper, Judge, to engage in a private conversation with a defendant about his case while it was awaiting decision, wasn't it?"
"Surely."
"It violates a rule against what we call ex parte contact, right-without the other party?"
"Correct."
"Someone from my office was entitled to be there. True?"
"Absolutely."
"And as a judge of the court of appeals, were you free to reveal the court's decisions before they had been published?"
"There is not an explicit rule prohibiting that, Mr. Molto, but I would have been disappointed in any other member of the court who had done that, and I consider it a serious mistake in judgment on my part."
Responding to my father's characterization of this breach as 'a mistake in judgment,' Molto makes my dad agree that there are elaborate security procedures in the court of appeals to prevent word of decisions leaking out in advance, and that the law clerks and other employees are warned when they are hired never to reveal a decision beforehand.
"Now how many years, Judge, have you been on the bench?"
"Including the time I sat as a trial judge in the superior court?"
"Exactly."
"More than twenty years."
"And during the entire two decades you have been on the bench, Judge, how many times previously have you disclosed a decision that was not yet public to just one side?"
"I've never done that, Mr. Molto."
"So this was a serious violation not just of the rules, but also of the way you've always done business?"
"It was a terrible mistake in judgment."
"It was more than a mistake in judgment, Judge, wasn't it? It was improper."
"As I said, Mr. Molto, there is no specific rule, but I agree with Judge Mason that it was clearly wrong to tell Mr. Harnason about the outcome. It struck me as a formality at the moment because I knew the case was fully resolved. It didn't dawn on me that Mr. Harnason might flee as a result."
"You knew he was on bail?"