He might have been right. He worked hard, as hard as any associate I had ever seen, but he also had a life outside the law.
He had two healthy, gorgeous children and a beautiful wife, and his career was off to a better start than he could ever have imagined. I was not married, had never had children, and while I knew hundreds of people I could think of only two or three I really regarded as friends. Surrounded by the anonymous faces of courtroom crowds, I spent my days doing everything I could to become the closest acquaintance of the twelve new strangers that made up the next jury I had to persuade. I went home each night to an empty house and only on rare occasions thought there was anything wrong. Young and affable, bright and decently ambitious, Elliott Winston was living the American dream, while I lived alone, still searching for something I could never quite define. Had I known that one of us would one day find himself making this drive, I would have thought it much more likely to be he.
Elliott would not have waited nearly so long to do it. He always moved quickly, without hesitation, without any of those second, qualifying thoughts that cowards call prudence and use to excuse their failure to act at all. It was one of the advantages of having lived a blameless life. He never had to question his own motives or examine his own conscience. He could do whatever he decided to do and know that he was doing the right thing.
Perhaps it was more likely after all that, as between the two of us, I would be going to see him instead of the other way around.
I had meant it when I promised myself I would go to see him, but my calendar was full. There was a trial that lasted a full week instead of the three days for which it had been scheduled. There was a brief to research and write on a complicated issue on which no two courts had been able to agree, and I had only a few days left to do it. There were a dozen trials I was supposed to be getting ready for, and a dozen more after that. There were a thousand things to do and no time in which to do them. I had a million reasons not to go and I kept inventing more. I was afraid of what I would find, afraid of what I would feel. I gave myself a deadline of the last day of March and tried to convince myself that waiting until then was an orderly way to proceed instead of just another excuse for delay. On the morning of the thirty-first, I got in my car and began the drive, telling myself that I could always change my mind and turn back.
It was the second week of spring and it was as cold as any day we had that winter. Slate gray clouds ran across an angry sky, fleeing in front of a towering black thunderhead. The rain began to fall, light at first, then a hard, relentless downpour. Then, suddenly, it stopped, and there was nothing, not a sound, not a breath of wind, only an eerie half-lit calm. A single quarter-inch piece of ice rattled off the windshield, then another one, and then another, and the hail hit like machine gun fire. Cars swerved across the freeway as drivers turned on their lights and put on their brakes, and some of them tried to pull off onto the shoulder. It was over in a matter of minutes. A shaft of sunlight broke through and gave a silky sheen to the wet surface of the road. Across the valley to the west, the lowlying hills of the coastal range were covered with clouds. Before I had driven another five miles, the sky had turned black again.
Half an hour later I turned off at the third Salem exit and stopped at the traffic light. Across the street, an old man with weathered skin squinted straight ahead as he shuffled toward the entrance of a pancake house. A step behind him, a plump woman with short, iron gray hair gestured with her hand, talking rapidly.
He held the door open for her, a blank expression on his face, nodding as she passed in front of him.
I drove through a section of small wood frame houses built in the 1950s and 1960s, single-story houses bunched close together, with green grass lawns in front and square fenced yards in back.
When they were new, children could ride their bicycles in the street and no one thought about locking their doors at night.
Now there was too much traffic and everyone locked everything they owned. Finally, I reached Center Street and found what I was looking for.
You did not need to know the date it was built; you knew as soon as you saw it that this was something out of the nineteenth century. There must have been a certain pride of construction when it was finished, a belief that something spectacular had been achieved. It is hard to imagine what old buildings looked like when they were new. Even when a fortune has been spent on their restoration, it is like seeing a very old woman dressed in expensive clothes: She may look elegant, but she will never look young. The photographs that were taken of it at the time are old themselves, grainy black and white shots of stone and marble and brick, an enormous public building rising up in the middle of a place where, as yet, scarcely anyone lived. And always and everywhere, the people whose pictures were taken, staring into the camera, somber, sullen, as if each of them carried in their souls the secret of their own damnation. You could see the same thing in courtrooms all over the state, old enlarged photographs showing the early settlers, with grim faces and dead eyes, standing near the covered wagons that had brought them across the prairies and over the mountains. The women look meaner than the men, and the men look demented; the children look as old as their parents, and their parents look like they have already died.
My imagination was too much at work. Everything here reminded me of death, or things worse than death. Lining the street, large leafless elms, grotesque black shadows set against a hard leaden sky, looked as if they had been torn out of the earth and set upside down so their roots would wither and die in the harsh arctic air. But more than anything else, it was the building itself that gave me this awful sense of emptiness and despair, this sense that nothing had any meaning. It ran along the edge of the street, not more than twenty feet away, for the equivalent of two city blocks, a three-story brick fortress with a metal roof joined together with pinched, overlapping seams, like the old buildings of Paris. The yellow paint had in places faded white and in others peeled away, leaving behind bare bricks bruised with splotches of brownish purple covered with moss and mold. Supported by heavy three-sided braces, rotting wooden eaves extended the roof out over the walls. In vertical rows, narrow windows, some of them six feet tall and not more than a foot and a half wide, let in the outside light through a dozen small wood-framed glass panes.
At the far end, below a grass-covered knoll, I turned into the long circular drive. There were two street signs at the entrance, one for each of the narrow paved roads that bridged off from one another. Bluebird Lane and Blue Jay Lane. At the top, a third road led down the other side, through a cluster of tall firs, past two tennis courts laid out end to end and separated by a rusting chain link fence. The nets were frayed and one of them sagged to within a foot of the playing surface. Large puddles of water had collected in the hollows of the cracked cement. The road, little more than a pathway, disappeared into another clump of trees and came out a little farther on at a row of clapboard houses with dormer windows. The road was called Bobolink Way. I wondered who had given each of these small streets the name of a bird and what must have been going through their minds.
I parked at the top of the knoll in front of the entrance to the three-story brick building I had just come around. Unlike the rest of it, this part, which was four stories instead of three, had been newly painted, a vibrant yellow trimmed in harvest brown. At the top was a cupola with four false windows. Whether they had been painted over or whether there had always been wooden panels there instead of glass, I could not tell. The roof above the cupola was shaped into a narrow spike, and on top of that was a flagpole with a round orb on top. Freshly painted, the roof was already leaching rust.