She stared at me a moment longer, challenging me to disagree.
Then, suddenly aware of her own intensity, she became embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she said, laughing quietly at herself. “I didn’t mean to go on like that.”
“It’s my fault,” I replied. “I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss what you were saying. But it’s hard for me to think of you like that…”
“Mentally ill,” she added for me.
The waiter began to serve dinner, and for a while we talked only of inconsequential things. It did not really matter what we talked about. The sound of her voice was all I cared about. It was the sound of home, the place you wanted to come back to, the place where no matter how long you had been away, you were always welcome, and always wanted.
“You still haven’t told me,” she said halfway through dinner. I didn’t know what she meant. “About the boy: John Smith. What’s he like?”
It made me smile. Most of the people who appeared as defendants in the criminal courts were men in their twenties, but for Jennifer, anyone that age was still a boy.
“Remember how we used to feel when someone older-someone our parents’ age-called us boys or girls? One of the things I’ve learned is that each generation thinks the one it follows must have been born ancient and incompetent, and the one that comes behind it will die young and inexperienced.”
Jennifer bent forward, a birdlike look of astonishment on her face. “And one of the things I’ve learned is that each generation thinks it invented sex.” She paused, an impish glow in her large bronze-colored eyes. “I happen to know, however, that sex was actually invented late one August night in the back seat of somebody’s old Chevy while Johnny Mathis was singing ‘Chances Are’
on the car radio.” She paused again and broke into a dazzling white smile. “And I have a witness-unless he’s forgotten.”
“I remember the car,” I said vaguely.
She raised her eyes and opened her mouth and taunted me with her smile. “I can understand if you’ve forgotten. It was over almost before it started.”
I turned up my hands. “Before that night, it always had ended before it started-in a manner of speaking.”
“I knew I was the first,” she said with a show of triumph. Then, as we looked at each other, surrounded by strangers but somehow alone, the bright, glittering grin slowly dissolved into a sad-eyed bittersweet smile.
“I wish you had been the last,” I whispered with a sigh.
“Me, too,” she said, a lost look in her eyes. “We would have had a good life, I think. I know I would have been happy married to you. Do you think…?”
She was the only thing in my life that had ever made sense.
I could almost feel what it would have been like sitting here with her, in one of the most expensive restaurants in town, on her birthday, or our anniversary, or just because, no matter how long we had been married she would always be the best-looking woman I knew.
I looked at her a moment longer before I said anything. “You know the answer to that better than I do,” I said finally.
She stared down at her hands and then forced herself to smile.
“Now,” she insisted as she sat straight up and pretended everything was all right, “tell me about John Smith.”
I hesitated. I did not really want to talk about John Smith. I wanted to talk about us. She shook her head. “Tell me.”
I hesitated again, this time because I was not quite sure how to begin.
“He makes you want to believe in the essential goodness of human beings.”
She tilted her head. “Don’t you?”
“Believe we’re born innocent and only become corrupted by civilization? No. I think there are a lot of people born evil. I think Calvin Jeffries was like that. Jeffries had a brilliant mind and was perhaps the worst human being I ever knew. John Smith suffers from some kind of retardation and he wouldn’t hurt a soul.
His parents-whoever they were-didn’t want him, and whoever had him as a child tortured him-deliberate, unspeakable acts-
that had to have caused incredible physical pain.”
I started to describe what had been done to him-what from the scars left on his body we could tell had been done to him-
but I caught myself in time. “He was treated like an animal,” I instead remarked. “Have you ever known anyone who did that: mistreated an animal? Sometimes the animal becomes vicious; other times they become scared, quick to shy. Hard to know why there’s that difference: Maybe it’s just their nature. John Smith is like that: frightened of everyone, scared of his own shadow, and yet, at the same time, just dying for an act of kindness. He looks at you with orphan eyes, the eager look of an innocent boy-you’re right about that: He is a boy-a boy who wants someone to take him home. It hurts even more when you think about what they did to him. You have to know that they made him think it was his fault, made him believe that it was because he had not done what he was supposed to do. How hard he must have tried to understand what he was supposed to do; how difficult it must have been to comprehend the meaning of the names they must have called him.”
“Then you’ve decided for sure,” Jennifer said. “You’re going to defend him?”
At first I thought I was hearing the unfamiliar voice of my own conscience; then I remembered that the words echoing in my mind were simply a variation on what Howard Flynn had told me to my face. “If I don’t help him, what good am I?”
It was the kind of sentiment Jennifer was certain to approve, and among the other things that seemed not to have changed through all the years of her absence was how much I wanted her approval. When I was eighteen, or nineteen, or twenty-one, or twenty-two, I would have said those words, words that someone had said to me first, and, in her presence, believed they told the truth about myself. I would have been Clarence Darrow or Don Quixote or both of them together, anything I thought she might want me to be.
“Howard Flynn told me that,” I admitted. “He tries to be my conscience.”
She put her coffee cup down and touched her mouth with a white linen napkin. “You’re not taking this case because someone else thinks you should. You’re taking it because you think you should.”
I handed the waiter a credit card and when he had gone I looked back into Jennifer’s waiting eyes. “I’m taking it because that kid in the public defender’s office was an embarrassment.” I was trying to sound tough and cynical and I failed so miserably I started to laugh. “I’m taking the damn case because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“Yes. I knew what you’d think of me if I didn’t.”
For a long time she looked at me without saying anything. “Did you really?” she asked finally.
I tried to be completely truthful. “I think I might have,” I admitted, as I helped her out of her chair.
Outside, in the misty night air, she held my arm with both hands as we walked down the street. Her high heel shoes tapped lightly on the sidewalk, and our breath blew like white transparent clouds into the darkness. Our foreheads bent close together, we turned the corner to the street where we had parked the car, and then, suddenly, without any warning, a metal shopping cart appeared out of nowhere and nearly ran us down. My hand shot out in front just in time to grab it. Pulling Jennifer behind me, I swung around to the side while the cart passed in front of us. An old woman-or what looked like an old woman-
was shoving it along as if nothing had happened, as if she had not seen us at all.
The old woman was wearing a torn overcoat and a green wool scarf. Her face was fat and red, with tiny slits for eyes and a pudgy, off-center nose. A red wool knit cap was pulled down below her ears and what looked like dirty cloth bandages were wrapped around her hands in a way that covered her palms and left her fingers free. Her mouth hung open and as she passed by you could hear a harsh rasping noise with every breath she took. A tooth was missing in front, and just above her lip three long white hairs grew out of a mole. The cart was loaded with bulging black plastic garbage bags, but whether they were the sum total of her earthly possessions, or debris she had found to trade or sell, there was no way to know. The back wheels were broken and wobbled sideways as the cart rattled into the night.