“Mr. Antonelli, does the defense wish to call a witness?” he asked, repeating with the same civil smile the same question he had asked before.
Is this what it was like to go out of your mind: to be aware-
acutely, intensely aware-of everything going on all around you, struck by how strange are all the things you always took for granted, astonished at the infinite complications of even the most seemingly simple things? Words, for example: breathe air in to stay alive; breathe it out to make sounds that explain to yourself and maybe others as well why you should keep doing it. Is this what it was like, locked up inside yourself, seeing things with a clarity you never had before, and then, when you try to explain it-describe what you’ve seen-discover you have forgotten how to talk?
“Yes, your honor,” I heard myself say, surprised to find myself standing up. “The defense calls Dr. Clifford Fox.”
The tan suit coat he wore was a little too wide for his shoulders, and his pants were bunched up in front at his belt. His gray hair curled up over his collar at the back of his neck. He spoke very softly and chose his words with care. He had the tolerant habit of someone who spent much of his time with children. I asked him all the usual questions about his training and experience and, thinking about Jennifer, paid almost no attention to what he said.
“And have you had occasion to examine the defendant in this case, known as John Smith?” I asked, opening the file that held his report.
“Yes, I have.”
I closed the file. “And?”
Fox leaned forward, resting his elbows on the wooden arms of the witness chair. “And?”
“Yes. What did you find? What can you tell us about John Smith?” I pushed back from the counsel table far enough to cross my legs. I put my hands in my lap and began to tap my fingers together.
“Where would you like me to begin?”
I was watching my foot swing back and forth and I did not hear his question.
“Mr. Antonelli?”
“Yes, your honor?” I replied, looking up at Judge Bingham. He seemed to be worried about something.
“The witness asked you where you wanted him to begin. Are you all right, Mr. Antonelli?”
“Of course, your honor,” I said, sliding my leg off my knee as I turned to Fox. “Just begin at the beginning, doctor,” I said. I crossed the other leg and began to move that foot back and forth.
Fox had just begun to say something. “Your honor,” I interrupted, abruptly rising from my chair. “Could we have a short recess?” Before he could answer, I turned away and walked quickly out of the courtroom.
I moved down the hallway, picking up speed with every step I took, banging my fist on the wall, swearing under my breath, wondering why I could not find a telephone. Just as I turned the corner at the end of the hall, I felt a hand on my shoulder and then another one under my arm as someone shoved me through the door to the men’s room. It was Howard Flynn and he could barely control himself.
“What are you doing in there?” he yelled as he turned me around. His eyes were bulging and his face was burning red. “Don’t do this! I know what you’re going through, damn it! But you can’t do this!” His chest heaved with each short, hard breath he took. “You want to end up like I did: a drunk who spends the rest of his life regretting it? You think that will make everything all right?” he jeered. “You’re not doing Jennifer any good! You’re not doing that kid in there any good! You’re not doing yourself any good!” he shouted in my face.
I did not want to hear it. Turning away, I bent over a basin and threw water on my face. “I have to find a phone,” I said as I dried my face with a paper towel. “I have to call the hospital.”
“Look, damn it,” he said, struggling to contain himself, “you’re in the middle of a murder trial. You have a witness on the stand.
You can’t go walking in and out of the courtroom like you’ve got more important things to do somewhere else.”
I wheeled around. “I have to call the hospital,” I repeated, glaring at him. “I shouldn’t have left there last night. I should be there now, not here.”
“What about the kid? What’s going to happen to him?”
“I don’t care what happens to him! Don’t you understand? I don’t care! I only care what happens to her. I should be there now.”
“Let the doctors do their job, and you do yours!” he insisted.
“You can’t do anything for her by sitting around the hospital.”
“I have to be there!”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. Maybe if you’d been there with your wife,” I screamed, taunting him, “instead of spending all your time trying to be a lawyer…!”
The anger, the frustration, all the nameless fear that had boiled up inside me, blinding me to everything except what I felt, vanished in an instant and I realized what an awful, unspeakable thing I had done. I reached for his arm, but he pulled away.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, shaking my head at how easily I had fallen into a state of mind in which the worst thing I could ever have said to him had become a weapon I was only too eager to use.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.”
The color in his face had returned to normal. He sniffed a couple of times and cleared his throat. “You better straighten your tie,” he said. His voice was quiet, subdued. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that.”
He bent his head, biting the inside of his lip. When he looked up, he searched my eyes. “There’s nothing worse than living with the thought that you could have saved somebody and you didn’t.
Don’t let that happen to you.”
I turned back to the mirror and adjusted my tie. “I’ll see you in court.”
The door swung shut behind him, and I gripped the sink with both hands and hung my head and tried to convince myself that there was some excuse for what I had done. I turned on the faucet, threw some more water on my face, and then pulled another paper towel from the metal dispenser. Flynn had ignored my apology and felt sorry for me that I had done something that made me feel I had to make one. It was a measure of his strength, and a measure of my weakness.
When I returned to the courtroom, I stood at the corner of the counsel table, waited until Judge Bingham brought court back into session, and before the echo of his voice had finished fading away began to ask my first question.
“Tell us, Dr. Fox: Is the defendant retarded or in any other way mentally deficient?”
“No, Danny-that’s the name he was given, whether by his mother or someone else I don’t know-is not retarded. He has an intelligence in the normal range, but precisely where in that range, I can’t say for sure.”
“Why can’t you say for sure?”
“Because he can’t read, and because he has a very limited vo-cabulary, and because he knows next to nothing about numbers.
I could not run all of the tests I would normally do with a child.”
“But Danny isn’t a child, is he?” I looked across to where Danny was sitting. He was grinning at Dr. Fox, waving at him whenever he caught his eye. “He’s a full-grown adult.”
“Physically, yes; mentally, he’s a child, a very young child. A very innocent child, I might add.”
Cassandra Loescher rose from her chair ready to object, thought better of it, and sat down.
“Would you explain that last remark, Dr. Fox? What do you mean: a very innocent child?”
There was something inherently kind about Clifford Fox, something that flickered unceasingly from beneath the shadows of his melancholy eyes. No matter how often he had been deceived and disappointed by what they became as adults, he could always find something to hope for in children. He smiled at me.