"That is my answer."
"I have no further questions, your Honor."
"Mr. Willow?"
"No questions."
"Thank you, Mr. Driscoll."
"Thank you," Driscoll said, and rose from the stand. He looked out over the courtroom for a moment, and then went to take a seat in the jury box alongside his wife.
"Is there any further evidence?" McIntyre asked.
"No, your Honor," Willow said. "That is all for the defendant Mitchell-Campbell."
"Your Honor," Genitori said, rising, "the contract between API and James Driscoll, dated August 16, 1963, contains the indemnity clause favoring API, and is annexed as Exhibit A to our answer and crossclaim. May it be deemed to have been submitted in evidence?"
"No objection," Willow said.
"Fine," McIntyre said. "Is there any further evidence to be offered by either side?"
"The plaintiff rests," Brackman said.
"Your Honor, may I at this time renew our motion to dismiss on the ground that no cause has been made?"
"I assume, Mr. Willow, that you will want to argue this motion as well as the merits of the alleged similarities, won't you?"
"Yes, your Honor."
"I hope, too, that both sides will be submitting proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law."
"Yes, sir."
"We will, sir."
"Well, it's almost four o'clock now, gentlemen, but perhaps we can be ready to do that tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I'll reserve any further comments and rulings until then."
"May we consider the case closed for all other purposes, your Honor?" Brackman asked.
"Yes," McIntyre said. "The case is closed for all purposes other than the submission of conclusions of law, findings of fact, and argument."
14
They take you back, Driscoll thought, they force you to go back to a time and place forgotten or at least deliberately obscured. It is instant therapy, it is crash analysis, this confrontation with yourself, an odd meeting with a seeming stranger who moves steadily closer until you recognize him with a start — he is you, but he is no longer you. Comparisons are odious, the man said, I forget which man. But what were they doing to me today if not forcing me to resurrect my youth (upon whom was Sergeant Morley based?) and then moving by logical if tedious progression into my so-called maturity (when exactly did you begin writing your book, Mr. Driscoll?) until they had brought the biography to date, into my dotage, my slow if clinging expiration (you are a novelist, are you not, Mr. Driscoll? No, I am a Vermont farmer).
The farm in Vermont is the here and now, the present. It was purchased for eight thousand dollars, a portion of my share of the movie money on The Paper Dragon. The farmhouse is red, you approach it over a rutted, ice-covered road in the winter; in the spring, the road is running and wet, soggy and mired. There is a falling stone wall bordering the property, said to have been built by colonial settlers, which theory I personally buy since there are still enough boulders firmly enbedded in the two acres of arable land to construct yet another wall from there to Boston and back. I pretend to grow forage crops there, alfalfa and hay and oats.
It is interesting, don't you think, that were I a novelist, were I truly a working novelist, my daily routine would be concerned primarily with seeking truth in terms of fabrication, the enlargement of fantasy, the exercise of imagination, a pretense hardly less energetic than that of being a Vermont farmer, which I am not, but which I purport to be.
I do not know what I am.
I have not known what or who I am for a very long time now, I thank you for that, darling.
We go to bed early in Vermont because a farmer, I am informed, must rise to take care of this and that, sowing, reaping, harvesting, breathing deep of clear Vermont air, ahhh, the outdoor life, rise and shine at five-thirty a.m., walk with springing step to the barn where Ebie begins her chores with the chickens. Yes, we have chickens, did I neglect to tell you that, Mr. Brackman? We have seventy-two chickens. We bought those with the movie money, too. So it is early to bed in Vermont, and since the bed part is never very good or very interesting anyway, it's really not too terribly difficult to throw back the covers before dawn and touch the cold wooden floor, scarcely colder than the bed in which Mr. and Mrs. James Driscoll lie, though we do sometimes make love. We he in love, so to speak.
Stay, she used to say, why must you go home? But go I would. I still don't know why. Perhaps there was in me, at eighteen, more of my mother than I imagined there was, the humorless woman wearing her black shawl. How could I explain to flfer that I was deliriously in love with a girl in Brooklyn and that all I wanted to do was hold her and touch her and look at her and love her day and night? How could I explain with the sound of Holy Mary, Mother of God coming from her bedroom each night, as if she were doing penance for God knew what mortal sin, every night, Holy Mary, Mother of God. While I thought of Ebie lying alone in that large bed on Myrtle Avenue, waiting for the next afternoon when I would taste her once again — that is the distant past, that is the far distant past. The present is Vermont, and a love-making that is only necessary, a biological release for both of us. We have not spoken the words "I love you" in so long I think if I heard them said or uttered them myself, I would begin to weep. We perform mechanically, we lie in love, my Southern flower and myself, remembering a past when all was fire and death, "the little death" the ancients called it, was that Hemingway? Did you feel the earth move? Yes, guapa. Truly? Yes, truly. You old bewitcher, you seduced a generation.
The distant past. Long before the red Vermont farmhouse I insisted on buying, half hoping she would refuse to come with me, half hoping she would pull out at last, abandon the marriage, end the loveless grappling, but no. Not Ebie, not that determined Southern flower. She had made the vows, oh my yes, and she would honor them, come crumbling wall or overflowing spring, rutted roads or bone-chilling winter. And how are you today, Mrs. Driscoll? the Vermont ladies all say, and she answers with a pert nod of her head and tells them about the pies she has baked, or asks their opinion on how to rid the house of flies. There are a dreadful number of flies in the house all the time, she says to Mrs. Dimmity, who is our next-door neighbor in the gray farmhouse across the road. Mrs. Dimmity does part-time housework for the skiers who rent the old Kruger place. They are a noisy lot, college boys and girls who speed along the black road at midnight every winter Friday, racing over the dangerous ice. I visualize them booming mountains in the daytime, shagging themselves into exhaustion each night. They bring the past into our fake present. I saw one of them one cold forbidding morning, she was blond and tall, so young, she wore a black parka and black stretch pants, she raised her mittened hand to greet me in the frosty dawn as I came out of the barn. I returned the wave, my heart was pounding.
The exterminator has visited us some five times already, but he cannot rid the house of mice. I cannot bear the thought of them scurrying in the night, scarcely secret sharers of our roof. They are the final insult, the final invasion of a marriage that certainly needs no further intruders. I visualize them nibbling at the wallboard, or licking the wallpaper paste, undermining the rotting original timbers of the old house until one day it will fall down upon our ears and a great cloud of mice dirt will rise on the air, and they will run, they will scatter away from the crumbling ruin, chattering and squeaking in triumph, having destroyed it at last, having destroyed even the meager shaky structure that has managed to survive until now.
It seemed so strong, it seemed so indestructible.