“Some of you may have thought I’d never come back,” he informed Mama. “I’m sure you wished I wouldn’t! Anytime a person gets out in the world and escapes this rat-trap, they must be dead, huh?” Unheim claimed he had found work as an actor in Fantasma Falls, and, though he had sworn long ago “never to return to this site of youthful struggle and underappreciation,” he had collected his lawyer (this is when he introduced Le Fleuer) and flown back to Sea View as soon as he received word of his aunt’s untimely collapse and death. He then informed Mama that he was suing her and Herman Mayfield for fraud and for a “baseless and altogether illegal misappropriation of family funds,” a phrase ominously exact in its wording.
Common sense, however, dictated that Judge Sutpen, who knew Mama’s and Herman’s motives could not have been purer, would toss the case in a heap of rage, but Sutpen soon fell ill (bone cancer, bad chance) and was replaced by a new circuit judge from the landlocked county of Dyersburg, a tough, ruddy ox named Judge Thomas Tunder, who carried no loyalties to the community and exercised a clinical, dogmatic approach in all matters of jurisprudence. What’s worse, Le Fleuer proved oddly well versed in the byzantine narrows of inheritance law, convincing Judge Tunder early on that a fair trial could not be conducted with a jury culled from the townsfolk of Sea View, since the community more or less abetted the decision made by the defendants. Mayfield objected and was overruled. The judge knocked his gavel, and soon Mama and Mayfield faced a gallery of twelve strangers from the town of Desperate Pines, fifteen miles away.
The trial lasted two months. A day didn’t go by that Mama didn’t write me to reprise the latest indignity she and Mayfield were forced to suffer. Included in her letters were newspaper clippings (the trial metastasizing into a major county scandal) that contained in their own right a skilled court artist’s inked sketches of the trial, so I came to possess a piecemeal cartoon of all that strange drama: I saw cartoon-Mama sitting at the defendant’s table, a righteous skein in her eyes. I saw Jesse Unheim, that haughty dandy, smirk etched into his face, hair parted down the middle, thin legs tapering into squiggles. (I remembered him as chubby with intelligent, scheming eyes, but he had lost weight and grown handsome.) Mama had said about Unheim, “He’s the kind of man who struts around in borrowed clothes,” and I knew what she meant from the pictures. His whole dandy act, even in cartoon form, was fraught with unease.
Mayfield, who in the drawings was always chewing his nail or tapping his fingers on the defendant’s table, Mayfield, whose very neck was a rectangle of queasy pen strokes, called as witnesses the entire cartoon population of Sea View to exhibit (a) how much the devolution of DeMille’s estate resonated with the conscience of the community and (b) how little love the late woman had harbored for her nephew. Many witnesses recalled her referring to Unheim as “a scoundrel,” “my good-for-nothing nephew,” and (to gasps in the courthouse) “a cocksucker.”
Even sure-footed Le Fleuer (who in those drawings appeared as a kind of French horn of a man) buckled a bit under this avalanche of testimony and, in what many local reports took as a sign of his increasing desperation, produced a letter supposedly written by Sandra DeMille to her young nephew in which she wondered, “Where is this young Jesse? I know you’ve made mistakes in the past, but I don’t think it’s right for those mistakes, especially for a young man’s mistakes, to define who he is. Home can be a cruel place. You are, Jesse, and have always been a part of the family.” Le Fleuer carted in his own handwriting expert (an undertaker by the look of the court sketches) who verified the “authenticity” of the letter.
Things were looking up for Mama and Henry Mayfield when, during a nasty spell of rain in mid-March, Jesse Unheim and Morgan Le Fleuer disappeared. Poof. Not at the Home Away from Home Inn. Not at McSteven’s, Connell’s, or any of the county bars. A garbage man, interviewed by the Sea View News, reported seeing four men in overcoats shove Unheim and Le Fleuer into a gray van around four-thirty a.m. one Tuesday. In their absence, Judge Tunder was forced to drop the case, and in the following weeks, word fumbled down the ladder of gossip that Unheim had owed money to the mob out west. By dangling the carrot of his aunt’s estate, he had persuaded his creditors to lend him their lawyer — hence the bizarre competence of Morgan Le Fleuer. But the mob grew impatient with Unheim, lost faith in his chances of winning in court, and removed him. Or so the story went. As before, he was now presumed dead. He had come — hijacked Mama’s life — and disappeared, this pathetic Unheim, who failed even at villainy.
Throughout this ordeal, that trial sketch of Unheim seeped into my imagination. I dreamt I caught that sketch of him in bed with Lucy, enmeshing its squiggly legs with hers. Dreamt I was lost in the bowels of the Communiqué, racing to find the stage, and when I reached the wing and stepped out, there stood that sketch of Unheim in my spotlight, Max next to him, the stage transformed into a courtroom.
Why, in all those months, didn’t I take the five-hour train ride to Sea View and sit by my poor mother’s side? Why did I content myself with writing her, with a leisurely reading of her struggles? There were reasons, though they all seem pale and tired now, like suspects under an interrogator’s lamp.
For one, I’d offered to come. In letter after letter, I’d insisted on coming — even booked a train ticket — but Mama refused: “I miss you more than you know,” she wrote, “but please don’t involve yourself in this mess. This Jesse is a joke, your Mama will be fine. Besides, what would your volunteers do if I stole you away from them?” And I, as always, obeyed, too naïve to know a woman’s insistence in such cases is asserted solely to be overruled.
Even so, I might not have risked leaving for fear of deserting Lucy. In my absence, I was sure, she’d forget who I was or vanish altogether. Like Unheim. Thrown in a van, whisked away. If Lucy was five minutes late for dinner, if I couldn’t find her after a performance, I experienced a light, if well-hidden, panic. She was one of those people who seemed ripe, primed for disappearance.
Plus, I had developed an allergy to Sea View. Or the fear of one. So many smiling angels had descended upon me since I’d escaped — Lucy, the Communiqué, these new handsome manners — all of which would float away from me, I was sure, if I so much as entered Sea View.
Besides, Mama and I had recovered such naked words in our letters it seemed a shame to test them with faces. A few times she and I spoke on the lobby phone, but it was never the same: We were tentative and alien. We hung up, ran to our pens. Our retreating hearts needed those letters, the distance and redemptive fiction of letters. That’s what Jesse Unheim was now: insidious and pathetic, but fictional. He, and the home from which he and I had both fled, transformed into a cartoon. Ah, that Sea View could have remained so, that Mama and I could have lived as pen pals!
• • •
She visited on April 15, two weeks before Max and I were set to leave on a ten-city national tour arranged by Bernard and financed by the famous eccentric and patron of the arts, Marguerite Harris, granddaughter of the late oil baron D. W. T. Harris. Bernard had invited her to a March performance, and Harris, who above all sought out that which was “fresh,” declared me just that. A week later, Max and I met Ms. Harris and Bernard at the Harlequin Club on Forty-third Street. Within fifteen minutes Bernard and Max were phoning her lawyer. It amazed me how quickly the business was settled. Fates sealed with a handshake. As if to confirm a process already under way rather than inaugurate a new one. How long did it take Achilles to return Hector’s body to Priam? For the Trojans to accept the horse?