The Burden of Proof

  “You up to a few questions, Sandy?”

  “Of what nature?”

  “The usual. You know. We got a report to make. Lieutenant’s on the way. Gotta fill him in. This come as a big surprise to you?” the cop asked.

  Stern waited.

  “Very much,” he said.

  “She the type to get all depressed and unhappy, the missus?”

  This survey of Clara’s character, to be attempted in a few sentences, was for the moment well beyond him.

  “She was a serious person, Detective. You would not describe her as a blithe personality.”

  “But was she seeing shrinks, you know, anything like that?”

  “Not to my knowledge. My wife was not of a complaining nature, Detective. She was very private.”

  “She wasn’t threatening to do this?”

  “No.”

  The detective, mostly bald, looked directly at Stern for the first time. It was evident he did not believe him.

  “We haven’t found a note yet, you know.”

  Stern stirred a hand weakly. He could not explain.

  “And where have you been?” one of the cops behind Stern asked.

  “Chicago.”

  “For?”

  “Legal business. I met with a number of lawyers.” The fact that Dixon might be in very serious difficulties, so sorely troubling only an hour ago, recurred to Stern now with a disconcerting novelty. The urgency of that situation waved to him like a hand disappearing in the deep, out of reach for the time being.

  “How long you gone?” Nogalski asked.

  “I left very early yesterday.”

  “You talk to her?”

  “I tried last night, but there was no answer. We have a symphony series. I assumed she had gone for coffee afterwards with friends.”

  “Who spoke to her last, so far as you know?”

  Stern deliberated. Peter’s shrill manner would quickly antagonize the police.

  “My son might have.”

  “He out there?”

  “He is quite emotional at the moment.”

  Nogalski, for whatever reason, allowed himself a brief, disparaging smile.

  “You do that often?” one of the cops behind him asked.

  “What is that, Officer?”

  “Travel. Out of town?”

  “Occasionally it is necessary.”

  “Where’d you stay?” the woman asked. Stern tried not to react to the drift of the questions. The officers, of course, knew by now who he was and reacted accordingly—they despised most criminal defense lawyers, who hindered the police at every turn and were often richly rewarded for their efforts. To the police, this was a natural opportunity—a chance to pester an adversary and to indulge their customary nasty fancies about foul play and motives. Maybe the spick was humping his girlfriend in Chi while somebody for hire set this up. You never know unless you ask.

  “On this occasion, I was at the Ritz.” Stern stood. “May I go? My son and I have yet to speak with his sisters.”

  Nogalski was watching him.

  “This doesn’t make much sense,” said the detective.

  It made no sense, the man said. This was his professional opinion. Stern looked intently at Nogalski. It was one of the hazards of Stern’s calling that he seldom felt grateful to the police.

  Coming back down the hall, Stern could hear Peter’s voice. He was carrying on about something. The same ruddy-faced cop who had shown Stern into the garage was listening impassively. Stern took his son by the elbow to draw him away. This was intolerable. Intolerable! Some tough element of resistance within him was wearing away.

  “My God, they’re going to do an autopsy—did you know that?” asked Peter as soon as they were alone in the corridor. Peter was an M.D. and today apparently he was haunted by his past, the pathological exams he had practiced on the bums turned up in gutters, the gruesome med school humor as six or seven students studied the innards of the deceased. Peter suffered with the thought of his mother as another mound of lifeless anatomy awaiting the coroner’s saw. “You’re not going to allow that, are you?”

  A good deal shorter than his son, Stern observed Peter. Was it only with his father that this craven hysteria occurred? Stern wondered. The climate of their relations did not seem to have changed for years. Always there was this lamenting hortatory quality, too insistent to be passed off as mere whining. Stern had wondered for so long what it was his son expected him to do.

  “It is routine, Peter. The coroner must determine the cause of death.”

  “‘The cause of death’? Do they think it was an accident? Are they going to do a brain scan and figure out what she was thinking? For God sake, we won’t have a body left to bury. It’s obvious. She killed herself.” No one yet had said that aloud. Stern registered Peter’s directness as a kind of discourtesy—too coarse, too blunt. But no part of him riled up in shock.

  This was not, he said, the moment to cross swords with the police. They were, as usual, being idiotic, conducting some kind of homicide investigation. They might wish to speak next to him.

  “Me? About what?”

  “Your last conversations with your mother, I assume. I told them you were too distressed at the moment.”

  In his great misery, Peter broke forth with a brief, childish smile. “Good,” he said. Such a remarkably strange man. A peculiar moment passed between Stern and his son, a legion of things not understood. Then he reminded Peter that they needed to call his sisters.

  “Right,” said Peter. A more sober cast came into his eye. Whatever his differences with his father, he was a faithful older brother.

  Down the hall, Stern heard someone say, “The lieutenant’s here.” A large man ducked into the corridor, peering toward them. He was somewhere near Stern’s age, but time seemed to have had a different effect on him. He was large and broad, and like a farmer or someone who worked outdoors, he appeared to have maintained most of the physical strength of youth. He wore a light brown suit, a rumpled, synthetic garment, and a rayon shirt that hung loosely; when he turned around for a second, Stern could see an edge of shirttail trailing out beneath his jacket. He had a large rosy face and very little hair, a few thick gray clumps drawn across his scalp.

  He dropped his chin toward Stern in a knowing fashion.

  “Sandy,” he said.

  “Lieutenant,” Stern answered. He had no memory of this man, except having seen him before. Some case. Some time. He was not thinking well at the moment.

  “When you get a chance,” the lieutenant said.

  Some confusion rose up between Stern and his son.

  “You talk to him. I’ll call,” said Peter. “You know, Marta and Kate. It’s better from me.”

  With a sudden lucid turn, the kind of epiphanal instant he might have expected at a time of high distress, Stern recognized a traditional family drama taking place. As his children had marched toward adulthood, Peter had assumed a peculiar leadership in the family—he was the one to whom his sisters and mother often turned. He had forged intensive secret bonds with each of them—Stern did not know how, because the same alliances were never formed with him. This terrible duty, Stern realized, should be his, but the paths of weakness were well worn.

  “Please say I shall speak to them soon.”

  “Sure.” A certain reflective light had come over Peter; he leaned against the wall for an instant, absorbing it all, worn out by his own high emotions. “Life,” he observed, “is full of surprises.”

  In Stern’s den, the lieutenant was receiving a report from his officers. Nogalski had come strolling up as Stern emerged from the hallway. The lieutenant wanted to know what the policemen had been doing. Nogalski spoke. The others knew they had no place to answer.

  “I was asking a few questions, Lieutenant.”

  “Think you’ve asked enough?” Nogalski took a beat on that. They did not get along, the detective and the lieutenant—you could see that. “Maybe you could lend a hand outside. There?
??s a real bunch of gawkers.”

  When the other officers were gone, the lieutenant gestured for Stern. He knocked at the door with the back of his hand so that it closed part way.

  “Well, you got a shitpot of troubles here, don’t you, Sandy? I’m sorry to see you again, under the circumstances.” The lieutenant’s name was Radczyk, Stern remembered suddenly. Ray, he thought. “You holdin’ up?” he asked.

  “For the time being. My son is having some difficulty. The prospect of an autopsy for some reason upsets him.”

  The cop, shifting around the room, seemed to shrug.

  “We find a note someplace, we could do without it, I guess. I could probably fix it up with Russell’s office.” He was referring to the coroner. “They can always measure the C.O. in the blood.” The old policeman looked at Stern directly then, aware probably that he was being too graphic. “I owe, you know,” he said.

  Stern nodded. He had no idea what Radczyk was talking about.

  The policeman sat down.

  “The fellas go over all the usual with you?”

  He nodded again. Whatever that was.

  “They were very thorough,” said Stern.

  The lieutenant understood at once.

  “Nogalski’s okay. He pushes, he’s okay. Rough around the edges.” The lieutenant looked out the door. He was the type someone must have called a big oaf when he was younger. Before he had a badge and a gun. “It’s a tough thing. I feel terrible for you. Just come home and found her, right?”

  The lieutenant was doing it all again. He was just much better at it than Nogalski.

  “She sick?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Her health was excellent. The usual middle-age complaints. One of her knees was quite arthritic. She could not garden as much as she liked. Nothing else.” From the study window, Stern could see the neighbors parting to let the ambulance pass. It rolled slowly through the crowd. The beacon, Stern noticed, was not turning. No point to that. He watched until the vehicle carrying Clara had disappeared in the fullness of the apple tree, just coming to leaf, at the far corner of the lot, then he brought himself back to the conversation. The left knee, Stern thought.

  “You don’t know of any reason?”

  “Lieutenant, it should be evident that I failed to observe something I should have.” He expected to get through this, but he did not. His voice quaked and he closed his eyes. The thought of actually breaking down before this policeman revolted him, but something in him was bleeding away. He was going to say that he had much to regret right now. But he was sure he could not muster that with any dignity. He said, “I am sorry, I cannot help you.”

  Radczyk was studying him, trying to decide, in all likelihood, if Stern was telling the truth.

  A policeman leaned into the room through the half-open door.

  “Lieutenant, Nogalski asked me to tell you they found something. Up in the bedroom. He didn’t want to touch it till you seen it.”

  “What is that?” asked Stern.

  The cop looked at Stern, unsure if he should answer.

  “The note,” the officer said at last.

  It was there on Stern’s highboy, jotted on a single sheet of her stationery, laid out beside a pile of handkerchiefs which the housekeeper had ironed. Like the grocery list or a reminder to get the cleaning. Unassuming. Harmless. Stern picked up the sheet, overcome by this evidence of her presence. The lieutenant stood at his shoulder. But there was very little to see. Just one line. No date. No salutation. Only four words.

  “Can you forgive me?”

  2

  IN THE DARK EARLY MORNING the day of the funeral, a dream seized Stern from sleep. He was wandering in a large house. Clara was there, but she was in a closet and would not come out. She clung shyly to one of the hanging garments, a woman in her fifties whose knees knocked in a pose of childish bashfulness. His mother called him, and his older brother, Jacobo, voices from other rooms. When he moved to answer them, Clara told him they were dead, and his body rushed with panic.

  From the bed, he contemplated the illuminated digits on the clock radio. 4:58. He would not sleep again, too frightened by the thronging images of his dream. There had been such a peculiar look on Clara’s face when she told him Jacobo was dead, such a sly, calculating gleam.

  About him the house, fully occupied, seemed to have taken on an inert, slumbering weight. His older daughter, Marta—twenty-eight, a Legal Aid lawyer in New York—had flown back the first night and slept now down the hall, in the room which had been hers as a child. His younger daughter, Kate, and her husband, John, who lived in a distant suburb, had also spent the night, rather than fight the unpredictable morning traffic over the river bridges. Silvia, Stern’s sister, was in the guest room, come from her country house to minister to her brother and to organize the house of grief. Only the two men, Peter and, of course, Dixon—forever the lone wolf—were missing.

  Last night, the task of mourning in its grimmest ceremonial aspects had begun. The formal period of visitation would follow the funeral, but Stern, always ambivalent about religious formalities, had opened the house to various heartsore friends who seemed to need to comfort him—neighbors, two young lawyers from Stern’s office, his circle from the courthouse and the synagogue; Clara was an only child, but two separate pairs of her cousins had arrived from Cleveland. Stern received them all with as much grace as he could manage. At these times, one responded according to the most deeply trained impulses. To Stern’s mother, gone for decades but still in his dreams, matters of social form had been sacred.

  But after the house had emptied and the family had trailed off to sleep, Stern had closed himself up in the bathroom off the bedroom he had shared with Clara, racked for the second time that evening by a wrenching, breathless bout of tears. He sat on the toilet, from which the frilled skirting that Clara had placed there decades before still hung, with a towel forced to his mouth, howling actually, uncontrolled, hoping no one would hear him. ‘What did I do?’ he asked repeatedly in a tiny stillborn voice as a rushing storm of grief blew through him. Oh, Clara, Clara, what did I do?

  Now, examining himself in the bathroom mirrors, he found his face puffy, his eyes bloodshot and sore. For the moment he had regained some numbed remoteness, but he knew the limits of his strength. What a terrible day this would become. Terrible. He dressed fully, except for his suit coat, and made himself a single boiled egg, then sat alone, watching the glint of the sunrise enlarge on the glossy surface of the mahogany dining table, until he felt some new incision of grief beginning to knife through him. Desperately—futilely—he tried to calm himself.

  How, he thought again, how could he have failed to notice in the bed beside him a woman who in every figurative sense was screaming in pain? How could he be so dull, his inner ear so deafened? The signs were such, Stern knew, that even in his usual state of feverish distraction he could have taken note. Clara was normally a person of intense privacy. For years, she had made a completely personal study of Japan; he knew nothing about it except the titles of the books that occasionally showed up on her desk. At other moments, she would read a musical score; the entire symphony would rage along inside her. Barely perceptible, her chin might drop; but not a bar, a note was so much as whispered aloud.

  But this was something more. Two or three nights recently he had returned home late, preoccupied with the case he was trying—a messy racketeering conspiracy—to find Clara sitting in the dark; there was no book or magazine, not even the TV’s vapid flickering. It was her expression that frightened him most. Not vacant. Absent. Removed. Her mouth a solemn line, her eyes hard as agates. It seemed a contemplation beyond words. There had been such spells before. Between them, they were referred to as moods and allowed to pass. For years, he prided himself on his discretion.

  Driven now, he moved restlessly about the house, holding the items she had held, examining them as if for clues. In the powder room, he touched a tortoiseshell comb, a Lalique dish, the dozen cylinders of li
pstick that were lined up like shotgun shells beside the sink. My God! He squeezed one of the gold tubes in his hands as if it were an amulet. On a narrow wig stand in the foyer, three days’ mail was piled. Stern fingered the envelopes, neatly stacked. Bills, bills—they were painful to behold. These prosaic acts, visiting the cleaner or department store, humbly bespoke her hopes. On the sixth of March, Clara expected life to continue. What had intervened?

  “Westlab Medical Center.” Stern considered the envelope. It was directed to Clara Stern at their address. Inside, he found an invoice. The services, identified by a computer code, had been rendered six weeks ago and were described simply as “Test.” Stern was still. Then he moved directly to the kitchen, already counseling himself to reason, exerting his will powerfully to contain the shameful outbreak of grateful feelings. But he was certain, positive, she had made no mention of doctors or of tests. Clara recorded her appointments in a leather book beside the telephone. Luncheons. The inevitable musical occasions. The dinner dates and synagogue and bar affairs of their social life. He had brought the bill and matched its date against the book. “9:45 Test.” He paged back and forth. On the thirteenth there was another entry. “3:30 Dr.” He searched further. On the twenty-first, the same. “Dr.” “Test.” “Dr.”

  Cancer. Was that it? Something advanced. Had she resolved to make her departure without allowing the family to beg her, for their sake as much as hers, to undergo the oncologist’s life-prolonging tortures? That would be like Clara. To declare that zone of ultimate sovereignty. Her mark of dignity, decorum, intense belief was here.

  Pacing, he had arrived once more in the dining room, and he heard movement on the second floor, above him. With even an instant’s distraction, he felt suddenly that, for all the blind willingness with which his heart ran to this solution, he had been caught up in fantasy. There was some explanation of these medical events more mundane, less heroic. Somehow he found the suspicion chilling. Last night, blundering about in their bathroom, searching for tissue, he had come across a bottle of hair coloring hidden in the dark corner of a drawer. He had no idea how long she had concealed this harmless vanity. Months. Or years? It made no difference. But mortification shuddered through him. He had the same thought now: so much he had not noticed, did not know about that person, this woman, his wife.