The Burden of Proof

  Tersely, Clara shook her head and went ahead of him out the door. A moment, like so many of late, of wholly different aspirations. At the head of the staircase in the dark gallery building, he stumbled and reached back for her hand. The iron newel saved him. When he looked up, Clara had her brow drawn down wearily in irritation, and a rare edge was in her eye. She might as well have proceeded with the pronouncement: He did not please her, in a deep abiding way. The hand he had reached back for, he remembered, had remained at her side.

  He had believed that was past. Instead, it seemed now that this was to be Clara’s parting look. Guilt had overcome her in the end and she had left behind a message begging forgiveness. But she apologized only for her conduct. The rest could not be changed. Clara’s heart, too, had been set to the fire and inscribed with this hideous grudge. Better she should have torn apart the house, broken all the china, slashed the pictures on the walls. Instead, full of rage and despair, she had smashed and destroyed herself, and left him to wound himself whenever he stooped for any of the pieces.

  He spoke to her of Argentina.

  His father had come from Berlin in 1928 to serve as a doctor in the agricultural settlements of Russian Jews who had arrived in the late 1880s and put down near Santa Fe. There Bruno Stern had met Marta Walinsky. From subsequent comments, Stern took it that his mother believed she had acquired the sum of life’s meaningful attainments by marrying a physician. Jacobo came at once, and four years later Alejandro; Silvia five years after that.

  In the same way some actors are always on stage, Papa was always a doctor. He wore a full beard and he was wedded by the heat of fierce anxiety to his professional manner. He walked through the streets of Entre Ríos in his white coat and brought it home to Mama to launder. He wore three-piece woolen suits in every season. His fingernails were carefully pared and his hands were whitish and bathed at the start of every day in lavender cologne. He hung his stethoscope about his neck, picked up his medical bag, and walked down two streets to his infirmary each morning. Mama told him that Papa was important. He made people better. They respected him. Papa loved respect. Something about respect—Stern never knew the precise dimension of his father’s failure—brought the family when Stern was almost five to Buenos Aires, with its gracious, cosmopolitan air. One more unfortunate move. The city folk took them for rubes, and Mama’s country relatives treated them at once as disagreeable porteños.

  In the United States, word that Stern had grown up as a Jew in Argentina was taken as suggesting dangers only slightly less than if his father had stayed on in Berlin. To be sure, among the Argentines there were many anti-Semites. Mama’s cousin Ritella recalled from her rocking chair with emphatic flourishes the Semana Trágica, tragic week, when she was in her teens and roving mobs had entered the Jewish quarter in Buenos Aires with iron bars and barrel staves, beating any Bolshevik they found, which was taken loosely to include virtually any Jew. But for the most part, the years in B.A. that Stern recalled were not dramatically different from what he might have experienced growing up in Chicago or New York. In the area north and west of Corrientes and Callas, nearly 300,000 Jews—many of them, like his mother, the children of Russian immigrants who had come to the Littoral provinces late in the nineteenth century—maintained a full community life. There were three Yiddish dailies, kosher butcher shops and bakeries, the tiny storefront synagogues. These were poor people—shopkeepers and factory workers, dockhands and meatpackers—who, as Mama put it, sold their labor to survive.

  To Clara, as she sat across from him in the Chinese restaurant in a booth whose sides were magnificently tooled with red-eyed dragons with green tails, the familiar details were not emphasized. He spoke of the Indians who trod barefoot in Entre Ríos; the country’s uncouth gauchos. He explained the crazy quilt of Argentine culture, with its diverse European elements of British uprightness, Italian amplitude, and Hispanic bravery and guilt. The excitement of a far-off place and its customs thrilled her; you could see it in her face, but she sat silent as a cat. At times, you would think she was not capable of speaking. He, in the meantime, carried on with animation about what he most often felt inclined to hide. Her luminous look felt to Stern like a kind of homage.

  Afterwards, she accepted his arm and they walked through the park back to George Murray’s Chevy.

  “You really must stop calling me Mr. Stern.”

  “Very well. What are you called, then. Alejandro, is it?”

  “Most people call me Sandy.”

  “Very good,” she said. “Sandy.” Even with her perfect manners, he could tell that she struggled not to react to the inanity of the name. He joked that at last they had been introduced.

  “Oh, I knew who you were.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I recognized you. From Easton.”

  “Did you?” He was quite surprised. By his private calculations, she was too old to have been at the college while he was in law school, and he was certain she had not been a law student. There had been only nine women to enter in his three years and he had decided she was quite attractive and not liable to be forgotten.

  “I’m sure it was you. I saw you in the law school library all the time. You never seemed to leave.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said forlornly, “that certainly was me.” He asked what had brought her to the law school.

  “A fellow.” She looked down at the walk. “He was in your class. He was like you. He’d been in the service.” Stern asked his name, but she flapped her hand. No account. “He didn’t make it through.”

  Stern uttered a sympathetic sound. Of his class of three hundred, only about 120 had received degrees. The overheated atmosphere of law school and its occasional terror still returned to him at times in dreams. They had reached the car and Stern held the door.

  “I am shocked to find I was so memorable,” he remarked inside.

  “Oh.” She smiled a bit. “You had a GI haircut.”

  “Ah,” said Stern. He could read her thought: he had appeared so terribly out of place. The story of his life. Foreign-born scholarship boy with government haircut. At Easton he would have looked like an arrival straight from the immigration dock. She touched his arm. It did not surprise him that she already recognized the large place occupied in him by pride.

  She said merely, “Please.”

  He tried to save the moment. “I am flattered that I made any impression.”

  She looked down at her lap. So he saw it for the first time: Clara Mittler biting back her words. She knew a difficult social pass and had an infallible intuition for when to withdraw. He had learned to imitate her at this, in the way married couples will after decades, how to keep his silence when it was best, but he never had the same mastery as she. The subject drifted past; the sting receded. He started the car and drove, again tensely studying the streets.

  “Did you enjoy law school?”

  “To endure,” said Stern, “not to enjoy.”

  “That’s what my father says. I used to study in the law school library when I was an undergraduate. I wanted to go myself, but he wouldn’t hear of it.” She labored with the thought. “And what about Easton, Sandy?” She used his name deliberately. “Did you find it a pleasure to be out in the hills?”

  Here Stern showed more caution. This was apparently her alma mater. What could he say? There in the rolling countryside, thirty miles from the hub of Kindle County, Easton University had been built in the 1870s as an Episcopal alternative to the land-grant universities. By now, it had a magnificent faculty and a world-class reputation. But it was full of foppish fellows in tweed coats, boys from Brooklyn and Iowa who carried on as if they were princes and dukes. Easton was more Yale than Yale, a palace of pretensions. It had been an astonishing three years to Stern. Some people took him as exotic; others as a waif.

  “Easton,” said Stern, “I found to be much farther from the city than mere geography might suggest.”

  “Oh, yes.” She nodded heartily. “I used to think the s
ame thing all the time when I was teaching.”

  “Teaching?” asked Stern. For a few moments, he learned a thing or two about her. It turned out that after college she had been a grade-school teacher at the Prescott School in DuSable. The students were almost exclusively black—“colored,” they said in 1956—poor youngsters whose poverty surrounded them like a vast gulf between them and the rest of the world. On the coldest mornings, attendance was down substantially because of the number of children who did not own coats.

  “Nothing was wasted,” she said. “Every moment was worth-while. Whether you succeeded or failed.”

  “What caused you to stop?” asked Stern.

  In the dark car, she made a heavy sound. “I quit almost two years ago.”

  Move to strike as nonresponsive, Stern thought. The nomenclature of the courtroom was always in his mind these days, one more American dialect he wished to faultlessly master.

  “For a particular reason?”

  “I thought I had something better to do.”

  In George’s car, they both became silent.

  When he said good night to her beside the iron standards of the pointed fence that bounded Henry Mittler’s handsome Georgian home in Riverside, she shook his hand and smiled against her will, and made him promise to call her about dinner next week. He watched her dash up the stairs, full skirt and petticoats hoisted. She ran through the doors of the house, which were large enough to front a mission, without turning back. Was she close to tears? Something has happened. She had been here, then gone, aswarm in her own troubles. A fascinating young woman, bright and tenderhearted, and from the eagerness with which she spoke of seeing him again, he was sure that no snub had been intended. But as he stared up in the dark at the ocher brick and iron flower boxes that hung on Henry Mittler’s home, the weight of grim conviction settled on him. He would never really know what lay inside.

  21

  WITH HIS USUAL ABJECT LOOK, Remo Cavarelli waited in the marble corridor outside the courtroom of United States District Court Judge Moira Winchell. Stern hung on to Remo like an old tie—one too garish and oddly proportioned to accompany any part of the current wardrobe. With his coarse hands and North End speech, Remo was an embarrassment to the young lawyers in Stern’s office, who were accustomed to Stern’s current trade—business people and professionals overcome by material appetites or caught up in ambiguous circumstances. But Remo had been a client for nearly three decades, and Stern would not abandon him. He had first approached Stern in the teeming halls of the North End police court and reappeared every few years in the midst of one scrape or another, a tough block of a man with the roughened brown face of a mariner.

  Remo was a thief. He stole as a profession, with attitudes not unlike a professional hunter’s. He admired what he stole; he enjoyed taking it; he looked forward to doing it again. And he regarded apprehension as part of his calling. Each time he went to jail—and he had done three stretches already—he lamented the effect on his family. On the last occasion, Stern remembered, Remo had wept wildly as he contemplated separation from his young son. But he had come of age among men who made bluff pronouncements about the time they had done. And so, when he was caught, Remo Cavarelli pled guilty.

  That was how he intended to answer the indictment pending against him here for conspiring to loot an interstate shipment. Not today, of course. Like a man with a toothache, the only thing that Remo regarded as worse than his present predicament was its solution. But sooner or later, after Stern had arranged another continuance or two, Remo would approach the bar and publicly admit his culpability. And this time it would be against the advice of his lawyer. The government’s case was extremely weak—a conspiracy depending entirely on Remo’s coincidental appearance at the site where a hijacked refrigerator truck was being unloaded of its cargo of beef sides. Stern had encouraged Remo to go to trial, even offered to adjust his fee, but Remo was not interested. Trials were for people who had a gripe. Remo had none. At this point, with his fourth conviction, Remo was likely to be gone for a number of years. But he remained resolute.

  Before the courtroom door, Remo pumped Stern’s hand and Stern took a moment to explain what would happen today. The period for pre-trial motions was now past, and Judge Winchell would set a trial date. Remo was to do nothing more than stand at Stern’s side before the bench. His appearance was not required, but Stern urged Remo to attend nonetheless. He would look like a tamed ruffian beside the lawyers as they spoke a language he could not understand. His coat hung on him with an evident foreignness; his broad tie formed a huge knot and elevated the collar points on Remo’s polyester shirt. Remo’s head would list slightly throughout, and his large rough hands would cling to his sides pathetically, as if, like awkward sensors, they could feel the cold weight of the bars. Stern had seen Remo perform this routine before, and standing beside Sandy, he would break even the hardest heart.

  Today he would get the chance. Moira Winchell had started out as a federal prosecutor, and went on to spend a number of years as a big-firm litigator, one of those lawyers who attended to complex civil lawsuits, trading Himalayan masses of documents and seldom bringing cases to trial. Ten years ago, she had been the first woman named a federal judge in this district; by now, she had been elevated by her colleagues to chief. Moira was rightfully celebrated as the triumphal conqueror of generations of discrimination. But, alas, there was a reason Moira had succeeded when others had not. She was a tough cookie. And the bench had made her tougher. Facing the manifold burdens of life as a federal judge—crowded dockets, churlish lawyers, middling pay, and almost unlimited power—some people did not respond well. They came to the bench thrilled by the acclaim of their peers and became, in a short period of time, as temperamental as Caligula. Moira Winchell was one of them—snappish, sarcastic, even, at moments, downright mean. Stern had tried cases against Moira years ago, during the time she was a prosecutor, and forged with her a relationship of mutual regard. More recently, the judge and her husband, Jason, a law school professor, had passed occasional intermissions with Stern and Clara at the symphony. There, soothed by the music, Moira was amiable, if a little haughty. But in her courtroom she was harder than granite.

  “Mr. Stern, where are we going with this matter?”

  From the substantial height of the dark bench, Judge Winchell addressed him as soon as the clerk called the case for status. She gave no apparent attention to Moses Appleton, the Assistant United States Attorney who stood beside Stern on the shoulder opposite Remo. Moses, a young black man, was a crackerjack lawyer—he figured for great things—but the prosecutors, all of them, were like cigar-store Indians to many of the judges: fungible young functionaries routinely clamoring for vengeance.

  Stern promptly complained about the prosecution, claiming that they had not provided enough information on the case for him to determine whether it should be “resolved without trial,” an oblique reference to a guilty plea. Judge Winchell, who had heard it all before, motioned him silent. In the large old courtroom, lawyers, each awaiting his or her turn at the podium, sat by the dozens on the dark-lacquered benches, attending to the judge like a reverent congregation and all the while registering legal fees in six-minute increments.

  “Two weeks for the government to file a Rule 801 statement, supported by 302s and grand jury testimony. We’ll set the trial for two weeks thereafter. No continuances. Give them a date,” said Judge Winchell to her minute clerk, who sat almost at ground level, four feet below. The clerk, Wilbur, who took his cues from the judge, called out a date next month like an announcement of doom.

  Remo, beside Stern, spoke up for the first time.

  “So soon?” he whispered.

  “Hush,” said Stern.

  On the bench, Judge Winchell whipped her straight dark hair back over her shoulder.

  “Mr. Stern, might I have a word with you?” She started down the stairway beside the bench and, as Stern approached, waved Appleton away. He was unneeded. Stern knew wh
at was coming.

  “Sandy,” said Moira Winchell, suddenly beside him at his height, “I was terribly sorry to hear about Clara. We all think of you.” She placed her long hand on Stern’s shoulder and gave him a level look of real sadness. He found himself oddly moved by the judge’s sincerity. Here in the strong light of the courtroom, where Moira did not bother with makeup, Stern was impressed by the toll reflected in her features. Her pretty Irish face was deeply lined now; her eyes held no amusement. One tended to forget the earnestness that underlay all her efforts. The world watched her, she knew, waiting for a serious mistake.

  “Your Honor is most kind.”

  “Call,” she said. “We’ll have lunch.”

  Then she drew her black robe around her again as she ascended to her superior place. Her face was already wrinkled with its familiar look of irritation. More lawyers. More disputes. More decisions. Onward.

  Both Appleton and Remo had waited a few feet away.

  “Moses,” said Stern in the corridor, “I shall speak with you.” Then he led Remo into the attorneys’ room, a serene chamber with ancient oak desks and black-and-white photos of various judges of the court of decades past, all floured with dust and askew on the wall. Stern quickly summarized what had occurred. The judge would soon demand a final decision about whether Remo would plead guilty. Stern, again, urged him to proceed to trial, but Remo was clearly indifferent to this advice.