The Burden of Proof

  “I thought you might tell me about the Wunderkind account.”

  “The number’s on the subpoena.”

  “Why is it, Sonia, that this account is of such interest?”

  She shook her head firmly.

  “No can do, Sandy.”

  “You expect me to bring this woman to the grand jury without any idea what she may be venturing into?”

  “I’ve told you, she’s not a subject. I’ll be happy to put that in writing. If she tells us the truth, she has nothing to worry about. You know the drill, Sandy.”

  “But the secretiveness—”

  “Doctor’s orders,” she said. “That’s how we’re doing it.” She was speaking again of Sennett. Stern, despite himself, made a sound. This had seemed from the inception to be too significant a matter for an inexperienced Assistant. Now he could see quite clearly that Stan Sennett was behind the scenes, pulling the strings, pumping the levers, palpitating at the thought of a case that would get his name in The Wall Street Journal and bring a moment of disquiet to that den of thieves in the Exchange, as he saw them, with their granite palace along the river.

  Sennett was a wiry, humorless little man, with the narrow, bird-boned physique of a runner. He was married to a probate lawyer named Nora, an ascetic type with a fixed jaw. Stern always imagined the two of them in a home with no dust and little furniture, eating carefully and going out for weekend runs. Stan had started out as the Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney in Kindle County under Ray Horgan, but he had gotten a yen for California and joined the Justice Department in San Diego. As the choice for U.S. Attorney he had been roundly welcomed—Stan was intelligent, experienced, and more or less independent of the mayor and his dark cabal.

  It was, however, one of the sad facts of political reform everywhere that incorruptibility was not the sole attribute of good government. Sennett was the kind of grim bureaucrat, a person of strong discipline and limited vision and courage, who seemed to turn up too often in prosecutors’ offices. Everybody’s chief deputy, he never quite seemed to believe he had assumed the mantle himself. In Stern’s judgment, he had a dangerous mixture of attributes for a man in power: he was vainglorious and insecure, quick to make judgments that were not always correct, and entirely beyond persuasion once he had done so. When you sat with him, presenting a problem, pleading for mercy or simply trying to make a point, his small shining eyes would follow you while his expression remained forbidding. ‘No,’ he would say the instant you had finished a ten-minute presentation. ‘No can do.’ Few words of explanation, little warmth. No argument. He would stand and shake your hand and see you to the door.

  Now he was using Klonsky as his cat’s-paw. That was for appearances, but the fact was, this was his case. Stern wondered if Klonsky knew how quickly he would push her aside when the lights of the videocams filled the room. In the meantime, a dark, high-density fluid of regret poured through Stern, the stuff of gloom. Sennett would be dogged in the hunt; Dixon, whatever his evasive maneuvers, was in for a long, bloody fight. Lost in these reflections, Stern reached forward and picked up the check.

  “Oh, no,” she said. As they walked to the door, Klonsky insisted on paying her share. Stern eventually recognized that this was a point of propriety and took two dollars from her. Duke, with his fried-up hair, received their money and bade them, with heavy accent, to return.

  Outside, he shook her hand and told her that Margy and he would see her the following Tuesday. She faced him with what was already becoming a familiar look of ambiguity and regret.

  “Thank you for asking me. I enjoyed our conversation.”

  “As well.” He made a brief, cutaway bow, Mr. Alejandro Stern, the foreign gentleman. She smiled at that and, with her heavy files slung across her body, went off toward the new federal building down the block. Pigeons with their shining gray heads arose fluttering in her path, and a rush of underground air, breathed up through a grate in the walk, ruffled her skirt. As he watched her go, it came to him again, an intimation clear as the arrival of spring, that he was alone. The usual affairs of the day, the courthouse, his children—they did not seem to do. Like nausea or hunger, a deep-sprung bodily response, the sense of his own unconnectedness overcame him, just as it did certain mornings, and to his surprise he stood for some time watching the figure of Sonia Klonsky whittled by distance and the phenomenon of aging vision, until she was no longer distinct amid the dark forms on the street.

  22

  AT NIGHT, HE SAW HELEN—more often, each week. The logic seemed irrefutable. Why should he be home in an empty house when Helen, a charming dinner companion, was available? Various adolescent intuitions told him that he was moving with too much dispatch toward an undesired destination. But she was such pleasant company, and who, reasonably, would choose loneliness? He was fifty-six and going steady.

  And, like some teenager, he was also screwing his brains out. In fin de siècle America, it seemed, this was how men and women paid respects. The hell with notes and flowers. Let’s get it on! One afternoon, Helen met him for lunch at his club in Morgan Towers. In that upright atmosphere, with the waiters in frogged coats and the bankers and business folk waxing genial, Helen grasped his hand and said, “Fuck me, Sandy.” She had had a glass of wine and her eyes looked very green.

  And did he resist? Not on your life. Mr. Alejandro Stern, at 1:27 in the afternoon, rented a room in his own name across the street in the Hotel Gresham. They were at the elevator when Stern recollected that he lacked a necessary item. In the hotel’s sundry shop, the attendant proved, of course—of course!—to be an older woman, with a heavy tailored suit and a strong German accent. Already giddy from the loss of inhibition and the lunchtime wine, Stern stuck up his courage and was able to clearly pronounce, “Prophylactics.”

  “Of course.” The woman nodded ponderously as she searched through the warren of old-fashioned cupboards where the rubbers were hidden. Eventually, she offered an entire box of different brands. “Good to use them,” she added, in the most cordial hotel style. In the elevator, Stern and Helen had been unable to contain their laughter. Thereafter, that was their watchword. At the most intimate moment, Helen was apt to drone, “Good to use them.”

  Making love to Helen was inevitably that kind of good-spirited enterprise, and often highly educational. She had read all the books; she had practiced every maneuver. There was nothing she was going to miss. Some developments that took Stern by surprise were, naturally, the result of thirty years with one lover in which the zones of exploration had been long established. He was mystified the first time Helen had extricated herself from his embrace and nudged him onto his back, then moved below. His first thought was that he was the object of a visual inspection, a prospect which he found far more exciting than he would have imagined, but she was soon otherwise occupied, busy with her mouth and fingertips

  “Did you like that?” she asked afterwards.

  He answered slowly. “The wings of a dove.”

  Yet, even making allowances for his lack of prior experience, he still found in Helen a disconcertingly determined interest in the sexual act. This was not a roundabout complaint concerning Clara. Whatever inadequacies she may have felt—and who could doubt the evidence?—he had never been dissatisfied. But for Helen the actual moment of encounter, the performance, was supreme and seemed to acquire a detached dreamlike rapture that Stern sometimes experienced in museums. They were, both of them, the thing observed, pure phenomenon: her body, his, with their rosy tumescent glow and throbbing veinous parts, the glistening pinkish shaft probing and disappearing. He watched with Helen’s bold approval. She slipped her hand down to provide yet one more stimulant.

  Like a door prize, there was always something new. One day she tweaked the nipples of his chest while he worked above her. Another time, she lifted her legs and gently moved his hands so that his thumbs kneaded at the delicate little bead which he could reach as he pumped inside her. She presented herself from the rear, the side. She fac
ed him and sat athwart Stern on a dining-room chair. Naked, stimulated, he would drag around the furniture as she instructed as a prelude to the latest innovation. He told her afterwards that the combination of sexual exertion and stoop labor threatened a coronary occlusion.

  “You’re in good shape,” Helen said and reached below to pet him admiringly.

  Stern could tell that Helen was immensely proud of her role as pathfinder and instructor. But occasionally the unlikelihood of these antics would overcome him. In the hotel room the afternoon they had received the peculiar blessings of the German lady in the sundries shop, Helen stood upon two dressers and Stern caught the sight of their forms on the dull slate-green surface of the television tube: a short man, with the tip of his erect penis nipping up just above the bottom of his white belly, which hung on him like a flour sack, his hands dug into the flattened shapes of Helen’s buttocks, crouching slightly and pressing face and tongue upward into the wet odoriferous reaches of that mystical passage. It looked like a circus trick or the played-out fantasy of a cheap pornographer. The image remained with him for hours, lurid, fascinating, but nonetheless disturbing. Was this some more essential self, or a brainless imitation of what others aspired to? Who were they supposed to be? A part of him remained ill at ease with this emphasis on the physical, not what he’d thought of as his best realm. But whatever his misgivings after the fact, he enjoyed these encounters as they were occurring. He admired Helen’s lack of restraint, and her agility. When he thought of her, it was with appreciation and desire, even while he discouraged himself from pressing for exact answers about the true state of his feelings for her.

  His friends and acquaintances welcomed Helen openly. It made for fewer reminders of Clara and her passing, which no one wished to contemplate. The Hartnells invited Stern and Helen to a ritzy summer cotillion that Silvia had organized at the Greenwood Club. At first delighted to be included, Helen became uncomfortable with the pretense of the evening once she had arrived. Whenever backs were turned, she rolled her eyes at Stern and made faces, conduct which upset him, with his lifetime adherence to certain rigid courtesies. “You don’t like all this schmaltz,” she murmured to him at one point. Helen’s honesty was wonderful and endearing, but he also realized how uncertain it made him. She could set him on edge a dozen times a night with her straightforward observations, particularly of him. Was he brave enough to face Helen and her facts? She wanted to know everything about him and then make it better. At one point, turning away from the bar and looking across the enormous tent that had been pitched for this affair, he observed her in animated conversation with Silvia and found himself alarmed. This was a mismatch, Stern thought suddenly. His sister was a woman guarded by layers of the most protective refinements, much as the petals lay about the center of a rose. His first impulse was that she was somehow in danger. He whisked Silvia away to dance.

  “So?” asked Stern. His sister had known Helen only remotely over the years, having encountered her principally at family affairs.

  “A charming person,” Silvia answered, somewhat formally. He would have expected a similar response from Clara, who, no doubt, would have thought a contessa or professor a more fitting companion for Stern. At that point, Helen came whirling by in Dixon’s arms, looking happier than she had all evening. Helen, like most women, enjoyed Dixon’s company.

  “Is he the one who is in so much trouble?” she asked Stern as they were driving home on the highway cut between the dark hills.

  “He is,” said Stern simply. With her unfailing sense for what was important to him, Helen listened carefully to everything he told her about his practice, but he could not recall exactly what he’d said which led her to piece this together.

  “Well, you’d never know it,” Helen said. “He’s quite entertaining.”

  “When he wishes to be,” said Stern.

  In the dark, she placed her head on his shoulder. Clara, raised in the fading era of rigid female posture, would never have been capable of this gesture, and he drove the hour back to the city with Helen drowsing, a warm, comforting weight upon him.

  Two nights later, they had a different kind of evening. Helen’s daughter, Maxine, came to town with Rob Golbus, her husband of only a few months. Maxine had been Kate’s childhood friend, and Helen proposed an evening out with all three couples—Kate and John, Maxine and Rob, Stern and her. With the perfect resourcefulness one expected from Helen, she figured out entertainment pleasing to everyone and bought tickets to a Trappers game. Stern was always delighted to spend a night in the handsome old park with its brick outfield walls and cantilevered upper decks, where skied fly balls occasionally came to rest as homers. But there was soon an irritating undertone. Too much seemed to be assumed. Maxine spoke repeatedly of Helen and him visiting St. Louis, so that he began to feel both put upon and cornered, while Kate seemed coltish and jumpy all evening. When Helen casually—too casually—mentioned a remark Stern had made to her one morning this week at breakfast, Kate burst into the unnerved tittering one would have expected from an early adolescent. When John offered to go downstairs for refreshments, Stern eagerly rose to lend a hand.

  With their order placed at the counter beneath the stands, they stood in silence. His son-in-law, laconic as ever, put on his glasses to watch the televised version of the game on the screen above the old fry grill.

  “How is the matter proceeding?” asked Stern eventually, desperate for some topic of conversation. He thought, perhaps, to ask if Kate was bearing up; it had occurred to him that the stress of John’s problems might have contributed to her worn look and high-strung mood.

  “The matter?” John looked at him.

  “The grand jury business.” Stern had lowered his voice slightly.

  “Oh.” John poked his glasses back up on his nose and reverted to the TV. “Okay.”

  “Klonsky, the Assistant United States Attorney, tells me you have found a lawyer.”

  “I guess.” John hitched a shoulder. It was time for sports; the rest of this was bad news, workaday stuff.

  “You are in excellent hands. Raymond is very experienced.”

  John removed his glasses.

  “Oh, I didn’t end up with him. I’ve got a guy named Mel.”

  “Mel?” asked Stern. “Mel Tooley?” It was an article of professional decorum never to speak ill of another lawyer to his client, but Stern could not restrain the note of contempt. Mel Tooley had not been on the list Stern had given John. The only list of Stern’s where Tooley might appear would be one naming the despised of the earth. Tooley, who had been the chief of the Special Investigations Division in the United States Attorney’s Office until he entered private practice approximately a year ago, was one of those lawyers who seemed to be attracted to the profession because it legitimized certain forms of deceit. Stern’s disagreements with Tooley over the years were celebrated; legendary. No wonder Klonsky had said she was surprised by the referral. How had John wandered into the clutches of a creature like that?

  His son-in-law had already gathered up the box containing the tissued dogs and the beers and was mounting the concrete steps back to the boxes. Fraught with paternal anxieties and lawyerly rules, Stern followed, lecturing himself. It was, in a word, none of his business how John had chosen his counsel—even Mel Tooley.

  Halfway up the stairs he ran into Kate, literally, jostled against her as she was on her way down. They both exclaimed. Stern laughed, but she seemed startled to see him and jumped back. Here in the stairwell, better lit than the stands, he again noticed her appearance. She was nicely turned out in a sort of maternity sailor suit with a large red bow, but she looked drawn and, most shockingly, seemed to lack her childish blush. It was more than pregnancy, Stern suspected. John’s situation was taking its toll. He instantly had the thought that this was the face of Kate’s true adulthood. Whatever he had long expected was now in its onset. He touched her hand.

  “Katy, are you all right?”

  Fine, she answered, j
ust on her way to the ladies’ room. She touched her stomach and added that it was for the third time.

  “But is everything else—?”

  “You mean John?” When he nodded, she seemed to wince fleetingly and touched her stomach again. She began to speak, then stopped herself. “I shouldn’t say anything.”

  Kate had been briefed, he saw, fully informed. She had the facts, the procedures. In all likelihood, she knew a good deal more than he did.

  “I quite agree. I merely wanted to reassure you.”

  “Daddy—”

  “I have seen these situations often, Kate. Trust me. It will turn out all right.”

  “I only wish, Daddy.”

  “You must be patient. It will all probably go on longer than any of us like. But you should not worry.”

  “Daddy, please. You’re starting to sound like Mommy. She never wanted me to worry. ‘Don’t worry, Katy, don’t worry.’ “ She had lifted her hands in imitation, quick, bird-like shapes. “Sometimes I wonder: Did she think if I worried I was going to break or something?”

  He considered this lament, so unlike her, not sure how to respond.

  “Daddy, it’s not that easy. Believe me.” With that, she sighed, a despairing sound, and took another step down. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she announced, and moved off in that direction. Stern watched her depart. What was that last bit about? But he thought he could read the portents in her mood clearly. She was worried not merely for her husband—but by him. Kate, not unlike her father, had learned more from John, and about him, than she had cared to know. John lumbered on, he slept nights, but his wife now had her eyes open. To himself, Stern briefly groaned and muttered one of his mother’s Yiddish phrases. As he emerged into the open night air, the crowd was roaring over a fabulous catch by the right fielder Tenack. Ascending, Stern had seen the ball go by like a shooting star.

  By prior arrangement, Rob and Maxine went off to spend the night at Kate and John’s—a chance for a more intimate visit. Helen begged Stern to stay with her. “Just to sleep,” said Helen, who had barely been able to rouse herself in the car. The large, somewhat secluded house which Miles and she had built only a year or two before the end of their marriage seemed to haunt her at times, especially after one of the children visited.