It was before eight; the secretaries were not in. But they were in luck. Sennett picked up the line himself.
48
SENNETT AGREED TO SEE HIM AT FOUR. The U.S. Attorney was cagey on the phone and asked what their meeting might concern, but Stern said merely that it was imperative that they speak. Sennett was at an obvious disadvantage, too apprehensive to ask him to elaborate. The idea came to Stern while they were still speaking. That brittle unyielding edge in Sennett’s voice suddenly riled him, but before placing the call, he waited to see Dixon off, and to attend to a few matters on Remo’s case, scheduled to start trial a week from Tuesday. By then, it was close to noon.
“Would you have a few minutes for lunch?” He had reached her directly.
“I’m not eating,” Sonny said. “The heat’s sort of got me.” She hung on the line, waiting for something, probably an explanation. “If it’s about your meeting with Stan, I won’t be there.”
More a personal matter, Stern responded. He would welcome a moment of her time. “Could you meet me at the Morgan Towers Club in twenty minutes?”
“Oh, Sandy, I hate those private clubs. I’m dressed like a bag lady. You know, with the heat.” As always, the air conditioning in the new federal building had failed.
“I prefer a neutral locale.” Away from her office, he meant. “For your sake. I promise there will be no fashion commentary.”
“My sake?”
“When we meet,” he responded.
He feared at first that she would not come. He sat in one of the overstuffed club chairs across from the elevators, watching the polished steel doors open and close and the business types disembarking. When Sonny arrived, she looked rosy and agitated and, as she herself was the first to acknowledge, out of place, dressed in a simple sleeveless maternity frock better for a country outing. Sonny seemed to have reached that point in her pregnancy where the premium was on merely surviving. There was a vague ungainly roll as she walked. Approaching, she removed a broad slouch hat, with a pink satin ribbon, which she had worn to protect herself from the sun.
“Here.” Stern had raised a hand in greeting. He complimented her appearance, and asked again about lunch or a drink.
“I couldn’t.” She put a hand on her stomach and made a face. “And I’m on the run. Come on, Sandy. What’s this about?”
On second thought, he led her down a hall to a rear cloakroom, a small space paneled in red oak, unused in the summer. The banging of the kitchen went on behind the wall, and the vegetable and meat smells of luncheon cooking emerged through the air returns. The place had a vague secret feel.
“I apologize for this maneuvering. I suspect Sennett might criticize you for meeting with me.”
She made another face in response: Who cared?
“Sonny, I am deeply grateful for your act yesterday, but it was ill-advised. I am certain that the United States Attorney was displeased.”
“I wouldn’t call him cheerful.”
“No doubt.”
She was looking around for a chair. Her legs hurt, she said—she had walked over too quickly. He found a round back card chair in a corner. She put herself down in front of the empty coatrack and fanned herself with her hat. Stern remained standing.
“Sandy, what’s the point?”
“Go to Stan, today. Tell him you have thought the matter over and that you are prepared to proceed with full vigor.”
“I’m not ready to proceed with full vigor. And today he doesn’t care, anyway. He’s flipped out over the fact that you found out about”—she dropped a beat—“about the informant. He had four assistants in the library last night until two doing legal research. That’s Stan. It’s always this macho crap: it’s okay because I say so. Then when it hits the fan he wants to call out the Marines to cover his derriere.” She stopped abruptly. He knew that as usual she felt she had spoken too freely. “I had no idea, by the way,” Sonny said. “You know, who it was. I finally asked Stan three days ago. Right after we got off the phone. I think it’s sick.”
“Sonny, I would not pretend I am not deeply chagrined, but I shall tell you in the privacy of this room that I do not believe the government’s conduct in this matter was unlawful.”
“Probably not,” she said. “But it’s shitty. If Stan didn’t have a smirk on his face, it wouldn’t bother me as much. It’s not disembodied principles to him. It’s a grudge.”
“Sonny, there are no disembodied principles in the practice of law.” He spoke with some weight. “There are human beings in every role, in every case. Personalities will always matter.”
“It was over the line. The way he handled it.” She fingered the ribbon on her hat. “Listen, Sandy, I wasn’t doing you a special favor. At least, I don’t think I was. I just got really uneasy with the idea of enforcing a subpoena based on that kind of information if we hadn’t disclosed the source. I could just see it: the judge locks you up and then finds out there was a sensitive issue which the government never mentioned. She could land on us with both feet. I thought if you wrote a brief, maybe you’d raise it, maybe we would. It would give me a chance to talk to Stan again.”
Stern nodded. Her reasoning had been cautious, sound. More thoughtful—more lawyerly—than her boss’s.
“Don’t think I’m not still pissed at you,” Sonny said. “I am. That was an ugly little charade out in the country—asking me questions about those account papers, like you’d never seen them in your life.”
“I had not seen them,” he said simply. “Ever in my life.”
She studied him intently, trying to figure it out, whether he was telling the truth, and if he was, how it could be.
“I really don’t understand,” she said, then raised a hand. “I know. You’ve got your confidences, right?”
“Correct.”
“It must be a hell of a story.” She shrugged. “I suppose that’s why you don’t want to tell it to the grand jury.”
For an instant, he said nothing.
“Sonny, when we were in the country you shared as much as you could with me out of a sense of fairness. I would like to respond in kind. Speaking with Stan this morning, I am sure I left him with the impression that I wished to meet in order to complain about the government’s use of my son as an informant. No question, I shall do a good deal of that. But assuming that Mr. Sennett is willing to make the concessions he ought to in the circumstances, I would expect our discussion to lead eventually to an agreement for Dixon to enter a guilty plea.”
She took that in and then tipped her head admiringly.
“Nice timing,” she said.
“I believe so.” They both lingered with the thought of how far Sennett would go to prevent Stern from causing a stir about the government’s tactics with Peter. “So, you see, there will be no further grand jury investigation or contempt proceedings.”
She smiled when she made the connection.
“You want me to kiss and make up with Stan before he knows? Right?” Sonny laughed out loud. “Oo, that’s sneaky,” she said. “And, boy, does he deserve it.”
Stern smiled with her, but did not speak. Sonny fanned herself again with her hat.
“Look, Sandy, I’m okay with him. He didn’t fire me. He knew he should have clued me in a long time before on something this delicate. And besides, he’s political enough to figure out the angles. An Assistant out there criticizing him on the issue? No way he can have that. He has to keep me inside the tent. He just took me off the case. He said I’m not objective about you.” With that, due to the heat perhaps, or what she had said, or one of the many bodily quirks of pregnancy, her color rose again—her cheeks grew bright, so that for all the world he had the impression of a flower unfolding. “Which I’m not,” she added quickly, showing a swift, rueful smile and allowing her eyes to drift to him, where they remained.
It was, Stern thought, a sweet look they shared.
“I think I might have run away with you that night,” she said quietly, “if you
had asked.”
“And I was so close to asking,” he answered. Until he heard himself, it did not occur to him that they both had spoken of something in the past, but now, for the first time, that seemed to suit him just as well. Speaking, he had found some touch of grace, a perfect note, so that neither she nor he nor anyone passing would ever know precisely where the meter fell, how much of even one syllable was uttered in the kindliest jest or the truest lost ardor. “Regrettably,” he continued, “you are married.”
She placed both hands on her stomach. “Lucky for me.”
“Just so,” he answered.
“I told Charlie we got married so we could be crazy together, so we just have to go on that way.” She laughed at herself, flipped her hat, took her feet. “Tell me you approve.”
“I do,” he said.
“That makes one of us.”
He laughed out loud.
“Sonny, you have inspired me,” he said. He took a step closer, and she averted her face slightly, giving him her cheek. But he did not kiss her. Instead, moved or, as he would have it, inspired, he placed one of his soft hands on each of her bare shoulders, and then in some peculiar ceremony, standing just a few inches from her, let them travel down her arms, a strange would-be embrace. He grasped her above the elbows, on the forearms, at last her hands. She had raised her face by then to greet him, eye to eye.
“When I grow up,” she said, “I want to be like Sandy Stern.”
49
SO THAT WAS LIFE, thought Stern. He descended in the Morgan Towers elevators, blinking off the presence of this young woman as if he were emerging from strong light. For an instant he was full of doubt. On another day, when he was less weakened by lack of sleep, might there have been a different outcome? The doors fell open to the noon sun blazing through the lobby’s enormous plate-glass windows, and as he stepped forward, eyes stinging, light-headed, he was amazed to find again that he felt more positively himself than he had in months. The core things—not simply the safe items, but matters of faith and influence—remained in place, impervious to the stamp of failure. He touched the center button on his suit jacket and lifted his chin properly, as he so often did. Mr. Alejandro Stern.
He did not return to the office. Instead, he drove home and went immediately to bed. He would rise and re-dress in time for his appointment with Sennett. But right now he needed solemn contemplation. One of the philosophers, Descartes, Stern believed, had chosen his bed as the site for intense reflection, and for unknown reasons Stern had long followed his example. Most of his closing arguments were composed here, with a bed tray beside him amply laid with food and a yellow pad. He wrote down very little. Instead, he weaved the arguments and phrases in his mind—the same sentences, the same notions, again and again, until his consciousness was little more than the passionate speech he was going to deliver. Today it was Clara. Her last hours now belonged to him.
Stern had known a number of suicides. It was one more sad facet of his practice—so many of his clients were intent on doing harm to themselves one way or the other. He had stopped asking himself why decades ago. For too many of them, the answers were obvious: the self-negation, the willful personal abuse, the deficits, shames, the scars. In the late fifties, when he was starting out, Stern had defended the drug case brought against a local rock ’n’ roll star who went by the name of Harky Malarky. Harky was full of the untamed moonstruck bleakness of an Irish bard and always danced along the precipice. Morphine addiction. Destructive women. Violent friends. He died, blind drunk, on a motorcycle he purposely raced from the roadside into a magnificent Utah canyon.
And there were others, not as vivid as Harky, but they all had the same unshakable belief that they were doomed. And Clara had it, too. He had always known that. A terrible hard-bitten pessimism, an absolute gloom. She never foresaw a future in which she was included. A psychiatrist he had met over the years, Guy Pleace, confessed to Stern one night at a private moment, during a party at the Cawleys’, that he wrestled with the impulse to commit suicide each day. He got up every morning and it was a task as certain as shaving and going to the office: he must not kill himself. That night, Pleace said, he had seen a goblin of sorts beckoning to him from a lamppost. He had driven around the block three times to be certain it was not there. His wife, who was accustomed to this, took it calmly, knowing that he would have to satisfy himself. Eventually, three years ago, Guy had played a losing game of Russian roulette, one round in the chambers—he had, apparently, let the goblins take their shot.
In the midst of his unnerving, half-drunk confession, Pleace had laughed, because some famous depth psychologist, probably Freud, had commented that human beings cannot grasp the reality of their own deaths. That was not true of Guy; and probably not of Clara, or most others who make a deliberate departure. The cup is always half empty or half full. For most of us—certainly for Stern—the concern was over how much remained. Since the time of his fortieth birthday, in his inevitable greedy way, he had remained irritated by the feeling that the serving had been slight to start with. Here, at home, under his covers, alone with the afternoon sounds of the neighborhood and the air conditioning recirculating the still air of the household, he recognized how frightened Clara’s death had left him. We stand in line with certain recognizable figures. Her turn. Now yours.
But for Clara, a bit like Guy, the moment must never have been far away. Nate, in fact, said she had told him as much. To Clara it was always a brief ride to a known destination. She meant to be of service along the way. But a sense of futility that went beyond any psychological name—depression or anomie—no doubt often overcame her. What was the point in waiting, given the aeons, the eternity in which she would never take part? And in this frame of mind she had faced her final choices. Dixon’s magnificent, grandiose act in the end must have only complicated her overwrought state. There was not a bearable alternative on the horizon. Could she actually stand by and watch as Dixon undertook this gruesome act of self-sacrifice? Could she reveal her problems, and the past, to her husband, devastating him and, in all likelihood—given the odd explosive chain effect of anger and grief—Silvia, too? That would be a poor reward for Dixon, who, in the circumstance, might even lose the will and strength to see his promise through. Could she instead bear the rest of it and also watch her children march off to the penitentiary? It was not suicide, thought Stern. Not in her eyes. It was euthanasia in the face of mortal heartbreak.
Could he have saved her? Was it the cheapest lie, the glossiest balm for his soul to think that if the same two persons had married today, in a franker era, this would not have taken place? They had assigned one another roles at a time when their own ambitions for each other allowed for more unexplored geography. Now there were counselors and meddlers and self-help aids to force couples to walk within each other’s fence. He had respected boundaries that, with just a bit more strength or attention or nerve, he might have been able to surmount. His every effort, though, would have been against her will.
Thirty-odd years ago, Clara Mittler had drafted a composition, called it Clara Stern, and remained intent on playing it to the end. It was a woodwind part of austere and unwavering beauty, and he was the uncritical audience, one set of hands clapping when he took the time to occupy his seat. The quiet precision of this performance hid from all—but most significantly herself—a terrible banging turmoil. Somewhere, well beyond her power to bring it forth, there must have been a thunderous rage. She knew it only as disorganized sound. The noise, she had told Nate, the crashing dissonance of anxiety and unending disappointment, was always with her. Ultimately the noise had come from all directions, at unendurable volume, and Clara bowed to the aesthete’s inevitable grief that Beauty would not be her.
He knew for some reason just now what he had not before—how it was done. He had never understood why she had chosen the car. But today that was clear. She had triggered the ignition and then slipped a cassette into the player. The police, of course, had not even
looked. It would have been Mozart, certainly, but Stern felt a stitch of a keen frustrated grief that he would never know which selection. The Requiem? The Jupiter? But the remainder he could imagine. The volume had been turned up considerably—the woodwinds lowed with lost sounds of the soul and the plangent violins engulfed the small space, so that even a fine ear could not detect the engine’s rumble, and she lay back, eyes already closed, no doubt, while the magnificent music rose in great waves toward that perfect moment at the end of every piece when there was silence.
50
WHEN HELEN CALLED, Stern was dreaming: Dixon had accosted him on a street corner. He was smoking one of Stern’s cigars and in his usual joking manner was pointing out that he had gone bald. He circled his hand over his crown and with considerable satisfaction turned about so that Stern could see the large spot where the straight black hair had actually fallen away. As Helen spoke, the dream and its difficult feelings still swam within him and for just the barest instant he was convinced his dreaming had gone on.
“What?” He was lost. Was she crying?
“I need you.” She seemed short of breath. When he had answered—as in the office, ‘Stern here’—she had said repeatedly she was sorry to be calling. Sorry. Sorry. “I need you here. Please.”
“Yes, yes. I shall be there momentarily.”
In the bathroom, he felt unbalanced by the light. He splashed water on his face and gave up the thought of shaving. The line of a sheet was impressed on his cheek. Had she even mentioned the problem? One of her children, he imagined. The boy in college. He crept down to the garage.
When he started the Cadillac, the digital clock flashed on. It was almost three; early Friday morning. He had been asleep since a little after nine, having gotten only an hour or two on Wednesday night. Marta had kept him awake, demanding that he share in advance every thought and nuance that would go into the closing argument in U.S. v. Cavarelli. Stern had delivered this argument at ten yesterday morning, then waited with poor Remo most of the day for the jury, which returned near five o’clock. Not guilty. With the verdict, Judge Winchell had fixed Remo with a sour look, but her sole comment had been to Moses Appleton: ‘Better luck next time.’ Marta, who had assisted her father throughout, even cross-examined one of the surveillance agents, was eager to celebrate. Gracious to the core, Moses had insisted on buying both of them a drink. After a single soda water, Stern had left Marta and Appleton for the sleep of the old and weary. Why were triumph and exultation always so fleeting? He drove through the night streets now, toward Helen’s, waking gradually and increasingly alarmed.