“Oh, come on, Joe, be—”
“What happened?”
“I saw him.”
“Oh fuck!”
“I told him what had happened to you.”
“He would’ve known that.”
“I told him about the house, how we could lose the house.”
“Oh Jesus! Anna, you’ve humiliated me. I spent years, literally years, cultivating that relationship and in one visit you—”
“Joe, listen to yourself. He sold you out, and you’re still worried about—”
“Anna, there was nothing personal in what he did. It was business. He had to do it. I can’t believe it! My wife goes to this man and airs our dirty laundry.”
“Joe, you said you were finished.”
“And you were primed to believe me, for perhaps the first time since we got married.”
“Joe, do you really think—”
“What did he say?”
“Well . . . He heard me out, and he said you were . . . he said you were a good man . . . and that he liked working with you and—”
“Really? He said that?”
“Yep. He said that . . . and that he was sorry that things had turned out the way they had. I told him we were going to lose the house and he said he was sure that wouldn’t happen, that you would be . . . back on top again very soon. He had no doubt about that, but there was nothing he could do.”
“You begged him. Oh Jesus, you begged him.”
“Joe, I didn’t. I didn’t.”
“You humiliated me for nothing. More than nothing. This is going to cost me more than a hundred thousand. I already had ideas to put to him. You didn’t know that. He would’ve backed me if you hadn’t made me look pathetic to him. They hate losers. You never beg them. You’ve got to offer them something they want. Jesus! What on earth made you think he would help you? Why would he do anything for you?”
“He owed you, Joe. I thought it was worth trying.”
“Well, it wasn’t, was it?”
“That’s why I went to my father. I had no one else to turn to.”
“And he let you down too.”
“Yes, he let me down too.”
24. Sam was wetting his bed every night and waking up. The trial started. Joe was due to give his evidence ahead of me. He might well have been drinking the morning he testified. I’d gone to work, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. I thought it all the more likely after he’d precipitated a mistrial and the discharge of the jury by his mention of Carlo, Simon’s missing student, which the judge deemed irrelevant or overly prejudicial or something. Everything was going to have to start again.
Without telling Joe, I went to see someone from the bank that held the mortgage to our home. I explained the situation. He was sympathetic but ultimately he only allowed us a further reduction in repayments for four months, after which, if we could not resume repayment at the original rate, the bank would be forced to sell the house. Joe was visiting my office for regular meetings with Céleste. It nauseated me. The trial was due to start again when Joe finally put the only thing he owned outright, his car, on the market. The money would go to pay for his mother’s accommodation at the retirement home.
It was around this time that I again heard from Dr. Klima.
“Alex, you know I could report you to the judge and to your professional association. You really do try my patience, you know.”
“I could say you tried one of mine.”
“You wouldn’t though, would you? It wouldn’t be worthy of you. Listen, since you’re harassing me, can I get your professional opinion?”
“Of course.”
“This doesn’t mean I owe you anything, right?”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“It’s about Sam. To be honest . . . I’m worried about him. He’s wetting his bed. He’s crying—”
“I’m happy to talk to you about him, but at least until the trial is over, I think it might be better if you talked to someone else.”
“Why, are you going to say it’s my fault?”
“Oh, Anna, we always say it’s the mother’s fault. You know that.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I thought sometimes it’s the ex-girlfriend’s fault.”
“Seriously, Anna, if you’re really concerned I could give you the names of some colleagues who specialize in children.”
“I thought you specialized in children.”
“Is this making you feel better?”
“Isn’t that your job?”
“Yes, I am supposed to make somebody feel better. It happened once. I remember it well.”
“Now you are trying to make me feel sorry for you so that I’ll do or say something for your friend. Alex, things have been terrible for me. I’m not going to visit him again. Please don’t ask me for anything because—”
“Anna, I didn’t call to ask you for anything. I called to tell you something, for what it’s worth. It’s a sign of something—an altruism bordering on mental illness, misguided love maybe. Call it what you will.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Sam.”
“What about him?”
“I don’t know why it took this long to come out, but Simon’s lawyer only now found out—she didn’t find out—I told her—about Simon rescuing Sam from the swimming pool.”
“That again.”
“You still haven’t asked Sam?”
“No, it doesn’t make any sense. There’s already too much craziness going on around him.”
“Well, Gina, Gina Serkin, Simon’s barrister, wants to call Sam as a witness.”
“No. No way. You can’t. You fucking bastard. Is this blackmail—”
“Hold on. First, it’s not up to me.”
“Who’s it up to?”
“Simon.”
“Then he’s evil. This is worse than taking him in the first place.”
“Anna, I’m calling to tell you that Simon won’t permit Gina to call Sam as a witness.”
“I’m supposed to be grateful for this, I guess?”
“You should be. Calling Sam to give evidence about the swimming pool incident would greatly increase Simon’s chances of acquittal.”
“Simon made it up.”
“Anna, talk to your son. Ask him. He’ll remember. Ask him about the time the gardener fished him out of the swimming pool. He was very shaken. He won’t have forgotten it. Then ask him if this was the same man who picked him up from school that day, who gave him chocolate milk and let him play with his dog. Ask him.”
This time Joe managed to give his evidence without aborting the trial. It wasn’t a matter of either of us learning from our mistakes. The mistakes we could make were by no means limited to those we had already made. He felt better having given his evidence, and now, he said, he was free to go to court every day and sit, as he put it, “in the audience,” so the jury could see the stolen boy’s father.
The night before I was due to give my evidence, I dreamed that I had to go to visit Joe’s brother, Roger, again. In the dream I walked in as I had before, with the smell of the place sickening me. I kept having to walk around looking for Roger, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I turned to see one of the patients, the one who was smoking, rubbing himself against the back of an empty chair, and I wanted to look away, to walk away, but I felt obliged not to, however much I wanted to run like hell out of there. Before I could leave in good conscience I had genuinely to try as hard as I could to find Roger. So, despite my repulsion, I walked up to and then in front of the man. He said nothing but continued rubbing himself. Up close I saw him smile at me. It was Michael Gardiner rubbing himself, and the chair in front of him that had appeared empty from the back had Sam sitting in it, swinging his legs as he sometimes did in Joe’s mother’s kitchen. I raced over to hug him, to take him away. He didn’t appear distressed at all, but he looked up at me and said, “Where’s Mum? Yeah, but where’s Mum?” I woke up with my heart pounding, got out of
bed, and rushed into Sam’s room and just stood there till I’d calmed down. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
I wasn’t due to give evidence till midday at the earliest. It was school vacation time, and I drove Sam to my parents’ house. My mother came to the door when she heard the car pull up. I had finally taken Dr. Klima’s advice. I had asked him. “Sam, you’ve never had an accident in the pool, have you?”
“No.”
“No, I didn’t think so.”
“I haven’t, really, I haven’t.”
“I believe you, Sam,” I said, giving him a big hug. I didn’t want to release him.
“I always go before I get in the pool.”
“What? Say that again, sweetie. What did you say?”
“I don’t ever do it in the pool anymore.”
“Sammy, sweetie, I want to ask you a question and I want you to have a good hard think before you answer. It’s important, but you won’t be in any trouble whatever the answer is, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You know how you’re not supposed to go into the pool without an adult watching?”
“I don’t. I really don’t, Mum.”
“I know you don’t, sweetie, but think hard and tell me, did you ever fall in by mistake?”
“Yep.”
“You did?”
“It was a hot day . . . but it was an accident. I—”
“What happened?”
“My ball fell into the pool. I tried to make it float back by paddling the water and I fell in, in my school clothes.”
“What happened then?”
“I was scared. I swallowed all this water and I was out of breath and I was scared.”
“What happened then?”
“He came into the pool and got me out, and I got my breath back.”
“Who did?”
“The gardener. It wasn’t my fault because the ball—”
“Sam, was that man, the gardener, the same man who picked you up from school the day Dad was late?”
“Yes. He has a dog, Mum. We played with his dog. Can we get a dog like the gardener’s dog? He was middle sized and he was gray. Can we get one, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
My mother came to the door when she heard the car pull up. I took Sam to the door and she hugged him the same way I did, putting one hand at the back of his head and squeezing her other arm around him. It was the first time I had noticed that we both did this. For all that she couldn’t say, to me anyway, and probably to Sophie, as a grandmother she was completely unrestrained. I’d given him a devoted grandmother. Would he remember his times with her? Grandmothers don’t get much of a press these days. Perhaps they never did. Even the grandmother of God, St. Anne, doesn’t get a mention in the Bible proper. She doesn’t turn up till an unreliable second-century document and even then, once Our Lady is three years old, she vanishes, right out of the Apocrypha, a grandmother for eternity and the patron saint of Christian mothers.
Mind you, I’d had my doubts about St. Anne from the time I learned that my aunt and namesake, my father’s late older sister, had died in Italy from complications in childbirth which, I intuited from the way it was barely discussed in my childhood, was tinged with shame. If St. Anne could let Zia Anne down, then any saint can let you down. And if the saints could let you down, who couldn’t?
St. Elegius, the patron saint of jewelers, must have been distracted or else unable to intervene at the suburban jewelry store I had for years been taking my bracelet to for repairs. A board had replaced a plate-glass window. I was on my way home to change for court when I saw it. With time to kill before midday, I thought I’d stop. I’d been meaning to go there anyway. The shop was empty but for the old man, as it always was.
“Mr. Leibowitz,” I said as he greeted me with his smile, “were you burgled?”
“The police say burglary but . . . I don’t know . . . it doesn’t feel like burglary in the air.”
“What do you mean?”
“The window was smashed, but nothing was taken. What kind of burglar does that?”
“Maybe the alarm scared them away.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. I think in the air sometimes I can smell it.”
“What?”
“Europe. Europe in the thirties . . . You’ve come about your favorite bracelet, yes? But you’re wearing it.”
“No, I didn’t come about the bracelet, but to ask about the window.”
“That is very kind of you. Your bracelet, it is well? It’s like family. It was born here and now it brings your little boy here and while it’s—how can I put it?—it’s not the most expensive piece ever to come through here, it is probably the most cared about. I do remember. It has a story to it that I don’t really know but—apart from the man who came to pick it up not long ago there was also the much younger man who had himself aged. He came in asking about your bracelet, the man who had bought it for you all those years back.”
“You remembered him? How could you possibly have remembered him after all that time?”
“He was a memorable fellow. He came in all those years ago wanting to buy a silver bracelet for his girlfriend. He looked at all the silver bracelets I had, but he was a student and didn’t have much money and it saddened him. We got talking about his girlfriend. The boy was meshugah for her, for you. He saw the number on my arm, and we talked for a couple of hours about the war, politics, history, all sorts of things. He was a nice boy. At the end of it I told him I would make him a silver bracelet, design it myself, and let him have it cheap. This was how your bracelet was born. That is why I don’t forget him.”
“And you’ve been losing money on it ever since.”
“But you keep coming back, and sometimes with your son.”
“And you never charge.”
“It’s not his son, is it? Ah well, it’s none of my business but, as I said, everybody loves that bracelet.”
“I do.”
“And so did the other man, the man who picked it up recently.”
“Oh, he did, did he?”
“Look after your boy,” the jeweler called out to me as I left his jewelry store.
At home, Joe surprised me with a reprise of his assertion that there had been no work conference that fateful weekend.
“It was a lie, Anna. I happen to know there was no conference. You were going away with Simon, weren’t you?”
“You’re not going on about that again, are you? If Simon and I were planning to go away together for a dirty weekend, why would he go and kidnap Sam? It doesn’t make sense. Don’t you see that?”
Joe was silent. It had finally sunk in. I couldn’t have been going away with Simon. Joe filled the electric kettle and switched it on. He stood there waiting for it to boil. He looked across at me.
“It’s Buchanan, isn’t it?”
He was getting close.
As I sat at the dressing table, in front of a photo of a woman and a man which the wedding photographer had promised would enable them to “forever joyfully recapture the day,” and looked in the mirror at a likeness of that woman preparing to go to court, I knew he was getting the picture, indistinct though it was. My unintended dismemberment of him was complete.
25. I drove, parked the car, survived the onslaught of photographers outside the court, and swore on the Bible, all as if in a dream. Dutifully I repeated my story at Mr. Henshaw’s request. I might have sounded too practiced, but at least it was over. I was exhausted. All I had to do now was to get through Gina Serkin’s cross-examination and live the rest of my life with the consequences.
She asked all the questions we’d been expecting, questions designed to show how close Simon and I had been ten years earlier, how in love we’d been. And just as I had for Mr. Henshaw, I told the truth. I had loved him. He had marked my life forever. She asked good questions but not enough of them. There was so much more that she could have gotten out of me, so much more that would have shown the jury just who he was and
what we were together. I’d been programmed, long before him, to receive saints and martyrs and he had them all for me: Billie Holiday and Abe Meeropol and the others. She should’ve asked me about Abe Meeropol. I remembered it all. He wrote songs under the name Lewis Allen, the name under which he is credited as the author of “Strange Fruit.” He adopted the Rosenberg kids after their parents were electrocuted. You had to really love Abe Meeropol. My mind wandered. It roamed. I wanted to sleep until, all of a sudden, she brought me back with her best question yet.
“Mrs. Geraghty,” she began, “I put it to you that you were in fact in an illicit relationship with Simon Heywood on the day in question.”
Other than my son, there was only one person on earth who claimed to love me above everyone else, and he was unwell and I was being asked to convict him. I looked over at him now.
“Mrs. Geraghty? . . . Mrs. Geraghty? Do you understand what I am putting to you?”
“Your Honor, do I have to answer that question?”
“Yes, Mrs. Geraghty, you do have to answer . . . Mrs. Geraghty?”
The judge was asking me to grade all the major decisions of my adult life. He seemed to be saying that I, a victim, had to confess my mistakes, the big ones, to the world in a crowded courtroom, and let the consequences fall where they may.
“Mrs. Geraghty,” he persisted, “are you thinking about your answer or are you indeed refusing to answer?”
I never did get used to being called by Joe’s mother’s name. The judge seemed to be getting angry. “Mrs. Geraghty?” he asked again.
part
seven
1. I was seven years old, almost eight, when my father came home with a dog. It was beautiful—a full-blooded, pure-bred schnauzer with shaggy gray hair and twinkling brown eyes so full of intelligence, so alive with personality, that he seemed at once more of a playmate than a pet. He was a gift, my father said. But he was a gift my mother could do without and she erupted at my father for bringing him home. Who was going to care for it? Who was going to wash it, feed it, walk it? When I said that I would, my mother rattled off a list of things I had started and then given up. It was an impressive list for one so young. It would have been nice to have kept up any one of them, but then none of them had provided the instant reward this dog did.