A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [181]
It was all such a far cry from my office at Blackwell Elementary, so far from the day I slapped Robbie and he stared back at me, seemingly unaffected. “Mrs. Dirks told you,” Rafferty said, “that my client made an admission, but what she hasn’t told you is the circumstance and the context. Fortunately I am here to tell you more about my client’s statements, to draw a complete picture. Thank goodness I will be able to give you the all-important context, ladies and gentleman, the context.”
I took in the jury with sidelong glances. There was a pair that intrigued me: one, a stout woman with jowls and a mouth that had petrified into a scowl, and the other, a gray-green, tall, thin lady with penciled eyebrows, arched in perpetual wonder. Both of them had identical blond beehives, nominal hair teased up into the magnificent fluff of what looked like cotton candy. They sat next to each other, the one surly, the other astonished, thinking—what? I longed to be ridiculous, to sing to them, “Beau—ootful Soo—op! Beau—ootful Soo—op! Soo—oop of the e-e-evening, Beautiful, beautiful Soup!” Next to them sat a young man who stocked dairy products in a grocery store, perhaps a soulmate of ours, in love with yogurt, cheese, butter, cream, eggnog. There was an aging hippie with white hair flowing down his back, the face of a Greek god, and eyes that looked from a distance as if they were golden. He climbed telephone poles for a living, and I imagined him with a houseful of colored-glass insulators, his wife in despair at the collection that was growing beyond their storage capacity.
Robbie was the first to take the stand. Again, he sat on his mother’s lap. He’d lost a front tooth so that in some ways he looked more childlike than he had before. I wondered how he’d spent the last several months, how it felt going to first grade as the little boy who’d nearly been done in by the school nurse. His mother was exquisitely sad, her luster slightly faded, though nothing that couldn’t be polished up at a moment’s notice, brought back to its former gloss and shine. It was my fate being decided, and yet the words of the hallowed court fell away as I watched the darling gestures mother made, the tilt of her head, her little caresses, the smallest kiss at his ear after they were excused. She herself seemed to me like some golden, steaming, delectable, irresistible potion that is held out, that one is urged to Drink, Drink! And only when the liquid has irretrievably slipped down the throat does one know what one has drunk. I couldn’t help thinking of her in immoderate terms. Rafferty’s protestations did not in any way move the judge to order Mrs. Mackessy down from the witness box.
Robbie had grown up enough so that he no longer required the doll to demonstrate my torture. His long, serious face and the baby language he used for his private parts did not match. The words were those that Miss Flint had perhaps suggested. Against his glimmering mother he was nearly invisible. But what I saw was a tired boy, someone who looked as if he didn’t want to play anymore. He was going through the motions but it was as if he could hardly muster the energy to do much damage. When Mrs. Dirks requested a recess until the following morning, due to the witness’s apparent fatigue, the judge, to our amazement, rumbled that we were all tired, that we’d all been waiting, that the thing had been postponed twice, and that we had to move along. He granted her thirty minutes for rest.
Out at the far end of the hall, during the break, Rafferty hugged his appointment book and simpered, “He likes me! Judge Peterson really likes me!”
Howard was standing by the water cooler and when he heard Rafferty he turned and gave him a withering look, the sort that makes a person feel that it might