A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [190]
Chapter Twenty-one
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THE TEACHER FROM ROBBIE’S preschool, Rafferty’s first witness on Monday, was a tall, graceful woman named Linda Gildner. Her brown hair was done up in a French braid with pretty, tightly curled tendrils framing her face. She was wearing a navy dress with a scooped neck and a dropped waist, speckled all over with light blue birds. Howard, during the break, in a moment of surprising levity, said that she looked like a Disney version of the caretaker, the sweet nanny who had magical powers. I said that she could probably make the birds in her own dress come to life and fly around to amuse her charges. He snorted and his lips widened. Although as a family we hadn’t gone anywhere over the weekend, he had disappeared for several hours Saturday afternoon with the car. I suspect he had driven to the farm. It had been a long, quiet two days and the girls had bickered quite a bit. Although our joke wasn’t too funny, it nonetheless gave me a sense of relief. It was communion, of sorts. Howard and I had been in a holding pattern, like two aircrafts circling each other, around and around in the fog, the heavy weather preventing us from landing or straying from our loops.
Linda Gildner spoke about Robbie as if she didn’t want to mention his bad behavior, that it wasn’t her nature to squeal on people, but of course she had sworn to tell the truth and must please the court. Rafferty managed to act as if he also was suffering throughout, as she quietly explained that Robbie had been a belligerent, troubled child two and three years before, and that her staff had repeatedly suggested that the Mackessys have him evaluated. Rafferty nodded periodically and then shook his head slightly, saddened, shocked, that one so young had gone awry. I thought to myself, Oh, but Robbie wasn’t that bad. Truly he wasn’t so awful. They were drawing him as a budding psychopath, based on his performance at preschool. It disturbed me that both the Gildners and Rafferty belonged to the Yacht Club and had spent vacations boating together. Linda told the court that even at the ages of three and four Robbie had had a pattern of lying, and not lying about isolated things here and there as all young children will, but deliberately telling falsehoods so that others would get into trouble. He lied to place blame elsewhere, and while that is not an unusual practice in three- or four-year-olds, Robbie, she said, had carried the tendency to extremes. He was a bright boy, sensitive to group dynamics, further along cognitively, she thought, than other three-year-olds in terms of knowing how to manipulate an adult. I wondered if it was evident only to me what gestures and phrases Rafferty had suggested she use in her testimony.
When Robbie had held a little girl’s arm on the jungle gym, and wouldn’t let go, so that the arm was broken, in full view of his teachers, Linda said that he vigorously denied having done so. He lied in the face of reality, she added, pursing her lips and nodding. He hadn’t been withdrawn or frightened, the way so many other children would have been, when he was gently questioned about the incident. He stormed and shouted, blaming the other boys, calling them by name, saying that they all had been on the jungle gym with him, that everyone but himself had twisted her arm.
It was one thing to be on trial as an adult, to have every past act come bubbling up and held to the light as a misdeed, every poor judgment fitting so nicely into the desired profile, but it was altogether different, shameful, to do the same for a boy of six. I should have been