A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [69]
“Surely they’ll have the mistake cleared up.”
“You’re probably right, Mom.”
I can’t say I had any better luck with Rafferty, when he called the following morning. When I explained the spurious charge he made a noise like a belch. “—Don’t believe it,” he said. He began to tell me much the same thing Finn had said about how probable cause is established. Alice trusted him implicitly and thought he would save her. She trusted him, not because the charge was false, but because she thought him irresistibly decent. We had met him at a barbecue. Within minutes Alice and Rafferty were dancing around on the Collinses’ patio. He knew a dance she’d learned when she was in high school. She was basing her trust on the fact that they both knew the same Hungarian polka. He had the kind of nasal voice that makes you want to somehow clear his throat for him.
“This can’t be pleasant for you,” he said.
“No,” I agreed.
“Of course not. It’s very upsetting. I just got into town but I’m going to run over to the public defender’s office, check in at the jail, and talk to Alice.” His voice was all nasal passage. It was hard to believe he wasn’t holding his nose and talking at me for the amusement of his secretary. “Can you come in tomorrow, around ten? I’ll have a better feel after I’ve talked to her. The bail is outrageous for someone like Alice and first thing we’ll petition the court, get the bond in a reasonable range. You must be sure not to discuss any aspect of the case on the telephone, either from your home or in the visiting room. That’s critical.”
He did not continue until I acknowledged his command.
“About tomorrow,” he went on, “—by the way, I know how dreadful this is for you, believe me.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, doubting his knowledge of my state of mind.
“Would another day be better?” he asked.
“Another day?”
“You said you weren’t sure—”
“No,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
I hung up, slammed a pot down on our oak table, as if that could stop the table from watching. I had to have a plan now, a plan, a good plan. All of my knowledge of the law I had learned years ago in the flickering shadow of “Perry Mason.” Still, I knew enough to know that Rafferty, Finn—none of them, had genuine understanding. I told myself that a person didn’t live with someone for nearly seven years without having a pretty good sense of their limits. Lawyers, people in the system, politicians, were so crippled by bureaucracy and jargon they no longer had common sense. As a nation we were losing our collective minds. There were any number of issues to point that up. Any number. Look at anything, any institution, any organization, any system for dealing with problems. Take the AIDS epidemic, for starters. I’d been reading the articles buried in the paper for enough years to figure out that AZT might be killing people instead of the AIDS virus. My old friend Lloyd was sick in New York City. You could follow the whole thing, see the illness becoming so politicized that no one dared to speak about the jarring facts. The dishes were going to break if I threw them much harder into the cupboard. I had to have a plan right now, a sound plan, a way to fight. First of all, I had to find someone who would watch the girls, for my meeting with Rafferty, and for the visiting hour on Sunday. I had to talk to Alice, really talk to her, to know why this had happened. It wouldn’t take me long to go and come back for the fifteen-minute visit. There had to be someone we knew who would care for Emma and Claire. Someone who would watch over them for a little over an hour on a Sunday afternoon. I could hear the boyng, boyng of a jew’s harp. It took me a hell of a long time to figure out that it was coming from me. It must have been my nerves. I was thinking I could hear the damn things.
Cathy Johnson came to mind after I’d put all the clean pots away. She was a nurse who worked with Alice at the immunization clinic. She had told me a while back that she worried occasionally, in the middle of the night. She worried that an infant might be brain damaged from a measles shot.