A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [91]
Alice would have been able to make a good story from the hearing in spite of the fact that it was supposed to be a low-key affair. Rafferty had told me that the preliminary hearing was not the place to draw out the details. He said that if he brought into focus the slatternly mother, the ill-mannered boy, months later at the trial the D.A. would have had the time to create Mrs. Mackessy as Mother Theresa and Robbie as the all-American choirboy on a PBS special. He had told me that the defense holds everything close to the chest, that it is the prosecutor who must play the hand. At the hearing the judge might be sympathetic to the poor single mom doing her best to raise up her child. At the trial Rafferty would introduce the real Mrs. Mackessy, as well as sing, and dance, if necessary, Alice’s praises: the fine caring professional nurse who is being blamed for Carol’s neglect and Robbie’s failures.
For all my background in history, I had been thinking lately that stories were pretty useless. The first scientists, way back, in pre-Socratic time, figured out that if they were going to understand anything they would have to discard narrative in favor of empirical methods. The Creation myths explained, after a fashion, who and why, but science would tell how and what. I had tried not to see the hearing as a story but as a series of facts which explored these questions: How did this happen? What is Alice? It was an absurd question, I realize, What is Alice? And yet I found myself asking, and not knowing how to answer. I had gone over and over the hearing in my mind and with each passing hour I was more and more bewildered. That night Theresa came over I thought, for about five minutes, that the splintered facts might make sense. I thought I might be able to lay out the pieces for her. With her experience she would amplify and connect where I could not.
“I think a lot about Alice,” I said.
“Oh Howard,” she blew, “if you only knew how I think about her. My sister asked how I could still be friends with her and I said, ‘If the same thing had happened in your built-in pool, do you think I’d stop speaking to you?’ I feel as if I’ve lost two people, that’s what no one, least of all my husband, understands.”
I couldn’t, of course, ask her what had been nagging at me since the day before. What is my wife, Theresa? I mumbled something about how we have air-conditioned squad cars instead of wooden carts but that nothing else had changed much since the Inquisition.
“And you can pay your fines with American Express,” she added. “You’re right! The changes are insignificant.”
On that Monday I had left the girls off at a day-care center in a shopping mall on the outskirts of Racine. It had been the only place I could find that would take them on a drop-in basis. The morning had gone badly at the beginning. The gallon jar of milk had fallen out of the refrigerator and shattered on the floor. The car keys had gotten lost. A cow in her prime was sick with diarrhea for no good reason. When we got to the day-care place, Happy Haven, Emma and Claire screamed about it. I had to shake them off of me and leave them sobbing in the hands of two high-school students. They had badges on their red aprons that said, “Trainee.” Out in the parking lot I could still hear my daughters crying. When I was trying to drive away the engine flooded. I had to sit for fifteen minutes before the car would run. I wasn’t sure by the end if I was hearing their appeals or imagining the worst. The noise continued as I drove. I could still hear them after I was a mile down the road.
There were jackhammers going in front of the courthouse. I was very hot in my suit. There’s an inscription on the north side of the entrance, a quote from Goethe. “In the government of men,” it says, “a great deal may be done by severity. More by love.