Terence Mann stopped playing, tense with a dissonance of perplexity. A
wrong time and mood for Chopin: his hands had been dull in the C-sharp
Minor Impromptu. No music now, but an impulsive sorrow of December wind
leaning against the building in the dark. "_Callista never cried._"
To Maud Welsh, that had been "real unnatural." Judge Mann did not find
it so. Self-pity was not evident as a quality of Callista Blake.
He understood with almost amused distress that he _liked_ the girl.
That, plus old dislike for the representative of her accuser the State:
how far can you go with such a bias before the judicial lid blows off?
He remembered doubtfully a talk with Joe Bass the evening
before--anything more than a flurry of wishful thinking? Increase of
humanitarianism in the last century and a half? Well, social history
agreed, if you read it with some detachment from the immediate terrors
of the decade. And the increase could hardly be ignored or dismissed
except by someone bitterly in love with his own pessimism. Modern
postwar pessimism, although a cult like any other, was persuasive,
deceptively articulate. Something contagious in a comprehensive
the-hell-with-it.
Social history made it clear that capital punishment had dwindled in
frequency from a common public entertainment to something almost rare.
The states still practicing it gave evidence of official shame, or at
least of a schizophrenic need to serve two contraries, to appease the
recurrent vengefulness of their multitudes but also to hide the dirty
thing, tacitly apologize, soften its most visible nastiness in the hope
that conscience would shut up and sleep again. Such a condition would be
preliminary to change. Like tuberculosis and venereal disease, capital
punishment was on the way out but going out in the manner of things
legal, with dreary and creeping slowness. Wasn't that how he had
reasoned two years ago, when his name was up in the election more or
less unopposed? Or had he honestly faced it at all?
Hadn't he simply regarded a judgeship as mostly useful work and $18,000
a year? And hadn't he accepted, without enough examination, the doctrine
that a judge is only an instrument of something greater than himself? An
instrument of _what_ something, greater than himself _in what way_? The
questions projected themselves beyond the cloud-curtain of mysticism.
But it seemed to Judge Mann that unless they could receive a daylight
answer, the doctrine itself was solemn nonsense.
Imagining Society with a capital S to be greater than the individual--no
answer there, only a more opaque mysticism. The mental construction
"Society" is an achievement of the individual brain, an organ that had
better not be too dazzled by products of its own authorship.
The issue of capital punishment had been bound to arise. _I knew the
laws. I knew that New Essex was no more free than any other state from
crime and the balancing crime of punishment._
From an unseeing stare at the carpet, his head jerked up as if at the
entrance of another. _Balancing crime of punishment_: he had been
thinking in specific words, talking to a half-personalized projection of
the self, and the words had power to startle him.
It was a commonplace to Terence Mann that punishment itself is an
archaic evil in the law. As special prosecutor, as defense lawyer on a
few occasions, in the relatively clean region of civil law, he had tried
to favor any reorientation of thought and action that might discredit
punishment as a respected motivation and replace it by efforts at
healing and reclamation. As a judge, familiar with the endless parade of
minor offenders (most of them with no chance of redemption, for where in
the modern state was there a sufficient will to redeem even the young,
or the time, patience, money, wisdom, to implement it?), Judge Mann had
been aware of no impulse in himself to punish, only of a desire to
lessen disorder, and try for the long view. And then, Callista Blake.
But--_balancing crime of punishment_: well, there it was simply his own
unexpected rephrasing of the issue that had startled him. Apart from
that, if that was significant, this self-castigation probably served no
purpose.
Fashionable but without merit, to wail that we are all guilty. So we
are, in a sense, and (unless one intends to do something about it) so
what? Breast-beating is as solitary as any other form of
masturbation. The modern spirit, he thought, for a long time before
Hiroshima, had grown too fond of the wail, the masochistic acceptance of
futility that ended in a downright enjoyment of it, a perversion as
sterile as the antics of the louse-eaten monks of the Thebaid. Admit
that two years ago he might not have been completely honest with
himself. All right: what mattered now was that a slow broadening of
reform might look very fine in the armchair perspective of a history
book, but was no use at all to Callista Blake, nineteen years old.
Capital punishment was on the way out, taking her along with it.
Therefore in the very present specific instance: _What to do?_
Wandering to the other side of the room, fingering the stacks of sheet
music and the bound volumes, Judge Mann reflected that a judgeship is a
very damned comfortable thing, to the nerves of pocketbook and of
vanity, until a moment of self-appraisal brings you the image of a
bewildered monkey in a black gown. An image caught as though in multiple
mirrors. No good turning your head aside: a mirror in every wall, and
the monkey, poor puzzled well-meaning bastard, in every mirror.
He did not want now the fury or grief or laughter of Beethoven; not now
the lofty tenderness or robust passion of Johannes Brahms. He took down
his one-volume edition of the _Well-Tempered Clavichord_ and glanced at
a memory-stirring litter of pencil marks made long ago in the curly
script of his teacher Michael Brooks. Mr. Brooks had died before the
war, very old and partly blind. He might live another hundred years in
these marks, far longer in the spreading influence of his fifty years of
teaching, the impetus he gave to other lives continuing beyond any
knowledge or measuring. _Very good, Terence!... More slow trill practice
absolutely essential!! Andante does not mean Adagio. In this Prelude
schmaltz is possible but I do not like it. Excellent but you could do
better. Bring out the inner voices._
Mr. Brooks grew vivid in memory, speaking with difficulty and panting
breath because of age and the burden of fat that seemed (till you
learned better) as though it might block his pudgy improbable hands away
from the keyboard entirely. He had been seventy when Terence at age
eight began lessons; he went on teaching twelve years thereafter.
Terence remembered the gray eyes, tiny-appearing, sometimes inflamed, in
folds of drooping lids and fat, the completely hairless skull rising to
a peak, the wondrously ugly features that after the first impact of
astonishment left the word "ugly" without meaning. "You think the Fugues
are dry, Terence? Bring out the inner voices.... See, Terence, all the
composers have something for you. But when you are unhappy--" blinking,
sighing, coughing; and Terence recalled a child's botheration, dread of
giggles, at an old man's prolonged throat-clearing, guttural noises,
conversational spray, habit of patting forlornly at the air when a
needed word was gone from him--"or when you have discovered that
happiness is only a sometime thing at best, not too important, then try
Bach, Terence, try Bach. Because he will let you enter a place where you
become bigger than sadness or happiness. And bring out the inner
voices."
He set the old book on the piano. Hands and brain were tired, the hour
late, though the neighboring apartment-dwellers were tolerant and often
kept their mechanical music perking until after midnight. For a while he
was in that place: _Well, Mr. Brooks, "container and thing contained":
aren't we always bigger than what stirs within us? All the same it was a
good way to talk to a child._ But the very facility of his hands
betrayed him, leaving his mind too free. Good at first, to continue
private thought while Bach was speaking, but then only another
troublesome dividing of the self.
Terence's father, not a patient man, would have said at this point or
sooner: "God-sake, Terry, make up your mind!"
He would have said that, before 1928. In that year Father changed. And
maybe the gray and harassed man could have entertained doubts earlier in
his life on such an issue as capital punishment. He didn't have a closed
or ungenerous mind; he couldn't afford to, a small-town doctor with two
skittish growing boys and a wife who came to believe herself in deep
other-worldly communication with Mary Queen of Scots. But many of
Father's opinions were formed when he was a young man in the era of
Teddy Roosevelt, and he didn't always remember to speak softly. Unlike
his older brother Uncle Norden, who must have early learned the
advantages of speaking softly at great length--anyhow Uncle Nord built
up that accomplishment into a thundering good law practice.
Father (before 1928) would likely have said if you asked him that
criminals so hardened as to commit murder--oh, put 'em out. For the good
of society. Human failures: the unfit--odd word much loved by the
nineteenth century, used apparently in a sort of gentleman's agreement
that no one was going to ask: unfit for what? Father would not have
spoken so out of vindictiveness or lack of human feeling: just the
impatient judgment of a busy man with troubles of his own, who accepted
a number of antique notions because he grew up with them. That few
hardened criminals ever commit murder, that most murderers have acted on
a blinding impulse unlikely to recur--such facts would have been outside
his mental territory, and unacceptable. Knowledge of what Father would
have said was for Terence a bloodstream thing, no longer traceable to
any remembered words. Like most people including doctors, Dr. Carl Mann
had never witnessed an execution, nor known anyone well who wound up in
jail. Gentlemen don't.
After Elinor Mann's final breakdown and commitment, Father no longer
announced his views with much positiveness. In that year 1928 the bottom
fell out; Dr. Mann couldn't even get positive about Al Smith, in spite
of a long-standing rage at the imbecilities of Prohibition. When not
meeting the heavy demands of a country medical practice, he was beating
out heart and brain in a private crucifixion, asking himself the wrong
questions: _What could I have done differently? Where did I fail her?_
As though a clarification of his own past might even then help to
restore Elinor's mind, that had never really tolerated the difficulties
of living before it made permanent retreat into the smoke of paranoid
fantasy.
Terence's hands fell away from the piano, leaving the third Fugue
unfinished. How had he arrived at contemplation of that time-eroded
grief? The subject was Callista Blake, not Elinor Mann.
Who still lived, if you could call it that, in the curiously ordered
world of yellow brick and manicured lawns that was Claiborne Hospital.
She was seventy-eight this year, clouded by senility along with the
psychosis. She recognized Terence on his visits, listening or seeming
to, usually with patiently closed eyes, as he toiled to create a
conversation.
Jack, successful in his own psychiatric practice, had more difficulty
when he drove or flew from Boston to see her. Thirty-one years ago the
cobwebs of her delusions had wrapped themselves inextricably around the
life of the elder son, four years older than Terence and at that time
in his Junior year at Harvard. Her voices (many others along with that
of Mary Queen of Scots) had informed her that Jack was increasingly
involved with gangsters and women of ill fame. The college authorities
and, for some never-explained reason, Mayor Jimmy Walker, were all in it
together. When she was on the point of going up to Cambridge to deal
with all that, Dr. Carl Mann, goaded at last into understanding, said
no. She flung an inkwell in his face and gouged it with a pair of
scissors; though he was fairly muscular and she was not, it required the
help of his office nurse to restrain her. Most of that was over, the
dust settling, when Terence, sixteen years old, got home from school.
Now in her antiquity the sorrows, fantasies, and angers of the past were
still preserved for her by the specialized, selective memory of the
schizophrenic, flies in amber. A year ago, Terence and Jack visiting her
together, she told Terence that she could easily have forgiven poor Jack
if he had lived. Then it came out, in a natural, pleasantly quiet
conversation, that the slim gray-haired man sitting over there was
nothing but a body, stolen for no good purpose by the unclean spirit of
Henry VIII. Later, at the airport, Jack remarked: "Psychiatrically
speaking it may be a poor symptom, but don't mind it, Terry. I'll make
out all right as hell-fire Harry Tudor. Less of a strain than some of my
other roles."
"Beyond psychiatry, isn't it?"
"If you mean beyond effective therapy, yes, boy." "Boy" from Jack was
acceptable--always had been. "It was beyond existing therapy thirty
years ago." Jack also counted years. "We just don't know the score on
paranoid schizophrenia. We know approximately what to expect, which is
something maybe. Mental disease could be the last holdout among medical
enigmas, Terry. We may be sweating out cases like Mother's when there's
a pill or a shot for cancer. It's the--oh, the inaccessibility of mental
action." Jack had been tired, but not remote; fatigue never dulled a
shining quality of his alertness. "Wait till you get some big case in
court with a borderline paranoid as a star performer."
That conversation of a year ago had been hampered, Jack waiting on the
start of his plane flight back to Boston; no leisure, bustling
strangers, time pressure, uproar of loudspeakers and warming engines.
Was it relevant now? Callista Blake a borderline paranoid? Rather
urgently and emphatically, Judge Mann thought: _No, she's not._
Psychiatry more or less stood in the wings, in _People vs. Blake_. The
State's man called her legally sane. If he hadn't, the State would have
had no trouble shopping around for someone who did. Warner had had the
girl examined by a Dr. Coburn, who might or might not testify; so far
Warner had dropped no hint suggesting an insanity defense.
Inaccessibility of mental action: that was relevant. Dominantly. For
wasn't that the very essence of the principle of "reasonable doubt"? And
was there any rational formula anywhere in the law, except the principle
of reasonable doubt, at all likely to save Callista Blake?
_Must see Jack again, soon._ He looked out on the city's darkness past a
false curtain of window-glass reflection; a city of magic under a lens
of illusion, as long ago in the creaky white-pillared house in
Emmetville where he grew up he used to look out from the bedroom he
shared with Jack, at images that would not live by day. Especially on
rainy nights the vacant lot on the other side of Maple Street became for
the boy transfigured, a garden of living shadows; sometimes, under the
lash of wet wind, even the sea as Conrad and Melville had given the sea
to him. In winter, leaves fallen, one could look past the few naked
trees at the back of the lot, to a gleam of water a mile away, Walton
Pond reflecting the motion and glitter of the railroad yard on its far
side. Every night at 9:25, the ghostly passage of a fourteen-car express
(to Terence and Jack, The Express)--one of the great trains that
couldn't be imagined as stopping at Emmetville. You did not hear its
thunder, only saw the silent gliding of windows; then thirty seconds
after the vanishing came the desolate splendor of the whistle crying for
a grade crossing, the night imperfect until that music had fulfilled its
mission and died. _See him again; and bring out the inner voices._
The once vacant lot was now occupied in front by a filling station, in
the rear by a drive-in theater; as a passion-pit, that probably served
on a mass-production basis the same purpose once served by the vacant
lot, where he and Jack occasionally discovered and snickered at the
discarded rubber, stained handkerchiefs, and other detritus of hasty
lechery. As for the gracious white house, where Terence had once known
every spot, every squeaky board and dim hideaway in closets and under
the eaves, it now belonged to someone who had made it a Tourist Home
with noxious plastic animals on the front lawn, and called it Tumble
Inn. So perish treasures of the spirit, to be born elsewhere in other
guise, perhaps.
And he remembered the evening after his mother's commitment was made
definite. Jack had been home for several days, his presence helpful in
the confusion, the curious desolation like and not like a death; Jack
would be returning to college in the morning. Terence had gone to bed;
Jack was about to, lazily delaying. "How honest shall we get, Terry? Are
you, inside of you, relieved? I am." Half undressed, Jack stood over
Terence's bed, smoking, in ever-observant kindness.
"I guess I am."
"Bad, the last few months?"
"Each day a bit stickier. The moods. No--no way of _talking_ to her.
Every remark turned upside down. Like trying to see a room in a twisty
mirror.... Jack--"
"What, kid?"
"Does it mean we shouldn't marry?"
"No." His brother's quiet hand waved away smoke from between them, and
the question too. "It's probably not hereditary. Anyway your children
get half the endowment from _their_ mother. Marry a mattress type,
Terry, brains optional. No, come to think, you couldn't get along with a
clothhead. Make it a mattress type _with_ gray cells; they do exist.
Might have to hunt around a little. Testing mattresses." Jack sat down
and spread his left hand light and warm on Terence's chest, frowning off
at the window, saying to it: "Got a kid brother with social conscience
yet."
It was, at sixteen, the first time Terence had encountered the full
revelation of love for another, seeing that other as a complete human
being all the more beloved for his separateness. He said only: "Not
hereditary--how can you be sure, Jack?"
"Nobody's sure--just the best educated guess. I saw this coming more
than a year ago. Had to study into the thing for my own sake, Terry:
books, talk with one of the Psycho faculty up there who seems to be able
to tell his ass from a barrel of flour, useful accomplishment. I had to
answer that question you asked, and others. Like for instance asking a
character I saw in the mirror: How about you, Jack, you going that way
too one of these days? Studying it seemed to be the only method of
meeting it head on."
"That why you switched to premed courses this year?"
"Partly. Would've anyhow, I think. Mother's brains began to get hurt and
kicked around when she was small, I think--but not by the genes. Wish
we'd known Grandpa and Grandma Kane. They seem to have been a lovely
pair of pious frauds, probably started raping her wits as soon as she
could talk. Uh-huh, Terry, I've got every intention of marrying and
plowing a few seeds into that interesting furrow. You will too, my
guess."
Terence had felt then a hunger to talk bawdy and blow the lid off in
words; wondered also if he would cry, because of the secret inner fire
that held no name in the language: happiness was not the name, and the
new-discovered love for his brother was only a part of it, an opening
of a door. "Got something all lined up?"
"Nope--playing the field. A premarriage elective. Technical studies, how
to tease down the most drawers with the least squawk." He said that with
no leer but a mild pagan amusement already far removed from the idiom of
Emmetville. (As it turned out, Jack went on playing the field quite a
while, not marrying till he was thirty-nine; in his terms that probably
made sense too.) "You haven't tried it yet, Terry?"
The sixteen-year-old Terence flushed unhappily and shook his head on the
pillow, wishing there had been a hundred experiences, suppressing an
impulse to invent a few. But Jack wasn't dismissing him back to
childhood. Jack said: "I hear tell, and ancient memories within this
senile bosom do confirm, that in every well-conducted high school there
is at least one--how shall I put it with utmost delicacy?--at least one
kitty with an available pussy. Or two, or three." He grinned and took
his hand away. "Relax, boy. There's no rush." As he finished undressing
with his unfussy neatness, he asked: "Remember Cassie Ferguson, in my
class?"
"Cassie--black hair, skinny, lot of eyebrow. Well well."
"Did the quiet, you-be-damn manner fool you? The ones who put out for
the joy of it don't make much noise about it. Cassie was very very good
for me. More tricks than a monkey on a greased flagpole." Jack turned
out the light and sat on his own bed for a final cigarette; he said
softly, recalling childhood: "We missed The Express. Did she blow?"
"She blew, she blew ..."
"Good night, Terence Mann."
He turned from the window, from the lights of Winchester. He ran the
blunted tip of a thin finger along the edge of the piano's raised leaf,
a motion of affection: another friend. A friend not exactly left behind
when he went to law school, but--
It seemed to Judge Mann that his present way of existence, compared to
that of, say, Michael Brooks, was not very successful, important, or
useful to others. A majority of his countrymen would assess it
differently of course: Mr. Brooks, never a concert performer even when
young--poor health, no presence, no glamor--why, the old boy probably
did well to make three thousand a year, if that. Obviously the bitch
goddess wouldn't have looked twice.
He wondered (not long) why the thought of another face, familiar and
vigorously detested, should have crowded away the cherished ugly
features of Mr. Brooks. This face was a handsomely carved block of
chilly pink meat under white hair. High falcon nose, flexible lips that
squeezed a manifest delight out of elaborately precise diction. Words
did not simply pass through the lips of Judge Cleever: they were
escorted out, by a pair of busy pale red snakes, the only organs of the
man's face that ever knew emotion. The lips writhed, twisted, enjoyed,
were sickly passionate: "that you be taken hence to the place from which
you came, and thence, at the appointed time, to the place of execution,
where--" but give the dreary old cannibal credit, the apparatus under
that raptorial beak would squirm with the same enthusiasm when it was
ordering a poached egg. The pallid blue eyes of this pillar of society
were astonishingly dull. Cleever was an earnest prohibitionist: no
drink, no smoking, no cussing, likely hadn't been laid in thirty years,
yet you could observe similar eyes whenever the drunk tank yielded its
human load to the courts and hospitals. To learn of an original thought
behind those soggy irises would be nearly as incredible as to learn of a
generous one. Cleever had been a judge since the days of the political
machine preceding Timmy Flack's, into his present miasmic twilight of
senility. Automatically, in a new trial, if Terence Mann were for any
reason disqualified, he would sit in judgment on the life of Callista
Blake.
_Thanks, Judge, thanks to your obscene simulacrum for reminding me of
several things I must not do._ Terence Mann flexed his hands to relieve
a tension; then he played the third Fugue, to completion this time, and
well enough. Mr. Brooks would have rubbed his fleshy nose and said:
"Mmm."
Then he was compulsively searching through a pile of long unused
material, until he unearthed the beginner's book, the first-grade
instruction prescribed by Michael Brooks. He remembered insisting, eight
years old, that he must pick out the book personally, so off to Simms'
Music Store in Winchester with the tickled, slightly bumbling Doctor,
who knew everybody and took occasion to introduce him to the lantern jaw
and slow-motion smile of Hubert Q. Simms; and embarrassed the
toe-twisting bejesus out of the boy with some well-meant cockadoodle
about "latest threat to Josef Hofmann." Then four blocks down Court
Street to (Terence hadn't quite believed it) Judson's Piano Store. This
same piano now standing here thirty-nine years later, rather old as such
things go but good as new. The Doctor's way, taking such a plunge out of
nothing but faith in a small boy's dream. Probably that year he'd been
just barely able to afford it. _He should have lived another forty._
But Dr. Carl Mann, in the early winter of 1930, not drunk for he never
was, a blue ugliness of ink still visible in the long seam of scar
tissue across his face, his financial affairs well in order--in fact
very little hurt by the smash of 1929, for country people still got sick
and still paid for it as well as they could--and the night cloudy, yes,
but no rain or ice on the roads, happened somehow to drive his car into
the concrete abutment of the railroad overpass at Pritchett. His only
unkindness the matter of uncertainty. It could easily have been a
syncope as the coroner decided, or a mechanical failure of the car
concealed by the total smash. Or the Doctor might have been uncertain
himself, up to the last blind instant of no return.
Here anyway was the instruction book, pages gone brown at the rims, and
with the script of Michael Brooks. _Eyes on the notes! Get rid of that
shoulder-arm tension!!_
Judge Mann carried it to the armchair, with a go-to-bed glass of brandy.
Not all those careful fingerings had been written in by Mr. Brooks. The
last half of the manual (he had forgotten) had quite a few figures in an
eight-or nine-year-old hand (correct too!) placed there after he had got
by the first few hurdles with his enthusiasm still afire. The book would
be more or less out of date, Judge Mann reflected: modern pedagogy had
new notions, some good, some not.
He wondered if he was examining this relic from a middle-aged need to
get nearer somehow in time to the mind of Callista Blake. Partly, maybe.
Certainly the dignified black notes before his eyes, the passages of the
third Fugue remembered, The Express, the first discovery of _Huck Finn_,
_Moby Dick_, Beethoven Opus 57, the embrace of a Filipino girl whose
body was a little golden candle flame--certainly none of all that had
the effect of shutting away Callista Blake. She was very present.
("_Which is the Clerk?_") But more than anything else, here at the
frayed, tired, lonely end of the evening, he was wondering--practically
too, and with the special fascination of such practical problems--how he
would go about helping a child beginner to free the fourth finger,
strengthen the fifth, accomplish the small-immense passage from the
five-finger cage to the wide-open country of the octave. And he found
that he meant just that: how _he_ would do it, he, Terence Mann, age
forty-seven, not merely Judge of the Court of General Sessions in and
for the County of Winchester, but also a pianist of more than decent
competence.
If in the habit of speaking aloud in loneliness, he supposed he could
have said reasonably to the imagined presence of Callista beyond the
bright amber of the brandy: _Not now, not while your life is proposed
for burning, Callista. But afterward, maybe. Afterward. Possibly a
letter to the New Essex Bar Association, explaining how for me the law
has been an interlude of a quarter-century, and interesting, but now I
would rather attempt something that I find more important. Which would
annoy the holy hell out of them, Callista, but all the same I may write
it._
A curious thought which he took to bed; sleeping quite soon, to
encounter the inner voices of sleep, with moments of tranquillity.