Defending Jacob(39)
He snorted. “Yeah, okay, Dad.”
Inside I found Laurie on her hands and knees rummaging through the cleaning supplies in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. She was still wearing the navy skirt she wore to court.
“Just leave it, Laurie. I’ll take care of it. You go rest.”
“You’ll take care of it when?”
“Whenever you want.”
“You say you’ll take care of things and then you don’t. I don’t want that thing on my house. Not for one more minute. I’m not going to just leave it there.”
“I said I’ll take care of it. Please. Go rest.”
“How can I rest, Andy, with that thing? Honestly. Did you see what they wrote? On our home! On our home, Andy, and you want me to just go rest? Great. This is just great. They walk right up and write on our house and nobody says anything, nobody lifts a finger, not one of our f*cking neighbors.” She enunciated the expletive meticulously, right down to the final G, as people who are not used to swearing often do. “We should call the cops. It’s a crime, isn’t it? It is a crime, I know it is. It’s vandalism. Should we call the cops?”
“No. We’re not calling the cops.”
“No. Of course not.”
She came up with a bottle of Fantastik, then snatched up a dish towel and soaked it under the faucet.
“Laurie, please, let me do this. Let me help you, at least.”
“Would you just stop? I said I’ll do it.”
She had taken off her shoes and she marched out like that, barefoot in her nylons, and she scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.
I went out with her, but there was nothing for me to do except watch.
Her hair bounced to the vigorous movements of her arm. Her eyes were wet and her face flushed.
“Can I help, Laurie?”
“No. I’ll do it.”
At length, I gave up watching and went back in. I heard her scruffing against the side of the house for a long time. She succeeded in rubbing out the words, but the ink left a gray cloud on the paint. It is still there today.
10 | Leopards
Jonathan’s office was a little warren of cluttered rooms in a century-old Victorian near Harvard Square. The practice was essentially a one-man operation. He did have an associate, a young woman named Ellen Curtice who was just out of Suffolk Law. But he used her only as a stand-in on days when he could not be in court himself (usually because he was held on trial elsewhere) and to handle basic legal research. It was understood, apparently, that Ellen would move on when she was ready to launch her own practice. For now, she was a vaguely disconcerting presence in the office, a mostly silent, dark-eyed observer of the clients who came and went, the murderers, rapists, thieves, child molesters, tax evaders, and all their cursed families. There was a bit of Northampton about her, a bit of the college kid’s orthodox radicalism. I imagined she judged Jacob harshly—the suburban rich kid who pissed away all the advantages he had lucked into, something like that—but her behavior gave nothing away. Ellen treated us with elaborate politeness. She insisted on calling me Mister Barber and offered to take my coat whenever I showed up, as if any hint of intimacy would undermine her neutral pose.
The only other member of Jonathan’s team was Mrs. Wurtz, who kept the books, answered the phone, and, when she could no longer stand the mess, reluctantly scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom while murmuring murder under her breath. She bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother.
The best room in the office was the library. It had a red-brick fireplace and bookcases lined with familiar old law books: the honey bindings of the Massachusetts and federal case reports, the army-green Mass. Appeals reports, the wine red of the old Mass. Practice series.
It was in this warm little den that we gathered just a few hours after Jacob’s arraignment, in early afternoon, to discuss the case. We three Barbers sat around an old circular oak table with Jonathan. Ellen was there too, scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad.
Jacob wore a burgundy hoodie that had the logo of a clothing company on the chest, a silhouette of a rhino. As the meeting began, he slumped in his chair with the cavernous hood over his head like a druid. I told him, “Jacob, take your hood off. Don’t be disrespectful.” He slipped it off with a sulky flip and sat there with an absent expression, as if the meeting was a matter for grown-ups that held little interest for him.
Laurie, in her sexy schoolmarm glasses and a lightweight fleece pullover, looked like a thousand other suburban soccer moms, except for the shock-hammered look in her eyes. She asked for a legal pad of her own and gamely made ready to take notes along with Ellen. Laurie seemed determined to keep her head—to think her way out of the maze, to remain clearheaded and industrious even in this surreal dream. She might have had an easier time of it, honestly, if she had not been so engaged. The stupid and belligerent have it easy in these situations; they can simply stop thinking and gird for battle, trust to the experts and to fate, insisting that everything will turn out right in the end. Laurie was neither stupid nor belligerent, and in the end she paid an awful price—but I am getting ahead of the story. For the moment, seeing her with her pad and pen inevitably reminded me of our college days, when Laurie was a bit of a grind, at least compared to me. We rarely took classes together. Our interests were not the same—I was drawn to history, Laurie to psych, English, and film—and anyway we did not want to become one of those nauseating inseparable couples that mooned around campus side by side like Siamese twins. In four years, the one class we shared was Edmund Morgan’s intro to early American history, which we took freshman year when we’d just started dating. I used to steal Laurie’s notebook before exams to catch up on the lectures I’d skipped. I remember gaping at her class notes, page after page of neat cursive. She captured long phrases from the lectures verbatim, broke the lectures down into branching concepts and subconcepts, added her own thoughts as she went. There were few of the cross-outs or scribbles or snaking arrows that filled my sloppy, frantic, clownish class notes. In fact, that notebook from Edmund Morgan’s lectures was part of the revelation of meeting Laurie. What struck me was not just that she was probably smarter than me. Coming from a small town—Watertown, New York—I was prepared for that. I fully expected Yale to be swarming with brainy, worldly kids like Laurie Gold. I had studied up on them by reading Salinger stories and watching Love Story and The Paper Chase. No, the epiphany I had looking at Laurie’s notebook was not that she was smart but that she was unknowable. She was every bit as complex as I was. As a kid, I had always believed there was a special drama about being Andy Barber, but the interior experience of being Laurie Gold must have been just as fraught with secrets and sorrows. She would always be a mystery, as all other people are. Try as I might to penetrate her, by talking, kissing, stabbing myself into her, the best I would ever do was to know her just a little. It is a childish realization, I admit—no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but after all, we were children.