Double Delight Page 4

  Each year, the Feinemann Foundation gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars to artists. Poets, prose writers, painters, sculptors, playwrights, composers … the only criterion, apart from excellence, being that the artist be an American citizen. Nelson P. Feinemann had been a controversial financier of the 1920s who had had a reputation for his ruthlessness with business rivals and associates alike; in some quarters, even at the present time, his name was synonymous with duplicity. (Had not one of his vice-presidents gone to prison in his stead? Had not one of his sons committed suicide?) Yet, like his predecessors Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Andrew Mellon, among others, Feinemann had left a considerable fortune for philanthropic purposes, and so his reputation had wonderfully improved. Never in the eight decades of its operation had the Feinemann Foundation encountered an artist who refused its largess, whatever his or her publicly proclaimed standards of personal integrity. Quite the contrary! Thousands of applications flooded into the office, and it was the responsibility of Terence Greene, and carefully selected panels of judges, to decide among them. A task that seemed to grow more onerous each season …

  Trapped. Am I trapped? They’d said that his mother had “gone away” but they had never said anything about his father and so for years, for more years than seems possible, Terence had believed that he was so special a boy, he had had no father. Isn’t he a sad case! Poor little bastard.

  Why had I wanted, what it was I’d wanted?

  His handsome leather attaché case had been a gift from Phyllis for Terence’s forty-fourth birthday. She had bought it as a substitute for Terence’s old briefcase, battered and creased as an old shoe, which he’d owned as a young academic. The sleek new attaché case boasted the initials TCG in gold; it was made of Italian leather, with a Gucci label. Dreamily, Terence found himself thinking of the horse chestnut tree behind the sprawling farmhouse in Shaheen, for the smooth leather case, which smelled still of newness, was a deep russet-red, the hue and even the texture of horse chestnuts. He and his cousin Denton, who was two years older than Terence, had collected the most beautiful horse chestnuts and hidden them away in a drawer in the room they shared until, weeks later, forgotten by the boys, the chestnuts were discovered by their Aunt Megan, softened, rotting. Boys, what is this? What a smell!

  By noon, Terence hadn’t yet been called for a jury. He was feeling cheated, impatient, angry. No choice but to have lunch at Mill Hill Tavern across the street, amid a maze of tables, customers, cigarette smoke, an odor of grease. He ordered a glass of beer, a sandwich. Almost, now, he wished he were in New York, in his comfortable office where frequently he ate, excellent food delivered from a deli on the first floor. He opened his attaché case, determined not to waste time. Shuffled through papers. X was applying for a $40,000 grant for the purpose of. Y was applying for a $49,000 grant for the purpose of. Strange that Terence Greene should be determining people’s lives when he’d had so little to do with determining his own.

  Hettie’s boy. What a laugh, see him now!

  Terence smiled. For after all no one did see him now; no one from his old, lost life.

  By degrees he’d become aware of customers at a table to his right, talking animatedly together, laughing frequently and loudly. There were three of them, seemingly related, grandparents and a teenaged grandson; they ate their lunches avidly, sharing portions. Bowls of steaming soup, enormous stuffed sandwiches. The man was perhaps seventy-five years old, snowy-haired and -bearded, with a heavy, flushed face and eyes crinkled at the corners: He talked the most, as if giving instructions, while the others nodded, or interrupted, or challenged him. He wore a nautical cap, a white dress shirt that strained against his hefty chest and stomach, and a black clip-on bowtie, slightly askew, that shone like dull leather. The woman was both grandmotherly and girlish, in her late sixties perhaps, and hefty too, with a moon-shaped, good-natured face, enormous bosom and hips that jiggled when she laughed, and crisp dyed brassy-blond curls atop which was perched, with quaint propriety, a black pillbox hat of the kind Jacqueline Kennedy had made fashionable in America, many years ago. And the boy—a tall hulking kid built like a linebacker, but with a droll baby face, and a giggle that erupted like firecrackers. He wore a cheaply cut sports coat in which he seemed to feel uncomfortable, and a Phillies baseball cap reversed on his head.

  What were they talking about so intensely?—a trial? (Terence thought he heard the words “D.A.”—“judge.”) What was so urgent?—so funny?

  Trying to be inconspicuous, Terence slipped his work back inside the attaché case, and set the case on the floor directly behind his chair, for safekeeping; his sandwich was brought him, and a second foamy glass of beer, and, feeling happy suddenly, Terence ate his lunch while eavesdropping on the diners beside him. He could not follow the thread of their remarks, nor could he decode them, but he was fascinated. From time to time the snowy-bearded patriarch would lean close to the others, tug at his beard, and murmur something severe, in a lowered voice. And the woman would giggle, and shiver. “Yes, yes! Amen to that!” And the boy would stretch his muscled shoulders suggestively, as if primed to fight. “Man, yeah! They better!”

  Once, startled by the vehemence of the boy’s response, Terence involuntarily glanced over at him, and the others. He saw them, suddenly silent, looking at him.

  The moment passed. Terence looked quickly away, to the food on his plate. He was embarrassed to think that the old couple and the boy might suspect him of eavesdropping.

  His fleeting impression was that the elder pair frowned a bit at him, though more searchingly than critically; the boy, handsomely blond when seen full face, though with a mildly blemished skin, narrowed his eyes, then, unexpectedly, like a small child, smiled.

  Friendly, good-natured people. Perhaps a little simple.

  Terence, who’d been enjoying his lunch thoroughly, saw with regret that it was time to leave. He drank down the last of his beer, went to use the men’s room, returned to his table, picked up his check and paid the waiter, and left a generous tip. Quite deliberately, he didn’t glance at the party at the table beside his (though noting that the woman had left the table) but walked briskly out into the bright June day, which was warmer now, but breezy. How good he felt, and how simple life was!

  It was five minutes to one. The Mercer County Courthouse, diagonally across the street from the Mill Hill Tavern, looked less forbidding now.

  No sooner had Terence returned to the jury assembly room when he and approximately fifty other men and women were sent up to the fifth floor, herded into a courtroom of modest proportions, addressed by a woman judge of youthful middle age, in full judicial costume. The case to be tried was one in which the defendant was charged with “aggravated assault”—the State of New Jersey v. T. W. Binder. (To Terence’s surprise, the defendant was in the courtroom already, seated beside his lawyer: a sullenly attractive young man in his early thirties with a thick neck, rounded shoulders, a recent haircut.) One by one, jurors’ numbers were called, as in a lottery; as in a lottery, Terence was resigned to not being selected; yet, astonishingly, at the fifth draw, “Terence C. Greene” was called.

  Conscious of the rather formal, stiff figure he made, in his expensive suit, Terence crossed the courtroom floor and took a seat in the jury box. Seeing the young man staring at him, only a few yards distant, he began to wonder whether he wanted to sit in judgment on a fellow human being after all.

  It seemed to him, as the draw continued, and other jurors came forward to take their seats, that T. W. Binder was looking at him—or was he imagining it?

  Yet, during the voir dire, when he was questioned by the judge, Terence was careful to give answers of a kind that would not disqualify him. Was he associated in any way with law enforcement officials, did he have any connection with the legal counsel for the defense? Had he ever been the victim of a crime or crimes? (Several of his fellow jurors, answering “Yes” to that question, were thanked and excused immediatel
y.)

  Had Terence Greene ever been the victim of a crime or crimes? He thought for a moment, and said, “No, Your Honor. I have not.”

  He believed that was a truthful answer. Really, he did not remember. As a child—well, all that was lost.

  Next, the judge asked if Terence was familiar in any way with the case to be tried: Had he read about it, seen or heard news broadcasts, spoken with persons involved? (At this question too, obliged to answer “Yes,” several jurors were excused.) Terence, who, like all Queenston residents, read The New York Times, and rarely any local newspaper, said, without hesitation, “No, Your Honor. I have not.”

  The judge’s final question was baffling: Was Terence acquainted, in any way, with the “Ezra Wineapple” case?

  Ezra Wineapple?—he’d never even heard the name.

  “No, Your Honor. I am not.”

  Satisfied with these answers, the judge thanked Terence, and moved on to question the next juror, and the next. As the procedure continued, with the assistant prosecutor and the defense attorney requesting from time to time that jurors be excused, rejected jurors left the box, potential jurors took their places, but Terence Greene, and two or three others, remained where they were.

  And so, for the first time in his life, Terence Greene was to be a juror in a criminal case.

  The trial would begin the next morning. The fourteen jurors were excused early. Terence, buoyed by feelings of excitement and apprehension, was halfway to the parking garage when he realized—what? The attaché case Phyllis had given him was missing.

  He’d forgotten it completely.

  At first, he thought he must have left it in the jury assembly room; then he remembered placing it on the floor, behind his chair, at lunch. So it must be there, at the Mill Hill Tavern? Unless, seeing that it was an expensive case, someone had made off with it?

  Terence half-ran back up the hill, to the tavern diagonally across the street from the courthouse. It was mid-afternoon now, and less crowded. Trying to keep the desperation out of his voice (Phyllis’s beautiful gift! for his birthday! filled with documents from the Feinemann Foundation!), he asked the manager if anyone had found an attaché case with the initials TCG on it, but the manager said no, not that he knew. Terence searched about, on the floor beneath the table he’d had, and nearby; but found nothing. It must have been taken: stolen.

  “God damn.”

  The amiable young waiter who’d waited on Terence, for whom Terence had left a generous tip, claimed not to know anything about the case either. “Where’d you set it?”

  “Here. Right here.” Terence felt a fool, pointing at a spot on the grimy floor. The memory of the corned beef sandwich he’d eaten so hungrily returned, as a garlicky-acidic belch. Yes, what a fool!

  Bringing a luxury item like a leather Gucci case into a tavern in Trenton, absentminded as usual. As Phyllis would say, what could Terence expect?—off in a world of his own.

  It occurred to him then that though the case had been taken, its contents would have been of no interest to any thief; so he went into the men’s room, and, distasteful as the prospect was, sank his arm to the shoulder into the trash receptacle stuffed with used paper towels. He pawed about, grimacing. Recalling how (strange, he’d forgotten it during the judge’s questioning) his wallet had been picked from his pocket a few years ago, in Penn Station: credit cards, insurance papers, driver’s license, cash—gone.

  Nothing in the receptacle but paper towels.

  The manager was looking on, sympathetic, but guarded. “You want to try the women’s room, too?”

  But Terence Greene knew himself defeated. And his stomach was reacting, too. “No, thank you. I don’t think there would be much point.”

  So strangely apprehensive, sleepless as if on the verge of a new life as if I myself were on trial, the charge unknown.

  The State of New Jersey v. T. W. Binder was a distinctly minor case, involving only four witnesses for the prosecution and one (the defendant himself) for the defense. It would be completed within three days. It was presided over by a recently appointed woman judge, argued by a young and rather rawboned assistant prosecutor and a weathered-looking public defender with sideburns and old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses that slid down his nose as he gestured. Its participants were Trenton residents of no unusual distinction. It would set no legal precedents, occupy no more than a column or two in the Trenton Times.

  And yet: Are there “minor” cases?—do not all such cases lead to “major” consequences?

  Thirty-two-year-old currently unemployed T. W. Binder (his first name was “T.W.”) was charged with aggravated assault in an attack upon a young woman in her own home, the previous December; the young woman, Ava-Rose Renfrew, who had been “viciously beaten” and had “suffered permanent injury” as a consequence, was to testify, as were three witnesses, of whom two were members of her family. The State would prove, the young prosecutor asserted, in his reedy, nasal voice, that the defendant had knowingly, purposefully, and recklessly intended to inflict serious physical injury or did inflict such injury—in violation of the New Jersey statute against aggravated assault.

  The defense counsel, in a more practiced, modulated, insinuating voice, scanning the faces of the jurors as if he, and they, had done this exercise many times before, emphatically denied the charge, asserting that the defendant Mr. Binder had at the most “pushed and pulled” and “attempted to restrain” the young woman in question. There was no proof—“I repeat, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and will repeat: absolutely no proof”—that so serious a crime as aggravated assault had been committed or intended.

  Terence Greene, with his fellow jurors, sat very still, listening intently to the opening arguments on the first morning of the trial. Though much was dryly formal and summary, and much was repetitious in a way worrisome to a person of Terence’s intelligence, he found the proceedings riveting. The judge at her elevated desk, in her black judicial gown; the stiff young prosecutor who glanced frequently at his notes; the defense counsel who continually pushed at his glasses, and seemed perpetually on the brink of sarcasm; most of all, the husky young T. W. Binder in his cheaply cut brown suit, hair recently razor-shaved at the sides and back of his head, eyes hooded, sullen—how real and purposeful they all seemed, and, in Terence’s imagination, how significantly they were linked! And I, too. And I.

  Terence noted that the officers of the court employed simple, clear, formulaic phrases, much repeated. The assumption was (no doubt, it was true) that the men and women in the jury box were not very bright. The judge, in her opening instructions, had said several times, “Remember: I am the judge of the law, and you are the judge of the facts.” The prosecuting attorney summarized the case he was to present, summarized the summary, and repeated it; the defense counsel did more or less the same thing, though with more animation in his tone. Terence, the lone juror from Queenston, and the only man of the seven men on the jury to be wearing a suit, had to resist his habit of nodding sympathetically when someone spoke to him. It was an old mannerism of his undergraduate days when he had not only nodded as his professors lectured, but squinted and worked his mouth, half-consciously, gripped by a terrible need to know—to know not only what was being said, but its secret, subtextual meaning. For life is not ripples on the surface of a stream, it is not on the surface at all.

  He listened. Yet his mind drifted. He was in two places simultaneously—in the fifth seat in the jury box, but also in bed, a single lamp burning. How could you, oh damn you!—that lovely Gucci case! and he’d apologized another time, he was a fool, he was careless and absentminded and deeply, deeply regretful, would she forgive him?—another time? and almost shyly he’d touched her, her shoulder smooth and warm beneath the wide satin strap of her nightgown, and, after a moment, brushing away his hand as she might brush away a fly, she sighed audibly, and switched off the lamp. Yes of course I forgive you, until next time.

  His little boy leaping up into his arms. A swift
hug, a wet kiss. Dad-dee! and his heart was torn with love. And now, Aaron grown to his father’s rangy height but with thicker, darker hair, darker eyes, that look of impatience slamming through the downstairs on his way to the garage to his gleaming white ’91 Pontiac Firebird calling back over his shoulder words you didn’t want to hear.

  Terence repressed a shudder. Perhaps he was imagining it, but it seemed that T. W. Binder regarded him more fixedly than he regarded the other jurors. Was the man innocent, or guilty? He had a low forehead, a prematurely creased skin, steely eyes. That trapped expression Terence saw sometimes in Tuffi’s eyes, when the dog hesitated before trying to descend a few steps; before slipping and falling with a startled yelp.

  Everyone was waiting for the prosecution’s main witness, Ava-Rose Renfrew, the alleged victim, to be summoned. Yet, expectations were balked, as in a deliberately teasing avant-garde play. For the defense counsel argued X, and the prosecutor argued Y, and both requested that the jury be sent out of the room, and so the jury was herded out by a young blank-faced sheriff’s deputy to wait in the jury room adjacent to the court for two and a half hours.

  Two and a half hours! Terence, pacing about, trying not to listen to the others jurors’ chatter, could not believe it. He knew little of courtroom procedure, but he knew enough to fear that the trial might end abruptly, if the defendant decided after all to plead guilty; or if a plea-bargained deal was struck with the prosecutor. And then—what? Would he and his fellow jurors be sent back down to the jury room? Then never, never would it have happened. Never would he have known.

  But the trial continued. The jurors were herded back into the jury box, and there was T. W. Binder, hunched as if reconciled to his fate, staring.

  And, now—Ava-Rose Renfrew?

  But, “Your Honor—!” the defense counsel said, and there was yet another interruption. For a document was mislaid, or missing.