Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 Read Free Page B

Toyland right here in Calusa, where she worked for three years before setting out on her own in January.
    The idea for Gladly comes to her at the beginning of April sometime, she can’t recall the exact date, and she tells that honestly
     to the Court now. The studio in which she works is so shadowed by the plants growing outside that it is dark even in the daytime.
     She works with a huge fluorescent light over her table, sketching ideas, developing them, refining them. She wears glasses
     when she works. In fact, she wears them
all
the time, except here in this courtroom today, where Matthew wants Judge Santos to notice that wandering right eye and forge
     a connection between Lainie’s condition and that of the bear she created. The strabismus, as her visual defect is called,
     commenced when she was three years old. At least, that was when her mother first detected what was then merely a slight turning-out
     of the right eye. Glasses failed to correct the condition. Two operations to shorten the muscle also proved fruitless. The
     right eye continued to wander. (When Lainie was sixteen, her mother confided to a friend that her daughter had “a wandering
     eye,” but she wasn’t talking about the strabismus.) Lainie explains her condition to the Court now, gratuitously contributing
     the fact that the word “strabismus” comes from the Greek word
strabos,
which means “squinting”—there you are, lads. A cockeyed squint, after all!
    Gladly comes to her out of the blue.
    She’s been working since early this morning, constructing a model for a fire engine with a girl doll at its wheel and several
     other girl dolls, all with flowing red hair the color of the truck, hanging from its sides. Casting each delicate doll from
     individual wax models, hanging them on the deliberately macho prototype truck she’s constructed of wire and wood, she finds
     herself humming as she works, and oddly—
    Ideas sometimes come this way, she tells the Court.
    —one of the tunes she initially hums and then actually begins singing is a hymn called “Keep Thou My Way,” which she learned
     when she was a little girl growing up in Winfield, Alabama, and attending a Bible-reading class taught by a woman named Helen
     Lattimer.
    Keep Thou my way, O Lord
    Hide my life in Thine;
    O let Thy sacred light
    O’er my pathway shine.
    Kept by Thy tender care,
    Gladly the cross I’ll bear
    Hear Thou and grant
…
    …and she remembers all at once that in all the children’s minds “Gladly the cross I’ll bear” became “Gladly the cross-eyed
     bear,” in much the same way that “Round yon virgin” in “Silent Night” became a chubby little man whose name was John Virgin,
     or “Lead on, O king eternal” in yet another hymn became “Lead on, O Kinky Turtle.” And suddenly she thinks Oh, God, a whole
line
of stuffed toys, starting with the Cross-Eyed Bear and going from there to the Kinky Turtle and Round John and who knows
what
other characters I might find in the malaprop depths of rural America!
    She rolls the fire truck to one side of the table, opens a pad, and begins sketching, starting with the outline of the bear’s
     head, tilted to one side, and then filling in the crossed eyes and the silly little grin under its black triangular nose—
    And here she shows the original drawing to the Court:

    “I would like to offer Ms. Commins’s drawing in evidence, Your Honor.”
    “Any objections?”
    “None.”
    Lainie makes some twenty drawings of the bear that night, working feverishly from the moment of inspiration to one in the
     morning, and she goes to sleep exhausted but content until she wakes up in the middle of the night with her eyes burning,
     and goes into the bathroom to put some Visine drops into them, and recalls how devastated she’d felt when the ophthalmologist
     in Birmingham reported that the second operation had not helped her condition, and standing there in the bathroom with the
     eyedropper in her