Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) Read Free Page B

have trouble believing it. But here we are in a capital trial so, no, the prosecution is obligated to present evidence that will convince you not just beyond a reasonable doubt but beyond the shadow of a doubt. That’s why each and every one of you should be at work today, ladies and gentlemen, or at home with your families, going through your usual routines. Because there is no evidence in this case. Not even enough to have brought Mr. Madison to trial, let alone try him for his life.”
    I faced the jury silently as Morty continued, faced these twelve women and men who, I felt certain, were quite prepared to kill me. It was obvious to me that they despised me, and I knew precisely the cause of their hostility. For wasn’t it just such windy professors as myself who’d poisoned their children with atheism or socialism or worse, who’d infused their previously unsullied minds with dreamy fantasies of changing the world or writing a great novel, while at the same time teaching them not one skill by which they might later find employment and thus avoid returning to their parents’ homes to sit sullenly in front of the television, boiling with unrealizable hopes?
    How odd that I was to be judged by these people, I thought, as I allowed my gaze to drift over to the jury, all of them dressed neatly and with quite somber expressions on their faces. How many had I passed on the street or glimpsed in the park with no anticipation that they might ever have any power over me, much less the awesome one they now possessed?
    To the extent that I’d thought of them at all, it had been as characters in some Coburnite version of the Spoon River Anthology. There’d even been times when I’d sat in the park or on the town square and made up gravestone poems about the people passing by, cynical little rhymes that Sandrine had rarely found amusing, and in the midst of which she’d sometimes risen and walked some distance away.
    What had she been thinking at those moments, I wondered suddenly, and on that question I once again saw her lift her eyes from that study of Iago: cynics make good murderers . Could Sandrine have sensed something dangerous in my mocking quips, I wondered, and had her sudden rising and walking away from me been only the first small steps toward the final, isolating distance she’d imposed upon me during the last weeks of her life?
    She’d changed so much during those last months, I recalled as I returned my gaze to the front of the courtroom. She’d become so quiet, so still, at least until that last smoldering night when her fury had boiled over and she’d actually thrown a cup at me. Prior to that night, and because she was still so young and because there is nothing more infuriating than bad luck, I’d expected her to rage against death, rather than against me, but she’d exploded like a roadside bomb, her fury so fierce it had finally driven me from the house.
    Things had been very different before that night, however. In fact, during that last week, a gravity had settled over her, so that I’d often found her sitting in complete silence, no longer reading or listening to music but simply, darkly thinking . Had it been in the midst of one of those sessions of deep thought that she had come to some monstrous judgment on her life? Is this what I had seen in that little sunroom, Sandrine wrestling with her past as her future closed, coming to grips with the cruelest of her “bottom lines”: that she could not add a single second to the clock, the one precious second that would have allowed time for her to . . . what?
    In Sandrine’s case, I had to confess that I simply didn’t know.
    On that thought, and quite suddenly, while Morty continued his opening argument, I recalled Sandrine’s suggestion that we retrace our first trip together, make it our second honeymoon.
    â€œLet’s book a trip around the Mediterranean, Sam,”