Bright Young Women(103)
These were not things that the girls would have talked about unless they were compelled to under oath. They wouldn’t have wanted people to pity them or think they were complaining. Nobody liked a complainer, and we wanted so much for people to think well of us.
A grisly day of tearful testimony, Carl’s story would read the next morning, but still no word from the state’s only eyewitness.
I waited around all day as the witnesses were led into the courtroom by the bailiff, one by one, until it was just me, acid-mouthed from drinking too much of the putrid courthouse coffee.
“Won’t you sit, Pamela?” Eileen begged four hours in. “You’re making me nervous.”
But I couldn’t risk wrinkling my dress. The judge was allowing cameras in the courtroom, and it seemed a matter of life or death that no one caught the star witness without so much as a hair out of place.
In the end it didn’t matter, because court was adjourned and the bailiff was telling me it was time to go home, reminding me not to read the papers or watch the news until I had testified. Tina would collect all the headlines from that week and save them for me to read, something I wouldn’t do until well after the trial ended, out of some bizarre sense of superstition.
I walked through the lobby on tiptoe, straining my eyes to locate Mr. Pearl. Why hadn’t I been called to the stand? I was scheduled to fly back to New York the following morning. Did I need to change my flight? I was externing at a firm in Midtown that summer, and I’d used all of my excused absences to make the trip for the trial.
“Pamela!” Mr. Pearl had found me first. I turned to see him hurrying toward me at a forward-leaning angle, as if walking uphill, his briefcase latched but corners of paper sticking out of the seams. I focused on those shards of papers, a pit in my stomach. He had closed it in a hurry.
“You need to go back to your hotel room,” he said the moment he was within earshot, “and not watch the news or read anything, and just wait to hear from me. Can you do that?” He put one hand on my shoulder in a consoling gesture.
“Yes, but—”
“I have to get to Judge Lambert’s chambers. Right now. But I need you to do that for me. Okay?”
I nodded. Okay. “But my flight is tomorrow and—”
“Don’t change it for now.”
Panic constricted my lungs. Don’t change it? “But if I don’t change my flight, I won’t be able to give my testimony.”
Mr. Pearl squeezed my shoulder harder, not comfortingly but out of frustration. “Please, just—I’ll explain as soon as I can.”
I watched him go, my shoulder throbbing.
* * *
I did the five-minute walk back to my hotel in three and a half. I kept picturing the phone in my room ringing before I could get there and taking wild risks—darting out into the street despite the traffic officer’s open hand. “Watch it, lady!” he shouted over the furious percussion I left in my wake.
About the only time the hotel lobby was quiet was in the late afternoon, after court adjourned. The lookie-loos were mostly locals and members of the press dispatched to the ninth floor, the makeshift site of their serpentine media center, to edit down their coverage in time for the evening news. So I noticed the woman right away. She was plump, with a practical wash-and-go haircut, sitting on one of the lobby couches with her hands folded in her lap, her thumbs going round and round, managing to look impatient and nervous all at once. When I came flying through the doors, she stood and intercepted my path.
“Excuse me,” she said in this entitled way, as though I’d stepped on her foot and needed to apologize at once. I’d ignored the hand signals of a traffic cop, body-swerved moving vehicles on a busy city street, but here was finally an obstacle to thwart me. This was the confusing, potent presence of Shirley Wachowsky. Ruth’s mother.
RUTH
Issaquah
July 14, 1974
It was fifteen fiery miles from Tina’s house in Clyde Hill to Issaquah Catholic, the wintry conifers gone still in the heat, too spent to sway. By the time I arrived, I had wet rings under my arms, one shade darker than Tina’s navy shift. Rebecca gave me a spacious hug, leaving plenty of room for the Holy Spirit between our pelvises, and informed me I was clammy. My brother achieved an even more distant, one-armed embrace, smashing my niece between us. She grabbed my finger in her sticky hand and examined it with orbed eyes, mesmerized by what she’d found. Allen stared at my clear skin and my Italian leather sandals suspiciously before taking off to play with some cousins in the circular pattern of the grass, cut for us first thing that morning, my mother announced self-importantly. The purple hydrangeas in my father’s garden had bloomed a feminine shade of pink; this seemed to be his way of foiling her color scheme from up above. She had dressed like a giant grape, hoping to match him, but now she just looked like a giant grape.
“I took the liberty of copying down a few lines of Scripture that might be nice for you to say,” my mother said, pressing a wilted sheet of paper into my hand. She didn’t usually speak like this—Scripture—but Sister Dennis and Father Evans were standing right there, looking itchy in their wool habits and stiff collars. What would they say if I told them we didn’t even keep a Bible in the house? That my mother must have gone to the library or asked a neighbor to borrow their copy? That, as a very last resort, she would have gone to church?