After the ‘victims,’ the government next calls several of the attending physicians, who testify to their utter mystification about what was happening to their patients. There are points for cross-examination, but they can all be made with the pathologist whom the government will call next. Stern and Marta know from prior experience they have an opportunity to gain some ground with Dr. Rogers, and their hope is that the government is forced to call her before Sonny recesses the trial for today. But the judge adjourns after the last doctor climbs down. The first day of evidence in United States v. Pafko concludes with the prosecutors far ahead.
8. Paint
Facing his first long trial in years, Stern had known his energy could not possibly match what it once was, but he is shocked by how drained he is after court. He’s done little more than watch today, but even so, the high-tension focus the courtroom requires, combined with the drama of yesterday, has sapped him. His synapses, neurons—wherever it is that thought forms—are too fatigued to function. He even feels a few feathery traces of the tachycardia that besets him now and then and concerns Al, his internist. Stern has promised Marta and himself he will not be heroic when he wears down. After a word to Kiril, then his daughter, Stern summons Ardent and is soon in the Cadillac on the way home to the West Bank. He is well prepared for tomorrow’s crosses and he can review any materials he needs by remote connection from home. It is better to rest in advance.
After Helen and Stern were married in 1990, both sold the houses, less than a mile apart, where they’d raised their children with their first spouses. Together they bought this place, a one-floor brick cottage with a shake roof. It has a nice master suite, an updated kitchen, a guest wing to encourage visits from out-of-town children, and the large garden Helen loved to tend. Pregnant, if unspoken, was the realization that they were both likely to die here. Now that mission is half accomplished.
Having been widowed once before, there is a disconcerting familiarity to the vacancy Stern experiences whenever he enters the empty house. He knows how to turn on several TVs so there is a burble of background noise, how to swim through the occasional disconnected sensations of already being a ghost, just lurking here on earth. Helen’s departure, like Clara’s, had come with no warning. He woke one day as a married person and by noon was alone. Helen died of a cerebral aneurysm on the elliptical at the community health club. Is it somewhat easier because he has been through this before? Perhaps, on some level, he accepted the impermanence that’s implicit in any second marriage. After Clara’s suicide, he had been shipwrecked. But that was suicide. Now his grief feels more prolonged. With Stern’s cancer there had been a period of mourning, of leave-taking, between Helen and him, but then g-Livia had worked its miracle. Now he can only hope Helen felt his intense gratitude to her for the brilliant light, the real joy, she had shone into his life.
Once through the door, Stern barely has the strength to stagger to the living room. Helen came into the marriage with an ill-trained little dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Gomer, and when the pooch died he was quickly replaced by Gomer II and now Gomer III. Unlike his predecessors, Gomer III did not bare his teeth at Stern when he approached Helen, but the dog was largely as proprietary of his mistress as the others. The only recognition Stern ever made of the unlikely event of Helen passing first was insisting, before Gomer III came from the rescue shelter, that his wife recruit someone else to take the dog if Stern survived her. But Gomer is too high-strung to be trusted around Helen’s grandchildren. To his unending chagrin, Stern has been left with the animal, who gives every indication of blaming him for Helen’s disappearance. He feeds Gomer III every morning and each night, and with Pinky’s help continues to arrange for the walkers and groomers. In return, he receives next to no gratitude. Gomer wags his little whip of a tail now, but only because he expects his evening victuals.
Stern drops his briefcase and pours a finger of scotch, then falls into the black Herman Miller chair that looks out on Helen’s garden, a wreck again this year without her tender hand. He does not know how long he has been asleep when he is awakened by Pinky rattling through the kitchen.
“Dinner, Pops? Did you eat?”
In the fog of waking, he actually needs a moment to recall.
“Soup?” Pinky’s culinary skills are limited, but he seldom has an appetite at night. Chef Boyardee is good enough as a prop for his efforts at conversation with Pinky.
Stern is still unsure if it is accurate to say Pinky lives here. Within the family, Pinky tended to have two principal defenders, Stern and Helen. Stern’s love for his granddaughter exceeds his understanding. It is simply there in his heart, and Helen, a partner who always understood what was essential to him, took up Pinky’s cause as her own. For several years, Helen had encouraged Pinky to use the guest wing here as a landing spot when, as always seemed to happen, she reached the end of a live-in relationship of roughly six months’ duration with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Stern was always secretly elated by her unannounced return. With no warning, she would drift into the kitchen around eight thirty a.m., grab something from the refrigerator, and let him know that she would like a ride to work. Given that pattern, Stern was shocked a few months back when he heard Pinky say offhandedly in the office, ‘I’m sort of taking care of my grandfather these days.’
Stern’s children had undoubtedly encouraged her. Pinky might not be long on practical skills, but she could go to the grocery store, do the laundry, and dial 911 when, as will someday happen, she finds her grandfather collapsed on the kitchen floor. Being Pinky, however, she still disappears for days without warning.
They eat their soup together at the breakfast bar in the kitchen as Pinky flips through messages on her phone. Gomer, who clearly has more affection for her than for Stern, plops down at her feet.
“And what did you make of today’s court proceedings?” Stern asks when she appears to be resting her thumbs. Pinky does not always hear what is said to her, but this time she shakes her head dolefully.
“I thought you stomped it yesterday, Pops, but today—” She stops. A fine athlete like her father, a former Division I football player, Pinky had been a competitive snowboarder until a fractured vertebra put an abrupt end to her hopes for a college scholarship. She still reverts often to boarders’ lingo. “Today, I thought they marched all over Pafko’s ass. Is it gonna be like that every day?”
“I expect not, Pinky. I believe we have quite a bit to say for Kiril.”
“That’s good,” she says. “But he’s guilty, right?”
Stern actually finds himself offended for his client’s sake. Has she been listening to her Aunt Marta?
“Pinky, why would you say that?” It would be unlike Pinky to have made a rigorous evaluation of the evidence.
“No, I mean, the defendant’s always guilty. I mean, I was always guilty.”
While Pinky was in high school, Stern appeared in court in behalf of his granddaughter so often after drug arrests, which increased in frequency after she broke her back, that he would grimly joke about having to jettison the rest of his practice. Finally, he found himself sharing with her a hard-learned lesson: In life there are those who get away with things and others who don’t. Pinky’s natural defiance puts her in the second group.