“I understand your point of view,” Mr. Fraley said to Frank, “but it doesn’t matter. They’ll make her wish she’d just accepted an apology and never bothered to sue. It’s a lawyer’s job to wear people down.”
That was eight months ago. She hadn’t liked the lawyers, Misters Fraley and Paul, in the beginning. But she respected them now. They’d been right about everything. The defense lawyers and the newsmen, who didn’t appreciate her counterattack against the yellow press, had done all they could to stifle her determination. Already she was more tired than she’d ever been in her life, and this was less than a year into the lawsuits, a process her lawyers predicted could last four to five years, even longer.
“You’ll get through this,” Frank said. “Look at all you’ve overcome in this decade alone.”
He didn’t understand that the wear was cumulative. Of course, it shouldn’t have been. One was meant to get stronger, to learn from every crisis, to build an ever thicker shell. That was indeed how the first half of her life had felt: an accretion of layers, a stoicism, a set of tricks for dealing with stage-door Johnnies and everyday boors, another set of tricks for holding off the competition and demanding one’s right to remain in the limelight. But since . . . when? . . . perhaps early in her forties, something had changed. Frank would always blame the train crash. It was an easy event to point to. Everyone could see the pain caused by broken ribs, a twisted back. No one could doubt the physical toll.
But Annie knew it was an entire series of blows, none of which could be entirely separated: first, the accident and the tricks it had played on her mind; next and unrelated, but equally injurious, the malicious headlines; and finally, the trials themselves. Each by itself might have been mere nuisance, a bee sting. The sum total was something else: a swarming attack. This was what it meant not only to age, but to fall from grace. To have your face pushed down in the mud, or worse.
At her very first trial, in Scranton, the defense lawyer had taunted her. “You’re the woman who used to shoot out here and run along and turn head over heels, allowing your skirts to fall.”
“I beg your pardon,” Annie replied without emotion. “I didn’t allow my skirts to fall.”
At that moment, she’d allowed herself to look out at the jury, expecting sympathy, moderation and intelligence. But the first among them who caught her eye had none of those traits. He was a pale, narrow-faced man with poorly cut hair, a slack jaw and black eyes, staring right at her. He seemed to be looking for signs that she was part of the underworld, a drug fiend, a performer in a “leg show” or something equally ridiculous. Annie stared back at the man as long as she dared, expecting him to blink and look away. But he wouldn’t. Instead, he noticed her looking and leered—a fleshy-lipped halfway smile. She leaned back in her chair, heart pounding. He looked familiar, but so many of them did. Maybe it was the mouth. Maybe the beady gleam of his eyes. She could imagine his hands on her wrists. She could imagine—remember—his smell. The man she’d never forget. The man who wasn’t a man at all, but an animal.
The defense lawyer asked her again, “Didn’t you turn handsprings?”
“I am the lady who shot, but I didn’t turn handsprings.”
Later, her lawyer would say that she looked unflappable. But she hadn’t felt it. She’d barely managed to find the words. Her heart had trilled so fast, it felt as if she’d had a pigeon caged inside her ribs.
The first trial had been in November. Now it was April. But even after those months, as she found her way to the farthest edge of the dark train platform, that juror’s face remained with her. Thirty-three years had gone by since the chapter of her childhood about which she seldom spoke. The juror shouldn’t matter, but he did. There were dozens more trials still to come. People whispering. Men staring, assuming.
She tilted her hat low over her eyes in the hopes that no one would recognize her as she waited for the train doors to open. She had an all-day trip home to New Jersey ahead. But she didn’t want to go home, even with Frank waiting there for her, already knowing the first argument they’d have. She had an idea that would upset him: Europe, a quick trip to get away from it all. The trials were unevenly spaced—sometimes only weeks apart, more often months. The steamer would take a week or longer, she might spend ten days in England or the continent, and finally another week back. With Frank if he truly understood. Alone if he didn’t.
Perhaps she would find a spa, some place with hot springs and minerals that would leach away whatever was ailing her. Perhaps she’d find a doctor. In America, she didn’t dare buy cough syrup or a tin of herbal tea, lest the reporters would twist it into more evidence that she was a drug addict. In Europe, she could see someone confidentially. But would that help?
She checked the train station clock. Why must everything run late? But it wasn’t yet. She was simply getting anxious.
She pulled up the edges of her collar and tugged the lapels of her heavy wool coat, trying to create a barrier against the cold that no one else on the platform seemed to feel. They were all dressed for spring. She was shivering, but perhaps that was because of the meals she kept skipping. On many of these trial days, she fasted, too upset to eat.
A European doctor. Perhaps he could give her something for her ailments.
She had occasional headaches. But that wasn’t enough reason to consult a medical expert. Really, what bothered her most were the images that flashed through her mind. They’d started three years ago at the time of the train crash, the full terror and strangeness of which she’d confided to no one. But after several months of unhealthy rumination, she’d gotten control of them. Her life seemed to be on track. She’d appeared as herself in an East Coast stage drama that, while hackneyed in terms of plot, was successful enough to run for several months. At one performance, she’d fallen from her horse. The press enjoyed that—any chance to see her fail. She’d avoided injury, but she had to admit that her mind had been wandering. She’d been thinking about the crash, or more specifically, the minutes after. And with even more intensity, the minutes before, working her way backward through increasingly vivid reencounters with every sensation before the collision, looking for the limit to her strange immersions in those prolonged and exceedingly lifelike moments—a limit she hadn’t yet found.
And then came the ridiculous Hearst lies, completely unrelated to anything that had happened before. Just another bit of extremely bad luck. The recovery she’d made over three years was now without purpose, for this had stalled her career yet again. She had gone forward a step and back two—more than two, because sources of unresolved bitterness had been dredged back up, a black scum painting the lining of her defective soul. The images began to return, fed by anger, frustration, the parallels between the worst moments in her life and this one: having no control over a man who would ruin her. She felt pursued by inappropriate thoughts, a muddled temptation to indulge the memories, to deepen the pain, as if pressing on a bruise or reopening a barely healed cut.