Scott Turow: The Burden of Proof

Now, examining himself in the bathroom mirrors, he found his face puffy, his eyes bloodshot and sore. For the moment he had regained some humbled remoteness, but he knew the limits of his strength. What a terrible day this would become. Terrible. He dressed fully, except for his suit coat, and made himself a single boiled egg, then sat alone, watching the glint of the sunrise enlarge on the glossy surface of the mahogany dining table, until he felt some new incision of grief beginning to knife through him.

Desperately-futilely-he tried to calm himself.

'How, he thought again, how could he have failed to notice in the bed beside him a woman who in every figurative sense was screaming in pain?

How could he be so dull, his inner ear so deafened? The signs were such, Stern knew, that even in his usual state of feverish distraction he could have taken note. Clam was normally a person of intense privacy. For years, she had made a completely personal study of Japan; he knew nothing about it except the rifles of the books that occasionally showed up on her desk. At other moments, she would read a musical score; the entire symphony would rage along inside her. Barely perceptible, her chin might drop; but not a bar, a note was so much as whispered aloud.

But this was something more. Two or three nights recently he had returned home late, preoccupied with the case he was trying-a messy racketeering conspiracy in to find Clara sitting in the dark; there was no book or magazine, not even 'the TV's vapid flickering. It was her expression that frightened him most. Not vacant. Absent. Removed. Her mouth a solemn line, her eyes hard as agates. It seemed a contemplation beyond words. There had been such spells before.

Between them, they were referred to as moods and allowed to pass. For years, he prided himself on his discretion.

Driven now, he moved restlessly about the house, holding the items she had held, examining them as if for clues. In the powder room, he touched a tortoiseshell comb, a Lilac dish, the dozen cylinders of lipstick that were lined up like shotgun shells beside the sink. My God! He squeezed one of the gold tubes in his hands as if it were an amulet.

On a narrow wig stand in the foyer, three days' mail was piled. Stern fingered the envelopes, neatly stacked. Bills, bills-they were painful to behold. These prosaic acts, visiting the cleaner or department store, humbly bespoke her hopes. On the sixth of March, Clara expected life to continue. What had intervened?

"Westlab Medical Center." Stern considered the envelope. It was directed to Clara Stern at their address. Inside, he found an invoice.

The services, identified by a computer code, had been rendered six weeks ago and were described simply as "Test." Stern was still. Then he moved directly to the kitchen, already counseling himself to reason, exerting his will powerfully to contain the.shameful outbreak of grateful feelings. But he was certain, positive, she had made no mention of doctors or of tests. Clara recorded her appointments in a leather. book beside the telephone. Luncheons. The inevitable musical occasions. The dinner dates and synagogue and bar affairs of their social life. He had brought the.bill and matched its date against the book.

"9:45 Test." He paged back and forth. On the thirteenth there was another entry. "3:30 Dr." He searched further. On the twenty-first, the same. "Dr."

"Test."

"Dr."

Cancer. Was that it? Something advanced. Had she resolved to make her departure without allowing the family to beg her, for their sake as much as hers, to undergo the oncologist's life-prolonging tortures? That would be like Clara. To declare that zone of ultima sovereignty. Her mark of dignity, decorum, intense belief was here.

Pacing, he had arrived once more in the dining room, and he heard movement on the second floor, above him. With even an instant's distraction, he felt suddenly that, for all the blind willingness with which his heart ran to this solution, he had been caught up in fantasy.

There was some explanation of these medical events more mundane, less heroic. Somehow he found the suspicion chilling. Last night, blundering about in their bathroom, searching for tissue, he had come across a bottle of hair coloring hidden in the dark corner of a drawer.

He had no idea how long she had concealed this harmless vanity. Months.

Or years? It made no difference. But mortification shuddered through him. He had the same thought now: so much he had not noticed, did not know about that person, this woman, his wife.

":Daddy?" Stern's daughter Kate, his youngest Child, was at the foot of the stairs. She was in her nightgown, a tall stalk of a young woman, slender and heartbreakingly beautiful.

"Cara," he answered. He had always used this endearment with the girls at times. Stern was still holding the lab bill, and he pressed the envelope into the back pocket of his trousers. This was not a matter to discuss with the children, not today, at any event, when the thought would foment even greater anguish, and certainly not with Kate.

Beauty, Stern suspected, had made the world too simple for Kate. She seemed to drift along, buffered by her uncommon good looks and a kindly disposition. Perhaps that apportioned blame unfairly. Much must have happened here, at home. Clara had concentrated so on Peter; Stern in turn shared a natural intensity with his older daughter, Marta.

Kate had never been irradiated by the most intense energies of the mysterious family dynamic.

As a youngster, she had.displayed the same intellectual talents as her brother and sister; and she had Clara's musical talent. But all of that had withered. In high school she had met John, a sweet, Gentile lunk, an almost laughable prototype, a football player and a paragon of blond male beauty with his apple-pie face and hapless manner. A year after college, in spite of her parents' gentle discouragement, she had married him. John started out in his father's printshop, but it was soon clear the business could not sustain two families, and so Dixon had put him to work at MD, where, after some false starts, John seemed to be making do, one more ex-jock jostling about on the playing field of the markets.

Kate herself taught school. She loved her husband with a pitiable tender innocence, but Stern at moments could feel his heart rub itself raw with worry at the prospect of the moment Kate finally learned about the wallops the world could deliver.

Now she touched his hand.

"Daddy, I want you to know something. We weren't going to say anything for another month, but everyone is so sad-" Kate's mouth trembled slightly.

Dear God, thought Stern, she is pregnant.

She lifted her face proudly. Kate said, "We're going to have a baby."

"Oh my," said Stern. He grasped her hand. "My," he said again, smiling bravely and trying to recall exactly how he would be expected to reflect his delight. He kissed her first on the temple, then took her in his arms. He did so only rarely, and here in her thin nightgown he was amazed by the feel of his daughter, her narrowness, the loose movement of her breasts against him. Kate wept with sudden abandon, then drew back.

"We couldn't say anything," she explained to her father.

"It wasn't safe yet. We'd had some problems. And now I keep thinking, What if Mommy knew?" Once more she became uncontrollable. Once more Stern took his dark, beautiful daughter in his arms. But even as he held Kate, he found there was an abrupt adjustment in his own vision of things.

Clara had abandoned the children, too. He had viewed this last act of hers as aimed exclusively at him. But the children, grown but troubled, were still not past the point where they required occasional assistance.

Would it have made a difference, had Clara known Kate's secret? Or had she decided that they too'd had the last of what she could stand to give?