Steve Martini - The Jury

He is wearing a pair of white painter’s overalls, bits of sawdust on one shoulder that he has missed in brushing off. Some splotches of what look like dried glue on one pant leg.

Frank is a finish carpenter. He is an artist with wood. He has shoulders like a linebacker and forearms like Popeye. The man can move beams the size of tree trunks, notch and carve them into place single-handedly, with nothing but a hand-cranked come-along to hold the weight while he dangles from a ladder: the kind of guy you would want on your side if you had to go to war.

In another life, he’d been a teacher until he learned he couldn’t stand the confinement of the classroom. Frank took a job as a woodworker’s apprentice in a shipyard and over six years he mastered the skills of a shipwright, finishing the interiors of yachts, until the federal luxury tax crushed the industry and threw him out of work. Ever resilient, he started his own business, and for the past fourteen years has worked by hiring himself out to contractors on large homes that require an artist to finish the wood.

It runs in his blood, independence and art. I have seen charcoal and pencil drawings of his children framed in the hallway of their modest home. Doris tells me that these are Frank’s work. He had taken anatomy courses to better understand the articulation of the human body, how it moved and functioned. He now produces drawings-drawings with such a flourish of confidence one might think they were ripped from the sketch pad of da Vinci. It causes me to wonder what might have been, had he turned to oils or other media. Doubtless he would have been no more affluent. Unfortunately for Frank, he is also hobbled by the mercantile tin ear of the artist. He has no sense of his own worth.

Like a vagabond he now travels in his beat-up Volkswagen van, a sixties-vintage van, working on its third engine and for which the only spare parts can be found in wrecking yards. The rear springs sag under the load, tools of his trade assembled and collected over thirty years. Chisels and power saws, miters for angles and small curved handsaws of Japanese steel mail-ordered from Asia. He uses these for cuts of microscopic precision. I am told that he has assembled whole staircases in homes that might qualify as castles, only to dismantle the entire structure, risers, treads and railings, just to shave a little more wood until the pieces fit like the parts in a puzzle. Frank’s signature in wood is perfection.

He is an addict when it comes to to his craft. He will drive a thousand miles in the broken-down van with his ladders on top to labor for a month on a log mansion in the wilds of Montana, for some eastern investment broker with the palace appetite of the Medicis. For Frank, it is the work, not the client, that is critical. It is not difficult for a man like this to find himself laboring at art for which he will not be paid. The fact that contractors will hunt Frank down for these special jobs is a testament to his skill, even if what he receives barely covers his gas. He is today’s equivalent of the ancient metal smith hammering gold on a pharaoh’s mask. No one will ever know his name, even as they marvel at his craft.

Today the dust on his work clothes reflects the dull pallor of his face, which is lined with deep furrows as if some gnome had pulled a plowshare through the gullies under his eyes. I would bet he hasn’t shaved in three days, five-o’clock shadow gone to seed. He has lost forty pounds in the months since our last meeting, so that I have to re-calibrate the register of my recognition before I am sure I have the right person.

What passes for a smile these days edges across his face and then is gone just as quickly. He gets out of the chair and moves forward slowly, down the center aisle, then sidles sideways across the front row of chairs on the other side of the bar railing to approach.

“Frank. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

He extends a hand and we shake, somewhat shy. His large hand engulfs my own so that I have the feeling that it has been closed in a sandpaper glove. The flesh of his hands is tough enough to grind glass.

There has always been some social distance between us; Frank the blue-collar man, Paul the lawyer. He is constrained by self-imposed social divisions of another era. I suspect that doctors would unnerve him, like talking to God. For Frank, this would be an added point of stress in dealing with his daughter’s illness.

“Been a long time,” he says.

“It could have been under better circumstances.” I motion with my head toward the judge’s bench and smile.

“Tough day?” he asks.

“They’re all tough. You know my partner, Harry Hinds?”

“Don’t think we’ve met,” says Frank.

Harry gives him a mystified look and offers his hand.

“Frank Boyd. Harry Hinds.”

They shake hands, and Harry finally connects the name. “Oh, you’re the little girl’s. .” then catches himself.

“Right. Her father.” There is something about Boyd that brings to mind the actor William Devane. It is in the sad-sack eyes, and the face that seldom changes expression, as if the load of life were simply too oppressive to permit any real relief. It is the look of a man who is not allowed emotionally to come up for air, who is quietly drowning.

“How’s Doris?” I ask.

“Oh, good. Good. She’s tough.”

And then the inevitable: “Penny?”

At this he gives me an expression, sort of turns away. “Not too bad,” he says: the big lie. What he means is, not too bad for a child who is dying.

“I need to talk to you,” he says. “If you have a minute.”

“Sure. You want to do it here? I’m finished for the day.”

He looks around a little at the room, daunting formality, walnut railings and fixed theater chairs. “Maybe we could get a drink,” he says. “I’ll buy.”

Harry offers to clean up, to haul our files back to the office. He has hired some enterprising teenager with a hand truck and a van in the mornings and afternoons to help us with the cardboard transfer boxes filled with documents. These seem to propagate like rodents as the trial goes on.

Harry and I check signals for the morning, then Boyd and I take off. It is clear that Frank is suffering from more nervous agitation than usual this afternoon. When you know someone as I’ve known him, not intimately but through periods of calm and frenzy, it becomes obvious when there is a favor to ask and the person is uneasy about asking it.

He follows a half step behind me, across State Street, to the Grill at the Wyndham Emerald Plaza. Frank is uncomfortable here and shows it.

“I’m not dressed for this,” he tells me.

“Don’t worry about it.”

I suspect he’s wondering whether he has enough in his pocket to spring for the drink he has offered. Though Frank has all the work he can handle, I suspect that he and Doris have never made more than fifty thousand in a single year.

Doris held a seasonal part-time job with a small company for a while, but had to give it up when Penny became too sick for day care.

We shuttle between tables as the after-work crowd starts to settle in for drinks and embellishments on the day’s war stories: secretaries on the flirt, young lawyers on the make. The only ones you won’t find in here are the bondsmen from bail row a block away. They are too busy making money chasing tomorrow’s clients.

We find a table in the back, dim light and wood relief. I order a glass of wine, the house Chablis, and give the waitress my credit card to start a tab. Frank argues with me, but it is halfhearted. He accepts a drink, orders a beer, Bud, and thanks me.

He is a big man, sinewy and strong as a bull. He is a full inch or more taller than I am, even sitting here, hunched over the table.