James PATTERSON - Alex Cross’s Trial

I was wearing short pants, but Mama was “dressed for town” – a lacy flowing dress that swept the ground, a sky blue shawl with dark blue fringe, and her ever-present wide-brimmed straw hat. A boy always thinks of his mother as pretty, but on that afternoon, I remember, she seemed to be shining.

Our chore that day was to pick up eighteen yards of blue velvet Mama had ordered from Sam Jenkins’ Mercantile for new dining room curtains.

“Mornin’, Sam.”

“Why, good morning, Miz Corbett,” he said. “Don’t you look nice today.”

“Thank you.”

For Mama, that was mighty few words to utter. I turned to look at her, but she seemed all right.

Sam Jenkins stood there peering at her too. “Is there something I can help you with, Miz Corbett?”

“Yeah,” she said, “Sham. Oh. Excuse me.”

Something was wrong. Why was my mother slurring her words?

“Did you come to pick up that fabric, Miz Corbett?” said Sam. Instead of answering, Mama squinted hard and rubbed the front of her head.

“Miz Corbett? You all right?”

Silence from my mother. Only a puzzled gaze.

Then that slurred, weak voice again.

“When doesh shoe… when…”

“Miz Corbett, have you been… have you been drinking? ”

Mama shook her head slowly and kept rubbing her forehead. I felt the blood flush through my body.

“Don’t be shilly. I sh… I… don’t…”

I spoke very quietly. “Mama, what’s wrong with you?”

“Ben, you better take your mama home now. Looks like she may have had a little touch o’ the grape.” He forced a laugh.

“My mama never drinks. She must be sick.”

“I’m afraid she is, son. Whiskey sick.”

Suddenly my mother’s knees buckled. She drooped over to one side and then fell to the floor with a heavy thud.

Sam Jenkins turned to the back of his store. “Henry, come up here! I got a lady passed out drunk on the floor.”

FROM SEPARATE DIRECTIONS CAME two teenage boys. One was white, with red hair. The bigger one was black, as tall as he was skinny.

“Y’all help this boy take his mama out of here,” Sam Jenkins said.

The white boy leaned down to Mama and tried to lift her. She was small, but he couldn’t find the right angle to maneuver her into a standing position.

“Marcus, you gonna help me?”

“Mist’ Sam, I think this lady sick,” said the black kid.

“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Mr. Jenkins. “Just get her out of the store!”

They lifted my mother up and carried her out to the sidewalk, where they set her on a bench near the watering trough.

“Shit. She ain’t sick,” said the redheaded boy. “She’s drunk as a monkey.”

I was trying my best not to cry, but I couldn’t stop the tears blurring my eyes. I was helpless and small, and something was terribly, terribly wrong with my mother. I believed that she might die right there.

The white boy disappeared back into the store, shaking his mop of red hair in disgust.

Then Marcus spoke very softly to me. “Want to hep me carry her down to the doctor?”

I remember nothing of how we got my mother to Dr. Hunter’s house. I do remember hearing the doctor say, “Louellen isn’t drunk. This is apoplexy. She’s had a stroke, Ben. I’m so sorry.”

I burst into tears.

Later on, when I understood what the doctor’s words really meant, I wished Mama had been drunk. Everything in our lives was so different from then on. The next day she was in a wheelchair and looked twenty years older. Eventually she regained her ability to speak, but she left that chair only when she was lifted into the washtub or her bed.

She wrote a few poems about her condition – “A View from a Moving Chair” and “Words You May Not Understand” were the most famous ones – but she was always weak and often distracted.

To my surprise, she sometimes enjoyed talking about that day in Jenkins’s store. She would laugh at the idea that she had been mistaken for a drunk, but she always repeated the lesson she had learned that day: “Just remember one thing, Ben. That was a black boy who helped us. He was the only one who helped.”

I did as she instructed. I remembered it through grammar school, high school, college, and law school. I remembered it whenever colored people came to my office in Washington with worried faces and tears in their eyes, asking for my help.

But sometimes I couldn’t help them. The way I couldn’t help Grace Johnson.

I rested the neck of the banjo against my arm and began to pick out the notes of “Bethena,” the saddest rag Joplin ever wrote. Every note in that jaunty, quick tune is minor, every shading of the melody is dark.

For all that, it made me feel better – a little homesick, maybe, but what’s so wrong with that?

I HEARD THE CLICK of the front door, then the happy, giggly sounds of Amelia and Alice hurrying inside.

This was followed by Meg’s icy voice.

“Say a quick hello to your father, girls. Then wash up for supper.”

Amelia poked her head through the parlor door, a happy little angel of seven in a red-and-white gingham sundress, shortly followed by Alice, another helping of strawberry short-cake in an identical outfit.

Those dresses were the only thing identical about the girls. Although they were twins, they barely looked like sisters.

Amelia was small, with fine, dark, beautiful features exactly like her mother’s. Alice was taller, blond and lanky, and had the misfortune of taking after her father, though I will say that our family looks had settled better on her face than on mine.

“Remind me again which one of you is which,” I said with a stern expression.

“Daddy, you know, ” said Amelia. Alice squealed in delight.

“No, I’ve completely forgotten. How am I supposed to be able to tell the difference when you look exactly alike?”

To Amelia, that was a scream.

Meg walked into the front hall. “Come along, girls. You heard what I said.”

I pointed at Alice. “Oh, now I remember. You are… Amelia.” And then, pointing at Amelia, “So that means you must be Alice.”

“And you must be Mommy!” Amelia pointed at me, giggling at her own cleverness. Was there any sweeter sound in the world?

I knelt down and kissed her, then her sister, and gathered them both for a big daddy-hug.

“Where have you two been causing trouble today?”

In a ridiculously loud stage whisper Alice said: “We’re not allowed to say… but we were hiding in church.”

Meg called again, with the business end of her voice: “Girls!”

“Mama says you’re in trouble,” Amelia reported. “She says you’re in the doghouse.”

“And we don’t even have a dog!” Alice crowed with laughter.

“Girls!” That voice brooked no nonsense.

They ran from my arms.

I WILL NEVER FORGET the rest of that evening, not a moment of it. Not a detail has been lost on me.

“You and I are living in two different marriages, Ben. It’s the truth, a sad truth. I’ll admit it,” said Meg.

I was flabbergasted by this announcement from my wife of nearly eleven years. We were sitting in the parlor on the uncomfortable horsehair sofa Meg’s father had given us as a wedding gift. We had just finished an awkward supper.

“Two different marriages? That’s a tough statement, Meg.”

“I meant it to be, Ben. When I was at Radcliffe and you were at Harvard I used to look at you and think, Now, this is the man I could always be with. I honestly believed that. So I waited for you while you went to law school. All the time you were at Columbia, in New York, I was wasting away at my father’s house. Then I waited some more, while you went to Cuba and fought in that war that none of us understood.”