Sara Paretsky - A Woman’s Eye

The table was silenced for a moment: we were surprised by the violent edge to Lotty’s anger. Penelope Herschel shook her head slightly at Servino,

He caught her eye and nodded. “Sorry, Lotty. I didn’t mean to upset you so much.”

Lotty forced herself to smile. “Paul, you think you develop a veneer after thirty years as a doctor. You think you see people in all their pain and that your professionalism protects you from too much feeling. But that girl was fifteen. She had her life in front of her. She didn’t want to have a baby. And her mother wanted her to. Not for religious reasons, even-she’s English with all their contempt for Catholicism. But because she hoped to continue to control her daughter’s life. Claudia felt overwhelmed by her mother’s pressure and swallowed a jar of oven cleaner. Now don’t tell me the mother is not responsible. I do not give one damn if no court would try her: to me, she caused her daughter’s death as surely as if she had poured the poison into her.”

Servino ignored another slight headshake from Lotty’s niece. “It is a tragedy. But a tragedy for the mother, too. You don’t think she meant her daughter to kill herself, do you, Lotty?”

Lotty gave a tense smile. “What goes on in the unconscious is surely your department, Paul, But perhaps that was Mrs. Hampton’s wish. Of course, if she didn’t intend for Claudia to die, the courts would find her responsibility diminished. Am I not right, Vic?”

I moved uneasily in my chair. I didn’t want to referee this argument: it had all the earmarks of the kind of domestic fight where both contestants attack the police. Besides, while the rest of the dinner party was interested in the case and sympathetic to Lotty’s feelings, none of them cared about the question of legal versus moral responsibility.

The dinner was in honor of Lotty Herschel’s niece Penelope, making one of her periodic scouting forays intoChicago’s fashion scene. Her father-Lotty’s only brother-owned a chain of high-priced women’s dress shops in Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto. He was thinking of making Chicago his US beachhead, and Penelope was out looking at locations as well as previewing the Chicago designers’ spring ideas.

Lotty usually gave a dinner for Penelope when she was in town. Servino was always invited. An analyst friend of Lotty’s, he and Penelope had met on one of her first buying trips to Chicago. Since then, they’d seen as much of each other as two busy professionals half a continent apart could manage. Although their affair now had five years of history to it, Penelope continued to stay with Lotty when she was in town.

The rest of the small party included Max Loewenthal, the executive director of Beth Israel, where Lotty treated perinatal patients, and Chaim Lemke, a clarinetist with the Aeolus Woodwind Quintet. A slight, melancholy man, he had met Lotty and Max in London, where they’d all been refugees. Chaim’s wife, Greta, who played harpsichord and piano for an early music group, didn’t come along. Lotty said not to invite her because she was seeing Paul professionally, but anyway, since she was currently living with Aeolus oboist Rudolph Strayarn, she probably wouldn’t have accepted.

We were eating at my apartment. Lotty had called earlier in the day, rattled by the young girl’s death and needing help putting the evening together. She was so clearly beside herself that I’d felt compelled to offer my own place. With cheese and fruit after dinner Lotty had begun discussing the case with the whole group, chiefly expressing her outrage with a legal system that let Mrs. Hampton off without so much as a warning.

For some reason Servino continued to argue the point despite Penelope’s warning frowns. Perhaps the fact that we were on our third bottle of Barolo explained the lapse from Paul’s usual sensitive courtesy.

“Mrs. Hampton did not point a gun at the girl’s head and force her to become pregnant,” he said. “The daughter was responsible, too, if you want to use that word. And the boy-the father, whoever that was.”

Lotty, normally abstemious, had drunk her share of the wine. Her black eyes glittered and her Viennese accent became pronounced.

“I know the argument, believe you me, Paul: it’s the old ‘who pulled the trigger?’-the person who fired the gun, the person who manufactured it, the person who created the situation, the parents who created the shooter. To me, that is Scholastic hairsplitting-you know, all that crap they used to teach us a thousand years ago in Europe. Who is the ultimate cause, the immediate cause, the sufficient cause and on and on.

“It’s dry theory, not life. It takes people off the hook for their own actions. You can quote Heinz Kohut and the rest of the self-psychologists to me all night, but you will never convince me that people are unable to make conscious choices for their actions or that parents are not responsible for how they treat their children. It’s the same thing as saying the Nazis were not responsible for how they treated Europe.”

Penelope gave a strained smile. She loved both Lotty and Servino and didn’t want either of them to make fools of themselves. Max, on the other hand, watched Lotty affectionately-he liked to sec her passionate. Chaim was staring into space, his lips moving. I assumed he was reading a score in his head.

“I would say that,” Servino snapped, his own Italian accent strong. “And don’t look at me as though I were Joseph Goebbeb. Chaim and I are ten years younger than you and Max, but we share your story in great extent. I do not condone or excuse the horrors our families suffered, or our own dispossession. But I can look at Himmler, or Mussolini, or even Hitler and say, they behaved in such and such a way because of weaknesses accentuated in them by history, by their parents, by their culture. You could as easily say the French were responsible, the French because their need for-for- rappresaglia -what am I trying to say, Victoria?”

“Reprisal,” I supplied.

“Now you see, Lotty, now I, too, am angry: I forget my English… But if they and the English had not stretched Germany with reparations, the situation might have been different. So how can you claim responsibility-for one person, or one nation? You just have to do the best you can with what is going on around you.”

Lotty’s face was set. “Yes, Paul. I know what you are saying. Yes, the French created a situation. And the English wished to accommodate Hitler. And the Americans would not take in the Jews. All these things are true. But the Germans chose, nonetheless. They could have acted differently. I will not take them off the hook just because other people should have acted differently.”

I took her hand and squeezed it. “At the risk of being the Neville Chamberlain in the case, could I suggest some appeasement? Chaim brought his clarinet and Max his violin. Paul, if you’ll play the piano, Penelope and I will sing.”

Chaim smiled, relaxing the sadness in his thin face. He loved making music, whether with friends or professionals. “Gladly, Vic. But only a few songs. It’s late and we go to California for a two-week tour tomorrow.”

The atmosphere lightened. We went into the living room, where Chaim flipped through my music, pulling out Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuck In the end, he and Max stayed with Lotty, playing and talking until three in the morning, long after Servino and Penelope’s departure.

The detective business is not as much fun in January as at other times of the year. I spent the next two days forcing my little Chevy through unplowed side streets trying to find a missing witness who was the key to an eighteen-million-dollar fraud case. I finally succeeded Tuesday evening a little before five. By the time I’d convinced the terrified woman, who was hiding with a niece at Sixty-seventh and Honore, that no one would shoot her if she testified, gotten her to the state’s attorney, and seen her safely home again, it was close to ten o’clock.