Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

Ben’s unresponsive state was the work more of the bourbon than of his head injuries, though the swelling caused by the latter made things difficult for the paramedics at first. But though it was touch and go in the hours after he was found, in less than a week Ben had stabilized to the point where he was cleared to return home, pending arraignment. For by then criminal charges had been brought against him, and not just a DWI, which by itself might have been felonious enough to threaten his career. Instead, two detectives drove up from Manhattan to stand beside his hospital bed and arrest him for attempted sexual assault. He was so surprised he thought maybe it was just the morphine, but when he asked one of the floor nurses the next day if all that had really happened, she tightened her lips and nodded. Cornelia, Cornelia, he thought. Maybe she really was that ruthless about getting where she was going; or maybe she was that scared of the psychotic boy-giant who apparently considered her his own. Either way, he realized, he was now out in the open water, and he had gone all that way for her sake without ever having the first clue who she was.

Helen didn’t even want to let him come home from the hospital, but he was so weak and in so much pain — these days hospitals turned you out pretty much the moment they felt they could do so without killing you — that she caved. Still, she couldn’t believe how little sympathy she felt for him. Eighteen years. At night she left the Vicodin and a glass of water by his bedside and went to the living room to sleep on the couch. Sara came out of her room only for meals; school started in less than two weeks. Their phones were all turned off. By the middle of each afternoon Helen longed frantically to get out of the house and just be somewhere else, even for an hour, but she was scared to leave Sara alone with her father and more scared to leave Ben alone by himself. She sat in the kitchen and watched for strange cars through the blinds.

Any old-fashioned hope that this was the sort of indiscretion powerful men might cause to disappear was undone by the camera-phone photos, which were all over the Web in a day, and in the newspapers the day after that. A letter of resignation, which Ben signed, had been brought to him in the hospital. His former partners then let him know, via registered letter, that, in an effort to send the message that they did not condone his behavior, they had filed disbarment proceedings against him as well; they had no real grounds to do so, but just knowing they considered their reputation damaged enough to care about the symbolism of filing was chilling to him. He had a few acquaintances who were litigators at rival firms, but even those who returned his phone calls wouldn’t take his case. With a bail hearing imminent, it didn’t seem like a great idea to represent himself. In the end he had to settle for a lawyer right there in Rensselaer Valley — the only one in town, in fact — who insisted on a large cash retainer because, as he said to Ben and Helen while drinking a cup of take-out coffee in his second-floor office above the hardware store, he wasn’t at all sure that when everything was said and done they would have a cent left to pay him.

“If it’s as hopeless as all that,” Helen asked the lawyer, whose name was Joe Bonifacio, “then what do you suggest we do?”

“Two things,” said Bonifacio. He must have been around the same age as Helen and Ben, sallow and sharp-eyed, and dressed as if for yard work; though he was polite and engaged, she couldn’t help feeling there was something obligatory, something ginned up, about his interest in them. You’d have thought he saw a case like this every day. He had apparently spent his whole life, apart from college and law school, right there in Rensselaer Valley, which made it remarkable that Helen couldn’t remember ever seeing him before. “One, Ben, we have to start to lay the groundwork for the idea that you are not responsible for your actions, that they were committed in an altered state. You admit nothing, you apologize for nothing. Let me ask you this: had you been under any particular stress in the weeks or months leading up to the incident in question?”

“No,” said Ben.

“Yes,” said Helen, looking at her husband in amazement. “Yes, he was. He was emotionally unstable. We have a doctor who will surely testify to that. Well, not a doctor, really, but close enough.”

“Stop it,” Ben said coolly to her. “I don’t want to be a coward now. Let it fall on me. If I’m going out, I don’t want to go out as one of those guys claiming he’s not responsible for his actions.”

Which Helen actually found somewhat moving, insofar as she could be moved by anything to do with Ben these days; but when she looked over at Bonifacio, he wore a smirk like he was enjoying a bad TV show. How he must have hated guys like Ben, Helen thought — lawyers who rode off to Manhattan every morning while he climbed the stairs beside the hardware store and tried to act outraged over whatever sad grievance one of the locals might bring in.

“Here’s the thing to remember, though, Ben,” he said. “It doesn’t all fall on you. If you want to go the noble route, while you’re off in jail writing your memoirs or whatever, your wife and your daughter will be put out of their house, and any money you have anywhere will be taken away from them faster than you can say ‘mea maxima culpa,’ all right? Now I am sure you would like to avoid their having to suffer for your sins any more than absolutely necessary, and if you want to avoid that, or at least negotiate it, the only way to do so is to find a way to contest the idea of your guilt.”

Ben’s response was an acquiescent sigh. His usual practice was trusts and estates, but at bottom, Helen saw, both men were lawyers, and shared an acceptance of the immutable truth of what Bonifacio was saying.

“So here’s what we do. Ben will be voluntarily committed to an institution in Danbury called Stages, maybe you’ve heard of it, where he will be treated for his chronic depression, bipolar syndrome, attention deficit disorder, panic attacks, alcoholism—”

“I don’t really have a drinking problem,” Ben said.

“Did I ask you if you did?” said Bonifacio, not unkindly. “You’ll recall I said there are two things you need to do, and that’s number one. Now, as to the rape charge.” Helen winced but did not correct him. “It’s my opinion that they know there’s no there there, in terms of evidence, and that their plan is to withdraw the charge before trial no matter what. They just threw it because they know that you’ll never get the stink of it off you. And the reason that’s smart, as I’m sure Ben has figured out, is that it softens the ground for the civil case, which in my opinion is where this whole flaming bag of poo has been aimed from the beginning. We have to start insulating you against that judgment as best we can, and we have to start today. So forgive me if I seem to overstep my bounds here, but thing two, Helen, is that you file for divorce immediately, on grounds of infidelity. Ben will not contest it.”

Ben frowned. “Does it have to be infidelity, though?” he said. “Because, not to get all Talmudic about it, but, as Helen knows, I was not actually, literally unfaithful to her.”

“As Helen knows?” Helen said. “What the hell do I know about anything? I only know what you say.”

“It’s the truth,” Ben said. “No reason to lie anymore.”

“If I may,” Bonifacio said, tossing his Starbucks cup in the waste-basket behind his chair. “The two of you are straying down a path which, while of course I understand and sympathize, is not really constructive to our purpose. You’re getting worked up about how to know the difference between what appears true versus what is true. You might as well forget about all that for a while. Everything you say or do now, no matter how intimate, is being performed for an audience, namely the jury pool here in town and in the rest of the circuit. It would be good for you to get used to that as quickly as possible.”