Free Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow Page B

quiet?'
    'Yes. She set I shouldn't be quiet.'
    From another person the repetition, particularly, might have seemed cruel, but Carolyn somehow seemed to have a need to know that was in some measure selfless. Not long before the trial, Carolyn and the shrink decided that the county would not call Wendell to the witness stand unless it was an absolute necessity. The confrontation with his mother, she said, would be too much. But even with that decision made, Carolyn continued to meet with Wendell, to draw more and more from him.
    "It's hard to explain," I told Robinson, "the way she looked at this kid. Into him almost. That intense. That earnest. I never figured her to be the type to have any kind of rapport with children. And when she did, I was astounded."
    It made her mystery so much larger. She seemed like some Hindu goddess, containing all feelings in creation. Whatever wild, surging, libidinal rivers Carolyn undammed in me by her manner and appearance, there was something about the tender attention she showed this needy child that drew me over the brink, that gave my emotions a melting, yearning quality that I took to be far more significant than all my priapic heat. When she took on the quiet, earnest tone and leaned toward dear, slow, hurting Wendell, I was, whatever my regrets, full of love for her.
    A wild love. Desperate and obsessive and willfully blind. Love, as love at its truest is, with no sense of the future, love beguiled by the present and unable to derive the meaning of signs.
    One day I talked to Mattingly about the way Carolyn had worked with the boy. It was extraordinary, wasn't it? I asked. Amazing. Inexplicable. I wanted to hear him praise her. But Mattingly took my comments instead as a clinical inquiry, as if I was asking what could account for this phenomenon. He drew meditatively on his pipe. 'I've thought about that,' he said. Then his look became troubled, recognizing, I suppose, that he was liable to give offense or be misjudged himself. But he went on. 'And I believe,' he said, 'that in some small way she must remind him of his mother.'
     
     
    The trial went well. Mrs. McGaffen was represented by Alejandro Stern — Sandy, outside the courtroom — an Argentinian Jew, a Spanish gentleman, courtly combed and perfect with his soft accent and his manicure. He is a mannerly, fastidious trial lawyer, and we decided to follow his low-key approach. We put in our physical evidence, the doctors' testimony and their test results; then we offered the fruits of the search. With that, the county rested. Sandy called a psychiatrist who described Colleen McGaffen's gentle nature. Then he showed how good a lawyer he was by reversing the usual order of presentation. The defendant testified first, denying everything; then her husband came to the stand, weeping unbearably as he described the death of his first child; Wendell's fall, which he insisted he had witnessed; and his wife's devotion to their son. A fine trial lawyer always has a latent message to the jury, too prejudicial or improper to speak aloud, whether it's a racist appeal when black victims identify white defendants or the no-big-deal manner that a lawyer like Stern takes when the crime is only an attempt. In this case, Sandy wanted the jury to know that her husband forgave Colleen McGaffen, and if
he
could, why couldn't
they
do that, too?
    In a kind of professional salvation, I found that in the courtroom I could almost wall myself to Carolyn; I enjoyed extended periods of concentration and would wake to her presence beside me, and to the grip of my obsession, almost with surprise. But this work of will came at a heavy price. Outside, I was largely useless. To perform the most routine tasks — talking to witnesses, gathering exhibits — required that all my energies be directed to a frozen inattention: Do not think about her, please do not think about her now. I did. I moved about in a spaced-out reality, vacillating among various lurid fantasies