Free Broken Vessels by Andre Dubus Page B

the booth with the blonde instead of a space beside him for her, she went to the counter and bought a paper cup of punch, whatever that may be; then she asked Nick to come outside. They quarreled; they had a date but he was with someone else. Then she tossed her punch onto his car and some went through the window, where gravity pulled it to his upholstery. His car was new, devoutly cared for, American. He attacked her: pushing, hitting, and once he held her over a park bench: pressing her back down across the back of the bench, he choked her with both of his hands. He is a tall creature and his hands are not small and I imagine they were very strong as they squeezed Jan’s throat.
    That night the two officers in the cruiser drove Jan to her home, only a few blocks away; her mother took her to Hale Hospital in Haverhill, where they treated and recorded her bruises and abrasions. On Monday Jan’s mother drove her to the Essex County Court House in Haverhill, and Jan pressed charges. Her mother told me on one of the calls from a pay phone that she had discovered, after Nick beat Jan, that he was twenty-one years old; she said if she had known this she would not have allowed Jan to see him.
    The magistrate’s hearing was in a small office at the court house, and while we waited I met Jan’s mother and, for the first time, saw Jan: not from a distance, screaming and crying, as Nick pushed her against bricks, and not weeping into her hands in the light of the cruiser. That morning she was anxious, neatly dressed, and lovely, with long soft blonde hair. I offered her a cigarette and we smoked and waited until a tall stocky officer in plain clothes called us into the small room. The magistrate, holding an unlit but recently smoked cigar, sat behind a table; Nick sat beside him: tall and handsome, and conscious of his looks. Swagger was in his face, his perfectly combed-back dark hair, his smooth shave. His dark eyes were interesting: they were not wary or attentive or humble; they were intense and angry, the eyes of a man unjustly treated. Jan sat opposite the magistrate, her mother opposite Nick, and I stood behind Jan and the officer stood behind Nick. The magistrate asked Jan if I were a relative or close friend; she said she had never seen me until that Sunday night. This is why I was her only witness, on the advice of the young lawyer from the district attorney’s office: her other witnesses were friends, two girls, the only people who had tried to stop Nick. All males at the Midway Pizza and Sub were Nick’s friends. The magistrate asked Jan for her story; she was nervous, but she had good control, and told the story calmly, chronologically, until she reached the moment when Nick attacked her. He loudly interrupted, said she was lying, and the magistrate turned to him and said: “Shut up. You’ll get your turn.”
    Then he asked Jan to go on with her story and when she finished, Nick started, his voice rising: it was all a lie, he had done nothing, he — The magistrate said: “Did you touch her?”
    Nick lowered his voice: “I touched her jacket.”
    The magistrate slapped the table, said: “Assault and battery; tell it to the judge,” and dismissed us.
    On a Friday morning in December my wife and I went to the trial. My wife sat in the rear and I sat beside Jan and her mother and grandmother. I had forgotten to borrow a necktie but I wore a jacket and my one pair of winter slacks and my wife had trimmed my hair. Make friends with the children of Mammon . As a man said to me once: There are seven Boston women dead because they believed in the American idea of respectability: they let the Boston Strangler into their homes; he always dressed well . Nick sat at a table with his lawyer, near the judge’s bench, and he wore a dark three-piece suit. His girlfriend, his only witness, sat to our right, across the aisle from our benches. During the other cases we watched, I