False Entry (43 page)

By another nightfall this too might be known. Dobbin was in there now, in the smaller room where the grand jury was sitting. It was to have sat this morning also, by now must be acquainted with the nature of the evidence to be heard this afternoon. “We shall present a witness … certain events on the night of September 19, 1932. You have already heard … concerning the alleged abduction of Lucius Asher and Perry Brown. … Evidence we shall hear … identification of persons allegedly involved in willful destruction of property belonging to the United States Government on that same date….” Or however it would be—far less formal, Dobbin had cautioned, than what he might expect to find. He understood, did he, that they were not trying a case here, only inquiring into the grounds for one. And if necessary, Dobbin had said, circling a wineglass in its small orbit, “the people” might shift its grounds. Murder, property under federal jurisdiction, misconduct of public officers, even, since they were in a corner of the state here, abduction across a state line. Federal grand jury. Dobbin put his glass down, not bothering to explain further, not even seeing the need, treading so sure-footedly across the spokes of this invisible network which surrounded the common man that even Pierre could see it: the small county jury moving across the field of justice like a company of moles with a lantern. And here, there, a face, a mask—a company of them—suddenly illumined in that swinging, polyhedral light. He had put down his own glass, his hand trembling, only seeing the full extent of things now. What if—small towns being what they were—some of both companies, mole and man, were the same? What then? Dobbin and he had not mentioned it between them, Dobbin only smiling—when he heard the names—a smile not learned in school. But out of the quorum of at least sixteen sitting inside there now, how many, on learning of the line of testimony to come, had bent their nude cheekbones, looking into their laps for cover? Now, suddenly, it was beyond his belief that any of them were in there, about to be seen in the proportions that six years or more had made them, not as he still saw them, all head, bodies no bigger than the unit men on graphs—a row of tiny figurants, each holding forward a face as large as a shield.

But here he was, Dobbin—the same man who last night had stopped him short at a certain point, saying, “That’s enough, I guess. Let the rest of it come out before them”—cutting through the throng of idlers, petitioners, would-be licensees, politicos with a power range of one tobacco chew, cracker-barrel well-wishers, his passage across the room starred here, there with hands that reached and fell back, as if the touch of him held the king’s cure. Here he was, saying, “Good. You’re here. Good,” once more thrusting out his own hand.

He drew Pierre aside, nodding as the judge passed them, coming out of chambers, a short, bald man with a pug jaw, two cranky dewlaps that promised benevolence to nobody—the new judge.

“Come in here a moment,” said Dobbin, and drew Pierre inside the chamber. Later he had no memory of its looks, whether it had stayed itself with its fan and its flies, at the time not even reminding himself that it was, had been, the Fourchettes’ office. All that afternoon things went on as if he had never been here before, or indeed anywhere, had no history up to or beyond each moment as he spellbound himself to it; later, the act of that afternoon seemed the purest thrust from the void—an obelisk emerged from the depths, to no sound of waters dividing—as those acts must seem which rise from the total sea bottom of ourselves.

“Recess,” said Dobbin. “Ten minutes or so. Then we’re ready for you.” Last night he had said “they.” He was smoking a cigarette whose stub he kept concealed in the hollow of one hand, occasionally peering in on it. “Didn’t know until last night that Lucine Brown worked for you people.”

“Last night?” Asleep until an hour ago, he felt stupid, his own mask not gathered.

“The old man who served us. He’s her father.”

Was it all to be as simple as this? Or was this too simple, even for Dobbins?

“Lucine came to me night before last. They’ve a sixth sense, you know.” Dobbin was not looking at him. “Wanted to testify. I shut her up of course. For her own good. And no use to us.”

Generally
, Dobbin had said last night, looking hard at him, eager—
one witness to one fact
,
or one set of facts
,
is enough for a grand jury. Very often the complainant himself.
But this one is no use to us. Who now were “us”?

“But the old man was terrified. Poor old devil, he feels guilty on his own part. And what he told me fits. That night every Negro who had a phone received the same anonymous call—‘Stay inside!’ Louie, the older boy, never came home—they would have got him as he came off the job. The old man tried to keep Lucine from going out after him, but she went. And while she was gone, Perry, the young kid, slipped out after his brother. She ran back in when the cars came. Went through without stopping, the old man said. For show. To show they had him. The flood cut niggertown off for two days. And Perry—he was only thirteen—never came back at all.” Dobbin’s voice was dry.

“They wouldn’t have—!”

Dobbin raised an eyebrow.

He felt his own softness, against men out for judgeships, out for other men.

“Who knows? Of course, quite a few were lost in the flood at the time. But we don’t know for sure, do we?”

His head flung back in sudden reflex.

“What?” said Dobbin.

“Nothing. I just remembered …” He was awake now, enough to switch names, even marvel at his own sudden resource. “Perry. Didn’t he used to carry for Miss Pridden?”

“Mmm, well … yes. Matter of fact, he did.” Distance was suddenly put between them, between Dobbin and his job. This was not the issue. Silence—a false note of it. “They’ve their own underground dynasties. That’s their real sixth sense, of course, nothing odd about it. My aunt used to say”—he said “awnt” now—“‘Just whisper to yourself in the mawnin’; bah nee-un-tahm int a dawky in nigguhtay-un don’t say to himself “
Do tell
!”’” His imitation was just a little bit out, careful not to mock too much. It was not hard to see how he would ingratiate himself here, how much he could imply, with no more self-incrimination than any man who was used to being liked.

“Time,” said Dobbin. With an exclamation, he dropped the cigarette, down to a mere coal, onto the floor, spat forth a bit of the paper that had clung to his lip. He rubbed his hands together. His whole manner had coarsened, in the way of a man who puts on shabbier clothes to keep himself out of notice in a low neighborhood. “All right now. Remember what I’ve told you. You’ll be under oath of course, but there’s nothing else too formal about it, certainly not here. You’ll be able to tell your story. I’ll be examining you. Right?” Thumbs in armpits, he regarded Pierre with satisfaction, as brought by the passage between them to a certain routine point that Dobbin recognized—as both softened and primed, shaken into that state of precipitation where Dobbin might look through him and let others do, to the goal beyond. “Right? Let’s go.” Hand on Pierre’s shoulder, he guided him down a corridor back of the main courtroom, leading to the door of the smaller one, outside which the attendant stood guard.

“Dobbin,” said Pierre. There, that was better. If he said “sir” he would feel it. “You kept your promise?”

“Mmm?” They had halted a few yards from the attendant.

“My uncle.”

“Oh yes. Took him aside early this morning. He knows you’re to be the witness.” Dobbin seemed already abstracted, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, one softly clanking his change.

“Nothing more?”

“No.” The curt tone reminded him that he had been advised last night that it would be preferable if his uncle were to be no more prepared for Pierre’s appearance than the rest. (“Hadn’t you better be on your own in this, Goodman?”) Pierre’s insistence had been put down to filial delicacy, making it clear that either Dobbin knew less about the town than he himself thought, or else that the Higby day in court had already dropped from its annals.

“What did my uncle say?”

Dobbin shook his head. “Not one for surprises, is he? Just—was it still in order, then, for him to administer the oath?” Dobbin made a vague, impatient gesture of dismissal. “Anyone may, of course. Juror, that is. Come along now. We must.” Then, in the very act of going, he turned, slipped his hands into his pockets again, leaned back as if he had all the time in the world. This was his mettle, his smiling stance said; the pace, fast or slow, always remained his.

“Tangled webs, these small principalities. Families … servants … childhoods.” The two of them might have been still at dinner. “But we’ll keep what order we can, shall we?” His voice had hardened; they were not at dinner. “The law doesn’t anticipate, you know. The law sets forth. It’s not for a district attorney to anticipate any disorder that may occur from such—in there, for instance.” He indicated the door of the room ahead of them. “Nor is it for anyone else to. Remember that!”

“I—”

But Dobbin, seizing his arm, gave him no chance, so that his answer, whatever it would have been, true or false, was lost—to himself as well.

“Listen to me—” said Dobbin. A phrase not as wise as it is common. “You were born Armistice, 1918, right?” Did his lip have a twist of
pater
to it after all? “That night you were … not quite fourteen then—a mere child; if there were not a chance of that other corroboration I would not even put you on the stand. As the bright young man you are now, full of the customary moral hair-splittings—oh, quite honorable ones—that come with majority, I’ve no present use for you at all.
But I do have a use for that child.
Now listen to me!” His voice gentled. “Remember, how it was for us at fourteen? How simple things were for us then? How we saw certain things, without understanding them? Did them, not even knowing there were consequences? When I was a child, I spoke as a child’—” The phrase moved him. It was a measure of his gifts that he remained unashamed of this, not lowering those steady irises by a fraction. “That’s all you have to do,” he said softly, gripping Pierre’s biceps with a consolatory squeeze. “Just remember how it was for that boy back there. Tell his story, just as he might of, then.”

No, Dobbin had never been an alien.

The attendant nodded as they approached him. His lofty nose and brow, meanly deserted by recessiveness beneath, gave him a tribal resemblance to Mount, the courthouse lounger, in the way an indoor replica of civic virtue, barbered and salaried, might recall an outside one eroded by pigeon dung and rain. “’Lo, Mr. Dobbin.”

“’Lo, Felix,” said Dobbin out of the side of his mouth, like a password. Once more his glance traversed Pierre—old stager checking novice for unlucky signs of green in the breeches, in the gills—then the door shut behind them with a silky
t-lick
and they were in.

At first, following Dobbin, sitting down in the chair indicated, he kept his eyes lowered, engaging with himself in a kind of blindman’s buff that restricted his impressions to peripheral images, to the murmurous confusion of a room which numerous figures were still crisscrossing on their natural tangents, in which twenty or so individual men were only slowly settling down to their duty as a “body” of the same. The room, perhaps fifteen by thirty feet, its ceiling as high as the main room but not domed, had a backstairs feel to it after the seedy, armorial space of the other. To his right, one tall, low-silled window obliquely flashed daylight and grass. At his left, the long table almost bisected the length of the room, leaving behind it a waste space through which Dobbin and he had brushed past a small table of Cokes and empties, a couple of choked spittoons, and in a corner the caretaker’s bucket, its stiff, gray mop hanging down to a point, like a substitute flag. Facing him, a curved dais held rows of auditorium chairs, their iron stanchions fixed to the floor. Feet shuffled past these, to the hollow, lecture-hall sound of seats successively snapped down. He might be in a classroom on a campus a thousand miles away; yet every pair of feet passing knew this place as intimately as he. This was the public room where men collectively tried those ideas of learning, punishment, prayer that they fled from in private, and it was always the same. In it, humanity always stank resentfully, ghostly transactors, reminded that their parts were animal by the toilets that were always somewhere down the line. Each man sitting down to serve his time here already knew how, as the day waned, the one window opening on a grosser reality would come to seem like a mirror at the end of a burrow, and each, as he left the place, would draw the same deep intake of breath, whether what had been done here were good or bad. They would be at close range when he looked up at them. Was each sitting there as he did now, an animal transfixed in the smell of man?

Dobbin touched his arm, sat at attention, stared forward. “Okay now,” he whispered. “Every son of ’em’s there.” The room fell silent. Pierre stood up.

They were men. They were both larger and smaller than memory had bred them. Each face made its own crotchet of space, as his own must, fear undomesticated, looking across at fear. In the center of the first row, one head remained bent—his uncle’s. Now it raised.

The clerk muttered his identificatory questions; Pierre answered. Here in this room, a name, that device under which a man labored so hard toward identity, meant nothing even to himself—a number answered to from a prison band, a patched patch between the shoulder blades. But the space between himself and his uncle, who by now had risen, had compressed; once again they were in the narrow hallway, under the light that no one had ever bothered to shade. Nearer and nearer it came, the face that could not be surprised, and it knew him, saying
You.

“You do swear …” it said, “you do swear, in the presence of the ever-living … that the evidence you shall give to the grand jury upon this complaint … shall be the … the whole … nothing but …” The truth. “So help you God!”

He strove for the great “Om” that must be proper to this question; heard the voice of the mole that answered. Dobbin rose, and touched his arm again; the witness, he said, need not stand, either now—during those remarks with which, since the jury had sought advice, he, Dobbin, must try their patience on such a hot afternoon—nor during witness’s own testimony to follow. Meanwhile Dobbin, lounging with a token hand on the table, hip against it, remained standing. But if it please the jury, he said, he’d stay as he was—by now they all knew anyway that the only way to shut him up was to hope that his feet would sooner or later get the message to his tongue.