Grantville Gazette - Volume V (23 page)

Maurice Tito stayed up all night writing the statement he read from the bench. He sent Thomas Price Riddle home at nine in the evening on the grounds that his continued health and well-being were of more importance to Grantville's long-term welfare than any one legal case.

He adduced carefully the reasons for the decision he was taking.

He dismissed
Murphy v. Murphy
on the grounds that Patricia (Fitzgerald) Stull, not being married to Francis Xavier Murphy from the perspective of civil law, had no need to divorce him.

Pat started to smile.

Laurie Koudsi requested that if he was going to dismiss the divorce suit, would he please enter a decree to the effect that the marriage of Francis Murphy and Patricia Fitzgerald was null.

Maurice Tito entered the finding. That the marriage was null on the grounds that it was bigamous.

Francis Murphy made his unhappiness with this finding known. Loudly. His attorney attempted to quiet him.

That was the point at which Dennis Stull arrived from Erfurt and was escorted into the courtroom by the bailiff.

Followed by Pat opening a little box that was suspended around her neck by a chain and bringing out the dime-store rings from 1965, which he promptly put back on the third finger of her left hand.

At which point Francis Xavier Murphy, pushed once more beyond the limits of what he was capable of enduring, jumped up and screeched, "Do you mean that you were wearing that man's rings around your neck all the time we were married, you whore? I thought it was some kind of religious medal."

Things deteriorated from that point. From the perspective of everyone except the reporters, that is.

"All in all," Maurice Tito said to his wife Renee that evening, "it's been an interesting day. Which is not the kind of day a judge wants to have in his courtroom, as a rule."

"All in all," Maurice Tito said to his wife Renee that evening, "it was an interesting day. Which is not the kind of day a judge wants to have in his courtroom, as a rule. It certainly wasn't what I expected when I set out for work yesterday morning, expecting to issue Pat a divorce decree from Francis Murphy. Probably the only ameliorating aspect of the situation is that he is still locked up, awaiting trial for the shooting at Central Funeral Home and related charges. Plus, now, new charges in regard to attempted assault with intent to kill with his bare hands while in a courtroom. Not that I don't have a certain limited amount of personal sympathy for the man, in the sense that it can't be easy to discover that over the years you thought you were married to a woman, during which she bore you four children, she was wearing another man's rings in a little box suspended on a chain around her neck."

"Do you know what Aunt Mildred says?" Renee asked. "Aside from the fact that Pat Fitzgerald was just never the most 'together' girl born in Grantville, West Virginia."

Maurice shook his head.

"She says that at the time, the gossip went . . ."

Maurice shook his head disbelievingly. Not disbelief that Renee's Aunt Mildred knew all the gossip. Mildred Barnes was the ultimate Grantviller, in a way. Her older son Warner was in the USE State Department now, and an officious, pencil-pushing bureaucrat unmatched in the administration. Her younger son Pelton was director of Grantville's Public Works Department. Pelton's wife taught first grade. And Mildred's daughter Amber Lee, now married to Sterling Pridmore, was, to say the least, well placed to have a significant interest in the enthralling soap opera surrounding the three-way matrimonial difficulties of Francis Murphy, Pat Fitzgerald, and Dennis Stull, being currently Dennis' executive assistant at the Erfurt Supply Depot.

Renee wasn't badly placed for picking up gossip herself, being a guidance counselor at the high school. Plus, there was the added dimension that unlike Mildred and the rest of the Warners, Renee and her sister Janet had ties into St. Mary's parish. Their mother, like Maurice himself, had been from out of town. She had also been Catholic. William and Gail Warner had been left up-time, retired and not yet back from their annual snowbird stint in Florida when the Ring of Fire hit.

Maurice, as an outsider, sometimes worried about the amount of nepotism that Grantville had brought to the administration of Thuringia and Franconia during the years 1631 through 1634. Not to mention to its administration of itself, so to speak. Not that they could have avoided it and still gotten anything done, in a town where families had been intermarrying for generations. Plus, the down-timers regarded it all as perfectly natural, since that was the way seventeenth century Germans did things, too, many of their towns being about the same size and marked by the same kind of multigenerational interrelationships.

Renee was chattering on. "Aunt Mildred says that they were all talking about it when it happened. Pat's sisters were left up-time, except for Suzanne Trelli, who's too young to have known, probably. She would only have been eleven or twelve when Pat and Francis got married. But Francis' sisters, Mag Farrell and Pauline Mora, are still right here in town. And his brother Andy. And so is Pat's mother. If anybody tries to prosecute Pat for bigamy at this late date, at least one of them will probably spill the beans."

She paused.

"Maybe it's not entirely proper legal procedure for me to clue you in, Mr. Judge. But there are just some things you need to know if you're going to make this jerry-built, winging-it, seat-of-your-pants administrative system run by a batch of under qualified, overstretched hillbillies that we're building work. Besides, if you had been born here, you'd know this stuff already, just by being alive."

"One of the books I was studying," Maurice pointed out, "said that the original idea of a 'jury of your peers' was not a jury of perfect strangers with no opinion on the case in advance, the way lawyers wanted jurors up-time, but rather a jury of your neighbors who could be expected to know something about the matter. In a way, I think, we're sort of shifting back to that idea. Getting the best information we can. The relevant stuff, no matter how it comes up."

"Bernadette headed straight over to St. Mary's," Tony Adducci said to his wife Denise. Denise was Pat Fitzgerald's first cousin, so she had a natural interest in all of this, considering that it was she and Tony's sister Bernadette who had bullied Pat into showing up at the visitation for Dennis' mother in the first place. Which had triggered the subsequent events when Francis tried to shoot her. "To let the Jesuits know about common-law marriage in Kansas and Iowa. I expect that at least one of them will shortly be descending on Tom Riddle for a briefing on the significance of 'full faith and credit' under the U.S. Constitution. The up-time one, that is."

"I'm going to talk to Mom and Dad," Denise said. "I'm not old enough to remember. I was only six at the time. But they must have known what Uncle Patrick and Aunt Mary Liz had in their heads back in 1968 when they pushed Pat into marrying Francis Murphy. There's just no way it would be fair for someone to prosecute her for bigamy after all these years, especially when she didn't have the vaguest idea that she was common-law married to Dennis."

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse."

"Well," Denise said, "sometimes it should be. Believe me, if Pat had the slightest idea that she was married to Dennis during all those years, she'd have spent them sitting in his lap."

"What is it likely to mean for Pat and Dennis?" Joe Stull asked.

"It's going to make things hellishly complicated, I think," Tony said. "I don't pretend to understand it all. For one thing, even though the common law marriage was—still is, for that matter—a legally binding civil marriage, it wasn't canonically binding on Pat, I'm pretty sure, since a Catholic can't—couldn't—well, could in the sense of being physically able to do it and could in the sense that it was legal under civil law but couldn't in the sense of having it recognized by the church-marry a non-Catholic in a non-Catholic ceremony."

"Ouch," Joe said. "Could you stop right there and draw a diagram of that?"

"No. I told you already that I don't really understand it," Tony said. "But still, I think that after a civil marriage, the church would have required her to get a civil divorce before she would be free to enter a Catholic marriage. I'm pretty sure of that. It wouldn't have just ignored the fact that she was married to Dennis, even if she didn't know that she was. I think."

"You think," Joe said.

"That's what I said. I think. That's my position and I'm sticking to it." Tony chewed on his mustache for a minute. "I don't know of any up-timer at St. Mary's who might really understand it all except Larry Mazzare, and he's still in Italy."

"Are Pat and Dennis married?"

"Yeah. Again, I think. At least if the NUS Constitution as we altered it to become the Constitution of the State of Thuringia-Franconia took over 'full faith and credit.' Somebody better take a look and see about that. If you want my advice, Dennis and Pat had better get a lawyer with more experience than Laura Koudsi and have the lawyer take a look and see about that. But I think they would still be married, because they would have been before the Ring of Fire."

"There aren't any lawyers with more experience than Laura Koudsi. She and Mary Kathryn Riddle are the first full-fledged new lawyers the system has hatched for us. Sort of full-fledged. Their pin feathers are starting to sprout, at least. Anyway, Mary Kathryn is working for Ed Piazza as legal counsel. Not to mention that she's the daughter of the chief justice and the granddaughter of the gray eminence who is mentoring our two non-lawyer other judges and educating all the rest of the upcoming baby lawyers to the best of his ability. Plus, she's the sister of the prosecuting attorney. It's practically incestuous."

"Is Pat a bigamist?"

Tony shifted uncomfortably. "Until the court issues some kind of a decision, probably God only knows. And I mean that literally. So it sort of depends on your view of God. Whether He's more into wrath or more into mercy. At least, that's the way the spirits are dividing at St. Mary Magdalene's these days. I'm sure you can guess what Tino Nobili thinks."

"I think," Bernadette said firmly, "that you had better hold a hearing. At least get the testimony down in black and white, while it's as fresh as possible in everyone's mind. If you want to wait until Larry Mazzare gets back to do anything about it, that's one thing. But the least you owe him is to get all the ducks in a row in advance. In my humble opinion, of course."

Father Athanasius Kircher looked at the opinionated middle-aged woman who might possibly, depending on how things worked out, become the most influential mother superior in the German church one of these years. If she got the new women's religious order she was proposing off the ground. That, too, was waiting for Larry Mazzare to get back from Italy.
In her humble opinion. Hah.
 

"I'll consult with the others," he said. There were a half-dozen down-time Jesuits in residence at St. Mary's parish these days.

"Take a hard look at consent," Bernadette said. "Have Hanni Heinzerling look around in the storage rooms and attics to see if she can find the applicable edition of canon law. The parish should have had a copy back in 1968. From everything I've picked up, it's entirely possible that when Pat married Francis, she wasn't capable of rendering informed consent. I was only twelve or so at the time, but Mom and Dad say . . ."

"My," Kircher said at the end of her story. "That's astonishing, if true. And the canon lawyers will be fascinated, because it will, indeed, revolve around the consent issue. Well, in essence, marriage questions almost always do. It's too bad that in the absence of a bishop, Thuringia doesn't have a properly constituted
Ehegericht
. There's nobody who can establish a marriage court. Administratively, we are still in a mess with Larry Mazzare being a cardinal but not, as far as we can tell, a bishop. There's just no clear jurisdictional chain of command between St. Mary's parish and, well, the pope himself. And it's not much better in Franconia, with Hatzfeld in exile still. There's only so much that a suffragan can do."

Francis Xavier Murphy himself refused to testify in the matter. The fact that his lawyer, Johann Francis Hardegg, was a Lutheran complicated his appearance before a Catholic canonical hearing quite a bit. Hardegg just kept getting up and repeating, "My client is not obliged to testify. This hearing is a purely ecclesiastical matter and the laws of the state do not require him to participate against his will."

This was most certainly true.

Dennis Stull also refused to testify in the matter, on the grounds that he was a Methodist, that Judge Tito said that he was married to Pat, she was wearing his rings again, and as far as he was concerned any more, that was the end of it. If someone charged her with bigamy, he added, he would spring her from jail and elope somewhere that was out of the local jurisdiction. All they needed to do was find someone to hold a wedding for them to make it feel a little more real.

Although he didn't say so, he thought, "and to make the rest of the Grantville women in Erfurt a little nicer to her when she moves up there with me, too."

"I think," Pastor Ludwig Kastenmayer said to Justus Jonas Muselius, "that as peculiar as it may seem, I had better be present at this Catholic marriage hearing. Just as a spectator, of course."

Kastenmayer had been to consult with the Lutheran theological faculty at the University of Jena numerous times in regard to the question of whether a spouse left up-time by the Ring of Fire should be adjudged to be legally dead, thus freeing the other spouse, the one transported to Thuringia in 1631, to remarry. His tact in bringing forth the case of Roland Worley as a stalking horse for the upcoming case of Gary Lambert had been sincerely appreciated by the ecclesiastical hard hitters of Thuringia.