Grantville Gazette - Volume V (24 page)

Since his treatise on the matrimonial difficulties of Wesley Jenkins and Clara Bachmeierin had also been well received in academic circles, Count Ludwig Guenther was planning to appoint him to the Lutheran
Ehegericht
for the county of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. With special expertise in conflicts of matrimonial law between up-time and down-time statutes.

All of which led to Kastenmayer's next statement. "The more I can learn of the up-timers' practices and expectations, the better, I suppose."

"It will take several days," Jonas pointed out. "It's not as if you don't have other things to do."

"I know," the pastor said regretfully. "Given the size of St. Martin's in the Fields parish, even with the opening of St. Thomas the Apostle on the Badenburg side, I should by rights have two junior pastors to assist me by now. But with war levies, the count's budget is in enough trouble without increasing appropriations to the consistory. It's a case of 'needs must,' I suppose."

"How old were you at the time of your attempted marriage to Francis Xavier Murphy?" Nicholas Smithson, S.J. asked. This was by no means his area of expertise, but the other Jesuits at St. Mary's had designated him to ask the questions because English, albeit seventeenth-century English, was his native language.

"I was twenty-one," Pat answered. "I was twenty-one on December 29, 1967, and we married the next March. So I was of age by anyone's definition. Under up-time law, I'd been of age since I was eighteen. That's why I was able to leave home and go live with Dennis at Leavenworth and my parents couldn't stop me."

Laura Koudsi anxiously signaled to her, a sign that meant
Just answer the question. Don't volunteer information.
Sometimes Laurie thought that Pat was her own worst enemy.

Smithson looked at Ms. Koudsi a little nervously. It was his first experience with a female lawyer present at a hearing in regard to matrimonial causes. She upset him a bit just by being present.

Not as much as having a Lutheran lawyer there did, though. Ms. Koudsi was at least Catholic.

He pulled himself back to the list of questions.

"I didn't want to marry Francis," Pat said. "I never wanted to marry Francis. I told my parents so. I told Father O'Malley so. Dad and Father O'Malley are dead, but you can ask my mother. She's here in town. You can ask Francis' sisters. You can ask my friends."

They did, of course. Jesuits were nothing if not thorough.

The affiants were in unanimous agreement that Pat had not wanted to marry Francis Murphy. "Even though," her mother appended, "it was clearly her duty to do so."

"Actually," Pauline Mora, Francis' younger sister, added to her testimony, "I don't think that Francis was wild about marrying Pat, either."

Upon being questioned, Andy Murphy and Mag Farrell, Francis' older brother and sister, expressed the same opinion.

Andy said he was afraid it was partly his fault. He was the oldest, he was the only other boy, and he hadn't been showing any sign of getting married then. Hell, he hadn't even met JoAnn. And his parents were getting awfully anxious that they'd never have a grandson to carry on the name.

Maggie Murphy, Francis' mother, testified that she and her late husband had "nagged" Francis into getting married because they didn't want him sent off to Viet Nam and maybe getting killed without leaving a child behind. In her view, Francis didn't have any objection to marrying Pat Fitzgerald, particularly. He didn't especially prefer her to any other girl, but he didn't object.

"And after all," Maggie said, "after the way she had behaved, running off to live with Dennis Stull, Pat should have been grateful that any good Irish Catholic man was willing to take her, whether she wanted him or not. That's what her parents kept telling her."

"Were you ever present when she replied to her parents after they said that to her?" Nicholas Smithson, the English Jesuit, asked.

"Yeah," Maggie said. "She said that she didn't need anyone to take her out of pity. That she could just wait for Dennis Stull to come home. She was pretty stubborn about that no matter how Patrick and Mary Liz browbeat her."

"I thought," Smithson said, "that Stull did return from Viet Nam before this purported marriage was solemnized."

"He did," Maggie said. "He got discharged and by February he was working in Clarksburg. And Pat went over there and saw him at least twice that I know of. If not more. That was even after Father O'Malley had already scheduled the wedding. Pat was being really contrary about the whole business. She wouldn't go to pre-Cana or anything. She kept insisting that she wasn't going to marry Francis."

Athanasius Kircher sighed. Those visits to Stull were new information. It would have to be investigated. Even though Stull refused to participate in the hearing.

"It wouldn't have happened," Pat said, "if I hadn't been so upset. I had a job in Fairmont and I was taking college classes part time, waiting for Dennis to get back. Then this whole thing blew up. It wasn't right after I came home. Dennis shipped out in September of '66 and I came home from Davenport—well, I came to Fairmont, not to Grantville—and got a job and started college part time at Fairmont State. That was when I took off Dennis' rings and put them in the box on a chain around my neck, because people around here knew for sure that we'd never gotten married and they'd have thought I was crazy to have them on. But I did keep on wearing them that way."

"Was the marriage to Francis Murphy already projected at the time of your return?" Smithson asked.

"Mom and Dad and Father O'Malley and Paul and Maggie Murphy didn't start nagging me to marry Francis until right around Thanksgiving in '67, more than a year later. From that point on, they kept at me and kept at me. They were just determined that I was going to marry Francis. I thought that if I could stave them off until Dennis got back and got his discharge, I'd be okay. That was going to be in January. I was so upset about it all that I lost my job right after Christmas. I messed up a few sales and the store let me go. I'd just paid my tuition for my classes for the second semester, so I was short on cash. I didn't have any money to pay my rent unless I was working. I tried for a short-term loan from the student credit union, but something hung it up."

"How is this relevant?" Smithson asked.

"I needed a place to live. Dad wouldn't loan me any money. He said that I had to come back and live at home. So I did, the end of December, when my rent ran out in Fairmont."

"You state that you 'thought you would be okay' when Mr. Stull returned. What happened?"

"A month before Dennis got out, Mom and Dad put an announcement in the paper that Francis and I were engaged, with a March wedding date. All sorts of people sent it to Dennis. Dozens of them, I think. Grantville being Grantville. As far as he knew, I was waiting for him. He was having a lot of problems anyway, just back from Viet Nam and several mess-ups with his paperwork so he was under a lot of stress. I wanted to spare him, so I hadn't told him what they were doing, pushing me to marry Francis, so it was a terrible shock to him. You can't blame Dennis for being real mad when he got back. I tried and tried to tell him that I was saying no, but we fought. He couldn't believe that they would have done that—published the announcement—unless I agreed to it. The last time that I drove over to Clarksburg to see him, we fought just terribly."

"How many times did you see Dennis Stull between his return from the army and the solemnization of your purported marriage to Francis Murphy?"

"Five or six, I think. I'm not exactly sure. He'd found a job in Clarksburg and was sharing a trailer on the job site with a bunch of other guys. It wasn't very private in that trailer, if that's what you're wondering."

Pat looked up. "You may not know enough about how things worked in West Virginia to ask me this next thing, so I'll tell you. I didn't go and apply for the marriage license, believe it or not. I don't know how they got it, but I know for certain that I never went to the courthouse with Francis to get one."

Laura Koudsi jumped a little. This was news to her. More and more, she was thinking that she would dearly love to have Francis Murphy under cross examination.

She looked across the room. Johann Georg Hardegg was taking extensive notes as he sat next to Murphy. Murphy turned his head and said something to his attorney. Hardegg motioned, requesting Smithson's attention.

"Yes?"

"My client wishes to state for the record that he did not go to apply for the marriage license, either. When Father O'Malley picked up the ones for St. Vincent de Paul parish for that week at the courthouse in Fairmont, he told the clerk that the stack was missing the one for Francis and Pat. He picked them up every week, of course. And it had been in the paper. So the clerk filled one out according to the information that Father O'Malley gave her and sent it back to Grantville with him. My client states that nobody should blame the clerk, because she probably just thought that he and Patricia Fitzgerald had appeared and applied and that the original had been temporarily misplaced somewhere. Especially since the clerk was his Aunt Bridget, who still lives here in town, and he doesn't want her to get in any trouble."

That brought the hearing to a halt for a while. On the following day, Bridget Mary Scanlon Jenkins appeared and confirmed Francis Murphy's statement. Then the questioning of Pat resumed.

"Do you have any other testimony to offer in regard to the period prior to the marriage?"

Pat shook her head at Smithson; the clerk reminded her to give a verbal reply.

"No."

"Then please describe the actual marriage itself, to the best of your ability."

Pat looked straight at him. "The morning I was supposed to marry Francis according to the announcement that Mom and Dad had put in the paper, I went downstairs and said one final time that I wasn't going to do it. That I was getting in the car and driving to Fairmont and going to class, just like I did every other day. Mom said that I was hysterical and at least needed to drink some orange juice or I'd get low blood sugar and have a wreck on Route 250. She handed it to me. I don't really remember the wedding. I don't remember anything until the next morning, when I woke up feeling half dead with my mouth all sour and my head aching and was in bed with Francis in a motel and all sticky down there. So I figured that it was too late."

Laura Koudsi motioned for Smithson's attention. "Before my client concludes her testimony, I would like to submit a list of witnesses who have agreed to testify in regard to Patricia Fitzgerald's physical and mental condition on the day of her purported marriage to Francis Murphy. I would also like permission to call two expert witnesses who have consented to provide technical information in regard to the effect of a class of widely available up-time drugs called 'tranquilizers' on the individual to whom they are administered. I also request that you postpone the conclusion of my client's testimony until after the above material has been entered into your record."

Father Kircher agreed and adjourned the hearing until such time as the additional witnesses could be scheduled to appear before it.

"My name is Suzanne Fitzgerald Trelli. I am the youngest sister of Patricia Fitzgerald. In March of 1968, I was twelve years old. I don't know whether that's old enough for you to take my word in a court or not, but I'll tell you what I remember.

"Pat's the oldest. Little Mary Liz, the next sister after Pat, was nineteen then. She graduated from high school that spring, joined the navy, and never came back. There was just a year between Mary Liz and Cathy, our next sister. She was eighteen then, so she was of age, and she left with Mary Liz. The navy wouldn't take her because she didn't have a diploma, so she worked for a while in Norfolk, got her GED, and then went on working at the shipyard. They both got married, later on. They have kids and lived down on the coast somewhere, in North Carolina. The next was our only brother. He was seventeen then. He was killed in Viet Nam in 1970. Not married, no kids. That almost killed our parents when it happened. Then Colette. She married Ed Piazza's brother Mark in 1978 and they moved out to California.

"Then me, I'm the last. When I was eighteen, I moved in with my uncle and aunt, Denise Adducci's parents. They helped me to go to college at Fairmont State just as if I was one of their own kids. I'm married to Felix Trelli who does placement for the Tech Center and I'm the language arts and remedial English specialist there.

"We have three children. Mary Suzanne, named for Felix's mom and for me; Patricia Beth, for my sisters Pat and Little Mary Liz who were like mothers to me for a lot of my life, and John Felix, for Felix's dad Giovanni and for Felix. That's 'Mary' in 'Mary Suzanne' for Felix's mother, not for mine. I'd rather have used her middle name, but she doesn't go by it.

"During those years that I was a kid, our mother was mostly checked out on prescription tranquilizers. It was Mom's own Valium prescription she used to give the pills to Pat the day they wanted her to marry Francis.

"I didn't go to the wedding. It was a weekday and I was in school. All I can tell you is what my sisters Little Mary Liz and Cathy told me later. They said that Pat was so zonked out that she couldn't even repeat the vows after Father O'Malley."

Pastor Ludwig Kastenmayer, sitting in the spectator's section, thought to himself that Frau Trelli's testimony was more remarkable for what it did not say than for what it did. Had he been one of the panelists taking testimony, he would have posed several follow-up questions.

Dennis Fitzgerald and his wife Rosemary, the parents of Tony Adducci's wife Denise and uncle and aunt of Pat, testified that they had not been invited to the wedding. "They told us that it was going to be very small and private," Rosemary stated.

"I wasn't there," Francis' brother Andy Murphy said. "I was working up in Pennsylvania back then, didn't have a car, and didn't have the money to come anyhow. It was a weekday, so I'd have had to take off and been docked my wages, too."