Saving Grace (47 page)

“Your Honor, the defense was given a chance to plea-bargain before the trial, and they turned it down flat. I’ll be damned if we’ll renew the offer.”

“Who asked you?” Jonathan growled.

“Do you want some time to consider?” the judge asked.

“No, your Honor.”

“Very well, Mr. Fleishman. It’s your funeral.”

* * *

The courtroom was jammed. Reporters jockeyed for position; spectators crowded in behind the last row of seats. Among them, standing head and shoulders above the rest, was U.S. Attorney Lucas Rayburn. In the section reserved for the defendant’s family, Gracie sat alone.

The only clear space in the room was the arena circumscribed by the judge’s bench, the witness stand, the tables of the prosecution and defense, and the jury box. The tall windows of the courtroom, dingy with the accumulated grit of the city outside, transformed brilliant sunlight into a diffuse gray mist. Jonathan, facing the jury from the center of the court’s arena, was illuminated darkly.

He closed his eyes, then opened them. “I came in planning to fight,” he said. “I’m no Christian. When someone attacks me, my gut response is not to turn the other cheek, but to strike back. Sitting in that chair, listening to
that woman
savage my reputation and belittle all that I have done and made of my life, I felt rage.

“She called me a hypocrite. She said I was greedy and arrogant and that I abused my position to enrich myself at the expense of the people I pretended to serve. She described a vile remnant of a man, with no shred of decency or honor to his name, and she said I was that man.

“Then it was Mr. Leeds’s turn. He described a very different man: an altruist of the highest order, who sacrificed his self-interest for the good of the people, whose only offense was his effectiveness. And that man, too, was said to be me.

“Thus the prosecutor drew one man and Mr. Leeds another; the two were as different as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and yet both described the same man. I don’t know how you felt; I was perplexed. I wondered how a single man could be two such different things.

“I used to believe that if a man knew who he was, it didn’t matter what others thought of him. The past few months have taught me different. I’m not saying a person can’t have hidden qualities. I’m saying perception stems from something real. It’s reflection, not invention. Men are not infinitely elastic creatures. There are limits to how far we will stretch. That’s why when a man is seen with such radical divergence as that woman and Christopher Leeds saw me, that man can lose his cohesion. He can lose his grasp on who he is.”

Jonathan stopped, searched the jurors’ eyes for understanding, found only puzzlement. He walked closer and tried again.

“It was Michael Kavin who gave me the answer to the riddle that plagued me. Michael was my oldest and closest friend. You heard him betray me; but did you see, as I who loved him saw, how he betrayed himself in the process? As painful as it was for me, the cost to him was greater.

“And yet, much as I would like to, I cannot say he lied. The things he said happened did happen. At the time, of course, we called them by different names or didn’t name them at all. Not because we feared surveillance, but because we convinced ourselves that if things aren’t spelled out, if acts aren’t named, then somehow they don’t really count. There are ways,” Jonathan said with a thin smile, “of talking about things without ever saying what they are. We were good at that. You might say I’m a man who thoroughly outsmarted himself.”

Now he saw them smile and nod with comprehension. Next would come sympathy. Politician to the core, Jonathan couldn’t help working the crowd, even though he wanted nothing from them.

He harshened his voice, pushing them away. “You know what we did. Michael told you. We extorted money. We forced companies to pay us for concessions from the city. And all the time we did it, we never felt it was wrong. It seemed so amicable, you see. Handshakes, drinks, smiles all around. No one ever resisted...
 
until Vito Tortelli.

“I watched and listened as my friend Michael destroyed us both; and suddenly it came to me: I saw that the degenerate ogre described by the prosecutor and the selfless altruist described by Mr. Leeds really were one man, but a man divided in two, a man who was not whole, who had no integrity, who’d convinced himself that he could be one thing in his private and another in his public life.” Jonathan looked from face to face. “As if there were a difference. There is no difference. You can’t divide yourself into separate selves, you can’t live by separate sets of rules. What you are is what you do and how you do it. I knew that once. I managed to forget it. Now I know it again.

“Therefore,” he said, turning toward the audience, “I have decided, against the advice of counsel, to lay down my arms. I will not defend actions I now find indefensible. For the sake of the man I used to be, as much as for the sake of the people whose trust I abused, I confess to the charges against me. I blame no one but myself.”

Jonathan’s gaze came to rest on Gracie, who sat up straight and haughty and so dry-eyed it seemed she would never cry again. He smiled at her, then turned back to the audience, to the avid reporters.

“The prosecutor was right about one thing. It doesn’t work without self-deception. You’ve got to sell yourself a real good line of goods to do what I did. Nor does it happen overnight. It takes years of gentle, steady shifting. You move, and the center moves with you.

“Once in a while, something happens. You see your face in a distorted mirror. Someone close to you says, ‘You’re not the man you used to be.’ But you explain it away. You grow layers of excuses, removable skins.

“Me, I told myself I needed the money in order to deal with the power brokers on their level. I told myself everybody did it. At the deepest level of excuse-making, I told myself I did it for my family. Why should my children pay the price of their father’s principles, which anyway were too deeply embedded to be compromised by a little finagling on the side? What right had I
not
to provide them with the best our society has to offer, when I possessed the means to do so?” Again his eyes touched on Grace. “Young people judge everything in black and white. Older people see shades of gray. As we grow older and take on the responsibilities of a family, as we acquire mortgages, debts, possessions that need to be financed and insured and maintained, we grow more tolerant, less critical, of ourselves as well as others.

“I’m not opposed to tolerance,” Jonathan said. “It’s just a hell of a dangerous commodity. A little goes a long, long way. More than a little, and a man gets lax in his views. He starts tolerating things he’s got no business tolerating.

“Not that I knew it at the time. That would have been intolerable. I convinced myself that this was a game in which everybody won, nobody lost.

“It’s not true. There may be victimless crimes, but extortion isn’t one of them.” He placed both hands on the railing that separated him from the rest of the courtroom and leaned forward. “One thing only I’ll say in my defense, and then I’ll shut up. Regardless of the other stuff going down,
I never stopped doing my job.
I never stopped fighting for my constituency.

“The prosecutor told you it was all a sham. She said I used my office solely to enrich myself. That’s a lie. Serving the people of this city was my reason for being, my heart and soul. The other stuff was something I drifted into.
 

“But I make no excuses. I take responsibility for everything I did, the good and the bad. They don’t cancel each other out. That is my only consolation.”

He walked back to the defense table and picked up a glass of water. There was a spontaneous eruption of applause that spread through the court— not only spectators, but also jurors and hardened reporters joined in.

Judge Malina pounded her gavel, but it was Jonathan who silenced them. “Why would you applaud?” he said in astonishment. “I’m saying I’m guilty.” He walked to the center of the court, where the gray city light shone down on him. “A ruined man stands before you. I have lost everything; soon even my liberty will be gone. I expect to serve many years in prison for the same offenses Michael Kavin will walk away from. But I wouldn’t trade places with him for the world, because with this act, I reclaim myself:
 
a battered old self, spotted and bruised, like the last peach in the bin, but my own.”

A female juror sniffled. Jonathan returned to the defense table and slumped against it. He looked spent, terminally weary. “I apologize to the people of my borough for betraying their trust, to my family for using them as an excuse for my own failings, and to my noble lawyer, Christopher Leeds. I apologize especially to Vito Tortelli, the only businessman we approached who had the guts to call a spade a spade, and who paid for his courage. Thank you, your Honor, for letting me speak.”

He nodded to her and the jury. As he walked around the defense table toward his seat, Gracie stood and stretched her arms out over the railing. Jonathan hugged her and let go.

Lucas Rayburn bulled his way through the crowd. Buscaglio rose to intercept him, but he passed her by and grasped Jonathan’s hand. They shook, and Lucas squeezed his shoulder. Then Jonathan sank into his seat.
 

Christopher Leeds put an arm around him. “You’re a dead man,” he whispered. “But no one will ever say you didn’t go down in style.”

EPILOGUE

Eighteen years later

GRACIE TIPS THE BELLBOY, locks the door, and leans against it with a sigh of contentment. She loves hotels, and this Albany Hilton is a good one, better than she could afford if she were paying. There was a time in her life when she lived in a series of hotel rooms much less luxurious than this, a time of healing suspension that left her with a taste for privacy and a recurrent hankering for motion. Though the privacy of hotel rooms is illusory, violated daily by unseen intruders, as illusions go it’s a strong one.

She is in this room by choice; she has been asked, indeed strongly pressed, to stay elsewhere. To this invitation she replied, with as much tact as she could muster, that she is too anxious before speaking engagements to be fit for human company. And while it is true that she is nervous, both she and the one who invited her understand that on this particular occasion there are more than the usual grounds.

Gracie orders a salad, an omelet, and a half-bottle of white wine from room service. While waiting, she unpacks. On the night chest goes a framed photograph of her children: David sitting on a tractor, holding baby Talia. A stab of longing, a physical pain, pierces her as she gazes at their faces. A week has passed since she kissed them good-bye, and two more will pass before she holds them again, assuming David lets her, for at the advanced age of eight he is getting too old (so he tells her) for mushy stuff.

Tamar claims he is the image of Jonathan as a child, but Gracie sees the resemblance only in his eyes, which are gray with flecks of green and lit from within by an almost painful curiosity. Much as she loves her firstborn child, she’s relieved to be away from him; for Grace is a secretive soul, and David’s inquisitiveness knows no bounds.

The day before she left the kibbutz, she walked into her house to find him studying the photo album she keeps hidden in a trunk. “That’s private,” she said angrily. He didn’t even hear. With eyes as round as silver dollars, he stared at the yellowed front page of the New York
Post.
“Fleishman arraigned!” the headline blared, but although he speaks his mother’s tongue fluently, David cannot yet read it. He was studying the photograph of her family standing on the steps of the municipal courthouse.

“That’s you,” he said, jabbing at her image with a grimy finger. His eyes traveled from her face to the face in the picture and back again, suddenly unsure. She knew why. The girl who stands on the edge of the step, her body poised like a pugilist’s, wears a fierce and wild look, an expression Grace’s children have never seen on her face and please God never will.

“Who’s that?” David demanded, pointing to the sober young man who stands close beside her, holding her arm.

“My brother.”

He looked up suspiciously. “You have a brother?”

“Yes.”

“Did I ever meet him?”

“No,” she said, taking the album from him, closing it firmly. “And I’ll thank you to stay out of my things.”

“Why haven’t I?”

“He lives very far away, in America.”

“So? We’ve been to America. Do you write to him? What’s his name?”

“Paul.”

“Paul Fleishman?”

“Paul Mann.”

“Why isn’t his name Fleishman, like yours and Grandpa’s?”

“He changed it,” Grace said.

“Why did he change it?”

She ran her hands through her hair and tugged. Then the door opened and Micha walked in. David launched himself at his father and wrapped his skinny legs around his waist. “Did you know Mommy has a brother?” he said in Hebrew.

Micha’s eyes went from his son to the album to Gracie’s face. He said, “Come on, sport, let’s shoot a few baskets before dinner.” David whooped and raced outside.

A temporary reprieve, she knows, artificially prolonged by her flight abroad. The boy has a sponge of a memory and he is relentless. The questions will come, and what will she tell him? She has buried her past without requiem; yet what did she gain by forgetting her mother, forsaking her father, and accepting her brother’s desertion? Her son looks at a photo and asks, “Is that you?”, and she is confounded. Perhaps people aren’t meant to rise like phoenixes from the ashes.