The Burden of Proof Read online

  “Daddy?” Stern’s daughter Kate, his youngest child, was at the foot of the stairs. She was in her nightgown, a tall stalk of a young woman, slender and heartbreakingly beautiful.

  “Cara,” he answered. He had always used this endearment with the girls at times. Stern was still holding the lab bill, and he pressed the envelope into the back pocket of his trousers. This was not a matter to discuss with the children, not today, at any event, when the thought would foment even greater anguish, and certainly not with Kate. Beauty, Stern suspected, had made the world too simple for Kate. She seemed to drift along, buffered by her uncommon good looks and a kindly disposition. Perhaps that apportioned blame unfairly. Much must have happened here, at home. Clara had concentrated so on Peter; Stern in turn shared a natural intensity with his older daughter, Marta. Kate had never been irradiated by the most intense energies of the mysterious family dynamic.

  As a youngster, she had displayed the same intellectual talents as her brother and sister; and she had Clara’s musical talent. But all of that had withered. In high school she had met John, a sweet, Gentile lunk, an almost laughable prototype, a football player and a paragon of blond male beauty with his apple-pie face and hapless manner. A year after college, in spite of her parents’ gentle discouragement, she had married him. John started out in his father’s printshop, but it was soon clear the business could not sustain two families, and so Dixon had put him to work at MD, where, after some false starts, John seemed to be making do, one more ex-jock jostling about on the playing field of the markets. Kate herself taught school. She loved her husband with a pitiable tender innocence, but Stern at moments could feel his heart rub itself raw with worry at the prospect of the moment Kate finally learned about the wallops the world could deliver. Now she touched his hand.

  “Daddy, I want you to know something. We weren’t going to say anything for another month, but everyone is so sad—” Kate’s mouth trembled slightly.

  Dear God, thought Stern, she is pregnant.

  She lifted her face proudly. Kate said, “We’re going to have a baby.”

  “Oh my,” said Stern. He grasped her hand. “My,” he said again, smiling bravely and trying to recall exactly how he would be expected to reflect his delight. He kissed her first on the temple, then took her in his arms. He did so only rarely, and here in her thin nightgown he was amazed by the feel of his daughter, her narrowness, the loose movement of her breasts against him. Kate wept with sudden abandon, then drew back.

  “We couldn’t say anything,” she explained to her father. “It wasn’t safe yet. We’d had some problems. And now I keep thinking, What if Mommy knew?” Once more she became uncontrollable. Once more Stern took his dark, beautiful daughter in his arms. But even as he held Kate, he found there was an abrupt adjustment in his own vision of things. Clara had abandoned the children, too. He had viewed this last act of hers as aimed exclusively at him. But the children, grown but troubled, were still not past the point where they required occasional assistance. Would it have made a difference, had Clara known Kate’s secret? Or had she decided that they too’d had the last of what she could stand to give?

  Above them there was stirring. Marta was on the stairs, a smaller woman, also dark, with wire-rimmed glasses and a bosky do of untamed black hair. She regarded the scene below with a vulnerable look of her own.

  “Group cry?” she asked.

  Stern awaited Kate’s lead. She squared her shoulders and dabbed her eyes. The entire family was to know. As he prepared for her declaration, entirely unexpected, an arrow of joy shot forth from the leaden-like mass of his interior and he was overcome by a startlingly exact recollection of the abrupt ways a baby’s hands and legs would move, random and sudden as life itself.

  “I just told Daddy. I’m going to have a baby.”

  Marta’s shriek split the household. A self-serious person, she carried on mindlessly. She embraced her sister, hugged her father. The two young women sat together holding hands. Peter arrived then, coming early to beat the traffic, and was informed. With the commotion John emerged, and everyone rose to hug him. In response to his reticence, they were always excessive. They had labored for years to make John feel accepted in a situation where, for many reasons, he knew he never would be. The group by then had migrated together to the living room. Silvia entered in her housecoat, looking grave; clearly she had taken their hoopla as the noise of one more calamity. Silvia and Dixon had never had a family of their own, much to Silvia’s despair, and the news, so unexpected, brought Silvia, too, to tears. It was barely past seven and the family, overcome by all of this, clung to one another. And there in the living room, Stern, at last, longed for Clara. He had been waiting for it. More than the disorder and the loss, at this moment there was the absence.

  When he looked up, Marta was watching. It had savaged Stern with sorrow to see her the night she had arrived. Marta, brave Marta, his boldest child, trod soldier-like up the walk, a canvas bag slung over her shoulder, weeping openly as soon as she climbed from the taxi. Stern embraced her at the door. ‘Daddy, I never thought she was a happy person, but—’ Throttled by emotion, Marta got no further. Stern held her and suffered privately the unequivocal nature of his daughter’s estimate of her mother. She had always held Clara at greater distance than the other two; as a result, perhaps, she had more to regret.

  Across the room, his daughter, with her father’s tiny close-set eyes, looked at him sadly now.

  I miss her, too, she mouthed.

  Stern, a frequent morning chef, cooked for the entire group. He fried eggs and flapjacks, and Marta squeezed grapefruit for juice, a family tradition. By nine, an hour before the mortician’s limousine was to arrive, they were all fed and dressed, quietly gathered once more in the living room.

  “How about bridge?” Marta asked. She prided herself on being unrestrained by convention. In most things, Marta styled herself in the ways of the late sixties. She had been a child then and took it as a time of great romance; she went about in flowing gowns and high-laced boots, with her wind-sprung hair. “Mom liked it when we played.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Peter. “She liked it when we square-danced, too, while we were kids. We can do-si-do to the chapel.”

  Marta whispered to her brother, Oh fuck off, but smiled. Marta had always tempered her rivalry with Peter, and she granted him special liberties now. Kate’s tears were constant, but Peter, of the three, seemed the hardest hit, morose, pensive, persistently out of balance. He went off by himself at many moments but returned inevitably to the comfort of his sisters. Close-knit, Stern’s children appeared to take strength from each other.

  Marta again mentioned bridge. “Daddy, would you mind?”

  Stern lifted his palms, not quite an answer.

  “Will you play?” Kate asked her father.

  Silvia motioned Stern forward, encouraging him.

  “I have a few things to look after for later.” She was preparing the household for the crush of callers that would follow the funeral.

  “I shall help Aunt Silvia. You four play.”

  “I’ll help Aunt Silvia,” said John. He was on his feet already, a huge young man, a mountainous blond with a neck thick as a tire rim. He had never mastered the game, like so many other things attached to his in-laws. The Sterns with their quiet intense ways had mystified John for most of a decade.

  “Come on,” Marta called. She was in the sun room, already looking for cards. Stern understood his daughter’s excitement. For an instant, it would be as when she was seventeen and the children were all safe from the world of grownup difficulties. Stern, as ever, found himself chafed and touched by his Marta and her impulses.

  “Katy, I will play with you,” Stern announced. He was always a partner with one of the girls, usually Kate. He and Peter squabbled when they played together. Stern had spent much of the little time he had at home playing one game or another with his children. Chutes and Ladders. Monopoly. Word games when they were in the primary g
rades. The four of them spent hours around a game table in the sun room. Clara seldom participated. Often she would sit in a fifth chair, with hands and ankles primly crossed, watching or, when necessary, assisting Kate. But she was not obtrusive. This, for better or worse—rules, moves, strategies—was Alejandro’s time.

  Peter made the cards and handed them to Stern to deal. The sun room—referred to in the old architect’s plans, drawn in the twenties, as ‘the solarium’—was a narrow area, rimmed with windows, floored in slate. From here they looked directly at Clara’s garden. It was the time of year when she would have begun to turn the soil. The stalks of last year’s gladioli, trimmed neatly almost to the soil, rose in rows, survivors of the mild winter.

  Stern bid a weak club. He played all conventions. Anything but hand signals, Clara said.

  “Are you going back to work after the baby?” Marta asked her sister.

  Kate seemed a bit puzzled. Her future, such as it was, was apparently beyond her. Within, Stern seemed to cringe. This child with a child! By John, no less. Vey iz mir. Kate told Marta that they did not know yet how the money would work out or how she would feel about leaving the baby.

  “Oh, it’ll be your first,” said Peter. “You’ll want to give it lots of attention. It will always be special.”

  The doorbell rang. Through the front panes, Stern saw his brother-in-law. Dixon had returned to town last night. He had been in New York on pressing business and had delayed flying home. Stern had felt slighted—the usual with Dixon—and he was taken aback, therefore, at his relief at seeing Dixon on the threshold with his bags yesterday evening. His brother-in-law, a large, solid man, had thrown his arms about Stern and made a good show of great sorrow. One could seldom be certain how Dixon truly felt. That was part of his genius—he was like a forest, full of many colors. He could greet you at any instant with a salesman’s blather or the gruffest truths.

  This morning, however, Dixon’s attention had returned more typically to himself. As Stern took his coat, Dixon lowered his voice discreetly.

  “When you’re back at the stand, Stern, I’d like to ask you a question or two.”

  Dixon always addressed him military fashion, last name only. They had met originally in the service, which had led, by turns, to Dixon’s making Silvia’s acquaintance and to his becoming in time her suitor, a development to which Stern was still not fully adjusted, three decades after the fact.

  “Business questions?” he asked Dixon.

  “That kind of item. I don’t need to trouble you now. I want to hear about your trip to Chicago.”

  Ah yes, thought Stern, the paths of ego were deep and the living needed to go on.

  “I understand your concern, Dixon. The situation may be somewhat involved, however. It is best that we discuss it another time.”

  A shadow passed, predictably, over Dixon. Fifty-five years old, he was tan, trim, and, even with this darkened look, the image of vitality. He was a powerful man; he worked out every day with weight equipment. Dixon worshipped at the same altar as so many others in America: the body and its uses. His dark brass-colored hair had grown paler and more brittle with age, but was cleverly barbered to give him a mannerly business-like look.

  “You didn’t like what you heard?” he asked Stern.

  In fact, Stern had learned little of substance. The documents he had examined in Chicago, account statements and trading records of the clients for an eight- or nine-month period, had been unrevealing. There was no telling what offense the government was investigating, or even who had suggested to them the prospect of a crime.

  “There may be a problem, Dixon. It is too early to become greatly alarmed.”

  “Sure.” Dixon drew a cigarette from an inside pocket. He was smoking heavily again, an old bad habit recently grown worse, which Stern took as a sign of concern. Three years ago the IRS set up a full-scale encampment in Dixon’s conference room, with barely a riffle in his breezy style. This time, however, Dixon was on edge. With word of the first subpoena, he had been on the phone to Stern, demanding that the government be stopped. For the present, however, Stern was loath to contact Ms. Klonsky, the Assistant United States Attorney. At the U.S. Attorney’s Office they seldom told you more than they wanted you to know. Moreover, Stern feared that a call from him might somehow focus the government’s attention on Dixon, whose name as yet had gone unmentioned. Perhaps the grand jury was looking at a number of brokerage houses. Perhaps something besides MD connected the customers. For the present it was best to tiptoe about, observing the government from cover. “They’re always looking for something,” Dixon said bravely now, and went off to find Silvia.

  In the sun room, Stern’s children were still speaking about the baby.

  “Will John help out?” Marta asked. “Change diapers and stuff?”

  Kate reared back, astonished.

  “Of course. He’s in heaven. Why wouldn’t he?”

  Marta shrugged. At moments like this, it concerned Stern that she seemed so dumbfounded by men. Her father’s daughter, Marta, regrettably, was not a pretty woman. She had Stern’s broad nose and small dark eyes. Worse still, she shared his figure. Stern and his daughter were short, with a tendency to gather weight in their lower parts. Marta submitted herself almost masochistically to the rigors of diet and exercise, but you could never escape what nature had provided. It was not, she was apt to say, the form favored by fashion magazines. Notwithstanding, Marta had always attracted her admirers—but there seemed an inevitable doom in her relations. In her conversation there were, by idle reference, a procession of men who came and went. Older, younger. Things always foundered. Marta, in the meantime, now came to her own defense.

  “Daddy didn’t change diapers,” she said.

  “I did not?” asked Stern. Surprisingly, he could not recall precisely.

  “How could you have changed diapers?” asked Peter, awakened somewhat by the opportunity to challenge his father. “You were never here. I remember I couldn’t figure out what a trial was. I thought it was like a place you went. Another city.”

  Marta called out for John: “Are you going to change the baby’s diapers?”

  John, carrying a thirty-cup percolator, entered the sun room for a moment. He looked as bad as everyone else, baffled and grieved. He shrugged gently in response to Marta’s question. John was a taciturn fellow. He had few opinions that he was willing to express.

  In another room the telephone rang. It had been pealing incessantly for two days now. Stern seldom spoke. The children answered, responding tersely with the time and place of the funeral, promising to share the condolences with their father. Most of these conversations seemed to end the same way, with a labored pause before the instrument was cradled. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ one of them would quickly answer. ‘We have no idea why.’

  Silvia emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, beckoning to Stern. This call, apparently, he could not avoid. In passing, he touched his sister’s hand. A woman with a staff of three at home, Silvia had been here toiling tirelessly for three days, running, organizing, taking care.

  “Ah, Sandy. What a sad occasion. My deepest sympathy.” Stern had gone up to their bedroom, still dark and shuttered, to take the phone. He recognized the voice of Cal Hopkinson. Cal was a lawyer. When Sandy’s beloved friend Harry Fagel had died two years ago, Cal, Harry’s partner, had become the Sterns’ personal lawyer. He updated their wills and each year filed tax returns for the trusts left for Clara. Cal was a practical fellow, amiable if not particularly appealing, and he came rather quickly to the point. Since Marta was in town, he wondered if Stern might want to come down with the children in the next few days to discuss Clara’s will.

  “Is that necessary, Cal?”

  Cal pondered in silence. Perhaps he was somewhat offended. He was one of those attorneys who lived for details, mowing them down each day in the belief that if they went untended they would overgrow the world.

  “It’s not necessary, San
dy, but it sometimes helps to prevent questions later. Clara left a large estate, you know.”

  Did he know? Yes, it came back to him that he did. If the truth were told, in these moments in which he was too harrowed and weak to avoid it, he could barely see Clara through the glimmer of gold when he had married her. Poor boy weds rich girl. It was a dream as thrilling and illicit as pornography. And in keeping, he had practiced the usual cruel repression. Early on, Stern stilled Henry Mittler’s obvious suspicions with a vow to his father-in-law that Clara and he would live solely on his income. Thirty years passed in which Stern feigned not to care about Clara’s fortune, in which he left the details of management to her and those he suggested she employ, and at the end, in the sorest irony, the lie was truth.

  “Is there some surprise in Clara’s affairs of which you wish us to be aware, Cal?”

  A lawyer’s pause here, the habit of a man who had learned to measure every sentence before he spoke. Cal probably considered it unprofessional to answer.

  “Nothing to shock you,” he said at last. “I’m sure you have the general picture. There are probably one or two points we should discuss.” Cal had laid just enough emphasis on “shock.” Surprise but not devastation, in other words. Now what? he thought. A careful, tidy person always, Clara had left behind her, with no sign of concern, a murky, littered wake. Stern said he would speak to the children and prepared to end the conversation.

  “Sandy,” said Cal abruptly. Merely from the tone, Stern could tell what was coming. “This is such upsetting news. You must forgive me for asking, but was there any sign?”