Prologue
My father was a criminal attorney. In his office, case files filled cabinets on all four walls. A few years ago, those files got transferred into boxes, and the boxes got stacked floor-to-ceiling in the room where I wrote novels. Chronologically arranged, and tagged both with dates and the surnames of clients, they formed a bulwark counterpointed by my windows; outdoor light, then, had to run through tunnels constructed of my father’s files before illuminating the pages I was working on.
One morning, sitting in an uncushioned Windsor chair while, outside my recessed windows, wind swiveled leaves so that their hidden sides showed, I opened a file and began to read. It was titled wilton, theresa, and the first thing I found there was a letter written on November 6, 1955, by a Mrs. James Lovell to the superintendent of Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, Washington, about her sister, Theresa Wilton, who’d been a mental patient at Western State earlier that year but had since returned to her family. Mrs. Lovell’s letter offered background: Theresa had four children; Theresa had left her husband, Frank, many times over the years; Theresa had attempted suicide two years earlier; Theresa had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic; Theresa currently had two sons at home, Sean and Marcus, ages seven and nine, she was incapable of caring for. At the moment, Mrs. Lovell said, Theresa was in the throes of mental illness, and firm in her belief that Frank planned to kill her and all their children—planned, even, to kill their son Kenneth, who was serving with the army in Korea.
The next day—I found this in a document entitled State of Washington v. Wilton, Theresa—Theresa Wilton took a .38-caliber revolver out of Frank’s suitcase, waited in a bedroom doorway as he came upstairs after breakfast, and shot him in the back. After stumbling downstairs, Frank died, facedown, on his kitchen floor, while Sean and Marcus looked on.
A judge asked my father to represent Theresa Wilton. There were not yet public defenders in Seattle, which in 1955 had no freeway or skyscrapers. My father was twenty-five at that point, and this was his first case. His initial move was to write to the King County Juvenile Court commissioner to say that Sean and Marcus were in jeopardy now that their father was dead and their mother in jail. They were in the care of an aunt, he explained, but that was temporary. Sean and Marcus had to go somewhere permanently—specifically, to the home of an older brother, Lee, in Fairbanks, Alaska, whom my father had contacted and who was not averse to trying. Could the commissioner sign an order to that effect?
Proceedings were cursory. Theresa Wilton was sent back to Western State Hospital because she was incapable of standing trial. She wouldn’t eat while being held, so my father went to Western State to see what he could do about it. Shortly afterward, Kenneth Wilton, on furlough from Korea, came to see my father. With the right court order, Kenneth explained, he could request an allotment from the Armed Services for the welfare of his younger brothers. My father sought the court order. Meanwhile, it seemed to him that if Sean and Marcus were going to Fairbanks, they ought to travel at the winter school recess, so he wrote again to the Juvenile Court about them, as well as to a Miss Witzak at the Washington State Department of Public Assistance.
In April of 1956, Mrs. Lovell wrote my father with two questions: where should she send Theresa’s 1955 tax return, and why was Theresa’s psychiatrist not seeing her more often? My father asked her to send him the tax forms, and went to see the psychiatrist. At about the same time, an attorney in Fairbanks—a Miss Kleeble—wrote my father about a life-insurance policy in which Frank had named Theresa as beneficiary. Alaska Statute 13.10.130, Miss Kleeble pointed out, was entitled person convicted of murder of decedent not to inherit from decedent. Since Theresa’s trial was pending, there could be a delay, or contention, about payout. My father wrote to R. N. Fenstrom, the regional claim-and-service supervisor for the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, and enclosed Frank’s death certificate, but Fenstrom wrote back to say, “A felonious killing by a beneficiary usually disqualifies them from obtaining the proceeds.” “To date,” my father reminded Fenstrom, “Mrs. Wilton has been convicted of nothing and is at Western State Hospital until such time as she is determined to be capable of assisting in her defense.” In late April, the Lincoln cut a check.
By May, my father had a trust account set up in a Seattle bank. He had the Lincoln’s payout of twelve thousand dollars. He had means of support procured for Sean and Marcus, who then moved to Fairbanks. In June, Mrs. Lovell wrote with a new set of concerns—reimbursement of funeral expenses, Social Security, a monthly allowance for Theresa at Western State, insurance money. The stream of correspondence ran all summer, at the end of which things fell apart for Marcus in Fairbanks and he was sent to the Griffin Home for Boys, near Seattle. My father became his guardian.
Theresa Wilton’s psychiatrist now broached the subject of her return to court. In March 1957, she was declared capable of standing trial. A judge found Theresa not guilty on grounds of insanity at the time of the shooting, but since there was a question as to whether this condition might recur, she was recommitted to Western State.
There followed a series of monthly reports on Theresa’s mental status, prepared by the director of the hospital’s outpatient department and sent to the judge who’d ordered Theresa’s recommitment. By mid-September, Theresa was out of the hospital and living with a friend in Portland. By early October, she had a job at a motel. By the end of November, her youngest son, Sean, was back in her custody, and by June 1958, my father was seeing to the paperwork necessary to terminate his guardianship of Theresa and Sean. In November of 1958, three years after the death of Frank Wilton, when my father was twenty-eight, he sent Theresa a check for $5,368.05, which was the remainder of the Lincoln’s life-insurance payout once Frank’s debts were settled. Interest had accumulated, and that interest was Theresa’s, so he sent her a second check, for $36.54. Marcus was still at the Griffin Home for Boys, and my father remained his guardian until Marcus turned eighteen. No one, as far as I could tell, ever paid my father a dime. Case closed.
Pretrial
Awhile back, I stopped writing fiction. I’ve been doing it for a long time, I’m not interested anymore, there are other things in life, I’d be repeating myself—I became aware that thoughts like these, uninvited, unexpected, persistent, and gnawing, were proliferating in my head, and outweighed any urge to write fiction, at first by a little, so that I stayed in the habit, but then by a lot, so that I quit.
It was a strange development for me. My situation was unfamiliar. Perplexed at first, I puttered and tinkered. I read books long unread. I took walks that might aptly be described as putting one foot in front of the other while trying not to forget that it was time to change a furnace filter. I swam laps with my wife every Tuesday and Thursday morning in a public pool. About once a week, we went to see a movie; about twice a week, we ate lunch in a café. My life clearly smacked now of bourgeois retirement. Predominantly, I cleaned, organized, repaired, and refurbished, and so the weeks went past without any fiction writing. Some days, I was distressed to learn that it was noon already, but this perturbation, from the start, was mild, a pang at worst, or an ephemeral hollowness. More persistent was a vague intimation that, at the heart of every moment of living, something was wrong. That faded, until I was waking up each morning without giving fiction writing any thought, or missing it. Fiction writing was behind me in full. There were other possibilities now. If that leaves you wondering about this book—wondering if I’m kidding, or playing a game, or if I’ve wandered into the margins of metafiction or the approximate terrain of autofiction—everything here is real.
One October Sunday afternoon, after I’d headed four rows of raspberry canes that still had leaves but were shedding them as I culled, my father called me. Two things, he said. First, a tree had fallen in his yard. Second, he’d had a minor car accident. The downed tree, while a nuisance, could wait indefinitely. The accident, though, was a problem, because his car was undrivable and he had to be at work in the morning.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t get hurt. No one got hurt. That’s on the bright side. On the downside, I’m at fault. I know that. I can’t blame someone else. I plowed into a parked car. I turned a corner and plowed into a car, and I sat there thinking, ‘I know what this means. It’s the beginning of the end for me.’
“Your mother,” my father went on, “had a series of parking-lot scrapes, and then a serious fender bender, and the result is, for about two years now, she hasn’t gotten behind the wheel of a car, which you know, of course, and anyway we only had the one car, and now it’s unusable. We’re okay, though, in broad terms.”
My parents were okay—in broad terms. They still lived in the house where they’d raised me and my sister—a brick saltbox with brick windowsills and a wrought-iron railing on one side of the fissured concrete risers outside their front door. It was full of failed windows with permanently obscured panes, and hemmed in by bushes irregularly trimmed. It had a half-basement crammed with objects put aside for a future dispersal that never came, and a roof that leaked where it met a chimney penetration. The rooms were low-ceilinged, the interior doorways trimmed by scant casing. Light fell across everything in a desultory fashion—across the ceramic figurines on the side tables, across the heaped-up matchbox collection, and across the sideboard with its display of blue-and-white Delft crockery. My parents, in their eighties, had gravitated toward their combination kitchen/dining room as the stage on which their lives would play out. They’d installed a half-sofa and a small television there, cramping the room with this modest arrangement. It was a bit of a feat to slip around the table where they took their meals and into the nest they’d made for themselves beneath a window—a window against which, at the moment, as my father explained, the whip ends of branches were curled in the aftermath of tree fall.
I went to their house. It wasn’t hard for me to do so. I lived about fifteen minutes away by car, which you could say sounds depressing—staying in the approximate neighborhood of your youth for your whole life. I wasn’t down about it, though. In fact, I liked it. Plus, I would have moved if there’d been a reason for it, like a job, for example, or because my wife wanted to. My sister had also stayed put. She’d stayed in Seattle, and had said about that, more than once, “Why move?”
The toppled tree in my parents’ backyard was a spruce that had succumbed to a recent windstorm. About a third of it had cracked off and now lay with its branches either spearing the earth or rising like bristles. Bark, needles, and cones littered the patio, and an acrid scent of resin hung in the air. I went to work with a chain saw until a reasonable neatness had been reintroduced, and then my father and I ducked into the cedar-shingled shed at the rear corner of my parents’ lot—ramshackle and dilapidated, with a duff-filled, detached gutter—to look at his car, which was emphatically crumpled on the driver’s side at the front, where a headlight dangled sadly. “What happened,” he said, “is that by the time I got home—and this accident occurred just two blocks away—all of the water had come out of the radiator. So now it has to sit here until I figure something out.”
—
the next morning, at seven-thirty, when I came to pick him up for work, he was waiting on his porch and crisply dressed. He got into my car looking eager, I thought, with his full-length raincoat clutched in one hand and a plastic grocery bag in the other.
We took off. I smelled Vitalis. My father wore a clip-on tie and suspenders under a single-breasted jacket. For a long time, he’d cut a half-decent figure in that costume or some variant of it, but now he looked like he’d borrowed extra-large clothing. A sticklike codger of his sort can strike people as a buzzard, particularly if his de-facto expression is a frown; in a younger crowd, he can appear to breathe resentment toward life and death both. My father wasn’t like that. He lacked the sinister, deoxygenated pall. His eyes were astir, and he smiled when he spoke to you. Mostly what he suggested, to me at least, was high-strung enthusiasm.
Downtown, I pulled into the garage below his office building. “Do you want to come up?” he asked. “Or is it straight to the library?”
I’d assured him the day before that driving him to work was no problem for me because I needed to go to the downtown public library. (Not true, of course.) At the moment, though, it was seven-forty-five, and the library didn’t open until ten. I told him this.
We got out. My father, striding along under the garage’s stark lights as if late for an appointment, his raincoat over one forearm and his plastic grocery bag slung from the other, pointed at the attendant in the garage’s pay booth. The attendant returned a thumbs-up.
We rode two escalators, and then an elevator, to the twenty-seventh floor. My father unlocked the door to his firm’s offices, snapped on a long bank of lights, and checked for a memo (apparently his firm still allowed for paper) that might have his name on it behind the reception desk. There were none. The place was silent.
We went to his office. I hadn’t been there in a long time. My father dropped his raincoat on a chair and took from the plastic bag he’d been carrying a smaller plastic bag full of bran flakes and a copy of The Seattle Times. Next, he opened a desk drawer stocked with paper plates and plastic spoons, removed from it yet a third plastic bag—this one also containing bran flakes—and merged his cereal. “I’ve got enough here,” he said. “Today is a Monday. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—positively, I’ve got enough for five days.”
He was in the habit, and had been for years, of buying a pint of milk, a cup of coffee, and a banana around ten, and then eating breakfast at a table in an underground concourse.
For now, though, he shut his breakfast supply drawer, slid his reading glasses from their case, sat down, and started paying bills. He wrote checks, put stamps on envelopes, licked and sealed envelopes shut, returned his pen to its place against his shirt pocket protector, got up, and strode to a cabinet. “I don’t want to be in your way,” I said. “You have work to do.”
“No,” said my father. “I don’t have work to do. I haven’t really had work to do in years. Every once in a while something comes in, but, basically, I just mill around here.”
He smiled as if bemused by his geriatric absurdity. There were three windows in his office, two with louvered blinds shut, but through the third I could see that it was getting light outside. “What I do,” my father confessed, while standing by his file vaults, “is look at the newspaper or read a book.”
He filed his invoices, returned to his desk, and sat down across from me breezily, in his element. “From 1958 until about 1998,” he said, “I had anywhere from thirty to forty cases going all the time, but since then, it’s tailed off, which is understandable, because I’m almost eighty-four.” He shook his head. “In years past,” he said, “I never had the kind of time I have now. In years past, I had not just dozens of misdemeanor cases on any given day but also felonies, homicides, rapes, kidnappings—serious matters, life-and-death matters, cases where people could get very long sentences. I don’t want it to be like that anymore, I don’t want to be as busy as I used to be, but I wish I was a little bit busier than I am right now, because I’d like to have a justification for coming here every day.”
My father reclined and put his thumbs through his suspenders. He had long combed his hair straight back so that it lay in regularly spaced rows over the top of his head, but at the moment a single lock, ...
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