Affidavit

Theron

The first thing Lorraine Beaudry said to him was: "You're taller than the photographs."

"I'm told it's a common complaint."

"It isn't a complaint. It's an observation. I like to start with the facts." She did not rise. She sat behind a desk the size of a small aircraft carrier, in an office on the ninth floor of a building on Westminster Street, with a window at her back that framed the gray stub of the Superman Building and a very low April sky, and she looked at him over the tops of her glasses with the unhurried attention of a woman who has been cross-examining people since before he was born. "Sit down, Mr. Wexcombe. Not there. That one's for clients I like. Take the one by the radiator."

He took the one by the radiator.

It was a hard wooden chair with a seat worn to a shine, and as he lowered himself into it he saw, on the corner of her blotter, the crab brooch. It had come off her lapel. It lay on a folded handkerchief, a small enameled thing in red and blue, with one claw bent.

"It's the clasp," said Beaudry. "It sticks. I take it off when I'm angry."

"Are you angry now?"

"I'm interested. It's a different thing. It takes longer to wear off." She picked up a pen, a heavy black one, and turned it end over end between her fingers. She was sixty or so, small, square, with iron-gray hair cropped close to her skull and the sort of face that had decided, early, not to bother with charm. "Mr. Pryor tells me you have a document."

"I do."

"He tells me you wrote it yourself."

"With his help. He corrected my grammar."

"And you wish me to give it to my client."

"If she is willing to accept it."

"She hasn't asked for it."

"No."

"She has, in fact, asked for nothing. She has asked for nothing from you since the thirteenth of March, except that you remain the person at the end of a form." Beaudry's eyes were flat and gray, like river stones. "You understand why this makes me nervous."

"I do."

"Tell me."

He had expected this. He had known, on the long drive from Bristol with Dell silent at the wheel and the dawn coming up pink and cold over Mount Hope Bay, that he would be asked to explain himself to a woman who had no reason on earth to believe him. He had gone over it. He had arranged it in his head: an introduction, a principle, a conclusion.

He found, sitting on the hard chair with his hat on his knee, that he had forgotten all of it.

"I have given her a great many things," said Theron. "In four and a half months. A flat, a crib, a cradle, a car seat. A set of smoke detectors. A fleet of soup. I have been, as I believe she put it, extremely helpful." He heard the dry note in his own voice. "She refused the most of it. The rest she accepted, and wrote down in a ledger, and was kind enough to call it a debt. And the thing that I have understood over the past three weeks, in a loft, with a stove, is that every one of those gifts was a lever."

"A lever."

"A thing that bears weight. Each time I gave, I put something on her side of the scale. It made it a little heavier. It made her a little more obliged. I did not intend it. But it was what the giving did." He drew a breath. "I have been thinking of what I could give her that was not a lever. I have thought about it very hard. And there is only one thing."

"Which is?"

"Power."

Beaudry's pen stopped.

"I do not mean money," said Theron. "I mean the other kind. I mean a thing that would let her ruin me, if she chose. A thing she could put in a drawer, or take to a court, or burn. With nothing attached. No condition, no deadline, no expectation of reply. I want her to have it in her hand and to know that I cannot take it back."

"And that is the affidavit."

"Yes."

"May I see it?"

He took it from his inside pocket and laid it on the blotter.

…

It was eleven pages. Ansel had typed it on the old Underwood, the one with the sticking e, at the desk by the window in the gray office on South Main Street, between the hours of ten on Sunday night and four on Monday morning, with Theron dictating from the other chair and the old man correcting his syntax with a quiet and terrible gentleness.

It began:

I, Theron Calder Wexcombe, of Newport in the County of Newport, being duly sworn, do depose and say:

1. That I make this affidavit voluntarily, without inducement, and for the sole purpose of placing in the hands of Odessa Marie Rourke a true and complete account of my conduct toward her, such that she may dispose of it as she sees fit.

2. That on or about the twenty-eighth of October I learned, from a document in the possession of Ansel Pryor, Esq., that my late brother had designated a person as the mother of his child by anonymous donation.

3. That I paid, or caused to be paid, the sum of forty thousand dollars to one Wade Pruitt, an employee of the Lumen Reproductive Center, for the purpose of identifying that person.

It went on.

It went on for eleven pages. He had made Ansel put in everything. The rented flat. The long window. The dates of the observation: 6:15 a.m., lemon water; 6:30, saltines; 7:10, departs for work. The car seat, the cradle, the smoke detectors, the debt of her mother's companion. The purchase of No. 13 through Ives Holdings LLC for eight hundred and forty thousand dollars. The deposit of two thousand dollars to the account of a man named Barrow, in the first week of February, for the purpose of receiving a report on the whereabouts and circumstances of the said Odessa Marie Rourke, a payment he had made, and forgotten, and discovered in the books of the company in March with a sensation of cold sliding water.

Paragraph 31 said:

31. That on the twenty-first of December I read Article Four of the Last Will and Testament of Gerard Wexcombe and understood its effect; that I computed, over a period of approximately forty seconds, the voting power it would confer upon the guardian of the child; that I thereafter concealed my knowledge of the said Article from the said Odessa Marie Rourke for a period of eighty-two days; and that I cannot swear, as I sit here, that the said computation played no part in any subsequent act.

And paragraph 38:

38. That on or about the twelfth of November I executed, in my capacity as a director of Wexcombe Marine, an attestation as to the maintenance of the vessel Marguerite, which I did not read; that I have since learned it to be false; and that I withdraw it in its entirety, as set out in the separate Amendment lodged with Narragansett Mutual on the twenty-fourth of March.

The last page read:

40. That I have not been asked to make this affidavit by the said Odessa Marie Rourke, or by anyone acting on her behalf. That she is under no obligation to read it. That she is free to file it, to withhold it, to give it to any person or authority she pleases, or to destroy it. That nothing in this document is a request for forgiveness, and nothing in it should be taken as one.

41. That the original is delivered to her counsel to hold at her direction, and that no copy has been retained by me.

Sworn to before me this fifth day of April.

There was a signature, in his own cramped upright hand. Beneath it, in Ansel's looping copperplate, a notary's stamp.

Beaudry read it.

She read it slowly, with her glasses pushed up on her forehead and the page held close, in a silence so complete that he could hear the clock on the wall counting the seconds. She read the first page and the second. She turned to the third. At one point she stopped, and made a small sharp sound in her throat, and he saw her finger move down a column and rest. At another she took off her glasses altogether and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

He sat on the hard chair and watched the Superman Building disappear into a low gray cloud.

At the end she laid the pages down, squared them with the edge of her hand, and sat for a long moment with her palms flat on the blotter.

"Mr. Wexcombe," she said. "Do you know what this is?"

"A confession."

"It is a signed, sworn, notarized confession to a series of acts that include, depending on how the Attorney General is feeling, solicitation of a bribe, conspiracy to invade privacy, and obtaining confidential medical information by deception. It admits to the commission of at least three felonies in the State of Rhode Island. It's the best piece of prosecution evidence I've seen in thirty years." She looked up. "And you want me to give it to a pregnant woman who has asked you to leave her alone."

"I want to give it to her. Yes."

"So she can hand it to the district attorney."

"If she wishes."

"So she can hand it to Albert Kessler's client, who will wave it in front of Judge Marchetti on the eighteenth of May and say: Here is the respondent, in his own words. He is unfit to hold a thing in trust."

"If she wishes."

"So she can put it in a drawer and use it, for the rest of your life, to make you do whatever she wants."

"I should be glad of that, actually."

Beaudry stared at him.

"Forgive me," said Theron. "That was a joke. It was not a good one. I find that I am very tired, and I have said the true thing so many times this week that I have begun to hear it as a bit."

"What is the true thing?"

"That I do not know how to be near her without taking something." His voice was low and level. "I have tried. I tried every day for four months, and I failed every day. And I think that the only way I can stop is to put a thing in her hand that makes it impossible. If she holds this, I cannot take her choice. I cannot take her vote. I cannot take her child. Because she can end me with a postage stamp."

Beaudry did not speak for some time.

Then she did something he did not expect. She picked up the crab brooch from the handkerchief, turned it over in her palm, and began, thoughtfully, to bend the claw back into place with her thumbnail.

"My client," she said, "is not a fool."

"No."

"She is exceptionally not a fool. She came into this office on the fourteenth of March with a bruise on her forearm from an IV and a legal pad covered in questions, and asked me four things. Whether she could be forced to disclose the identity of the donor. Whether she could be forced to disclose you. Whether you had committed a crime against her. And whether, if you had, she could choose not to say so."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her the last was a question of conscience, not law." Beaudry's thumb pressed the claw. "She said, 'I know. I'm asking if it's allowed.' And I said it was. And she nodded, and wrote it down, and said, 'Okay. Then I'll decide later.'" She looked at him. "That's all. For three weeks. I'll decide later. She has not decided."

His mouth was dry.

"I don't know," he said, "what that means."

"It means she has been holding this decision the way you hold a hot dish. Without a mitt. Because she doesn't want to set it down until she's sure where." The claw clicked back into line. She pinned the brooch to her lapel with a brisk jab. "Mr. Wexcombe. If I give her this, I am making a choice for her. I am telling her it's time. I'd rather she came to it herself."

"I understand."

"Do you?"

"I think so," said Theron slowly. "I think you are telling me that this too is a lever."

Beaudry went very still.

"Yes," she said.

"Even though it is not a gift. Even though it is the opposite of a gift. Even though it hands her the knife by the handle."

"A knife in a pregnant woman's hand is still a weight." Beaudry's face did not soften, but her voice dropped half a tone. "She has been asked to decide about you for four months. By you, by a judge, by a mother, by a friend. Everybody has a theory. Everybody has a request. Everyone is waiting to see what she does with her face. And you walk in with eleven pages and a bow, and what she will feel, I promise you, is not power. It's the pressure of one more person in the room."

He sat there.

It was a sensation of the oddest kind. He thought: I came here to give up the last lever. And I have found one. He thought of the kitchen floor on the thirteenth of March, the weight of her palm against the door. He thought of Don't touch me. He thought of the orange chair, and a pair of hands gripping molded plastic.

She has been asked for four months, he thought.

And I have been the most persistent asker of them all.

"Then I shall not send it," he said.

Beaudry raised an eyebrow.

"I shall leave it with you. In your safe. Sealed, with a note on the envelope, to be delivered if and only if she requests it." He drew himself upright. "It will be there, if she wants it. She need never think of it again, if she does not. And she will know, if she ever asks, that it was waiting. That it has been waiting since the fifth of April. That it was never a request."

"That's different."

"It is?"

"It's the difference," said Beaudry, "between handing a woman a loaded gun and leaving one in the cabinet." She sat back in her chair. For the first time, something stirred at the corner of her mouth. It wasn't a smile. It was the memory of one, the way a lamp is the memory of a fire. "Mr. Pryor said you'd say that."

"Did he?"

"He said, and I quote, 'My client is the only man in Rhode Island who can be talked out of a gesture by a lawyer, if the lawyer is right.'" She slid the pages toward him. "Initial each page. Then we'll seal it."

…

He was on the stairs, with the sealed envelope gone and his hat in his hand, when the telephone rang.

It was the old black one in the front office, the one with the dial, and the receptionist, a girl of twenty with blue-streaked hair and a nose stud, lifted it, listened, and turned with big round eyes.

"Mr. Wexcombe? It's for you. It's a Mr. Hale. He says he's been trying your cell for an hour."

He had turned it off.

He took the receiver. It was heavy and warm from her hand. He heard, over the line, the faint steady hush of a room with a very high ceiling, and under it a sound he'd known since boyhood: a chiming, many-voiced, precise, rippling out of a hundred rooms.

"Theron," said his uncle.

"Uncle Hale."

"You are a difficult man to find."

"I was at my lawyer's."

"Yes. I know. You've been at a lawyer's since seven o'clock this morning." The voice was pleasant, rich, amused. Its cream was perfectly whipped. "I was only a little surprised that it wasn't Ansel's. I should have thought that old crow would be the first to hold your hand through your public humiliation."

"He held it last night."

"Did he? How touching." A pause, the clink of a cup on a saucer. "I read your statement."

"Which?"

"The one you issued at six this morning. To the Journal and the Globe and the Newport Daily News. Three hundred and forty words. I, Theron Wexcombe, accept full responsibility for each of the actions described in the petition." Hale made a small contented sound. "It's very good. Quite your best prose. One feels the author's sincerity. I'd thought of framing it."

"Thank you."

"I believe you meant it."

"I did."

"You meant it so much that you've given me the case."

Theron said nothing.

"My dear boy." The voice dropped, silken, intimate. "You've admitted it. In writing. In public. Before the hearing. You've confirmed, over your own signature, every material allegation of Paragraph Nineteen. I need not prove a thing. I have only to read your statement into the record and sit down. The court will find that the respondent, by his own account, procured the mother's confidence by means of a bribe, concealed a material fact from her for eighty-two days, and purchased the building in which she lives. I shall call it a pattern of manipulation. Judge Marchetti will call it an admission. And I shall go home on the eighteenth of May a guardian ad litem, and a co-trustee, and a very happy man."

"You may."

"I'm so glad you see that."

"I see it perfectly well." Theron's hand was steady on the receiver. "I wrote it so that you would."

A silence.

It was short. A fraction of a breath. But he heard it. He heard it as a man hears a stair that isn't where his foot expects.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said, I wrote it so that you would see it. I made it as clear as I could." He leaned his shoulder against the wall. The receptionist, pretending to file, had stopped filing. "I wanted there to be no doubt in your mind that I had confessed. That it was complete. That there was nothing left for your investigators to find, nothing for Barrow and Voss to photograph, nothing that Mr. Kessler could hold in reserve to produce, in a dramatic moment, from a briefcase."

"That is—"

"It is rather a relief, Uncle. I recommend it. I had thought it would be like falling off a cliff. It is more like putting down a very large suitcase." He heard his voice, calm and light, and wondered at it. "You have been saving all of it. I know. You have been saving it for the eighteenth of May, in a file, like a card you were holding. And I have spent it. I have spent it all, in public, at six o'clock on a Monday morning. There is nothing left for you to reveal."

"Theron," said Hale, softly, "do you really suppose that is the whole of what I have?"

There it was.

It wasn't a threat. It was a delicate, almost courteous, almost kindly inquiry. And it went through him like a thin cold wire.

"I suppose," said Theron, "that it is the whole of what I have done."

"Is it?"

"Yes."

"And the document that you signed on the twelfth of November?"

He closed his eyes.

"I have withdrawn it."

"Yes. I know." The cup clinked. "I received a copy this morning from Hollis Brandt's office. In a courtesy envelope. Your amendment. Eleven paragraphs. 'I believe the alteration was made by or at the direction of the vice-chairman of the company.' I confess, I read that sentence three times." The voice was dreamy. "It's so brave. It's so very Wexcombe. A man standing in a burning building to say that the fire is his uncle's fault."

"It's what I believe."

"Do you have proof?"

"Mr. Hawkes does."

"Mr.— ah. The foreman." A faint pause. "He has a pension coming, I believe. Eleven years. It would be a pity if there were a problem with the paperwork."

"If there is a problem with the paperwork," said Theron, "I shall have the pleasure of explaining it to a federal examiner."

"My dear Theron."

"Uncle."

"You are so young." There was no mockery in it. It was almost fond. "You have always been. Your father used to say it: Theron will confess to the weather, if you let him. He meant it as a defect. I used to think it was a weakness. But I begin to think it may be a kind of armor. One cannot be blackmailed over a thing one has already said."

"No."

"One can only be destroyed over it. Which is a different art." The chime of a clock rang through the line, a high silver note, and then the others, answering. "I'm going to ask you a question, and I'd like you to answer it as truthfully as you've answered everything this morning. Do you know why I drew up Section 9(c)?"

"No."

"You don't?"

"I know what it says. 'Maintenance of Neutrality.' I know that you wished Dess to keep silent about her employer. I know that you were not asking for it out of tidiness." Theron's pulse beat in his ears. "I was hoping you would tell me."

"Ah." The old voice warmed. It had the delight of a connoisseur finding a vintage in a cellar. "That, my boy, is where you and I part company. You're hoping I'll tell you. I'm hoping you'll wonder."

The line clicked.

He stood in the front office of Lorraine Beaudry with the heavy receiver in his hand, listening to the dial tone. The receptionist was staring at him. Somewhere down the hall a typewriter began, and stopped.

"Sir?" said the girl, in a small voice. "Are you okay?"

"Yes."

"You went kind of white."

"I do that."

"Do you want a water?"

"I should like a great deal of water." He set the receiver in its cradle. "And I'd like to borrow your telephone. If I may. For a local call. It's to a gentleman called Dell."

…

"Sir," said Dell.

He was waiting in the Bentley at the curb, engine running, with a thermos of tea on the passenger seat and the radio turned low. He had the sports pages folded on his knee. When Theron got in the back, he did not turn his head. He met his employer's eyes in the mirror, and kept them there.

"Home, sir?"

"To the yard, Dell."

"Very good."

They pulled away from the curb. It had begun to rain, a fine gray April rain that blurred the tall buildings and slicked the black streets. Along Westminster the lights came on one by one, yellow in the gloom. A bus went past, throwing up a sheet of water. A girl with a green umbrella hopped a puddle on the corner.

"Sir," said Dell, after a mile.

"Yes."

"I took the liberty of reading the Journal this morning."

"I imagine everyone did."

"The statement was very good."

"Thank you."

"It was the sort of thing your brother would have signed." Dell kept his eyes on the road. "It put me in mind of the time he sank the Beetle Cat. He came home, Mr. Kit did, soaking wet, with a face like a boiled ham, and went straight to your father's study and said, 'Sir, I have sunk your boat, and I should like it understood that it was not the wind.'"

Theron's mouth twitched. "What did Father say?"

"He said, 'It was entirely the wind.' And Mr. Kit said, 'No, sir. It was I.'" Dell shifted gears. "Your father was extremely displeased. He sent him to his room. And your mother, who had been listening through the keyhole, went upstairs afterward and gave him a jam sandwich."

"I never knew that."

"No, sir. You were at school." The ghost of a smile moved under the gray mustache. "I mention it because, if I may say so, there are two kinds of Wexcombe. There are those who say it was the wind. And those who say it was I. Your uncle, God help him, is the first. Your brother was the second."

"And I?"

"Until this week, sir, I should have said you were an unusually well-disguised member of the first." Dell turned onto the bridge. The Providence skyline fell away behind them in the rain, and the gray expanse of the bay opened ahead, wide and flat and pocked with drops. "I think I should now revise it."

"Dell."

"Sir."

"Do you think it was a mistake?"

"The statement?"

"The affidavit. The envelope. The whole of it." Theron looked out at the water. "Mrs. Beaudry said it was a lever. She said it would be one more person in the room. I think she was right. I think I have, once again, in the very act of giving up, taken up space. I think I have made it about me."

Dell did not answer at once.

The wipers swung. The tires hissed. The bridge ran on ahead into the rain, a long gray ribbon with its lamps burning, and the gulls turned above the water like scraps of paper in a high wind.

"I'm a chauffeur, sir," said Dell at last. "I've no education in law. But I'll tell you what I told Mr. Kit, on the morning he came out of the study with the jam sandwich. He asked me if he'd been a fool. And I said, 'Sir, there's a difference between being a fool and being seen. A man may do one, and not the other. But you've done the second, and that's the braver.'"

"He wasn't brave."

"He was the bravest of the lot of you," said Dell, "and he'd be the first to deny it." He glanced in the mirror. "You've handed her the keys, sir. That's all. It's up to her whether she drives."

"And if she never does?"

"Then you'll have the keys in a safe in Providence, and a clean conscience, and a lot of time." Dell paused. "Which, from what I've seen of your last four months, sir, is the first time you've had either."

Theron laughed.

It surprised him. It rose from nowhere, a short helpless gust, and he put his hand over his eyes. "Dell. That is the cruelest thing you've ever said to me."

"I thought it fair, sir."

"It was fair."

"Yes, sir." The Bentley ran on through the rain, sleek and black and silent. The radio murmured. In the east, over the Sakonnet, the cloud had begun to open, a pale slice of washed gold. "Shall I put on the Red Sox?"

"God, no."

"The Bruins, sir?"

"What is the matter with you? It's April."

"Sir, it's hockey in April."

"It's baseball season."

"Not in this car," said Dell, with dignity, and turned on the Bruins.

…

He found it at the yard at half past four.

He had gone straight to the loft. He had been standing at the long window, in the failing light, with a mug of Portuguese coffee Hawkes had pressed on him and a half-planked hull below him like the ribcage of a sleeping whale, when a boy from the front office came up the stairs with a note.

"This come for you, Mr. Wexcombe. By hand. A lady brought it. She wouldn't give her name."

"What did she look like?"

"Old. Little. Round. In a purple coat." The boy shrugged. "She said to say it's from the lady across the yard. And she said you're not to say I said."

He took it.

It was a half-sheet of lined paper, torn off a pad, folded in four. He opened it with a hand that was, he found, not entirely steady.

It was in her writing. He'd have known it anywhere, the upright, small, tidy print, every letter distinct, the t's crossed with a single firm bar, as if each word had been filed in triplicate. It was short. It was dated that morning. It had been written, he saw, in haste, on a surface that wasn't flat, and the last line ran slightly uphill.

T.—

I saw your statement. I read it six times.

I'm not going to say it was a good idea. I'm not going to say it was a bad one. I'm going to say that I'm still angry, and that I'm also not.

I know about the envelope. I know it's in Lorraine's safe. I know because I called her at noon to ask if you'd done anything stupid, and she said, 'He's done something I can't tell you about,' and then she told me.

I'm not going to ask for it. I'm not going to say I won't.

I'm going to put it on the list of things I'm deciding later.

Thank you for the chicken.

—D.

P.S. Mrs. F says I'm not supposed to tell you she brought this. I've told her that you'll know. She says men are fools about who's carrying their mail. I think she's right.

P.P.S. My pressure this morning was 136/86. Pratt says that's "boring." I'd like it noted that "boring" is the best word I've heard in a month.

He read it standing at the window.

He read it again.

Below him, in the shipyard, in the failing light, the men were knocking off. A whistle blew. Boots rang on the concrete. A little way off, under a single yellow lamp, Hawkes stood with a clipboard and a stub of pencil, writing, in his careful two-fingered hand, the first page of a statement that would run to nine. The half-planked hull lay in its cradle, its ribs pale against the dusk. And somewhere in the middle of that long gray evening he realized that he had put his hand flat against the window glass.

Not for anything. Only to feel the cold.

I'm going to put it on the list of things I'm deciding later.

Thank you for the chicken.

He took out his wallet.

There was a place in it, behind the photograph of a boy of two with a high chair and a determined chin, where he kept the things that were not his. He slid the half-sheet in beside it. He closed the wallet. He put it in his breast pocket, against his heart, where the pulse of it beat, steady, slow, unremarkable, like a clock he'd forgotten to stop.

Boring, he thought.

Her pressure is boring.

And standing in a cold loft in a boatyard in Bristol, Rhode Island, on the fifth of April, in the smell of cedar and glue and the last of the light, Theron Wexcombe, thirty-six, chief executive of a company he was likely about to lose, defendant in a lawsuit he could not win, and author of a sworn confession to three felonies, put his forehead against the glass and began, quietly, helplessly, and without the smallest shame, to laugh.