The Hearing Read online

  “Hmmmm.” Like a cat purring, but without the contentment. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” Far away. Michelle could barely catch the words. And Samantha’s eyes—a child’s eyes in a woman’s body. Michelle studied her, gazing out the window.

  Michelle said, “I’m really sorry Larry couldn’t come.”

  “He has to work. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  Samantha was too practical to carry the fight beyond defeat. It was done now. Accept it. It was hard to know how much Samantha would really miss Larry. They seemed more like brother and sister than father and daughter. Larry had telephoned the hotel in Saint-Tropez, and Carl drove back and picked up Samantha’s things. He packed his own bag, and the next morning met the others at a Holiday Inn near the airport, where they had spent the night. That morning Larry had kissed Samantha goodbye, watched the three of them disappear into the departure lounge, and headed back to Saint-Tropez.

  Samantha slept most of the trip. Gus and Michelle watched her, like parents staring proudly into the crib of a newborn.

  The plane landed, stopped rolling, and a male voice on the PA system said, “Will Miss Samantha Young please call herself to the attention of a flight attendant?”

  When Gus had called Rothman from Nice to tell him what was happening, Rothman had said not to leave the plane with Samantha. “If reporters find out you’re on the plane we don’t want them to see you with Samantha and start wondering who she is. I’ll send some people to pick her up. We’ll get you back with her later.”

  Samantha disembarked with two White House Secret Service agents, and five minutes later the other passengers got off. Just past the Customs and Immigration area, a dozen men and women with TV cameras, microphones, and lights, plus a crowd of print reporters and photographers, confronted passengers. At first Gus thought there’d been a movie star on board. Then they spotted him and Michelle.

  Someone yelled, “What about the abortion?”

  A young man wearing face makeup stuck a microphone in Gus’s face.

  “There’ve been reports you arranged for the abortion of your wife’s child. Can you comment on that?”

  Gus looked at Michelle, trying to keep her balance in the crush of reporters jostling them with microphones, pocket recorders, and notepads.

  A woman waved a newspaper at him. A headline said PARHAM URGED ABORTION FOR WIFE. She yelled, “Did you see this?”

  Michelle struggled to remain upright, her face a picture of fury.

  A man yelled, “What about the rape case?”

  Rape case?

  Another voice: “Have you seen the TV ads? What’s your reaction to them?”

  A man pushed Michelle roughly aside to get closer to Gus. She glared for a moment at the back of his jacket, then kicked him behind his left kneecap. The knee buckled, and he dropped. Her face clouded with horror at what she had done.

  Gus grabbed her arm. Through the mob he spotted Rothman with two large young men in unbuttoned blazers. The men shot into the crowd, and twenty seconds later Gus and Michelle were in the back of a State Department limousine with tinted windows. Michelle’s hair was mussed, and a button had been torn from Gus’s jacket.

  Rothman said, “Welcome to Washington. You still wanna be a Supreme Court justice?”

  “More than ever.” Gus touched Michelle’s arm. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine. What a battle.” Dredging a comb from her handbag, she said to Rothman, “Where’s Samantha?”

  “In another car ahead of us.”

  Gus said, “I hope she didn’t go through anything like that.”

  “No one even knew who she was.”

  Michelle stuffed the comb back into her purse. “What I want to know is, where’d they get that arranged-for-an-abortion stuff?”

  “Someone suggested to the media that you ended a pregnancy.”

  “Who did that?”

  “Harrington, probably. It was on the news last night. He must have leaked the documents about your interest in abortion but withheld the documents showing that in the end you rejected abortion and had the child. This gets the pro-life people down on you for supporting abortion. If we want to reveal that you did not have an abortion after all, it forces us to come out on the issue, giving it more life and energy, after which the opposition will suggest that we faked the adoption documents and you really did have an abortion. The more we fight over it, the more attention it gets. Whatever happens, we lose.”

  “But can’t we do something? I never—”

  “There is no way we can win an abortion battle, Michelle. If Gus appears to support abortion, the pro-life people will attack him. If he opposes abortion, the pro-choice people will go for him. In either case, he’ll lose enough votes to kill his confirmation in the Senate.”

  Rothman glanced at Gus and smiled. “But don’t be impatient. We have weapons too. It’s just beginning.”

  Gus said, “What was all that about a rape case, and TV ads? We leave town for a day and it’s like the world changed.”

  “A day can be a very long time in this town. We’ll talk about it later.”

  “Where’re we going?”

  “We’ve got a house. State uses it for visitors. Very secure. No one will bother you.” He looked at Michelle. “Samantha will be there when you arrive. How is she, by the way?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “And Larry Young?”

  “A very nice man.”

  No one mentioned Doreen.

  The house was three stories, red brick, surrounded by a black, spiked iron fence, squeezed between the Brazilian and Norwegian embassies on a tree-shaded street of large homes and grassy lawns. A cook and a white-aproned maid lived on the top floor, and a team of round-the-clock State Department security agents, with jackets, ties, and nine-millimeter automatics, occupied a cramped office off the entrance vestibule, monitoring TV screens, motion sensors, and sound detectors arrayed around the building and on the roof. A locked steel cabinet contained stun grenades and Uzi automatic rifles. Six rosebushes along the south border had given the house its nickname and official security code: Blossom.

  The limousine eased through metal gates into a narrow driveway separating the house from the brick-walled Brazilian embassy. At the rear of the house, the limousine maneuvered in a turning space and backed down into a partially underground garage. Before the driver could get around to open the passenger doors, Gus and Michelle were already out, nodding hello to a dark-haired, twenty-one-year-old Portuguese maid named Louisa.

  The first thing Gus did was take a bath. He was up to his neck in steaming water when the door opened and Samantha walked in, carrying a toothbrush.

  She said, “Oh, excuse me. I’ll just be a minute.”

  She finished with her teeth, turned off the water, put the toothbrush back in its plastic case, screwed the top on the toothpaste tube, said, “See you later,” and walked out.

  As Gus lay there naked, stunned and silent, it dawned on him that he and Michelle may have been taking a lot for granted. Neither of them knew Samantha. They knew she was pretty and clever, and that she was their daughter. But they didn’t know her. In the day and a half since Gus had met her in the Nice airport, she had managed to leave him charmed, frightened, and bewildered. Solidly in the grasp of adolescence, she was childishly helpless one minute, stubbornly independent the next. You accepted her as a cute, innocent Shirley Temple and the next thing you knew she was coming at you like a rottweiler. It was hard to know who she was. She probably didn’t know herself. Growing up sur rounded by more adults than children—as she appeared to have done—had left her bright but lonely.

  Samantha wasn’t sure about Louisa, the Portuguese maid. Louisa had been in Washington only two weeks and it seemed the only friend she’d made was a twenty-two-year-old unmarried State Department guard named Todd Naeder. Louisa was so eager for feminine companionship that the evening Samantha arrived they sat in Louisa’s tiny third-floor bedroom while the maid poured out what appea
red to be two weeks of stockpiled intimacies, most of which involved trysts with Todd Naeder in the back seat of the garaged Cadillac limousine.

  “In the limousine?” Samantha asked, wondering if there was some polite way she could just say good night and go to bed.

  “Todd says it’s the safest place. The guards are the only ones with keys to the garage. It’s armored.”

  “The garage is armored?”

  “No, the limousine. Todd says the things we get up to in there it’s a good thing.”

  There must have been something wrong with Samantha’s smile. Louisa said, “How old are you?”

  “Guess.”

  “Seventeen.”

  Samantha shook her head.

  “Sixteen?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “Tell me.”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen! Oh, wow.”

  “It’s okay. Everybody thinks I’m a lot older.”

  “I don’t believe it. Thirteen. Are you …”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever …”

  “Am I a virgin? Yes.”

  “Todd’ll never believe it. That you’re thirteen, I mean. You stay away from him.”

  Samantha shrugged. Louisa was okay, she guessed, but she didn’t seem like the sort of person you really shared your memories with, not the kind of memories Samantha had.

  Samantha went to bed that night thinking about her father and about the Steinway she’d seen downstairs in the living room. She closed her eyes and imagined that she could hear the faint notes of Dvořák’s Concerto in G Minor. Dvořák was her father’s favorite composer, the G Minor Concerto his favorite piece. She imagined that she could get out of bed, go downstairs, barefoot in her pajamas, and stand in the doorway watching his back as he played the Steinway. Then she’d walk over to him and put her hands on his shoulders. Without looking around, knowing it was her, he’d lay his cheek on her hand. After a moment, she’d move around him to the other side of the piano and lean against it, elbows on the polished mahogany, and watch him play. His eyes would be closed. She’d close hers. Together they would soak in the music.

  She missed him a lot. Why had he let her go? He shouldn’t have done that. She’d already lost her real parents, and then she lost her second mother, and now she’d lost her second father. What was wrong? Why didn’t anyone want to hang on to her? Her second mother, Doreen, hadn’t made any bones about it. Once, when Samantha was seven, she’d gone to bed early, nine o’clock, and her mother had dragged her out of bed. Her mother’d been fighting with her dad all day. As far as Samantha knew, she’d been fighting with him all her life. She just seemed to get angrier and angrier, nastier and nastier. Samantha had gone to her room to get away from the screams and threats. If they hit each other she didn’t want to see it.

  Her mother had yelled at her. “What did I tell you to do?” It was as if she’d come into the room dragging all her anger with her, couldn’t move without it.

  Samantha said, “I’m tired.”

  “What did I tell you to do?”

  “Serve drinks.”

  Samantha was scared. Her mother had never hit her, but she’d hit her father, chased him with a knife into the bathroom. Lately she’d been mad all the time, never cooled down, never lost the lines of rage that marked her face like scars.

  “So get dressed and do what you’re told.”

  She was shouting. Samantha’d been up at six to finish homework she couldn’t do the night before because she’d been serving drinks to all the people who came to the house. She was tired of being scared of her mother. She felt like giving up.

  “I’m tired. I got up early this morning.”

  “Don’t talk back to me, Samantha.”

  Samantha was silent. She didn’t care.

  “Did you hear me?”

  Samantha turned toward the closet.

  “I’m talking to you!”

  She opened the closet door.

  “Don’t you ignore me, you little bitch.”

  Samantha turned and looked at her mother. Her mother’s hand struck Samantha’s cheek. Face burning, tears blurring her vision, not caring what happened, Samantha said, “I hate you!”

  She said it again, softly, not even minding if her mother heard. “I hate you.”

  “Don’t you—how dare you talk to me like that! You think I care if you hate me?”

  Her mother laughed, the nasty little laugh she used with her father. “Who cares if you hate me, a miserable little monster like you?”

  “I’m not a monster.”

  They were still in front of the closet, Samantha streaming tears, her mother’s eyes dark with fury, searching for ways to hurt.

  “Your mother thought you were. You’re lucky she didn’t kill you before you even got born.”

  What did that mean?

  “Oh, you don’t know what to say to that? Nothing smart to say to that?”

  Her mother nodded her head, staring at Samantha. Samantha knew that what her mother had said was something terrible, supposed to hurt her, and that her mother was waiting to see the pain.

  “So, you know so much, but you didn’t know that. Something you didn’t know. Not so smart after all, are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her mother crossed her arms. A man called from the living room, but her mother wasn’t listening.

  “You want me to tell you what I mean? You think it’s so awful here? Have to stay up till eleven o’clock serving drinks? You are so abused, you poor little thing. You know how lucky you are? You never should’ve even been born. And all you can say is ‘I hate you.’ You ought to be ashamed. If it wasn’t for what you’ve got here you’d be in an orphanage. Probably you’d be dead. You oughta be thanking me every day. Without me you’d be dead, your mother’d’ve killed you, and all you can say is ‘I hate you.’”

  “You’re my mother.”

  “Oh, really? You know so much. Well, you’re old enough to know the truth. I never had a kid. Neither did your drunken father.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “So now I’m a liar. Well if that’s the way you feel, maybe it’d’ve been better if your mother had killed you. A lot easier for everyone.”

  “You can’t kill a kid.”

  “You can if they’re not born yet.”

  Samantha remembered that conversation at least once every day, usually at night. She promised herself that someday she would meet someone who would love her so much that his love, even if it didn’t take away the memory, would take away the pain. She began to wonder who she really was. Most kids knew who they were. Why’d her real parents give her away? Why didn’t they want her? What would it have been like with them? Who would she have been with them? Was she lucky to be alive?

  As long as she could remember, she had felt like someone in hiding. In Milwaukee, with all the stuff that went on there, she’d go to bed at night, pull the sheets over her head, and hide. Traveling with her father, she’d still felt like someone hiding. And now, in this beautiful house with her real parents, she was still in hiding. What did you have to do to get out?

  She saw her life as books, like the Nancy Drew adven tures her father bought her in London. She knew that today her life had started a new book. The first eight years she had titled Horror Story. That was the part in Milwaukee. The next one, after Larry took her away, she called On the Run. Now, as she stretched on the soft sheets, letting her half-opened eyes roam among the unfamiliar shadows, she tried to think of a title for the new book. She was in a beautiful big house with a limousine, a maid, and embassies next door. Maybe High Society.

  She thought about her father and looked at her watch. In Saint-Tropez it was five in the morning. Her father would have just finished work, walking to the hotel, thinking of her. Aloud she whispered, “I miss you, Dad.”

  The next morning, her father called.

  “How are you? How was the flight?”

  “
It was fine. How are you?”

  Gus had answered the phone, called her to his office, then quietly left her to talk in private.

  Her father said, “I’m okay. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too, Daddy. But it’s great here. Don’t worry. It’s a big house and they’ve even got guards, like bodyguards? So don’t worry. They won’t even let me out without a guard. I’m real safe. But I miss you.”

  She could hear voices in the background and knew he was at work.

  “I’ve got to get back, honey. I love you. I’ll call again tomorrow.”

  He hung up.

  She was happy to hear his voice, but after she put the phone down she felt an emptiness, as if she hadn’t talked to him at all. It had been over so fast.

  She waited for his call the next afternoon, but it didn’t come. He called the day after that, and they talked for half an hour.

  The reporters at the airport had been nothing. Over the next few weeks, Michelle scanned the newspapers, radio, and TV reports, and every day it got worse.

  She said to Gus. “Isn’t there anything—isn’t there anything at all these people won’t stoop to? Why do they hate you so much?”

  “The White House nominated me. For some, that’s enough. Others, they look at my record—I’ve ruled against what they like and for what they hate.”

  “But you’ve ruled the other way, too.”

  “They don’t see it like that. They want someone who will rule the way they want every time. Politics is about dependability, Michelle. Justice is about impartiality. The two don’t always mix.”

  “But this isn’t politics. You’re not running for anything. It’s the Supreme Court. That’s not politics.”

  “Not supposed to be politics.”

  The rape case. Years earlier, Gus had prosecuted a truck driver for the shotgun killing of two other men trying to rape a young woman in a parking lot. Women’s rights groups demonstrated for the killer’s acquittal. Gus argued that the truck driver’s desire to defend the woman, while honorable, had not produced the right or the need to blow the would-be rapists away with a shotgun. Since Gus’s nomination, opposition TV and newspaper ads (coordinated by Helen Bondell’s Freedom Federation) had screamed that “support for rape” made Gus unfit for the Supreme Court.