incompetent.
Along with Clan, these men are becoming my friends. There is not a soul at Mays amp; Burton I miss. Why? These guys aren’t so rapacious, but maybe they just don’t have the drive to make it. I wonder if I do either.
Tunkie belches into the back of his hand.
“At any rate, Clan will be delighted, .. he begins.
“… That you took him off the hook.” Frank finishes, grinning at me.
On the drive out to the Blackwell County Human Development Center, my mind returns again and again to Mrs.
Gentry’s hearing. I decide I have a real talent for overlooking the obvious. This case must have stuck out like a sore thumb, because most judges wouldn’t have gotten past the fact that Mrs. Gentry is eighty-four years old and had undergone an operation that required her to enter a nursing home. But Judge Fogarty took the “purposes” clause of the guardianship statute seriously, as almost no one ever does. Is the prosecutor’s case against Andy this crystal clear and I can’t see it? Maybe the real lesson is that the law be damned, what judges (and juries) do is justice. If the judge’s mother has a right to hum in her own house, then Mrs. Gentry should have that right or the judge’s mother will give him hell when he goes for his Sunday visit. Is Andy’s case really about what people can identify with? Isn’t it similar to a situation in which a mother authorizes a doctor to use experimental cancer drugs to save her child’s life? The problem is that Pain’s life wasn’t in danger as long as she was in restraints. Yet what Olivia feared was that sooner or later Pam was going to end up like those men I saw-tied to their beds. No mother should ever have to accept that. Maybe that is the argument I should make to the jury: the choice Pam faced was being kept under virtual lock and key until she died. Because shock is currently (an unwitting pun I’ll have to avoid) out of fashion, her doctor felt he had no choice but to keep quiet about it until he could present proof it worked. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, you should think of Dr. Chapman }s a kind of a brave pioneer . maybe that’s a little thick.
Unexpectedly, David Spath is a bit of a dandy. With a mustache so trim it looks as if it has been stitched into place and an English accent straight out of World War II movies about the RAP (he surely possesses the stifiest upper lip in the state), Spath seems a foreign visitor instead of a man who has spent a career climbing a bureaucratic ladder. No wonder he hired Andy-he likes the way he dresses. Spath is wearing a striped blue chambray long-sleeved shirt that looks so smooth and neat it seems made of silk. Against the blue of his shirt, he has on a gold tie dotted with small, black, castle-like designs. His pants are Yorkshire cords that I recognize out of a Lands’ End catalogue my boss used to keep in her office at the Public Defender’s. Though it seems entirely useless information, I immediately assume this man is gay. There is an overrefined quality to his sensibility (I can’t put my finger on it-suffice it to say he is like my best friend. Skip, who just last month pitched a promising commercial art business and moved to Miami with his lover) that connotes a sexual orientation different from my own.
Given his lip, I expect a bone-crusher handshake, but his hand is as soft as that of an English gentleman visiting his country estate on the weekend. Instead of tea, he gives me a cup of coffee, and I sit across from him, wondering how this man got to be here. Even his office is decorated with English themes. Instead of pastoral scenes with hunting dogs and men in red coats on horseback, the pictures are of Dickens’ England-harsh industrial cityscapes done in gray, brown, and black. Gently, I try to bring up the subject of Andy by asking how long Spath has known him. Spath sips at his cup of coffee, obviously studying me, “I first met Andy,” he finally says, “when he was working for the state hospital.
He’s a good man. A good clinical psychologist. So why would he go off on his own and try electric skin shock without going through the process of getting the Human Rights Commit tee’s permission? I haven’t got the slightest idea.”
So much for easing into the subject. I try to keep in mind that Spath’s job has been jeopardized by Andy’s actions. If Andy is going to be helped by this man on the witness stand, it will have to be in bits and pieces. A good man here, a good clinical psychologist there. I try to back up.
“Why do you think a mother would let someone try shock on her child?”
Spath’s mustache, probably intended to give his face a more masculine look, almost succeeds, but not quite. His face is not so much soft as it is delicate. His nose is as thin as a communion wafer, and his tiny ears (partially hidden by a mass of thick brown hair) remind me of a bat’s. “To try to help her, of course,” he says archly.
“But the problem is we don’t know how to help children like Pam, and Andrew knew that.”
I fold my arms against my chest to keep them still, re minding myself not to argue with this man. My hope is that he will bring himself to admit (assuming it is true) that he knew Andy was going to try shock and will have the courage to admit it. I say innocently, “I thought the literature shows that shock works.”
For a moment I think I see real conflict in Spath’s face, which seems to collapse downward, but despite a brief nod, he says curtly, “The literature doesn’t prove anything from a statistical point of view because there hasn’t been enough research.”
This statement doesn’t qualify as a denial, and I press on.
“If you had a child that was retarded and self-abusive, wouldn’t you be tempted to try everything possible to help her?”
“Mr. Page,” Spam says, a note of exasperation creeping into his tone, “from a purely personal point of view, I sympathize with Andrew. I like him; I hired him because I thought he was qualified, and because I think this state needs to educate and hire more black professionals. I don’t even try to imagine what care for retarded black children was like before integration. But if a treatment plan involves aversive stimuli, we follow a certain protocol, and Andrew ignored it.”
I look over his shoulder at a picture of a grimy child working presumably in a cotton mill. Something, I don’t know what, tells me this man knew in advance what Andy was doing. He doesn’t seem like the conventional cover-your-ass manager I used to see when I worked for the state as a social worker investigating dependency neglect cases.
“If he had gone through the human rights committee,” I ask, “is there a chance it would have approved shock?”
Spath doesn’t hesitate.
“I seriously doubt it. Highly aver sive techniques are no longer in vogue today.”
I note that he didn’t say they don’t have their place in treatment of the retarded, but I can’t figure out how to use it to my advantage. Spath turns his back on me to pour himself a cup of coffee. He is fussy as an old maid, painstakingly measuring out a teaspoon of sugar as if that were all he had been put on earth to accomplish. I say, “This, I’m sure, won’t come as any surprise to you, but Andy told me that he thought he could talk you into purchasing remote-control shock equipment once he demonstrated that Pam was responding to shock.”
Spath silently stirs his coffee. If he at least concedes that he might have considered the idea, I can argue to the jury that what Andy did wasn’t so rash after all. It was just a matter of no one’s having the courage to try a controversial treatment. Had there not been an accident, Andy would have been regarded as a hero even if nobody had the guts to say so publicly. Spath finally removes the spoon and lays it up side down on a clean napkin.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way,” he says, giving me a strange, false smile as if he knows perfectly well that ends invariably justify means, since history is written by the winners.
“Why not?” I press him, still hoping fora miracle.
“Isn’t the point to help people?”
“This is not a field in which people are encouraged to free-lance,” he says.
“What happened to Pam, I think, proves that.”
I watch Spath sip at his coffee. I don’t hear any conviction in his voice. He sounds like one of those C.I.A. flacks who routinely refuse to acknowledge we are engaged in subversion of other governments. Iwanttosay: I think you’re lying.
You let Andy try shock on the condition that he not implicate you if something went wrong. Instead, I keep silent, afraid to alienate this man, who, if he were willing, could deflect much of the blame from my client, although at the risk of further damaging his own career. He hired Andy; he’ll be damned if he’ll try to save him. They must have talked about aversive measures like shock many times. Andy is the only Ph.D. on staff at the moment; the facility is too small (only 150 residents) for them not to have been in frequent contact.
There is bound to be a conspiracy of silence among Olivia, Andy, and Spath that I haven’t yet breached.
