Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — Book 4
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They carried the table down from the second floor because the rotunda had nothing in it but benches and the benches were bolted to the floor. It took Neil and the man from the funeral home to get it around the turn of the stair. Joanna went down ahead of them with her hands up, telling them where the wall was.
They set it under the clock. The clock had been seven minutes slow since before she was born and nobody had ever done anything about it. The county had put a wreath on a stand beside it that morning and gone home, and that was the arrangement. Doors at two. Her mother had said doors at two four times since breakfast.
“Cloth on it first,” the man from the funeral home said, and went out to the hearse for the cloth.
Joanna had been given the table. That was the job. Her mother had walked through the house on Saturday deciding what her father would have wanted out, and had written it down, and had handed her the paper and gone to see about the cars. Neither of them had said anything about it. The table did not require her to stand in a doorway and be told by people from the bar association that she looked tired.
There were six things on the paper. Four had come over in the trunk of Neil’s car — the portrait, the commission, the two bound volumes with his opinions in them. The other two were upstairs in her father’s chambers, and Miss Danner had them.
Miss Danner had come in on a Sunday to open the room. She was at her desk in the anteroom with her coat still on, and there was a clipboard squared up on the blotter with a pencil tied to it on a string.
“The robe and the gavel,” Joanna said.
“One at a time. It goes on the list.”
The closet was behind the desk. Miss Danner took the robe off its hook and laid it over her forearm and held it there and smoothed the front of it twice with her other hand.
“It was pressed in August,” she said. “He would not want it seen creased.”
“It looks fine.”
“It looks pressed.” She put it into Joanna’s arms.
The display case stood against the wall between the closet and the window, glass on three sides, and inside it was everything anybody had given her father in twenty-one years on the bench. Plaques. A pen set. A framed certificate from the Elks. Miss Danner opened the top right drawer of her desk and took out a key on a ring by itself. She unlocked the case and reached in and lifted the gavel off its rest and set it on the blotter. Then she shut the glass door and turned the key in it and pulled the door once to make sure it had caught, and put the key back in the drawer, and closed the drawer.
“Robe,” she said. “Gavel.”
She wrote both of them down, and the date at the top of the sheet, and then she looked at the clock on her desk and wrote that too.
Joanna took the gavel in her free hand and it was heavier than a thing that size had any business being. She got it downstairs with the robe over her shoulder and set it on the table harder than she meant to, and the sound went up into the rotunda and came back.
The funeral home had a stand for the robe. She hung it and stepped back and it looked like a robe on a stand, which was the trouble with all of it. The portrait was a studio photograph from 1971 and her father had not looked like that in 1971 or at any other time. The commission had the state seal on it and a signature nobody could read. She set the two volumes flat because they would not stand.
The gavel she put to the right of the portrait, and then moved because the plate on the band faced the wall, and then moved again because the head was round and it settled where it wanted to instead of where she put it. She ended up laying it against the base of the frame so it could not roll.
“That was re-plated in fifty-seven,” Miss Danner said. She had come down with the extra chairs. “When he took the bench. New plate, new date. He wanted it to say judge.” She looked at the card the funeral home had propped in front of the commission. “That should have the years on it. People will want the years.”
At two o’clock the man from the funeral home opened both leaves of the front door, and Kensington came in.
They came in for two hours. Joanna stood at the end of the table where her mother had put her and shook hands and said thank you for coming, and after the first twenty she stopped hearing the sentences and only heard whether they were long or short. The lawyers were long. The farmers were short and better. A woman she had never met told her a story about a hearing in 1962 in which her father had done something the woman clearly believed was extraordinary and Joanna could not follow at all, and then the woman cried, and Joanna held both her hands until she stopped.
Three different people told her the one about the snow. By the third she knew where it stopped being about the road and started being about the continuance, and she got her face ready.
Walter Teague held on to her hand the whole time he talked. The compliment started with the first time he had appeared in front of her father, and went by way of what the bar in this county had been before him and after him, and came to rest on the word standard. She said thank you. He said no, he meant it, and began again from a different year.
A man in a good jacket that did not fit him said her father had heard a road case of his in 1969 and had ruled against him, and had been right to. Then he shook her hand and went on down the line.
Her mother worked the middle of the room, where the county was.
“I do not want anybody thinking we have made an occasion of it,” Margaret said, at Joanna’s elbow, in the gap between two of them. “Because we have not, and if it had been left to me it would have been the church and nothing else, but the commissioners asked, and you cannot tell the commissioners no when they have opened the building on a Sunday. And I would rather it were here than at the house. I would rather they came here.”
“It’s fine, Mother.”
“It is fine because you did the table.” Margaret put a hand flat on the cloth for a second and took it away. “Nobody has said one word about the table, which is how you know.”
There was a woman at the back by the stair who had not sat down since two o’clock and was not going to. She had a good coat and she had kept her gloves on. Neil had brought her a chair early on and it was still there, empty, angled toward her, and neither of them had said anything more about it.
Joanna had met Lenora Harcourt twice, both times at things like this. She knew what she was supposed to do, which was nothing.
By four the line was gone and by five it was six people and the six people were talking to each other, about the schools, in the corner by the stair. Her mother left with the Prills. The man from the funeral home carried the chairs back two at a time and asked, each trip, whether he could take anything else, and each trip Miss Danner told him no.
Joanna took the card out of the holder in front of the commission and read it again. It gave his name and the years and it was correct. The wreath had begun to smell like a room with the windows shut. Somebody had set a coffee cup down on the corner of the cloth at some point in the afternoon and there was a ring on it now that would have to come out, and she stood looking at the ring for longer than it deserved, because nothing else on the table needed her.
Miss Danner was folding the cloth at the end when Neil took it out of her hands.
“Go home,” he said.
“These go back in the case.”
“They’ll go back in the case.” He had the robe over his arm already. He put the gavel down in the middle of the cloth and rolled it up in it, one turn, then the ends. “I’m parked at the north door. You’ve been on your feet since noon and you came in on your day off.”
“For the sheet.”
“Neil Harcourt. The robe and the gavel.” He said it like a man who had been made to say it before and was not going to be short with her about it. “Do you want the volumes too?”
“The volumes are the family’s.”
She wrote for a while longer, and he stood and let her.
Joanna went ahead and held the door for him because his hands were full. The square had emptied except for the cars. Her father’s name stood over the door in brass letters the commissioners had put up in 1973, and her brother went down the steps under it carefully, the robe over one arm and the bundle under the other. He was thirty-six years old. He had been at the house every day since Friday and he had made every telephone call, and she had made none of them.
“Go on home, Jo,” he said, without turning around. “You’re the only one of us who hasn’t sat down.”
She stood on the top step until his car went out of the lot.
Then she went back in to do the table. She reached for the cloth to fold it and the cloth had gone with him, so she wiped the top off with the side of her hand and started stacking what was left.
Lenora Harcourt came along the table on her way out. She stopped where Joanna was, close enough that Joanna straightened up.
“I have been standing at the back of this room for three hours,” she said, “trying to work out who you look like.”
“I’m adopted.”
“I know what you are.” She was looking at the side of Joanna’s face and not at her eyes. “It isn’t him.”
Joanna waited for the rest of it. She was good at waiting for the rest of a sentence. She did it all day with eight-year-olds and it worked on eight-year-olds.
“No,” Lenora said. “It isn’t her either.”
She put her hand on the corner of the table for a second, the way her mother had, and then she went out the way everybody else had gone out.
Joanna finished stacking the volumes. Her mother had told her that morning to say good afternoon to that woman and nothing else. She had done that. It had cost her nothing.
The clock over the stair said twenty past three. Joanna added the seven minutes and went up.
The courtroom doors were shut and there was nobody in the corridor. Wednesday afternoon in that building was a mimeograph running somewhere on the first floor and the smell of the machine’s fluid coming up the stairwell, and that was all of it.
Miss Danner had her coat off and two cartons on the floor beside the desk, squared to each other and to the wall.
“There are three,” she said. “The third one is the coat. I did not want the coat in with the desk things.”
“You didn’t have to do this.”
“It was going to be done.”
The chambers door stood open behind her. Joanna had been in that room six or seven times in her life and had been brought in every one of them. It smelled of the floor wax they used in that building and of something underneath the wax that was his, that she had never had a word for and did not have one for now.
The desk had been cleared onto the blotter. A leather cup of pencils sharpened down to different lengths, a paper knife with a bone handle, a box of throat lozenges.
“He kept a second pair of glasses in the middle drawer,” Miss Danner said from the doorway. “They are in the top carton in an envelope. The prescription is written on the envelope.”
“All right.”
“It is the old prescription. It was not current.”
Joanna went around the desk and opened the drawers, because they were going to have to be opened by somebody and she would rather it was her. They were empty. The wide one at the bottom had a rubber band in it and a dime.
Miss Danner came and looked over the desk at the drawer.
“That is his,” she said, and reached in and took the dime out and carried it away to put in the carton, and left the rubber band where it was.
The window behind the desk looked down on the square and the bank and the four parking spaces in front of the bank, and the radiator under it came on while Joanna was standing there and knocked twice and settled.
The framed photograph was on the wall between the windows, and she took it down because it was the only thing left on the walls and leaving it would have meant coming back. Two rows of men on a hotel staircase, dark suits, a banner behind them she could not read at that angle. The mount said Columbus and it said 1967 in white ink along the bottom.
She had looked at it before the way you look at something that is on a wall.
“That one is the bar association,” Miss Danner said. “He is in the second row.”
“I’ll take this one.”
“Then it goes on the list separately. The house gets what the house gets and you get what you take.”
She went out to the desk and turned the clipboard around and wrote it down, and Joanna stood in the doorway with the frame against her chest and read the sheet upside down while she wrote. The date at the head of it was the first of October. Miss Danner headed a sheet the day she started one and ran it until it was full. Every line had a time beside it in the second column. The entries were in her small square hand and the times were in her small square hand, and there was no place anywhere on the sheet for anything a person might have wanted to say.
“I’ll put it on the dresser,” Joanna said.
There was one picture on her dresser already, a studio photograph of a soldier, and about two feet of dresser and nothing on the rest of it. Miss Danner did not ask. She wrote photograph, framed, 1967, and put the time beside it, and turned the board back around.
The display case stood where it had always stood, between the closet and the window, with the glass shut on the plaques and the pen set from the Elks and the empty rest at the end of the middle shelf. Joanna put the frame in the second carton on top of the blotter, and went back for the lozenges, which she had missed, and put those in too.
Neil came in at about four with the robe over his arm and his hat in his hand.
“Miss Danner.”
“The closet is open.”
“I saw.” He was already going past her. He got the robe on the hook and stood a second squaring the shoulders on the hanger, and shut the door, and then opened it and shut it again with his knee against it, because the catch had never sat any other way.
“I would have gone in for it.”
“You’d have had to get the chair over.” He came back out and put his hat down on the corner of the desk. “It’s been on a hanger since Sunday. It didn’t sit in a car.”
Miss Danner ran the pencil down the sheet on the clipboard, found the line, made a check against it, and wrote the time beside the check. The line under it she left, and the pencil went back down on its string and swung twice against the desk edge and stopped.
“The gavel is still out,” she said. “I will have it Monday.”
Neil picked his hat back up. He looked at Joanna the way he had been looking at everybody for six days, which was carefully. He asked whether Margaret had eaten anything, and Joanna said she had eaten some soup, and he said good. He would come by Sunday if he could get free of the Reisinger thing on Saturday; if he could not get free of it he would come Monday evening instead, and would telephone first either way.
Then he had his hat on and was in the doorway.
“I’ll hand it to you Monday,” he said, back over his shoulder, and went off down the hall toward the north door.
Joanna picked up the top carton. It was the light one and she had picked it up because it was the one nearest her.
“The coat has been brushed,” Miss Danner said. “It was his practice to have the winter coat brushed the first week of October and it had not been done this year, so it has been done.”
“Thank you.”
“It was not a thing that needed thanking.”
She got the two cartons down to the car in two trips and came back up for the third, and by then it was twenty to five and the mimeograph had stopped. Miss Danner had the coat carton on the desk with the flaps folded closed across one another, which is how you close a box you do not mean to tape.
“There is a pocket diary in the coat,” she said. “It is the appointments. It stops on the twenty-ninth.”
“All right.”
“The docket book stays here. That one is the county’s.”
She said it in the same voice she had used about the glasses. Then she squared the sheet on the clipboard with two fingers, turned the board around, and held out the pencil on its string. Joanna signed at the bottom of the last line. Miss Danner took the board back and looked at the clock on her desk and wrote the time beside her name.
She had dressed for it as though it were church, which she knew perfectly well was not the same thing as dressing for a lawyer’s office on a Friday morning, and she had known it while she was doing it and had done it anyway, because the alternative was to stand in front of a closet deciding what a widow ought to look like in the second week of it, across a table from Lenora, and she had not been prepared to give the morning to that.
Barrett Sipe kept his rooms over the bank, which meant a flight of stairs off the square, a landing with a radiator on it, and a girl at a desk who took your coat and did not seem to know where to put it.
They were all there before her. She had allowed for that and had come at a quarter to anyway.
The table was long enough for eight and there were six of them at it. Sipe at the head with three folders in front of him, squared. A young man from his office at his left with a pad. Neil down one side with his jacket on the chair back. Joanna beside him, holding her handbag on her lap the way she had held it in waiting rooms since she was nine. And on the other side, alone, with her gloves off and set one on top of the other beside her elbow, Lenora Harcourt.
“I want to say at the outset that this is not a reading,” Sipe said. “There is no such thing. It is a document and you will each have a copy of it. What I would like to do is go through the schedule with you, and answer what I can answer, and tell you plainly when a question is one for the court.”
Margaret said that seemed sensible. It was the third sentence she had prepared in the car and it was the only one she got to use.
He began with the house.