Prize Women by Caroline Lea

Author:Caroline Lea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

22

Courtroom 2B, October 1937

Mr. Donovan is the lawyer’s name: he is sharp-suited and spectacled, with a habit of rubbing his right ear after he has asked Lily a question. He has red hair and pinkish skin, so that, as the late-evening sun illuminates the courtroom, it brightens his face and renders his ears almost translucent. Lily cannot take her eyes from them and has to ask him to repeat his question.

“Are you perhaps hard of hearing, Mrs. di Marco? Or is it a translator you need?”

Titters from around the courtroom, and Mr. Donovan looks smug, straightening the handkerchief in his jacket pocket, which, throughout every day of the court case, has always been perfectly pleated, has always matched his tie. Lily imagines Mrs. Donovan at home, laying out his clothes the night before—his matching tie and handkerchief, which she will have carefully ironed and folded. Do they have children? Does Mrs. Donovan stay up late into the night, ironing and folding, or does she rise early? Does she place his slippers, just so, by the side of the bed, so that his pinkish feet never have to touch the cold floor?

Lily feels a sharp distaste for this red-faced man with his mouse-like ears, his quick, harsh laughter, and his questions that are not really asking anything, but are telling the court and the judge and the journalists that Lily is stupid, that she is foreign, that she is not to be trusted.

Outside, still, the faint shouts of the rioters who have been moved on. Those people who all want their voices to be heard, even when it doesn’t concern them. Those people who are so full of opinions, when it is Lily’s life and future at stake. Lily swallows the surge of frustration, tries to keep her voice cool. She leans forward, enunciating slowly and clearly.

“I can hear perfectly, thank you. And I don’t need a translator. But you have asked a lot of questions.”

“Ah, yes, I see. It must be confusing. Let me go more slowly for you. Mrs. di Marco, I asked about the father of your children.”

Lily pauses. She can feel the eyes of everyone in the court upon her, can sense their held breath. This, she realizes, is the case that Mae has helped build against her, painting Lily as a woman of loose morals—promiscuous. Like all immigrant women.

Well, she won’t have it. She won’t.

She raises her chin, looks him in the eye.

“I was married to my first husband when I lived in Chatsworth. I had three children with him.” Three surviving children. Six miscarriages and stillbirths. “A beam fell on him during the earthquake,” she says. She remembers his body sprawled out under those stones of the collapsed wall. She remembers the shudder of his breath. The wet-fish open and close of his mouth. She remembers the beam that had cracked his skull. She doesn’t remember her hand releasing it.

“And?” asks the lawyer.

“And,” Lily says, deliberately quietly, “I married again.”

“And had six more children. Over how long?”

“Nine years.

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