Behave by Andromeda Romano-Lax

Author:Andromeda Romano-Lax
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2015-12-11T17:33:52+00:00

Chapter 18

Which left only the divorce itself, just weeks away. One year from the time John first kissed me on the cheek, one year from the beginning of our research with Albert, the court proceedings began. John had made it clear he would contest nothing, and he’d already agreed to the settlement, which granted full custody to Mary and would reduce his income to a third. I was not called to testify, and the only witnesses who were called in were not our close friends—not Leslie or William on John’s side, not Mary Cover on mine, and no one at all from the lab, thank goodness.

It was bad enough that, outside of a court, John had started to hear that lab colleagues and friends were speaking about him in disloyal, demeaning ways. They’d said to his face that he was the most brilliant psychologist of his day, second in influence only to Freud, and now they were saying that his experimental design was faulty and his research record not very deep. Most of them would be ready to take it all back whenever John managed to reclaim his professional glory, but still. I’d never felt closer to him than when I saw his vast circle grow smaller and smaller, his enemies emboldened by the rising swell of snide comments, his so-called friends weakening in their resolve to defend him.

John reenacted the trial details for me only later, in William’s Thirty-Fourth Street apartment, after the proceedings had concluded. William, who had heard it all once already, got up and left the room, leaving a bottle of bourbon and two glasses on the table.

The judge—John explained to me now, voice caustic and slurred—asked Mary how she knew. We’d been seen, “at various lunch rooms, and in her machine at all hours of the day.”

William MacGruder was brought to the stand. He was the boarder with whom we’d shared laughs and drinks at the flophouse. The judge asked: “Do you know the cause of the separation?”

“Yes I do.”

“Can you state what it was?”

“A brown-hair girl with blue eyes, was the cause of the separation.”

Why on earth had he been so coy? It was like he was quoting from the headlines.

The judge asked, “Do you know her first name?”

“Rosalie.”

“Do you know what the relations were between the Defendant in this case and the girl named Rosalie?”

“I know that they were intimate from all appearances.”

He’d seen us in the flophouse, MacGruder told the judge, “many times. A great many times. I hate like thunder to say it.”

Then there was Feeny, who had been a tenant in Dr. Thomas’s house, this very same house. He, like MacGruder, had seen me coming and going from a bedroom, wearing a man’s bathrobe.

The pièce de résistance, the part that all the newspapers had been waiting for, was more details about the love letters, thirteen or fourteen of them, which had already been leaked in part. These were John’s words, immortalized in the public record now, not in my own

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