Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

Author:Scott Turow [Turow, Scott]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Crime & mystery, General, Fiction - General, Suspense, Crime & Thriller, Fiction
ISBN: 9780140103366
Publisher: Gardners Books
Published: 2010-05-11T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

Three a.m. When I awake my heart is racing and cool traces of sweat are abrading my neck, so that in the idiocy of sleep I am trying to loosen my collar. I grope; then lie back. My breath is short, and my heartbeat thunders intermittently in the ear against the pillow. My dream is still clear to me: my mother's face in agony; that worn cadaverous image as she neared the end, and worse, her look of lost, unspeaking terror.

When my mother became sick, and quickly died, she was in the most peaceful period of her adult life. She and my father were no longer living together, although they still worked side by side each day in the bakery. He had moved in with a widow, Mrs. Bova, whose urgent bearing when she came into the shop I can remember even from the years before her husband died. For my mother, whose life with my father had been a dominion of fear, this arrangement became a kind of liberation. Her interest in the world outside her suddenly increased. She became one of the first of the regular callers on those listener-participation talk shows. Tell us what you think about interracial dating, legalizing marijuana, who killed Kennedy. She stacked the dining-room table with old newspapers and magazines, pads and index cards on which she made notations to herself, preparing for tomorrow's programs. My mother, who was phobic about venturing beyond our apartment building or the shop, who had to begin her preparations early in the morning if she was going to depart her home sometime that afternoon, who from the time I was eight sent me to the market so that she could avoid leaving the house—my mother became a local personality of sorts for her outspoken views about various worldly controversies. I could not reconcile this development with the accommodations I had made long before with myself to accept her wildly verging eccentricities, or the narrow margins of her former life.

She had been twenty-eight, four years my father's senior, when they were married, the sixth daughter of a Jewish union organizer and a lass from Cork. My father wed, I'm sure, for her savings, which allowed him to open up the shop. Nor was there ever any sign that my mother had married for love. She was an old maid and, I would guess, far too peculiar to gather other suitors. Her behavior, as I witnessed it, was apt to be excessive and ungovernable, with manic tours from pinnacles of rosy hilarity to hours of brooding looks. Sometimes she became frantic. She was forever running to ransack her crowded dresser drawers, rummaging in her sewing box as she made high-pitched excited noises. Because she seldom left home, her sisters made it a habit to look after her. This was a brave endeavor. When my aunts visited, my father would assail them in loud conversation with himself as busybodies, and he was not above actual threats of violence if they came when he was drunk.

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