The day was warm and clear. The air smelled good. Around the courthouse building, painters had thrown up canvas and ladders; the building evidently was undergoing alterations. The three of them had to stoop under ropes as they entered.
As his lawyer and witness entered the courtroom, Nat said to the lawyer, “Do I have time to go to the men’s room?”
“If you hurry,” the lawyer said.
In the men’s room –a remarkably clean place– he took a pill that Fay had given him, a tranquilizer. Then he hurried back to the courtroom. He found his lawyer and witness on their way back out; his lawyer took hold of his arm and led him into the corridor, frowning.
“I was talking to the bailiff,” he said in a low voice. “This judge doesn’t permit the attorney to lead.”
“What does that mean?” Nat said.
“It means I can’t ask either of you questions,” the lawyer said. “When you get up there, you’ll be on your own.”
“You can’t prompt us?” the witness said.
“No, you’ll have to tell your own stories.” The lawyer led them back toward the courtroom. “We probably won’t be first. Listen to the other cases and try to judge from them what you should say.” He held the door open, and Nat entered ahead of his witness.
Presently he found himself seated on a bench, like the pew of a church, watching a middle-aged woman on the witness stand telling how a Mr. George Heathens or Feathers had spilled coffee on Mrs. Feathers at a barbecue party in San Anselmo and that instead of apologizing he had called her a fool and a bad mother in front of ten people.
The witness became silent, and then the judge, a gray-haired heavyset man in his late sixties, wearing a pin-stripe suit, made a grimace of distaste and said, “Well, how did that affect the plaintiff? Did it cause any change in her?”
The witness said, “Yes, it caused her to become unhappy. And she said that she could not stand to be around a man who treated her that way and made her miserable.”
The case went on to its end, and then a second one, very similar, took its place, with new women and a new attorney.
“This is a tough judge,” Nathan’s lawyer said to him out of the corner of his mouth. “Look, he’s going through the property settlement. He’s really giving trouble.”
Nat scarcely heard him. The tranquilizer had begun to take effect, and he gazed out of the window of the courtroom, at the lawn. He saw cars going by along the street, and the windows of the shops.
To him, his lawyer whispered, “Say you had to go to a doctor. Say she made you physically sick. Say she was away for a week or more on end.”
He nodded.
On the stand a young, violently-nervous dark-haired woman was saying in a faint voice that her husband had hit her.
Nathan thought, Well, Gwen never hit me. However she had that fool in the kitchen with her that night when I got home. I can say that she was in the habit of going out with other men, and that when I questioned her as to who they were and what they did, she abused me and insulted me.
To their witness, his lawyer whispered, “You listen to what Mr. Anteil says and take your cues from him.”
“Okay,” their witness said.
She caused me distress and humiliation, Nathan thought. I lost weight and started taking tranquilizers. I lay awake at night worrying about money. She borrowed money and didn’t tell me about it. When she didn’t come home at night I had to call around to everyone we knew, thus notifying everyone that I had no idea where my wife was at night, or whom she was with. She ran up huge gas bills on our credit cards. She hit me, scratched me, called me dirty names in front of all kinds of people. She made it clear that she preferred the company of other men to me, and that she had little or no respect for me.
In his mind he rehearsed and rehearsed.
Not so much later he found himself up on the stand, facing the rows of empty seats and the few people. Slightly to his left and below him his lawyer stood tensely, holding a sheaf of papers and speaking very rapidly to the judge. Their witness sat ill at ease in the first chair of the jury box.
“Your full name is Nathan Ruben Anteil?” his lawyer said.
“Yes,” he said.
“And you live in Point Reyes Station in Marin County?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And you have been a resident of California for a period greater than one year, and a resident of Marin County for a period greater than three months? And you are the plaintiff in this dispute asking a divorce between you and Mrs. Anteil in the Superior Court of Marin County? And that the marriage between you and Mrs. Anteil ceased for all practical purposes on or about March 10, 1959, and that at this time you and she are no longer living together?”
He said yes to each question.
“Would you tell the court,” his attorney said, “the reasons why you seek a divorce from Mrs. Anteil.”
Now his lawyer stepped slightly back. The courtroom was a little noisy, because, in the rear, a lawyer was consulting in low tones with his client and two people in the front were talking and rustling. Nat began to answer.
“Well,” he said, “the reasons are that for the most part –” He paused, feeling the fatigue and languor brought on him by the pill. The sense of weight. “Are that she was never at home,” he said. “She was always out somewhere and when she came back even though I asked her where she had been, all she did was vilify me and tell me it was none of my business. She made it abundantly clear that she preferred the company of other men to mine.”
He tried to think what else to say. How to continue. All he seemed able to do was gaze out at the lawn beyond the windows, the warm, green, dry lawn. He felt terribly sleepy, and his eyes started to shut. His voice had trailed off, and only with great effort could he resume any sort of speech.
“It seemed to me,” he went on, “that there was nothing but contempt for me in her all the time. I could never depend on her to back me up in anything. She went her own way. She never acted like a married woman. It was as if we weren’t married in the first place. The result of this was that I couldn’t earn my living. I got sick and had to consult a physician.” He paused, and then he thought of the name of a physician. “Doctor Robert Andrews,” he said. “In San Francisco.”
The judge said, “What was the nature of this illness?”
Nathan said, “What would be called a psychoneurotic complaint.” He waited, but the judge had no comment. So he resumed. “I found myself unable to concentrate or work, and my friends all noticed this. This went on for a long period. At one time she stood on the front porch and shouted abuse at me that even the town’s minister heard. He happened to be getting ready to visit us.”
That had been the day that Gwen had moved her things out. Some neighbor had evidently realized what was happening, that their marriage was breaking up, and had called old Doctor Sebastian. The old man had come by in his 1949 Hudson just at the height of the argument between them; Gwen, on the front porch with an armload of towels, had screamed at him that he was a no-good bastard and that as far as she was concerned he could go to hell. The old man had gotten back into his Hudson and driven off. Apparently he had given up any idea of trying to help them, either because he realized that it was too late and he could do no good, or because what Gwen had said was too much for him. He simply was too frail to stand the stress.
Anyhow, Nathan thought, as he gazed out at the warm lawn and the sunlight, the shops and people, she finished packing her things and then I drove her and them to her family’s house in Sacramento. I even gave her back the snapshots of her that I carried in my wallet.
The courtroom was silent, waiting for him to go on. Waiting to see if he had anything more to say about the break-up of his marriage.
He said, “It was intolerable to me to be treated that way, as if I was second in importance to other men. I found strange cars sometimes parked in front of my own house, and when I got home I found men sitting there that I had never in my life seen before. And when I asked her who they were she became so enraged and vilified me so completely that even the other man became embarrassed. He asked to leave, but she told him to stay.”