7 October 1960
The Day He Tried and Failed to Find Out Why
Nathan arrived shortly before eight A.M. at the county jail. An overweight, sulky woman with two small children already sat in the lobby, avoiding his eyes. Avoiding everyone’s eyes. Other than she — them — he seemed to be the first to have shown up for visiting hours.
He logged himself in on a worn and dog-eared sheet carried over from yesterday’s visitations. He signed his name, produced his driver’s license — which he felt the officer behind the desk scrutinized too closely and for too long — and then filled in the name of the prisoner he was hoping to see.
Lenora Bates, he wrote in his careful script, hoping he was spelling her first name correctly.
The officer — if indeed he was some type of officer — took the clipboard, which held the form out of Nathan’s hands, turned it around. Began to read impassively. Then a deep frown unexpectedly furrowed into his brow.
“Have a seat,” he said. “This will take several minutes.”
Meanwhile a female guard opened a door into the lobby, nodded at the woman with children, whom she seemed to know, and allowed them inside.
Nathan looked back at the officer behind the counter. Hopefully. To see if he could go in, too.
The man shook his head. “You’ll have to have a seat. As I say. This will take several minutes.”
“It didn’t seem to take her several minutes,” Nathan said. Not combatively. Just in such a way as to invite explanation.
“I’m afraid your case will be more complicated. Much… more complicated.”
Nathan perched uncomfortably on the edge of the hard wooden bench the woman had just vacated. It was still warm from her bulk. Nathan had never understood how people could allow their bodies to get so large. Such a chaotic, uncontrolled existence.
Meanwhile the officer behind the desk picked up a phone and spoke into it quietly, in an obvious effort to keep his words from being overheard. But Nathan had always enjoyed unusually keen hearing.
“Ring up the watch commander. Tell him we need the coroner investigator over here.” A pause. Then, “Father, I think.”
Nathan ran the single troublesome word around in his head. Coroner. No one had died in this case.
Had they?
With a jolt like a baseball bat to his stomach it struck him that the infant, Baby Nathan Bates, who had been doing so much better last time Nathan called to check on his status, might have died.
He jumped immediately to his feet, and the officer looked up, surprised.
“A payphone,” Nathan said hastily. “Do you have a payphone here?”
“Yeah, there’s one out front.”
He ran outside. The October air had taken on an even sharper nip. Nathan had been feeling in his bones that the first snow would fall soon.
He dug in his pocket for a dime, and called the emergency room of the hospital. He now held the number, memorized, in his head.
Dr. Battaglia answered.
“This is Nathan McCann,” he said. Not even knowing what to say next. He could hear and feel his own pulse beating in his chest and neck and temples. It felt nearly impossible to breathe and talk at the same time.
“He’s not here any more,” the doctor said. Sounding all too calm about it. “Sorry to say this ends our correspondence, unless you find any more babies lying around in the future.”
Nathan saw the world grow brighter and more glaring at the periphery of his vision. He worried he might pass out. He tried to speak, but no words materialized.
“Yeah,” the doctor continued, “we handed him over to his grandma yesterday afternoon. Poor woman. She’s probably nearly fifty and she won’t get a good night’s sleep for at least a year. Babies are for the young.”
Nathan very consciously filled his lungs with air.
“Then he’s not … he’s all right?”
“Yeah, he’s doing great. Told you they could be strong little beggars. It’s like God wanted ’em to get born and there’s nothing going to stop them after that. He even had good color when I saw him last.”
“Oh. Well. Thank you, doctor. You’ve been very kind.”
Nathan made his way slowly back into the lobby of the county jail, the muscles in his thighs feeling loose and liquid, like runny jelly.
He took his spot again on the bench, where he waited, thinking very little, for well over twenty minutes.
? ? ?
“Detective Gross,” a small man said.
Nathan rose and shook his hand.
Detective Gross was a young man, or at least appeared to be so. He didn’t look like he could be much over thirty, yet the hairline of his red head was surprisingly receded, giving his forehead a strange, angular look.
“If you’ll follow me to my office. Sorry to say it’s a pretty long walk from here.”
Nathan followed him outdoors, then into an adjacent building. Followed him down dingy halls with high windows that seemed not to have been cleaned for years. Followed him into a small office with a baseball-sized hole in one of its dirty window panes, casting a distinct beam of light at an angle across the room. Nathan took a seat on the other side of the detective’s desk. He looked up at the window briefly, and thought of the recent bond measure to build a new jail. He had voted against it. Thinking himself far too overtaxed as it was.
He still had not spoken a word to this new man.
“This is always the very hardest moment in my job. Hate it, really. Nobody likes this. Not one bit. But I’m the investigator assigned to the coroner’s division, and somebody has to do this, so here goes. I am dreadfully sorry to have to inform you that your daughter died sometime in the night last night.”
“Lenora?” Nathan asked. Confused.
“Yes. I’m afraid so.”
“Of … ?”
“Sepsis.”
“Related to her recent childbirth?”
“Yes. Exactly. Apparently it had been a difficult birth, with a lot of bleeding. Because she was so young, I guess, at least in part. Being barely eighteen, and very small …”
A long silence.
Then Nathan said, “Don’t you have medical care for your inmates? Oh, I don’t mean that the way it sounds, only … Well, don’t you? I mean, aren’t you required by law to offer medical attention to any inmate who asks for it?”
“Ah, yes,” Gross said. “And now you’ve just hit on it. Any inmate who asks for it. But we don’t go around asking each one every day if she feels OK. The inmate has to speak up and let us know there’s some problem. A raging infection with a high fever, for example. And your daughter never said a word.”
“My daughter. I think you must be confused. I have no children.”
The detective’s face went blank. “Lenora Bates was not your daughter?”
“No.”
“What was your relationship to the deceased?”
“None, really. I never met her. I’m just the man who found her baby in the woods.”
“So no relation to her family at all?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh, my. This is embarrassing. I shouldn’t have given you any information at all. We haven’t even had time to notify her next of kin yet. I’ll have to have a firm talk with the guy who told me you were her father. He’s put me in quite an awkward position.”
Oh, poor Mrs. Bates, Nathan thought. Her daughter dead, and here she didn’t even know the news yet. And Nathan did. It seemed sad, somehow, that he should be feeling pity for her before she even knew she’d become a pitiable figure. Well, an even more pitiable figure.
“I never said anything to suggest I was her father, I assure you.”
“Well, bad assumption on his part, I guess. Maybe he figured nobody else would visit her. But it was highly unprofessional, let me tell you. You could help me out a great deal, Mr… .”
“McCann.”
“… Mr. McCann, if you could keep this under your hat for a couple of hours. The media will be all over this soon enough, but it’s very important that her next of kin be notified properly before they hear it on the radio or read about it in the paper. I’m sure you understand.”
“I have far too much respect for poor Mrs. Bates to allow such a thing to happen to her.”
“Thank you. Well, not to be rude, but I’d best get going on doing this difficult thing all over again. Can you find your way back to the parking lot?”
“I’m certain I can,” Nathan said, and rose to go.
“Mr. McCann,” the detective said. Before Nathan could get out the door.
Nathan turned back. Watched a swirl of dust motes, stirred by his movement, fly in the beam of light from the broken window. Wondered what the detective would do for warmth when the snow began to fly.
“If you don’t mind my asking, Mr. McCann, what were you going to say to her?”
Nathan pulled on his leather gloves as they spoke. “Say to her?”
“Yes. I just wondered — for purely personal reasons, mind you — about the purpose of your visit. I mean, here she did this unimaginable thing and left you to clean up from it, and I just wondered what you came to say to her.”
“Nothing, really. I had nothing to say to her. I was hoping she would have something to say to me.”
“Ah. I see. You wanted to know why. Why the woods? Why not a hospital? Or an orphanage? Why not put the kid in a basket and leave it on somebody’s doorstep?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Well, don’t think you’re the only one who wanted to know. Don’t think she didn’t hear the question plenty. From all the detectives who questioned her. And from the other inmates. Lots of the women in here are mothers. In fact, we had to keep her apart from the general population for her own safety. But we had no way to keep her so far apart that she couldn’t hear the comments.”
“And what did she have to say in her own defense?”
“Nothing. Not a word.”
“She never spoke?”
“Not a word. So maybe she had a reason but wasn’t saying. But my theory? My theory is that she didn’t know the answer herself. World is full of people so troubled they don’t even understand themselves. You could offer them a thousand dollars to explain their motivations, but they can’t tell you what they don’t know. And most of those miserable creatures find their way through here soon enough. So, I’m sorry, Mr. McCann. If there was a reason, it died with her. But if you ask me, it’s a question that never had an answer. Because there’s just no explanation that makes a lick of sense.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Nathan said. And stood mute for a moment. “But she wasn’t the only one in on it. There was the boyfriend as well. I wonder what he would say.”
“If you’re willing to put up with another of my theories … Day before yesterday his mother came in and made bail. Mortgaged her house to make bail for the boy. Now, it’s just a gut feeling, mind you. Call it a detective’s intuition. But I’m hoping that poor woman has family to take her in when she loses that house. Because I saw the look in that boy’s eyes on his way out the door. And I’d bet good money we’re never going to see the whites of those scared eyes around here again.”
Nathan digested this news briefly. Inclined to accept the detective’s instincts. Somehow the assessment felt right to him as well.
“Well, you’ll be wanting to go see Mrs. Bates …”
“Well, not wanting to, but …”
Gross rose and opened the door for Nathan, who found his way back to the parking lot on the first try.
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