“You’re right. This is far more serious. Do you realize how sacred the doctor-patient privilege is? I have patients secretly suffering from HIV, patients fighting suicidal depression, wives who’ve secretly had abortions, mothers who suspect their husbands of abusing their children, women who’ve been raped and never told the police, prominent drug addicts … the list is endless. If I were forced to reveal any of that in court, incalculable suffering would ensue. Yet you act like fighting to protect that secrecy is some quaint gesture. Do you expect me to raise a white flag at the first sign of danger? Surely you know me better than that. I’m seventy-three years old. If I choose this hill to make my stand, that’s my lookout.”
His righteous passion silences me, but only for a few moments. “I’m sorry if I sounded glib. But I’d understand your position a lot better if you only had yourself to worry about. What about Mom? Do you think she can stand waiting at home while you die slowly in Parchman Prison? Hell, in the shape you’re in, you might not even make it to Parchman. You could die in the county lockup awaiting trial. Think about the reality of that for Mom.”
“I am thinking of your mother,” Dad says in a tone somewhere between reverence and shame.
I shake my head. “I don’t believe it. You’re wracked with guilt about something. Fine. We’ve all done things we regret. But I don’t care what you might have done, and neither does Mom. Nothing on this earth could push us away from you.”
He slowly shakes his head. “You don’t know that. You can’t.”
“You think you’ve committed a sin so terrible that you could never be forgiven?”
“No. But there are some things so—so complicated that it’s a man’s duty to work them out for himself. Not to depend on others to do it for him.”
“Dad … I’d never say this to a client. But you’re not going to be my client beyond tomorrow, not if you’re going to trial, and—”
“You won’t defend me if this goes to trial?”
“A lawyer who represents himself or his family has a fool for a client.”
He seems to take this philosophically. “Go on, then.”
“Tell me what happened at Cora Revels’s house last night. Just the facts, in sequence, as best you can remember them.” I hold up my right hand. “Before you say no, let me tell you why you should confide in me. Maybe what happened was assisted suicide. Or maybe it was murder. But it might have been manslaughter, or even plain suicide. We won’t know until I hear the facts. Because even though laymen use those terms, each one has a strict legal definition.”
For a moment I think I’ve convinced him. Then he says, “I’m not sure I know myself what happened last night.”
“What do you mean? Can you prove you weren’t there? Or what time you left? With an alibi, this whole mess can magically go away. According to the clock-radio beside Viola’s bed, she died at five thirty-eight A.M.”
He lifts a small, desert-colored replica of a Tiger tank from a shelf behind him and toys with its scaled-down 88 mm gun. After slowly turning the turret a few times, he sets the tank back on the shelf. “That’s not what I meant. I was there. But I’m still not sure what happened. Or why.”
“Did you do anything to assist Viola to die? Did you inject her? Was there some kind of unexpected drug interaction?”
Dad blinks twice, then seems to shake himself out of a trance. “We’ve come full circle, Penn. I’ve told you I can’t discuss what happened last night. Let that be an end of it.”
“You mean you won’t discuss it.”
He turns up his palms, exposing his arthritically deformed fingers. “Semantics.”
“I know you didn’t murder Viola. I know that. You’re trying to protect somebody. Nothing else makes sense. You can’t be trying to protect yourself, because you’re about to destroy yourself. So it must be someone else. Tell me who you’re trying to save, and I’ll do all in my power to protect them. I swear it. Your life is on the line, Dad.”
“I’ve been on borrowed time for quite a while, son. You know that.”
At last my frustration boils over, and I get to my feet. “Why won’t you let me help you?”
“Because you can’t,” he says calmly. He picks up his dead cigar from the ashtray, puts it in his mouth, and relights it with a high-pressure butane lighter that roars like a miniature welding torch. “Penn, let me tell you something: I thought I knew my father. He lived to be eighty-six, remember? Died of colon cancer. Do you remember how religious he was?”
“He never missed a Sunday at church. Or a Wednesday night.”
“That’s right.” Dad exhales a raft of blue smoke. “Well, near the end, I found him staring out the front window of his house, crying. Crying. Can you see Percy Cage doing that?”
My grandfather was as hard as a Salem judge. “No, I can’t.”
“When I asked why he was crying, Dad told me he was afraid. Afraid of dying. I can’t tell you how shocked I was. I asked whether his religious faith didn’t give him some comfort—his belief in the afterlife. He turned to me with a stare that made me shudder, and he said, ‘There’s nothing after this life, Tom. This world. Nothing.’ Then he looked back out the window.”
Dad studies the glowing tip of his cigar. “I felt like the earth had cracked open at my feet. Even though I believed basically the same thing. Dad had been going to church his whole life, professing faith, teaching Sunday school, saying and doing all the right things. But when it came to actually staring into the void, all that went out the window. All those years, he’d never been the person I thought I knew. Never. I’m not judging him. I’m just saying that I had no idea who my own father really was.”