The Accused - Harold R. Daniels (best novels for students TXT) 📗
- Author: Harold R. Daniels
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Liebman: Now wait a minute—they haven’t been admitted as evidence yet. You can’t read them out.
Cameron: Let me have them, Mr. Gurney…. Do you have any objection to their admission as evidence, Mr. Liebman?
Liebman: No. I just didn’t like the way counsel tried to get them in.
Cameron: They will be marked as requested and admitted as evidence.
Gurney: I show them to the jury. They are a marriage certificate dated January 9 of this year and an application to the Dempster Insurance Company for a policy on the life of Louise Palaggi—Louise Morlock, that is—dated January 10. He didn’t waste any time, did he?
Cameron: That comment will be stricken. Mr. Gurney, I will not tolerate another such aside.
*
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Alvin Morlock. Introduction of documentary evidence by Prosecution Attorney Gurney.
Morlock and Dodson drove back to Warfield, the small town in which Ludlow College was located, on New Year’s Day. Morlock had made a tentative agreement with Louise to come to Providence on the following weekend. Dodson was glum and taciturn as he faced the prospect of four more months in the classroom. Classes began two days later.
Morlock was lonesome for the first few days after his return. His room seemed emptier, his evenings longer than they had been before meeting Louise Palaggi. Soon enough the loneliness slipped away and he was guiltily conscious that he had perhaps missed the solitude as much as the companionship. At the end of three days he had already begun to consider various excuses to prevent his going back to Providence on the weekend.
That night, his landlady met him as he came in the door. “You’ve got a visitor,” she said. “I invited her to wait in your room.” The landlady—she knew romance when she saw it—wore a conspiratorial smile.
Morlock muttered, “Thank you,” and hurried to the stairs, uncertain as to whether he was happy or annoyed. The visitor, he was certain, could only be Louise.
She was waiting inside the room. When Morlock entered, she ran to him and threw herself against him. “I got lonesome for you, Al,” she said. “Are you glad I came?”
He remembered to put his arms around her. He was very glad, he told her; he told himself.
Louise had half expected that Morlock would call her during the early part of the week; when he did not she knew that she had overestimated the pull of her sex and that Morlock would probably cancel their date for the weekend. She had been, she decided, a shade too hard to get, and there remained only one thing to do. She would remind Morlock that she was a woman and that he was a man.
Morlock had planned to spend the evening correcting term papers. Now he hastily changed his plans. He called Dodson and arranged to borrow his car. He took Louise to dinner and a movie and drove her back to Providence. When they got out of Dodson’s old car, she took his hand and said, “Come on in, Al.”
When she had hung their coats in a closet she came and sat beside him on the couch. He was aware of the woman softness of her body, and he was convinced now that he had been glad to see her, convinced that he really had been lonely. When he reached for her she came into his arms with an eagerness that matched his own. The night dissolved in a warm bath of sex.
They were married five days later by a Justice of the Peace in East Providence. Dodson stood up for Morlock. Morlock would have liked to have asked the austere Paul Martin, whom he considered a closer friend than Dodson, but he had hesitated out of fear that Martin would not approve of Louise. Louise Palaggi stood alone. Morlock had supposed that there would be a rather elaborate wedding with a traditional Italian reception to follow. Louise explained that since she was marrying him, a non-Catholic, her family chose not to come. He was just as pleased, he told her, and half meant it.
Morlock approached the ceremony with a sort of tender determination. He did not love Louise. She had none of the qualities he had supposed he would look for in a wife. Still, she had an Old World approach to marriage. She would make a home for the two of them. If she was unlike him in intellect, she was like him in that she was alone and lonely. They would make an enduring marriage, he determined, and was a little embarrassed by his own feeling of nobility.
More than any other emotion, Louise felt a warm sense of security. She was a solid married woman with nothing to fear. She would be a good wife. She would cook Morlock’s meals and keep his house clean. Even while she thought this, she had the feeling that they were children playing with dolls and that the whole thing was a game.
On the following day, Morlock, a tidy man in his personal and business habits, stopped at the Bursar’s office to report his marriage’. After the ritual flurry of congratulations by the girls working in the office, a heavy set man with a jovial face approached him.
“I’m Ed Hale,” the man said. “I handle the insurance or the college. You’ll want to increase your own insurance now, and we’ve got this little family policy that the college helps out with.”
“I was going to take care of that later,” Morlock said, wanting time to think about it.
“It won’t take a minute,” Hale said. He went on, bludgeoning Morlock, scenting a commission of a few dollars.
Morlock, already embarrassed by the very nature of his errand to the office, signed the application hurriedly and rushed away.
Gurney: Your name is Anna Carofano?
Mrs. Carofano: That is my name.
Gurney: Are you married?
Mrs. Carofano: Not any more. My husband died three years ago.
Gurney: And you presently operate a rooming house in Warfield, Massachusetts. Is that correct?
Mrs. Carofano: More of the tenement than a rooming house. I’ve got three tenements in the building, not just rooms to rent.
Gurney: I see. Were you acquainted with the deceased?
Mrs. Carofano: You mean, did I know Louise Morlock? Sure, I knew her.
Liebman: If it please the Court, the defense will stipulate that the accused and his wife maintained a residence as man and wife in the tenement house belonging to Mrs. Carofano as of January 13 of this year.
Cameron: Mr. Gurney?
Gurney: We’ll go along with the stipulation. Mrs. Carofano, would you say that they were happy while they were living in your house?
Liebman: Objection, Your Honor. The answer would be argumentative.
Cameron: I think in this case that the witness is reasonably qualified to express an opinion. I think we will let the question stand, Mr. Liebman. Do you wish an exception?
Liebman: No.
Mrs. Carofano: I don’t know if he was happy or not. She wasn’t.
Gurney: She told you that she wasn’t?
Mrs. Carofano: Sure. A lot of times. He’d come home at night and read a book. She said he never talked to her unless they were having a fight.
Gurney: Did they quarrel frequently?
Mrs. Carofano: Sometimes it would be every night. Then, for a while they’d get along a little better. He was always criticizing her, the way she cooked, the way she kept house. And he never took her anywhere. She said he thought he was too good for her just because he was a teacher at the college.
Liebman: Your Honor, hasn’t this gone far enough?
Cameron: I think the testimony is becoming irrelevant, Mr. Gurney.
Gurney: Yes, sir. Now, Mrs. Carofano, did the accused ever, to your knowledge, strike his wife?
Mrs. Carofano: I don’t know if he did or not. I do know that more than once she was afraid to go home.
*
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Alvin Morlock. Direct Testimony of Anna Carofano.
Morlock and his new wife moved into a hotel for the first few days of their marriage. It was agreed that Louise—Lolly, she liked him to call her—would find an apartment that they could afford. On the fourth night Morlock came home to the hotel to find her dressed and waiting.
“Al,” she told him, “I’ve found a place. I paid a week’s rent and there’s some furniture in it already that we can have. Let’s go and see it right away.”
“Of course,” he said. He was happy to see her excitement. Their marriage had thus far been prosaic. Morlock had fancied himself bringing home little gifts, finding her cooking his meals. This had been impossible in the greenhouse hotel existence. Now, with their own place, it would be different. He could bring Paul Martin home for dinner, a nice little affair with wine and after-dinner brandy. Morlock had never had an after-dinner brandy but he suspected that Paul Martin would be impressed by it.
Lolly seemed so happy at the prospect of moving that Morlock forced himself to hide his shock when they turned a corner and she said triumphantly, “There it is.”
The tenement was ugly, sordid ugly. He had not expected a vine covered cottage; neither had he expected to live in a house that was flanked on one side by a grocery warehouse and on the other by a bar. When they were inside, he tried not to notice the cracked and stained linoleum, the leprous plaster. “It’s nice, Lolly,” he said. “We’ll fix it up in no time at all.” Later, when they left the house to go back to the hotel for the final night, he glanced around him and was struck by the thought that only this neighborhood in all of Warfield resembled Federal Hill in Providence; only this house and a few of its neighbors were architectural cousins to the three-deckers of Lolly’s birthplace.
They bought appliances on credit. Morlock brought home paint and brushes and sandpaper and turpentine, with a little picture in his mind of a magazine cover picturing a young couple restoring an old tumbled down house. On the magazine covers the house had graceful lines—as did the people—and needed only a dash of paint to restore its beauty. The tenement that Lolly had picked for them needed more than paint.
There was a wooden wainscoting in the kitchen. It was about five feet high and covered with a Joseph’s coat of a dozen layers of paint. Under all this paint, Morlock explained, there was undoubtedly fine walnut. (It was cypress.) This would be their first project. They would strip off the old paint and wax the fine wood. The boards in the wainscoting were eight inches wide.
There had been some excitement for Louise in the first few days of their marriage. When the excitement was burned out, there came the novelty of moving to the new tenement. Other women, she was aware, would have been content, happy, even, with the project of fixing up a home. She waited impatiently for the miracle to happen to her. The wooden boards of the wainscoting were symbolic. Starting with a section of two boards she began scraping and sanding. It was hard work and the turpentine raised welts on her hands. She stayed at it for most of a day, not quite knowing what would be revealed to her when she had stripped off the old paint. When Morlock came home he was delighted.
“It’s beautiful, Lolly,” he exclaimed. “Look at the grain of the wood.”
Actually she had been disappointed. It was, as he had said, wood. She privately thought it had looked better with
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