Imaginary pressure of eyes at the back of her neck was a misery. Callista's mother and stepfather were two or three rows behind. At the noon recess they had been unwillingly jammed against her in the corridor outside. Mrs. Chalmers would have liked to cut her then, Edith thought, but washed together so in the loud human tide, that hadn't been quite possible even for Victoria Chalmers. The Pale Professor might even have rebelled at it—he was bravely friendly, pleased to stoop in his weedy tallness and shake hands, keeping haunted uncourageous eyes obstinately turned away from the great stone face. And so the Face had talked, pronouncing deadly commonplaces in Victoria's public manner, which always suggested the need of an organ obligato—a spate of commonplaces, all of them somehow conveying the implication that Edith Nolan was at the very least a Bad Influence.
Edith had never discovered much resemblance between Victoria and her daughter, except for prominent cheekbones and uncommonly white skin. Victoria's nose was classically straight, without the irregularity that gave Callista's features an almost Indian cast. Victoria's smoky-pale hyperthyroid eyes somehow lacked alertness, as though she could not be bothered with anything so simple as direct observation. Her hands were stodgy, unalive—nothing there of Callista, and nothing of Callista in her mother's rugged frame and Madam-Chairman chestiness. Edith could picture that bust inflating for voice projection when Victoria was about to read a paper before the Thursday Society of Shanesville—they "did" book reviews and current events. She had met Victoria on her home grounds twice, when Callista had invited her out to Shanesville with wry warnings. At home, Victoria was invincible, a conversational Juggernaut riding over a crumpled evening with every adverb in place.
And yet now, Edith thought, Victoria was probably suffering, in her fashion. She would be regarding Callista's trouble as an unwarranted attack of the universe against Mrs. Victoria Johnson Blake Chalmers; but with whatever strength of emotion remained, with whatever capability of love may exist in a person who must be always right, Victoria would be feeling a genuine distress for her maverick daughter, perhaps also for dead Ann Doherty, even for Jim Doherty. Maybe. Or maybe Callista had been right in the quick, casual, bitter remark that Edith remembered from many months ago: "Something was left out when Mother's chromosomes got slung together—I believe it was humanity."
Or the truth could lie as usual somewhere in the middle. In the noon recess, it had seemed to Edith that she glimpsed flickerings of real pain in Victoria—some kind of pain; under such conditions it might be hard to tell the difference between grief and the pinch of a tight girdle. Then the crowd had thinned enough to let them escape, and Victoria, still resonantly talking nothings, had marched Professor Herbert Chalmers away, a trainer jerking the leash on a shambling mournful Great Dane.
The electric clock behind Mr. Delehanty clicked and twitched, another scrap of eternity chipped off as Mr. Fielding declared: "I have no objection to the death penalty, and would make no exception for a woman."
The bald athlete Talbot J. Hunter stepped aside, and Cecil Warner, wilted and ancient, took over. The Old Man was tired, his questions a mere mopping up of areas Hunter had ignored: Fielding's newspaper reading, length of residence in Winchester; perhaps he just wanted to hear a few more overtones. In this case Cecil Warner—(Edith understood it fully today for the first time)—was not interested in the fee, the publicity, or the abstraction of justice. He was there because, with the curious devotion of an old man, he loved Callista. To use one of his own worn phrases, it was that simple. Since a woman of thirty-one does not live in the world of a battle-worn man of sixty-eight, Edith knew she could grasp the quality of that love from the outside only, with the mind only: enough, to accept the fact. But didn't a defense counsel need some inner coldness to sustain him?
She studied the twelve faces, their names already carved into her memory. She would retain the look of them as vividly as though each juror had sat in her studio under the clever lights while she examined the faults, planes, good points, chatted with them to let self-consciousness and vanity subside, searched for the portrait they wouldn't see, and at last finished her shots—one to please the customer if possible; one, if lucky, to please herself as a frozen instant of relative truth.
Peter Anson—oh, if he were furry instead of bald you could use color film and get a pink panda. That notion was not quite her own, but like something Callista might have said in one of her fantastic moods, more impudent than funny, more funny than spiteful. Anson's chubbiness would be deceptive, his good nature not the kind that he would maintain under serious pressure. His kindness would be limited to what he understood. Beyond that limit, Anson could be cruel.
Dora Lagovski, twenty-four, mammal, housewife. Dora would want to be photographed with a big mouthful of teeth, and you better do it.