JUDGE MANN: Is that agreeable to you, Mr. Hunter?
MR. HUNTER: Yes, your Honor, so long as the interruptions have to do with important points, not trivialities.
MR. WARNER: Sir, there are no trivialities in this case.
MR. HUNTER: Subject to the limitation I mentioned, the request of the defense appears reasonable, and I will not argue it.
JUDGE MANN: You may proceed, Mr. Hunter.
MR. HUNTER: The first of these letters, acknowledged by the defense to have been written by Callista Blake to James Doherty, is dated the 10th of May, 1959. Members of the jury, my dramatic ability is not, as Mr. Warner has described it, great. Any drama here is provided by the force of events, not by me. I must simply ask you to remember, while you hear these letters, that they (that is, the first three and the fifth) were written by a girl nineteen years of age, in the summer of this year, under the influence of a love affair which the testimony of witnesses has established and the defense has not denied. The first letter reads as follows:
"Jimmy—
"Tonight I cannot see you—that was really all I understood over the telephone, though I know you gave me the decent sensible reasons why you cannot come—something about work at the office, wasn't it?—for as soon as I heard you say that, I thought, Oh, bang goes the whole batch of cookies. You see, I was going to be domestic for you tonight, and I had just taken some cookies from the oven when you phoned—the airy egg-white kind, a sort of culinary idiocy because no damn good the next day, like letting air out of a tire. Therefore if I were a weeping wench they would now be soaked in brine and serve you right. But I never weep, Jimmy. Never. Remember that. So, since you cannot come, I will only count over the times I've had you with me, a miser adoring the sparkle and fall of jewels through her fingers. While you are submerged in the honest dreadfulness of whatever you do at the office—what the devil is it anyhow?—do you convey subtle conveyances and do dark deeds (these are puns) or just sit with your feet up and brood over Deals?—think of me playing with my pretties and having a better time than yourself, because this is all I can wish to do when you're away from me. Because I love you.
"It occurs to me, I never wrote to you before. You may not like me on paper. I sprawl and ramble, Dearest. Don't mind my doodling either—see the border I drew around your true name while I daydreamed and my pen was thinking for me? I'm only surprised it wasn't a tangle of Cupids, an out-of-season Valentine, and maybe it will be yet. In my here-and-now mood I would draw them saucy, I think (most of them), strutting and romping and showing off their little male apostrophes—all, I suppose, with a sneaking resemblance to you. Because I love you.
"No, don't say it's reckless and foolish of me to write at all—I know it. I can't care, not now. I tell you, Jimmy, what we have (is it possible it's only ten days?) is something that could not happen with Ann. Or anywhere in her world. I tell myself, I am not she, she is not me, my love (you know it) is nothing like what could happen for you with anyone but me. And there's my cure for jealousy—if I could apply it, if I could make my head rule me a little more, my crazy heart a little less. I want you, I'm empty and dull in your absence, tonight this is the only way I can talk to you. So let me talk, and think me foolish and reckless, and destroy this scrawled thing if you think best. It's me, though. Remember when you throw it away, it's me. And perhaps (because I love you) I wouldn't like you to burn me.
"More than you have already.
"Yes, I will type the envelope and mark it PERSONAL, lest the chaste eyes of Miss Anderson be stricken unto confusion and dismay. Damn 'em, why hasn't the Postoffice a Bureau of Hollow Oaks? Ooh—now I think of it, there is—not an oak, but a big maple with a hole in the trunk about seven feet above ground, on the path between your house and Mother's, near the pond. I saw a squirrel in residence there last year, stuck his head out and told me with the usual fuss that it was his'n. No good, I guess, because he's probably still there, and would think poorly of anyone dropping a letter into his living-room. He'd eat it or use it for nest-lining. That's how Nature is, you know, not a bit cooperative with the frills of romance, only with the essentials—but there, how cooperative indeed! As if, so far as Nature cares, every atom, every motion of life were aimed at nothing but the mounting of female by male and the begetting of young. Well, it comes to me that you with your long legs could reach that hole in the maple, though I'd have to stand on something. It comes to me that a letter could be squirrel-proofed in a metal box. Let us reflect on this."
Members of the jury, I might say in passing that because of this mention in the letter, the maple tree in question was examined. It does have a hole in it, nearer eight feet above ground than seven. Nothing was found there except an abandoned squirrel's nest; no sign of any previous disturbance by a human agency. [Laughter by the defendant.] I see Miss Blake is amused, which is her privilege I suppose. [Disturbance at rear of room, a man (James Doherty) leaving his seat for the exit; Mr. Hunter waiting for quiet.] The letter resumes:
"I love you as a sleeping seed in the earth must love the rains of spring, blindly, thoughtlessly, responding because it must—the shell breaks underground from the inward pressure, the outer warmth and fertile moisture. Shall I one day become a flower for you and know the sun? I am still in the dark, and rather blind, and yet happy to be living. You my awakener, it seems to me you're finding no such happiness. Am I too much for you, Jimmy? Too weird and different? Poor Jimmy, did you want only that May-day moment, and then discover the dryad had caught you fast and would not let go? There are thorns in my branches, I suppose. I never wanted them to wound. Oh, I must write no more like this, or I'll be needing you too much to sleep.
"Don't look distressed, as you did last night, and ask me, what are we to do? I don't know yet, Jimmy. There's an answer and we'll find it somehow. Likely it will be you that finds it, and not myself. I don't know. Maybe I'd never try to tell you what to do, even if I were inwardly certain what was best. May-day, it seemed ridiculous to me that anything about this could be a solemn Problem—no more a problem than the romping of animals. It is, of course—I merely had to shove that aside (without regrets) for the sake of May-day. It is, and I—(here comes a truth, my darling, that may be unwelcome or distressing; if it is, just set it down to my weirdness and forgive me for it)—I am, in many important ways, a much more civilized human creature than you. So civilized—so wide a gap between the cool life of the mind and the violence of that primitive part which never grows civilized in anyone—that I can never hope to explain myself, or be anything but a stranger to the easy routines of existence. My mind looks down on both of us, Jimmy, sees well enough that we are foolish lovers running into the jungle blind—(running, I will not say driven)—and inviting disaster in everything we do. But if now I only glimpsed you or heard your voice—why, away with all thought, the self you roused up on our May-day would be mad for you, throw away all sober knowledge, bite your throat, dance like a maynad and burn your flesh in a blaze of love."
DEFENDANT: The word is "maenad," if it matters.