A Matter of Conviction

Hank replaced the phone on its cradle. He was not looking forward to the woman’s entrance. In the preparation of his case, he’d have summoned her to the office once, and then only to ascertain facts of the boy’s background. Her unexpected arrival now rattled him. He hoped she would not cry. He hoped she would understand that he was the People’s attorney, hired by the citizens of New York County to defend their rights, and that he would defend those rights as vigorously as her son’s attorneys defended his. And yet he knew she would cry. He had never met her, but she was the boy’s mother. She would cry.

He took the typed sheets from his desk top and put them into a drawer. Then he sat back to wait for the mother of Danny Di Pace, hoping against hope that there would not be another scene to add to this day which had begun so badly.

She was younger than he’d expected. He realized that the moment she stepped into the small waiting room outside. She came toward the inner office then, and he saw her face completely for the first time, and he felt as if he’d been struck with something hard and solid, and he suddenly knew that all the events of last night and this morning had been building toward this one shattering practical joke. Shock followed instantly on the heels of recognition to render him completely speechless as he sat behind his desk.

Hesitantly, Mrs. Di Pace said, “Mr. Bell?” and her eyes met his, and then the recognition crossed her face, too, followed instantly by the same shock, a visible thing which knifed her brown eyes and then sent her jaw slack. She shook her head in disbelief and then asked, “Hank?” hesitantly, and then “Hank?” more firmly.

“Yes,” he said, and he wondered why this had to be and he knew with sudden intuition that he was being sucked into a whirlpool where drowning was a distinct possibility, where he must swim or drown, swim for his life...

“Are you... Mr. Bell?”

“Yes.”

“But I... Have you... have you changed your name? Is that it?”

“Yes. When I began practicing law,” he said. He had changed his name for many reasons, most of which were deeply rooted and unconscious and which he could not have explained rationally if he’d tried. He did not try to explain now. The change of name was a fait accompli, a legal decree reading “ORDERED, that upon compliance with all the provisions herein contained, the said petitioners shall, on and after the 8th day of February, 1948, be respectively known as and by the names of Henry Bell, Karin Bell, and Jennifer Bell, which they are authorized to assume and by no other names.”

“And you’re a district attorney?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And my son’s case is in your...”

“Sit down, Mary,” he said.

She sat, and he studied the face he had once known so very well, the face he had held in his youthful hands — Wait for me, wait for me — it was the same face, more tired perhaps, but the same face that had belonged to Mary O’Brien at nineteen, the brown eyes and the near-red hair, red with a burnished glow, the aristocratic nose, the sensual mouth, the utterly exotic mouth, he had kissed that mouth...

He had thought of this meeting many times. In the great American fantasy of star-crossed lovers meeting on wind-swept streets, he had imagined meeting Mary O’Brien again one day, and he had thought some of the old love they had known for each other would still be there, and perhaps their hands would touch briefly and they would sigh wistfully over a life together that had never been and never would be — and then once more part. And now, here was the meeting, and Mary O’Brien was the mother of Danny Di Pace, and he didn’t know what the hell to say to her.

“This is... very strange,” he said. “I had no idea...”

“Nor I.”

“I mean, I knew you were married. You wrote to me and told me you were getting married and... and maybe you even mentioned the name, but that was such a long time ago, Mary, and I never...”

“I mentioned the name,” she said. “John Di Pace. My husband.”

“Yes. Maybe you did mention the name. I don’t remember.”

He could remember every other detail of the day he’d received her letter, could remember the wet drizzle clinging to the airfield in the north of England, the sounds of the Liberators warming up outside, the white plumes of their exhausts sifting through the early-morning rain, the neat red and blue diagonal lines on her airmail envelope, the hurried scrawl of her hand, and the address, Captain Henry Alfred Belani, 714 5632, 31st Bomber Squadron Command, U. S. Army Air Corps, A.P.O. New York, New York, and the words: