The Burden of Proof Read Online Free PDF Page A

beautiful daughter in his arms. But even as he held Kate, he found there was an abrupt adjustment in his own vision of things.
    Clara had abandoned the children, too. He had viewed this last act of hers as aimed exclusively at him. But the children, grown but troubled, were still not past the point where they required occasional assistance.
    Would it have made a difference, had Clara known Kate's secret? Or had she decided that they too'd had the last of what she could stand to give?
    Above them there was stirring. Marta wa on the stairs, a smaller woman, also dark, with wire-rimmed glasses and a bosky do of untamed black haft. She regarded the scene below with a vulnerable look of her own.
    "Group cry?" she asked.
    Stern awaited Kate's lead. She squared her shoulders and dabbed her eyes. The entire family was to know. As he prepared for her declaration, entirely unexpected, an arrow of joy shot forth from the leaden-like mass of his interior and he was overcome by a startlingly exact recollection of the abrupt ways a baby's hands and legs would move, random and sudden as life itself.
    "I just told Daddy. I'm going to have a baby." Marta's shriek split the household. A self-serious person, she carded on mindlessly. She embraced her sister, hugged her father. The two young women sat together holding hands.
    Peter arrived then, coming early to beat the traffic, and was informed.
    With the commotion John emerged, and everyone rose to hug him. In response to his reticence, they were always excessive. They had labored for years to make John feel accepted in a situation where, for many reasons, he knew he never would be. The group by then had migrated together to the living room. Silvia entered in her housecoat, looking grave; clearly she had taken their hoopla as the noise of one more calamity. Silvia and Dixon had never had a family of their own, much to Silvia's despair, and the news, so unexpected, brought Silvia, too, to tears. It was barely past seven and the family, overcome by all of this, clung to one another. And there in the living room, Stern, at last, longed for Clara. He had been waiting for it. More than the disorder and the loss, at this moment there was the absence.
    When he looked up, Marta was watching. It had savaged Stern with sorrow to see her the night she had arrived. Marta, brave Marta, his boldest child, trod soldier-like up the walk, a canvas bag slung over her shoulder, weeping openly as soon as she climbed from the taxi. Stern embraced her at the door. 'Daddy, I never thought she was a happy person, but--' Throttled by emotion, Marta got no further. Stern held her and suffered privately the unequivocal nature of his daughter's estimate of her mother. She had always held Clara at greater distance than the other two; as a result, perhaps, she.had more to regret.
    Across the' room, his daughter, with her father's tiny close-set eyes, looked at him sadly now.
    I miss her, too, she mouthed.
    Stern, a frequent morning chef, cooked for the entire group, He fried eggs and flapjacks, and Marta squeezed grapefruit for juice, a family tradition. By nine, an hour before the mortician's limousine was to arrive, they were all fed and dressed, quietly gathered once more in the living room.
    "How about bridge?" Marta asked. She prided herself on being unrestrained by convention. In most things, Marta styled herself in the ways of the late sixties. She had been a child then and took it as a time of great romance; she went about in flowing gowns and high-laced boots, with her wind-sprung hair."Mom liked it when we played."
    "Oh, sure," said Peter. "She liked it when we squaredanced, too, while we were kids. We can do-si-do to the chapel."
    Marta whispered to her brother, Oh fuck off, but smiled.
    Marta had always tempered her rivalry with Peter, and she granted him special liberties now. Kate's tears were constant, but Pete, of the three, seemed the hardest hit, morose, pensive, persistently out of balance. He went off by