Garlic and Sapphires in the Mud: Remembering Paul Priest, 1931-2015

He was my first cousin once-removed, which didn’t really count as family, something I was acutely aware of when the young doctor at Wheatfields appeared in the visitors room, looking grim and wanting to discuss Paul’s condition. After asking whether I was Hannah and finding that I was not, was instead this distant American relation, he disappeared down the hall. It would not be until evening that Hannah would explain the problem: Paul was getting better, or at least not getting worse, “stabilized,” as the doctor had called it. The average stay at Wheatfields was a week—Paul had been there for a fortnight--and the National Health Service wanted something to be done: a transfer back to his flat in Quaker House or into a nursing home.  

“I’m being punished for living,” Paul had wailed when Hannah told him the news. He was listing to the right in the bed he had not left since he arrived, the retractable tray across his food-stained, tee-shirted belly filled with yogurt cups, dried apricots, Sippy cups of fennel tea as well as envelopes, cards, and poetry books (a pocket Emily Dickinson, a chapbook by one of his poetry group members), far more lively than his fellow-traveler across the hall, a woman who lay open-mouthed and still as a sarcophagus, gone by week’s end.

         The password for Wheatfields’ Wi-Fi was DOTHERIGHTTHING, all in caps, a detail I noted in the black-bound journal I carried with me everywhere. I had flown over from Boston the day before, having received Paul’s e-mail explaining that a fall at home had precipitated his move into hospice: “The cancer is up and down my spine, bedecked, and I cannot get out of bed. But nurses are lovely, the food excellent, my life expectancy a matter of weeks,” he had written. I called him the next morning, a Sunday afternoon at Wheatfields, when he was surrounded by his children and his elder son Oliver handed him his cell phone and he was able to talk: He had loads of visitors. And he loved being the center of attention. His voice was faint and scratchy, but he did not sound like a man who was dying.

“Death is a joke,” he had said, but there was no bitterness, only a kind of brazen giddiness.

         Just a year ago, I had flown to the UK to attend a wedding in Wales and stopped to see Paul for what I thought would be the last time. I wasn’t much of a transatlantic traveler and had never been to Leeds: Paul and I had always met in Canada where our families had summer places on Georgian Bay or in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Paul lived with his second wife Helen and my mother, his first cousin, all of them sharing in the nursing care of his mother, the artist Hartwell Priest, who died at home at 103.

Although Paul and I were not of the same generation, we shared many things: a love for writing and all things literary (like him, I was an English professor); a need to parse our pathologic relations (there was craziness in our maternal line, and I needed Paul to assure me, as he always did, that it had bypassed me); and the fact that we both had suffered, in different ways, from the divorces in our families. Once, when I had whined on a walk along Eau de Claire beach in Georgian Bay that I felt my existence was marginal, because I was the product of an unhappy union that should never have been, Paul explained that he didn’t believe anything in this life—certainly not with regards to love—was an accident.

During those three days with Paul in August of 2014, we packed in a lifetime of memories. I rented a car at Heathrow and picked him up at Oliver and Lizzie’s house in Norwich and we drove halfway across the United Kingdom stopping to tour Sandringham (he was of the opinion that if you’ve seen one royal pile, you’ve seen them all, but agreed to indulge my infatuation with all things royal). We went out to dinner at Akmal’s Tandoori Bistro with Una, his good friend from Quaker House and discussed her recent trip to Prague to attend a co-counseling conference. The next day, he put me on a bus to Ilkley so that I might hike the Ilkley Moor, something he was not up to. When I returned, he made dinner of jacket potatoes and pork chops which we ate at his small, cluttered dining table. We were invited to dinner with his colleagues Joyce and Colin at Joyce’s home in Guiseley, where we talked of everything from the lost art of memorizing poetry to the history of Oxfam.

On the last day, we drove to Haworth and toured the Bronte Museum, discussing the triumph of Emily and the tragedy of Bramwell, both of us moved by Bramwell’s last words: “I have done nothing great or good,” then amused by Paul’s observation that the real tragedy of the Brontes was: “not a scrap of humor anywhere!” After the museum closed, Paul urged me to explore the paths beyond the car park to the ruined cottage said to be Wuthering Heights while he rested on a bench outside the gift shop. “Seize the day,” he had said, and so I had, taking dozens of photos on my phone of heather and sheep and stonewalls and skies tumbling with clouds. 

When we had said goodbye the next morning in the car park of Quaker House, Paul smiling Gandalf-like in the midday August sunlight near the vegetable garden, Una giving me a hug and a tea-towel which said, Force May Subdue but Love Gains, I had thought: This is it. The last goodbye. And yet, nearly a year later, when had I read his elegiac e-mail from Wheatfields, “So Hail and Farewell, bright, bright spot in my life,” I had cried. I wasn’t ready to let go.

So I rode the bus to Wheatfields in Headingly most days for the last two weeks of Paul’s life, carrying my black journal everywhere and recording everything: from the chalkboard in front of the cake shop on Woodhouse Lane, which read: “The more you weigh, the harder you are to kidnap. Stay safe. Eat cake.” To Paul’s commentary on the art in his room—the watercolor painted by his grandmother of the fierce-mouthed, head-scarfed Cuban woman and the reproduction by Leonardo of the heart-shaped face of the Young Woman with an Ermine: “See! The old woman is talking to the young one, and she is saying, ‘As I am, So shall you be.’”  

I recorded the Symposium-like discussions that seemed to take place most afternoons in Room 5 with Paul’s many visitors grabbing extra chairs and crowding around his bed to discuss whether Christianity was an instrument of Judeo-Greco-Roman imperialism or whether old age really was a second childhood. I noted the singular family tableaux that gathered one evening around the deathbed: Paul’s English ex-wife, Diane, whom I had never met; Martin, the affable English cleric whom Diane had left Paul for; Hannah, Diane’s daughter from her first marriage, whom Paul had raised from the age of 2 and loved as his own child; and Una, Paul’s faithful friend from Quaker House, who brought him ices in freezer packs every night. And everyone was getting along! Diane was telling me about Hannah’s father, who left her for another woman, and Paul was telling Martin about his ancestor, Diggery Priest who came over on the Mayflower and went directly back to England, unable to stand the climate.

“Garlic and sapphires in the mud/Clot the bedded axle-tree,” Paul was saying, his voice softer and weaker so that I had to lean in close to hear him.

I had been in the UK for twelve days and Paul was still at Wheatfields, the issue of whether he would stay or go still unresolved, though Hannah, Oliver, and Joel were secretly touring a nursing home in Headingly, despite Paul’s opposition: “I feel called to heaven,” he quipped, “but not to a nursing home.”

In the meantime, I was reading aloud to him from “The Four Quartets.” I had taken a side trip to Cambridgeshire to visit a friend in Great Gidding, and she and I had walked to the tiny, medieval chapel of Little Gidding, which Eliot had visited in 1936 and after which he had titled the last section of his poem. I had shown Paul photos of the church on my cell phone and he had been thrilled because he had never been there.

Paul and I were playing a game where I would read him one line and he would see whether he could fill in the next.  When I started with the opening of Burnt Norton, Paul said, “April is the Cruelest Month,” which was from “The Wasteland” “and I worried that the exercise would prove too frustrating. Then, a few minutes later and surprising both of us, he had sung out the lines about garlic and sapphires.

“Well done!” I said, clapping my hands.

“Keep going,” he whispered.

And so I did, and while he could not recite any more intact couplets, he nevertheless corrected my pronunciation of the German “Erhebung,” my Italian pronunciation of  “Figilia del tuo figlio,” and my English pronunciation of haruspicate. When I came to the line, “Like the river with its cargo of dead Negroes, cows and chicken coops,” and stopped to say, “Jesus, what a racist!” Paul did not miss a beat and said: “What did you expect? He was from St. Louis!”    

“Well, Becky, this has really taken our friendship up a notch,” Paul said, taking small, steady spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup. It was early afternoon on a Monday in the second week of September, and the doctors would take Paul off the discharge list that evening. A group of ten friends from The Struggling Christians had just left Room 5, having finished their repertory of Gregorian chants, Paul trying to sing along, though apologizing that he was “a bit off key.”

“I don’t have words for how amazing it’s been,” I said.

“The next time we see one another, I will have the entire Four Quartets memorized.”

 “Fantastic!” I said, patting his glistening forehead and thinking, magically, that maybe this was not the last time. I put on my rain jacket, squeezed his free hand hard, and attempted to give him a hug; it was absurd to say goodbye to Paul while he was eating his lunch, and yet if I didn’t go now, I would miss my train to London.

Thirty-three hours later, Paul passed away.

“PAUL IS LIBERATED!” Hannah had e-mailed, all in caps in the subject heading.

I would like to think that somewhere Paul is singing: “And all shall be well and/All manner of thing shall be well.”   

All posts copyright© 2015. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Rebecca Rice: Juror No. 3 Reflects on the Case Against Leo E. Fugler, III: Published in "The Hampshire Gazette" June 13, 2015

The excused were giddy as schoolchildren on a snow day as they hurried out of the Hampshire County Superior Court, released from jury duty in the Commonwealth vs. Leo E. Fugler, III trial, grateful that they won’t have to spend days imprisoned in the jury box, hours listening to testimony about whether Fugler forced children to perform oral sex with one another some twenty years ago, relieved of ruling on whether the defendant is innocent or guilty of the 11 indictments of forcible child rape and sexual assault and battery, the details of which, read out in rapid fire by a granite-faced Judge John Agostini, elicited uneasy murmurs.   

     By mid-afternoon that day, after two impanelments in which lawyers for both sides questioned jurors, there were only seven of us left, seven out of 80 who hadn’t been disqualified—because we knew the lawyers or the witnesses or worked in the courts or didn’t believe children could be trusted in recounting sexual abuse or admitted we would suspect a defendant of hiding something if he chose not to testify.     
     When we returned to the bare-walled jury room on the third floor of Hampshire County Superior Court a day later, we discovered that subsequent impanelments from a second pool of 80 had yielded only six more jurors, bringing our numbers to 13 instead of 14. “What does that say about this case they couldn’t get 14 people out of 160?” one juror wondered. Then the court clerk was telling us to leave our belongings behind and line up by number to prepare to enter the courtroom.      
     “Juries are the better angels of our nature,” intoned a solemn voice from the film we watched on our first day in the jury pool, extolling the system that our Founding Fathers created which gives every man, innocent until proven guilty, the right to be seen, heard, and judged by his peers, a privilege that only three other countries in the world afford their citizens.
     During my six days spent as juror number 3 in the Commonwealth vs. Leo E. Fugler, III case, I tried to channel this better angel. As the judge instructed us at the end of each day, I did not read about the case in the local newspapers, did not Google the defendant or the lawyers, did not talk about the testimony to my son in college in Indiana or my boyfriend visiting from Maine or even to my fellow jurors. This last proscription was particularly hard as we twelve (our alternate was excused on Day Two) instantly became a little family, trading stories about work and local politics, sharing grapes, mints, donuts, and even clothes (the air conditioning was punishing and I lent my fleece jacket to juror number 4 on Day 2 and an extra pair of socks to juror number 10 on Day 3).         
     But what I could not do, which the judge urged before releasing us for the Memorial day weekend, was not think about the case. He might as well have asked me not to dream. I thought about it while shopping for organic blueberries at Whole Foods (one of the jurors worked in the florist’s department and I prayed I wouldn’t run into her). I thought about it while checking e-mail (a friend had forwarded a joke entitled Murphy’s 17 other laws, number 16 of which read: “When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.”) I thought about it while grading a student’s extra-credit paper on plagiarism (he had copied an entire assignment from the Internet, and instead of failing him for the course, I was giving him another chance).  
     At night, I shunned my boyfriend’s advances—engaging in sexual relations was as ugly as watching slasher porn—and wrapped myself in blankets and comforter, despite the summer heat. Closing my eyes, I met Leo E. Fugler, III: his massive body barely contained in its funereal suit, his huge, close-shaved head with his toothbrush mustache, his impassive face registering no more emotion than a parked front-end loader as his accusers testified against him. How did this man, sitting stoically between his lawyers--the soft-voiced, red-haired counselor to his right who did all the objecting and cross-examining and her grey-haired, yellow-tied partner to his left, mute except in sidebars with the judge—how did this fifty-five-year-old man match his twenty-years-younger doppelganger who had done all the evil deeds attributed to him? 
     Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep and failed to lose myself in a Dickens novel, I thought about the victims. The prosecution had projected school photos of them on two TV screens in opposite corners of the courtroom. The eldest girl broke my heart: an exuberant, soccer-playing teenager, her face was heart-shaped and dimpled and pretty and her smile open and unaffected and trusting, as if life would forever offer up its gifts like a succession of happy Christmas mornings. How had this girl turned into the thirty-three-year-old obese woman who suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Type II Diabetes and alcoholism and drug addiction? Whose swollen hands and feet were shaking from the side effects of all the medications she was taking? 
     Courtrooms, despite how they are portrayed on TV, are not dramatic places. After the prosecution rested its case in the second week, the defense called several witnesses, none of who offered new or germane information. There was the repeated trotting out of an architectural drawing of the floor plan for the house in South Hadley where the abuses allegedly took place—pretty useless, as one juror pointed out in our deliberations later as the drawing did not include doors. Fugler’s attorney made much of the discrepancy between testimony about where the abuses first took place—on the third floor or the first floor.  
     To my surprise, the defendant did take the stand. Speaking in a preternaturally calm voice, he fixed his gaze upon his attorneys—not once looking at the jurors—and denied the accusations, claiming that the three children had gotten together as adults five years ago and cooked up the charges because one had not been invited to a Thanksgiving dinner and another had not been given Christmas money and another had not been given a car.    
     “Someone is lying,” said one juror at the beginning of our deliberations, “and we have to figure out who.”  
     “I believe the kids,” another said when we first went around the table to see where each of us stood.  
     “It’s hard to imagine that someone would make up a story about being forced to have sex and stand up in a courtroom and admit to this humiliation without it’s being true,” another juror said.  
     “But there’s no evidence.”  

     “There rarely is in childhood sexual abuse.”

      Back and forth we went like this for almost two days, writing the names on a blackboard of all the witnesses in the order in which they had testified, going over our penciled notes on the legal pads we had been given, asking the judge to explain “beyond reasonable doubt” to us again. In a much slower voice than the judge had used seven days ago, our jury foreman, a dignified retired newspaperman, read aloud each of the eleven indictments, so many times that I no longer winced with the multiple referencing of sex organs. And because we were eager for unanimity, we haggled with one another on which charges we could rule not guilty because there was only one person’s testimony and which we could rule guilty because there was more than one person’s testimony.  
     We lined up for the last time to file into the courtroom to deliver our verdict on a thunderstorm-threatening Friday afternoon. The seats behind the prosecution and the defense were full. Most of the witnesses who had testified were present. When the bailiff delivered a guilty verdict for eight indictments out of eleven, the three grown children cried. Throughout the trial, I had kept my eyes pinned to the floor when proceeding in and out of the courtroom, but when I walked out, I nodded to the district attorney and then to the eldest girl witness who had so affected me.   
     Some of the jurors talked about going out for a drink afterward, but none of us felt like celebrating. Instead, we said goodbye and hugged one another in the hot sun on Gothic Street and headed home to mow our lawns and hug our kids and call our friends and try to process this experience which had affirmed the better angels of our natures while, at the same time, weighing our souls down with acts which the judge, a week later in his sentencing, called “beastly.” 

Published in The Hampshire Gazette, June 13, 2015. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author