Chapter 1

"Are you a virgin, Miss Pring?"

The young woman sat stiff and straight and silent, facing her inquisitor. The tendons in her neck protruded, her eyes were covered with a colorless glaze, bulging, like someone engaged in mortal struggle. I doubted that she actually saw the Penthouse lawyer who had been so vehement in his argument to the magistrate. His questioning of Kim Pring, the former Miss Wyoming, was precisely, faithfully, in accordance with law. I stood up to object. This was no witch's trial. But the magistrate, clutching a heavy volume in his hands, motioned me back to my seat. He peered intently into the book. I knew of its predecessor-that most venerated medieval treatise which once lay on the bench of every judge and every magistrate, the Malleus Maleficarum, the "ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority"1 on the prosecution of witches, that decreed "common justice demands the accused not be condemned to death unless she is convicted by her own confession."2

   How else could you see Kim Pring but as a witch? Had she not committed her vulgar, her worse than vulgar, act before the world, committed fellatio on the fool until he was actually levitated-until by her lurid sorcery he was made to rise, his arms and head thrown back in a delight bestowed only by those who possess the power of the devil?

   I tried to interrupt the interrogation again. "Here, Kim, would you like a sip of water?" There was pitifully little I could do to delay the torture. I started toward the witness stand with the glass, but her eyes were steadfast on her interrogator. The magistrate motioned me back to my seat, and the lawyer for Penthouse thrust the question at her again.

   "Are you a virgin, Miss Pring?"

No man would be asked such a question. No judge would permit such a scurrilous interrogation. Even if the question were allowed-a preposterous presumption--and should a man actually assert his virginity--an equally ludicrous likelihood-his answer would not be taken in his favor but, instead, as a concession that he was either dead or daft.

   The magistrate, however, had ruled that Penthouse had begun its interrogation completely within its rights. The question, and those I knew would follow, were intended to expose the woman's most private facts, to strip her bare of her innermost secrets. I thought of the Malleus, how it suggested that the interrogation begin with "light torture at first" and how, too, at the outset, the Penthouse attorney, a man referred to by His Honor as "Mr. Daichman," had asked only that one forthright question to which he now demanded an answer.

   The Malleus prescribed simple procedures designed to assure the successful trial of any witch. "While the officers are preparing for the questioning, let the accused be stripped, and her clothes searched for any instruments of witchcraft sewn therein, for they often make such instruments, at the instruction of devils, out of the limbs of unbaptized children."3 Naked, women were most likely to confess their crimes. The Malleus reported: "The Inquisitor of Como has informed us ... in 1485, he ordered 41 witches to be burned, after they had been shaved all over."4

   Kim Pring had been called to the witness stand in the United States District Court in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on the twenty-seventh day of September, 1980, nearly five hundred years after the Malleus first appeared, that authority said to be "among the most important, wisest, and weightiest books in the world."5 The publication acquired special acclaim and dignity from the famous bull of Pope Innocent VIII, Summis desiderantes affectibus, of December 9, 1484, and charged Europe's judges with the solemn duty of combating the Society of Witches.6 Over the two and a half centuries following its publication it is estimated that no less than a million women were burned at the stake, some responsible authorities estimating as many as nine million, mostly women, died in the fires.7 One authority even argues that the enormity of the atrocity could be compared only to the Holocaust.8

   Since those shadowy centuries and out of those abominable beginnings, the trials of innocent women, in one form or another, have continued. Although in America the last of the witches were hanged at Salem in 1692, the command of that malignant manifesto, the Malleus Maleficarum, has persisted like a virulent germ. Of course, I do not argue that we have made no progress in our search for truth, or that the pain of the trial of this woman, Kim Pring, in any real way achieved that state of abject horror of those times when terror froze the townspeople, when the smell of the burning flesh of women filled their nostrils and the screams of the condemned sizzling at the stake shattered the silence of the night. Those were, indeed, the dark ages: the diabolical times when men of power, the holy fathers of the Church, the landed, the wealthy, the great men of medicine joined to do their duty by the book, the Malleus. Under the holy hand of the Church they organized their inquisitions, accused and tried and burned the midwives and the magic healers of the poor whose crimes were often only the administration of herbs and roots and ancient potions gathered from the blessed Mother Earth. They tried and burned the earthy sensuous daughters of the forest squatters, for they too were obviously witches. Had they not seduced the pious fathers in their dreams and stolen the semen from their bodies in the night? Had they not dedicated themselves to the devil, lain with him, made their bargains? Most who burned were women, the poor and the old and the helpless, the not-worth-mentioning except for the enormity of their wickedness. But then, as now, the women were tried by men, and by men's laws in accordance with those ancient rites (and rights), for as theMalleus proclaimed, was not witchcraft, practically without exception, a crime of women?

   Daichman waited for Kim Pring to answer.

   I heard the dreadful screaming of the woman, the deadly metallic clicking of the crank, the deep dull thudding of the executioner's fist against her naked white flesh, the heavy exhortations of the judge pleading with her to confess---confess in the name of Christ and the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Apostles, Peter and Paul---so, too, these sounds must have moved the officers of the court to their most ingenious improvisations, and those few who dared whisper that these were the sounds of the devil presiding over the court, like crows cawing over carrion, were often themselves prosecuted as the damnable, the accursed heretics.

   So may it be.

   Kim Pring sat at the southernmost edge of the bench, quite obviously out of reach of the magistrate. Daichman looked up, waiting for His Honor's order. The magistrate gave the sleeve of his robe nearest her a quick, smart, downward jerk so that his suit jacket was now fully covered. Then he brushed away a speck, and waited for the woman to speak.

The judges were warned in the Malleus: "They must not allow themselves to be touched physically by the witch, especially any contact of their bare arms or hands, but they must always carry about them some salt consecrated on Palm Sunday and some Blessed Herbs. For these can be enclosed together in Blessed Wax and worn around the neck," for their "wonderful protective virtue."9 Even now some judges wear special pins on their lapels and certain gold rings on their fingers bearing the emblems of the secret organizations to which they belong, and some of our judges still wear the cross itself underneath their stiff white collars and their deadly black robes. The men of the law are holy men.

Kim Pring refused to answer Daichman. His Honor cleared his throat. The stubborn silence of the witch was always a serious detriment to justice. The Malleus gave advice. The judge "shall use his own persuasions and those of other honest men zealous for the faith to induce her to confess the truth voluntarily; and if she will not, let him order the officers to bind her with cords, and apply her to some engine of torture, and then let them obey at once, but not joyfully, rather appearing to be disturbed by their duty."10 An eyewitness to the tortures of witches reported: "There are men who in this art exceed the spirit of hell. I have seen the limbs forced asunder, the eyes driven out of the head, the feet torn from the legs, the sinews twisted from the joints, the shoulder blades wrung from their place, the deep veins swollen, the superficial veins driven in, the victim now hoisted aloft, and now dropped, now revolved around, head undermost and feet uppermost. I have seen the executioner flog with the scourge, and smite with rods, and crush with screws, and load down with weights, and stick with needles, and bind around with cords, and burn with brimstone, and oil, and singe with torches."11

   Word of the spectacle spread quickly. As the interrogation of Kim Pring mounted, the clerks and other employees around the courthouse began tiptoeing into the courtroom like people arriving late at church. Glancing at each other in slight embarrassment, they quickly, quietly, took seats near the back and leaned forward to listen. In a few minutes the room was already half full.

   I had demanded that the proceedings be conducted in privacy, but the magistrate had ruled, "This courtroom is a public place," and the doors had been flung wide open. Then he looked out at the gathering audience, and, recognizing someone, gave a faint but friendly smile, and without even looking down at Kim Pring, he commanded, "Answer the question, Miss Pring."

   The people strained farther forward to hear her answer, but she sat mute, shaking her head obstinately. Once she rubbed her eyes on the sleeve of her dress. I felt as if nothing had really changed, that we had learned nothing through the centuries. I felt helpless. I was helpless. I felt an urge to pull her down from the stand and run with her out into the safety of the streets of Cheyenne, out where people walked by with vacant eyes, where people thought justice was a natural right available to them like air, like water, where people believed that justice was the holy work of judges.

   "I object to this entire line of inquiry," I shouted. That's all I could do. Never once did the magistrate look in my direction. Again he fixed his eyes on the book he grasped with both hands, a work grown thick with time, at the very core of which I knew lay the Malleus Maleficarum.

   "Overruled," the magistrate said. His lips were pulled thin and he spoke through his teeth. "I've already heard your arguments, Mr. Spence." He looked down at the witness, and in a voice too shallow to carry feeling, he repeated his command. "Answer the question, Miss Pring." She stared silently out at the audience, then at the judge. She looked over at me for help. I could do nothing. Finally she shook her head.

   I thought she was very brave.

   When the witch on the rack still refused to confess, the officers of the court would start the slow cranking again until her hip joints began to give way, and there was a sickening snapping in her spine, and the muscles at her shoulders started to rip. Even then the accused often remained silent. Sometimes the officers of the court, patient men, finally grew weary of it, and one would say to the man at the crank, very quietly, respectfully, "When are you going to put a little pressure on this witch so we can be done with her and go home for supper?" Then the man at the crank would give a polite nod and another half turn to the crank for good measure, and in pursuit of his duty, he would deliver a heavy fist into the pit of the woman's stomach. An awful tearing could be heard, but still the woman would remain mute. The devil had taken her tongue. Following the further advice of the Malleus, the officers would wait until the morrow: "If, after being fittingly tortured she refuses to confess the truth, he [the magistrate] should have other engines of torture brought before her, and tell her that she will have to endure these if she does not confess. If then she is not induced by terror to confess, the torture must be continued on the second and third day. . . . ,12

   After work, and weary, the judge would plod home, giving the townsfolk kindly smiles as he passed by, and the townsfolk, of course, respected the judge, for he was their faithful servant committed to drive the plague of witches from the village. Judges were engaged in holy work.

   For over thirty years I had seen women struggle under the heavy body of the law. There had been remarkable reforms, I admit. Their position in the jurisprudential pecking order had been spectacularly elevated so that one might nowadays count token women jurists, and many women had taken up the profession of law as well. I admit I had witnessed a reluctant lip service offered by the fathers of the law to women and to women's rights so that one was left with the clear impression there had been a minor revolution out of which women had emerged in the law as equals. But I observed it as more a matter of social politeness by men in power than the delivery of any substantial new rights to women, more as a well-behaved tolerance of the "new woman" in the law rather than any real commitment by men that their counterparts be truly equal.

   But scars cannot be wished away, nor can the underlying damage once rendered to the flesh be denied. The remnant of that horrid history of women, however diminished, of that terrible trauma, however healed, remained as much a part of the law as if the infamous inquisitors, now subdued and genial, still reigned supreme--as if these thoroughly decent, ethical, agreeable men full of charm and social grace, elegant and disarming, still conducted the affairs of justice under the vestigial authority of that evil treatise, the Malleus Malificarum.

   Perhaps I should never have brought this suit for Kim Pring, for I knew these men of court had just begun to exercise the power men have always wielded over women. My objections to the questions only confirmed what the magistrate knew-it was his right to subject her to this and I was helpless to stop him. My adversary would show her no mercy. There would be no mercy, not in war, not in a trial for the trial of a case is war.

Finally Kim Pring spoke and what she said as a woman every man should have heard. She spoke to the magistrate in a clear enough voice, and the magistrate heard her, but his face didn't soften. He looked up quickly from his book and then went back to his reading. Surely his gift of dead ears was not given out of any perniciousness of his soul or insensitivity to her humanness. No. He was a man dedicated to the law, immersed in it, shackled by its precedents and therefore he could not hear the woman's words fill the courtroom as full as the screaming of any wretch on the rack.

   For centuries judges have been warned against emotion. The law is without feeling, like the numb member of one stricken. The Malleus explained how judges must protect against feeling, especially for women, "for sometimes, with God's permission, they [the accused women] are able with the help of the devil to bewitch the judge by the mere sound of the words which they utter, especially at the time when they are exposed to torture."13 The temptation to respond with mercy to the cries and the screaming is only the work of the devil and must never be allowed to amend the logic of the law. The law is logic. No, it was not that the magistrate was different from other men; he had been born with his full share of compassion, and off the bench one could easily see he was quite human. It was only that he had been fully trained in the law, and at the bench the law had rendered him deaf.

   I remember first seeing Kim Pring in the doorway of my office clutching an issue of Penthouse like a small girl caught with something nasty in her hand. Her mother stood behind her, as blond, almost as young-looking as she.

   "Here, give that thing to me," I said, taking the magazine and motioning both women to a seat. Almost in unison they took opposite ends of the couch in front of me, crossed their legs in the same direction, folded their hands in their laps, and peered at me politely with small smiles. They were like two sisters waiting for something magical to happen; perhaps they waited to be touched with the magnanimity of the law they thought was in my power.

   "I've already read this," I said, giving it a toss to the side of my desk. The magazine, trained by many readings, obediently flopped open to the first page of a story titled MISS WYOMING SAVES THE WORLD, BUT SHE BLEW THE CONTEST WITH HER TALENT.

   The mother fidgeted on the couch, embarrassed to be in such a place where sin is confessed and scandal revealed. She looked down at her hands and squeezed them together as if they comforted each other. The woman's hide was as thin and translucent as the egg of a small bird and gave off the same pale and pearly gleam, especially at the cheekbones and across the outer edges of the forehead. Her hair was done up to give a careless appearance, a kind of happenstance bouffant, I supposed, and she'd tied a purple paisley scarf around her neck and tucked it down the front of a plain gray long-sleeved dress the way my own Methodist mother had dressed herself for church.

   "That damn thing is obscene," I said. I slouched down in my chair, trying to look relaxed.

   "We always love to come to Jackson Hole," the mother replied, wiggling on the couch like a bird trying to settle on her eggs, her face aglow. "It's beautiful here." She looked with distant eyes across the room and out my front window. "Cheyenne is so flat and dry and hot this time of year," she said, retaining that same imprinted smile one I thought that might have remained perfect even when she slept.

   "This damn thing is libelous," I said, motioning to the magazine.

   "Well, I'd hope so," the mother said in her wee distant voice. She nodded her head in quick little birdlike affirmations.

   "How did you react to this?" I asked the daughter.

   "Well, it upset her terribly," the mother answered. But I kept my eyes on the younger woman. There was something extraordinarily sensual about her--sensual, I say, not classically beautiful. She was not a woman who had labored to make herself obvious in obvious places, not one who presented herself as beguilingly beddable or anything like that. At first glance she was in all ways an ordinary young woman-well-scrubbed, her fine, very blond hair hanging loosely past her shoulders and her blue eyes creating an impression of innocence and kindness. Yet it was likely a man would look at this woman a second time, and when he did, his focus would come naturally, irresistibly, to the mouth, and when she spoke he would find himself fascinated with the slow, easy movements of her ample lips.

   Kim Pring had won the 1978 Miss Wyoming contest hands down, and her reign had continued through the summer of 1979. Even the judges claimed they had chosen her for her talent, not her looks; that was the thing in Wyoming-talent. At the county fairs we select cattle for their conformation-groom them up pretty, parade them around, and hang ribbons on them, after which they are sold to the highest bidder, and butchered. But in Wyoming we have always professed a certain pride in our women. Weren't we the first state to grant women suffrage, to recognize women as fully endowed members of the species, with the same rights as men? Therefore was it not fitting that we chose Miss Wyoming for her talent instead of her looks?

   "I'll tell you, Mr. Spence," she said in a voice without the slightest seductive sound. It was more the clear, crisp voice of a boy. "I think something should be done about this. Those people at Penthousewell, they are the lowest kind. I mean they are nothing but"--she struggled a moment---"they are nothing but smut peddlers. That's what they are. Smut peddlers." Then instantly the anger left her voice; she seemed dismayed. "How can they say such things about a person and get away with it?" She stopped to think of how she was going to phrase her argument. She looked determined. Her lips began to move slightly ahead of her words.

   "I was the United States Grand National Twirling Champion," she said. "I've worked all my life for that title."

   "She worked very hard," her mother said.

   "And then in about three thousand words, or however many--I never took the time to count them-that magazine turned me into the world's greatest-" She pointed at the Penthouse flopped open on the desk in a pose worthy of its centerfolds. Now she was stopped by a mere word again. How should she say it in front of her mother and me? She looked at the prim, blond, smiling woman sitting next to her. She turned to me, and when I kept silent too, she said, "Well, you know what I mean."

   "Fellatio," her mother said suddenly, sweetly.

   "Yes, fellatio," Kim said.

   Soon she was earnestly, anxiously, cautiously trying to explain it to me, as a farm girl might confess a rape to her father. "They turned me from a baton champion to a--well, I'm just going to say it--to a blowjob artist in just one little article in a magazine." She looked quickly again at her mother and then at me, and seeing neither of us had disintegrated, a look of amusement slowly appeared on her face. Finally she let out a small boyish chuckle and smiled at her mother with soft eyes. She liked her mother.

   "Mother didn't even know what fellatio meant, did you mother?" she said.

   "I did too," the mother answered, her mouth still stuck in that small smile. "I think they should be sued for a million dollars for saying that about Kim. And they lied to the whole world. Everybody," she said. "Just everybody." Her eyes seemed placid, even happy. For Christ's sakes, she looked like the Madonna, I thought. She glanced again at her folded hands. "You know, of course, that Kim was born with a clubfoot?"

   "Oh, Mother," Kim said.

   "Well, Mr. Spence, she was. Her foot was terribly deformed. It was all pulled back against her ankle, like this." She took her left hand and forced her right hand down toward the wrist. I could envision the young mother, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, holding her newborn in her arms with that grotesque foot, a young mother too stunned to know what to do or say, too much a mother not to clutch the child to her, but hiding that one foot inside her robe so that her baby appeared perfect. Then I thought she had sobbed like a child with a broken heart.

   "Her father was in the air force, and right after Kim was born they stationed him overseas, so there was just Kim and me." The daughter said nothing, sensing, I supposed, it was her mother's clear right to speak. "I used to pull her foot out all the time--kept putting pressure on it, like the doctor said, and Kim would scream and-"

   "Oh, Mother," Kim said, very gently, "do you have to give all the gory details?"

   "Well, Mr. Spence might just as well know what we went through. At the time we were living at the base, and the doctors there put her in casts. We had to change them every week because a baby grows so fast, you know, and it hurt her. She was always crying, and finally my mother said I should stop it--that it was better to leave her crippled on the outside than to keep hurting the child and risk crippling her on the inside. But I wouldn't stop. No, I wouldn't stop. Nobody could stop me. And that poor child had to go to bed every night with her legs tied together on a steel frame, and then in the morning I'd have to massage her foot and-"

   "Oh, Mother, please," Kim said, and I thought she was about to cry, not for herself but, like someone whose empathy was complete, for this woman with her painful memory. "Finally when she was five, we had to have her operated on. They cut the tendons on this side to shorten them where they had been stretched out and they lengthened them on the other side." She made her finger the knife and did dainty cutting motions on her wrist to show me the operation. "And the operation, thank God, was a success." She stopped when she discovered she had completed her story and waited for my response.

   "That must have been very hard on such a young mother," I said. "It was hard on her," Kim said. "She didn't have time for anybody but me. She could have been something special. I mean she is special, very special, but she was beautiful enough to be Miss America herself," Kim said. She gave her mother a proud look and I looked too, and I could see that Kim was right. "And she never did anything or went anywhere except with me, and Daddy was gone overseas a lot of the time, and there was just mother and me."

   "I got her into baton twirling," the mother said. "She couldn't dance like the other girls, but she took right to baton twirling, and she practiced every day and I got her into contests, and she kept practicing and she began to win and the more she won, the harder she tried. Well, Mr. Spence, I always told Kim that if she was going to do something, she should be the best. And she was."

   "She made all my costumes," Kim said.

   "Yes, I still have them all--fifty-two of them hanging in the closet. You should have seen her, Mr. Spence. She was so cute."

   "I was fat, Mother," Kim said.

   "Well, she was just a little chubby is all, but she was as cute as a bug's ear. I took her everywhere, to all the contests. When she got to high school she was the head majorette for four years, and she was the head majorette at the University of Wyoming for four years too-all the time she was there--and one year the National Twirling Association sent her to Lima, Peru, to a big national festival and she won the competition at the Winter Carnival at St. Paul a lot of years--I can't even remember how many it was now, and for seven or eight years straight she won the competition at Notre Dame, and I got her special lessons from a nationally known instructor at Chicago," she said, finally running out of breath. "It cost us thirty dollars an hour for the lessons and we bought eight hours' worth, and once I took her to California for some more lessons from another instructor and we were there two days and-"

   "Oh, Mother, please. Mr. Spence doesn't want to listen to all the details." But she spoke to her mother in that very kind and patient way, almost as if she were the mother.

   "When Norman got back-that's my husband-he bought a '70 Malibu and he rebuilt it. He's very good at mechanics. He's good at anything he tries. Well, anyway, we just drove the wheels off of it. It had a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it when Norman traded it off for another old car. He likes to fix cars up. He goes out in the garage and works till all hours of the night." She looked down at her hands where she clutched a handkerchief.

   "Well, you must be very proud of your daughter," I said, and then Rosemary, my secretary, came in about a call I had to make, which is what she does when I've been with a client too long. But the mother went right on.

   "She won five regionals in one year, Mr. Spence. Probably any girl could have become the Women's Grand National Champion if she had practiced as hard as Kim did. You couldn't stop her. What she had, Mr. Spence, was the heart of a champion. That's what she had," she said.

   "It was Mother who was the champion. She kept me at it," Kim said.

   "But it was worth it," the mother said, still smiling faintly at the corners of her mouth. "Until this."

   "I'll go over your case with my partners," I said, but Mrs. Pring wanted to know, please, couldn't we come to a decision on the case today because they'd driven all the way from Cheyenne to Jackson Hole to see me and I said, of course. I didn't think it would be a very difficult decision. I didn't like the case.

   I watched them leave in a Toyota with a fresh paint job.