The Old Folks at Home

Summary

In a marble-columned courthouse scented with varnish and dread, the Coburn dynasty teeters: Senator John, a lion in winter whose whiskers once stirred senate chambers, now watches his sole heir, Steve—a human oil-slick of roulette debts, morphine vials and back-alley jazz—pivot from socialite slouch to hot-blooded reaper when a cuckolded impulse sends a rival’s skull against mahogany wainscot with a crack heard all the way in Hartford. The prosecution’s chain of evidence glints like Puritan manacles: blood-spatter on patent leather, a monogrammed handkerchief snagged on the corpse’s cufflink, a cabbie who swears he ferried the silk-clad wastrel from crime-scene to riverfront dive. Yet the matriarch, Eleanor Coburn—her face a map of every sleepless vigil spent coaxing fevers and campaign donors alike—rises amid the hush, voice trembling between lullaby and psalm, to conjure a private apocalypse of maternal anguish. Jurors, those twelve temporary gods, trade juridical law for the older lexicon of milk and womb; they nullify fact, acquit the boy, and leave the courtroom a cathedral of sanctioned disorder where justice kneels to the primordial throb of blood.

Synopsis

Senator John Coburn's son Steve, who associates more with gamblers, criminals and drug addicts than with his father's congressional cronies, impulsively murders his mistress' new lover. The senator tries to use his influence to have Steve acquitted, but all of the evidence firmly and correctly implicates him, and so the jury prepares to find Steve guilty without much deliberation. Before the verdict can be announced, however, Steve's mother rises in court to make an impassioned plea for her son. As a result, moved by the mother's grief, the jurors choose to ignore all of the evidence, and declare that Steve is not guilty.