Last Dance, Last Chance

discussion of it. She told the angry attorneys they could write their arguments or testify to them at a later date.
    Anthony looked smug. He had never played by society’s rules, and he was not about to start. He might be incarcerated at the moment, but nobody was going to make him testify.
    It had been such a long, long day, and Debbie was exhausted, almost to the point of tears. She felt that Judge Mix didn’t like her at all. Maybe all the strong attorneys in the world weren’t going to make any difference.
    *  *  *
    Now, despite the common sense in Sedita’s argument that the case against Debbie Pignataro be dismissed, Judge Mix declared that she wanted to continue the investigation of child neglect. And she denied the District Attorney’s motion to quash the subpoena seeking their investigative files. Soon, Anthony’s attorneys would be able to learn almost every bit of the intelligence they had carefully gathered against their client.
    It was easy to understand why Anthony and his attorneys should want to keep a rich vein of information about the D.A.’s investigation open. What was baffling was why Judge Marjorie Mix was so adamant in continuing the case against Debbie.
    None of them knew how long and agonizing Debbie’s struggle to regain her children would be. Sharon Simon had feared it would be this way, but she hadn’t told Debbie; that would have discouraged her before she began. Sometimes Debbie wondered if Ralph and Lauren would ever be allowed to come back to her. Maybe she would be an old woman and they would be grown up before the state would let them sleep in her house.
    She accepted that Anthony had wanted her dead. And now, he was actually helping those who would take her children away from her. Anthony seemed to enjoy being on stage in family court. He made a big production about shuffling his legal papers and conferring with his attorneys.
    An hour after he refused to take the witness stand, Anthony was found in contempt of court by Judge Mix and fined $1,000.
     
    His mother would pay it for him. Lena Pignataro was always there, supporting her son. She walked with her head up, above the crowd. But she darted scathing looks at Caroline Rago and Debbie.
    “She thought that money buys class,” Caroline commented later in one of her rare criticisms of other people.
    The old family court building in Buffalo was very cramped. All of its rooms and spaces were small and confining, all smelling of old radiators and the sweat and tears of thousands of people who had passed through over the years. Those who battled out old and new hurts there were forced together physically. The waiting rooms were always packed. If Caroline went in one room, she noticed that Lena made a big show of going into the other waiting room. But Lena and Caroline still had to pass by each other in the narrow hallways, almost touching. Lena never acknowledged Debbie’s mother.
    “We used to wonder what on earth Anthony could have told her about me,” Debbie speculated. “She and I had been so close for so many years that it had to be something awful—that I was a drug addict, or cheating on him with another man, or something like that. I was the one in the wheelchair, but she acted as if I were the criminal.”
    Judge Mix seemed to think so, too. A few weeks after Debbie testified on February 23, she included her suspicions about just how limited Debbie’s capabilities really were. “Illustrative of this claim was her repeated drinking of water from a cup held to her lips by her attorney,” Judge Mix wrote. At other times in the hearing, however, “Ms. Pignataro absently put on and adjusted her glasses, held papers from which she read, and turned pages, creating a different impression.”
    And Debbie had come to a place where she could turn a page or push at her glasses despite the numbness in her fingers. But she could not manage a flimsy paper cup full of water without spilling it on herself.
    Judge Mix postponed the hearings indefinitely.
    Debbie had a supporter in Donn Esmonde, a columnist for the Buffalo News, who titled his commentary “Time to Drop Case Against Mrs. Pignataro.”
    “Anybody who thinks watching small boys pull the legs off a fly is entertaining would have enjoyed himself Wednesday in family court,” Esmonde began his scorching criticism of the seemingly endless persecution of Debbie.
    “How any of this makes Debbie Pignataro a bad parent is a mystery, unless ignoring your kids