Short Takes
BY
MICHAEL MELTSNER
Quid Pro Books
New Orleans, Louisiana
Copyright © 1979, 2012 by Michael Meltsner. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the current publisher.
Originally published in 1979 by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Published in 2012 by Quid Pro Books, at SMASHWORDS. Also available in other digital formats and in new paperback edition.
QUID PRO, LLC
5860 Citrus Blvd., Suite D-101
New Orleans, Louisiana 70123
ISBN 1610271157 (ePub)
ISBN-13 9781610271158 (ePub)
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: Excerpt from “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth” in The Opposing Self by Lionel Trilling. Copyright © 1952 by Lionel Trilling. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Front cover image © by Oscar Martínez Heredia. The artist’s website is www.oscar.com.mx, where this and other new works of art are presented. The author and publisher express their gratitude for the permission to reproduce his beautiful work, entitled “Urban Watercolor,” for this cover to the new 2012 edition.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, locales, and characterizations either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual names, persons (living or dead), places, or events is entirely coincidental.
SMASHWORDS LICENSE NOTES: This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. It may not be resold or given away to other people; if you would like to share, please purchase a second license. If you are reading it and did not buy it, please return it to Smashwords. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors.
qp
Publisher’s Cataloging in Publication
Meltsner, Michael.
Short takes / Michael Meltsner.
p. cm.
I. Fiction—United States—Lawyers. I. Title.
PZ4. M53148S 2012
813’.5’4 79-4778
Also by Michael Meltsner
Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment
The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer
In Our Name: A Play of the Torture Years
To Jessie and Molly
And to the abstraction they remained committed for a long time to come. Many are still committed to it, or nostalgically wish they could be. If only life were not so tangible, so concrete, so made up of facts that are at variance with each other; if only the things that people said were good were really good; if only the things that are pretty good were entirely good; if only politics were not a matter of power—then we should be happy to put our minds to politics, then we should consent to think!
—Lionel Trilling
Tell
all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies.
—Emily Dickinson
Contents
Mr. Baker
THESE STAGGERED, restless flashes begin outside the emergency room of Beekman Downtown Hospital. The chairs here are bright-colored molded plastic, the kind that oppress weary travelers in airports and bus stations. My buns are settled on the rim of an orange cup, the small of my back searching for the factory’s idea of support. Salvatore, my assistant on this case, a student soon to be turned out to the wolves, has already given up on the chairs—though his neat, lithe body ought to be exactly what the industrial designers had in mind with their concept of one size fits all. Ever since the nurses shooed us away, Sal has been hunched against the wall, immersed in a casebook entitled Conflict of Laws, oblivious to the sounds that drift from the emergency room whenever someone passes through the heavy doors that separate us from my client. Secure for the moment in his academic garden, he accepts that I will do the worrying for both of us.
We rode the ambulance, helped the attendant lift the trolley with the semiconscious Mr. Baker to the concrete ramp, and followed the body to a hospital bed. Ever since, Sal has been steadily withdrawing. He is no stranger to hospitals, having been a medical corpsman in Vietnam; it was there that he learned the closed-heart massage that may have saved Baker’s life—that is, if Baker wasn’t just taking a fall for the audience. The memory of those army hospitals may be working on him. He certainly has no interest in conversation, though neither do I. My mind is occupied with whether Baker is putting on an act, simulating acute coronary insufficiency to go with the clinically established evidence of myocardial necrosis clearly revealed by his medical history.
It is both my shame and my skill that I question this heart attack. There’s the rub. He is my client; I am supposed to be his champion. Not only that: the medical records are full of episodes of chest pain induced by emotional stress. Electrocardiograms and blood chemistry reveal abnormalities that cannot be phonied. Baker’s desire to escape the judge who was about to send him to prison does not explain the courtroom seizure. There is no doubt except the doubt I feel.
Of course, Obitan labeled him a fraud the minute the body crashed through the chamber door. Maybe I’m still prone to the notion that judges know something I don’t.
With that special tenacity of the student returned from the wars, Sal has done his legwork, but his report of Baker’s rise and fall fails to stamp him noble or base. Is he hero or hustler? It might make good copy, though by this time we’ve all read the story before: a youth spent dealing and running numbers, in and out of state training schools, graduation to suburban burglaries that were unusual only in that they were impelled by a system. No one bothers any more to plan crimes; even then Baker showed signs of a special gift. He and his accomplices rode early-morning trains north with domestics from the Bronx and Yonkers. They made friends, teasing out the habits of the employers by flirting on the 8:30 to Scarsdale. Later they would arrive at an empty house with a van and in an hour whisk it clean of all fencible items. Returning from Stowe or St. Thomas, the owner would find his house bereft of appliances, jewelry and loose cash. So gentle was the wooing of the maids that no connection was ever made between these early-morning courtship patterns and the slick burglaries. According to Baker, they were a cautious lot. To make certain the M.O. wasn’t discovered, the team regularly shifted train lines: first the Croton-Harmon, then the Harlem division.
It was Malcolm X who reformed him. Baker’s soul, ready to be saved, put up only the briefest of struggles. He had been drawn to the backroads of Westchester by the lure of travel in a foreign land. Once there, he observed a social fact—the exposed suburban house—and everything else followed. He jived the domestic, waited for the inevitable vacation trip, arrived with the empty truck from R. B. Cesspools and Septic Tanks and returned to the city for a quick sale. To Baker it was a living like any other. “It kept me off the streets,” he said. But even before Malcolm’s glare, he began to tire of the game. Perhaps it was the need for system: the repetition required for success was too much like work, something Baker had little experience with, but enough to know—at least then—that he wanted no part of it.
Malcolm sized him up immediately. The great man stared Baker up and down and called him a puppet of the white man. “He looked into me like a shop window and said straight out what he saw.” There was no discussing these assessments. Men like that don’t bargain; if you argued, you could go to hell. “Listen, brother, get off the dime or you’re a dead man. If the cops don’t kill you, some dude with a knife will. Shuck it.”
Baker heeded the master, though death worried him less than becoming one of the men on the corner—trembling, shuffling, tumored, clutching bottles in paper bags. He joined the Muslims and after Malcolm’s assassination enrolled in the chaotic world of the New York Panthers, where they talked of bombing department stores one day and free breakfast programs for undernourished urchins the next. But it wasn’t until he became director of an East Harlem health center, one of those anti-poverty programs the city planted in the sixties without knowing whether they grew in sun or shade, that he found his stride, the right mix of local anarchy and official approval. By the time the cops arrested him for embezzling government funds, he had parlayed control over a small payroll into considerable neighborhood influence. It was thought that if any black who was accessible to “just folks” could fix something downtown—a building permit, a summer job—it was Baker. He denied this to me, huge teeth flashing a smile to let me know he wasn’t offended by the suggestion, and replied cautiously that he never used what little influence he had for other than advancing community projects.
When Baker walked down Third Avenue, shopkeepers greeted him with gusto. The kids respected him even though sometimes he wore a suit. He seemed to live in his office and didn’t even own a watch. Thus the charge they got him on adds to the mystery. The state’s lawyers claimed that Baker was diverting federal money to unauthorized purposes, and Baker agreed that technically they were correct. He replied—and insisted on a jury trial to demonstrate—that he spent the money to strip lethal lead paint from tenement walls, to repair dilapidated playgrounds, to pay kids to remove garbage that the Sanitation Department ignored—all discernibly related to the neighborhood’s health, which after all was his domain.
The street story is that Baker kills arsonists and that “they” caught him for taking some crumbs because the murders are unprovable. When I defend Baker’s peculation, this gossip concerns me not at all; when I try to understand the quantity of goodness left in the world, to judge, the inadmissible evidence is crucial. Here again I know almost nothing, since Baker used his dying heart, his history of angina, as an excuse to change the subject whenever I tried to slake my curiosity. The fact is, the incendiary curse of the slums, whether set by absentee landlord, disgruntled lover or bored gang, is almost unknown in the health center’s cachement area. Too many charred bodies have been found, immolated by their own jerrycans.
I have no way of telling and don’t really care whether he picked up a few crumbs for his flock, lined his pockets or even supervised the murders. About the client of a defense counsel, I don’t care; about the man, his essentials, the divination of his…direction, where the scale tips, I do care, and care more now that I’ve talked to Slade.
Earlier this afternoon, when I met Baker at court, I went over the humble-pie speech we’d worked out the week before. He was shaky—in fact, more humble-pie than I’d ever seen him—but I still worried that he wouldn’t show Obitan enough deference. Baker stands six feet four. He is as lean and muscular as a National Basketball Association guard and usually has the air of a savage who eats baby dolls for breakfast. But in the emptiness of the cavernous courthouse hallway, on this the day of his sentencing, Baker looked more the miserable native captured by slavers. Slouched on a bench, shrunk to half his height, he had a mournful cast to his deep brown eyes. Perhaps he could get away with it.
“Work with your weakness,” I said. “That’s right, think midget. This judge regards you as an arrogant colored man.”
Baker responded by meekly dropping his head between his knees, as if he were about to lose his lunch on the marble floor.
“Great. Keep it up.” I walked across the hall to check on Obitan’s movements. He was still charging a jury.
In a graffiti-covered phone booth I kept an eye out for the judge, fished for a document in my shoulder bag and dialed Clare, the lawyer who works with me at the clinic.
Everyone takes Clare as ardent and sincere, but I always listen for the tinkle of a barely audible sarcasm—one that matches my own, only softer.
“Any calls?”
“An ADA who claims you’re ducking him, someone who wants to sell you municipal bonds, and oh yes—the White House.”
“Who was it?”
“Gatorade, maybe. Or Marmalade. I couldn’t get it. Jeremy, aren’t you going to tell me what’s happening?”
“The Pres is in a big hole. He wants me to fly straight to Moscow, without passing GO.”
“Well, whoever it was wants you to call him back.”
My talk with Gary Slade was short and painful; afterwards I was stuck with choices I didn’t want. Slade had been with me at school. Later we did some consulting for a study commission, joined together to put over a short-lived conspiracy for reform. The pitch was that the two age-old approaches of dealing with dangerous criminals—executing them or holding them in warehouses—helped nobody. Since prison walls weren’t about to come tumbling down, our plan was to set up going businesses to be run by the inmates and owned by the long-termers; any profit they made would be split with the victims. It wasn’t a lightweight scheme for turning out license plates or computer key punchers, but a chance for real work. The idea never got a hearing: before we’d circulated a memo proposing mature consideration by a subcommittee of luminaries, the union-man realist on the panel killed it by throwing a fit over the jobs his members would lose. I hadn’t spoken to Slade since and didn’t much like him: he was the sort who talks shop on the tennis court. Nevertheless, we’d be colleagues for eternity, would always return each other’s calls. The union man taught us that you don’t necessarily do good by being good. His scorn drew blood that had mingled.
Now that he’s special assistant to someone or something important in Washington, Slade’s time is too valuable for reminiscence. “Listen, pal,” he said brusquely. “You’re being considered for a federal judgeship. If you want it, get your friends in line. Hustle.”
“Thanks, buddy,” I began, but Slade didn’t even say goodbye; he was already on his next call, probably talking water rights to the governor of Wyoming or tight money with the Federal Reserve.
The prospect of judging urges me to make up my mind whether enough light is left in the law to see what is happening. Most people who know anything about litigation regard it as a fraud. Not that important things aren’t decided. On the contrary, it’s just that the third-hand stories heard in court are marketed as truth. Lawyers, judges, the parties themselves must act as if they were certain, as if things were clear. With so much deception in the air, one must navigate by character, and the telltale usually shows nothing but bull. Often I have thought if this is what being a grownup is all about, I’ll stay a self-indulgent child.
I’m in a bind. Before I tell about Baker’s bizarre behavior, I want to give fair warning. The certified social engineer part of me believes steadfastly that every consumer is entitled to full disclosure, freedom of information, truth in packaging. I’ll feel better if I begin by venting a few generalizations, some catch phrases and labels. These stereotypes—why mince words?—are as true as they are false, but this whole exercise will be a waste if the reader is not prepared to follow the twists and turns of what we used to call the New York Lindy. That’s the goal, I suppose—approaching both dancer and dance, mastering the mystery without taming it.
Several years ago the flow of cases over my desk began to get to me. Their impermanence threatened my sense of accomplishment. I tried to build a dam by writing books about notorious murder trials. The newspaper reviewers said they were too cerebral. The law journals accused me of popularizing. The books sold poorly, their reception left me without a monument, but at least I acquired a literary agent.
Fritz, my agent and friend, says drop the harshness, tip off the changes, let things glide rather than jump. It’s probably good advice, but I can’t take it. The jumps are there, the edges are hard. And readers have rights, rights to the gist of what’s coming. Otherwise they might respond in the tedious and unproductive manner of what my brothers and sisters at the bar call a cold bench: a panel of judges who haven’t bothered to read the briefs so don’t know the facts of the case and must badger counsel to fill them in. A lawyer can waste a lot of time with a cold bench, time he doesn’t have, just getting it thawed out—telling the esteemed jurists, for example, why the case is in their court.
Rocking back and forth in their government-issue easy chairs, assuming a look of majestic detachment, these unprepared judges peek at the official case record, thumb through mountains of red-lined motion paper and cumbersome exhibits, all the while peppering the attorneys about preliminaries and peripheral matters. Because a cold bench hasn’t done its homework, we servants of the court are called upon to deliver some trivia to get the judges settled in the right groove. Between the obsequious may-it-please-your-honors opening and the no-nonsense command of the red exit light on the lectern, hardly any time is left for law, much less justice. Consideration of mercy, of course, is virtually unknown.
I don’t really fault the judges for wanting some of the details spelled out before they decide what may prove doom or destruction to those unfortunates, the clients—if only they’d remember that at most we have thirty minutes of their precious time. Take a case on my personal list of the top ten screwball lawsuits. The Federal Trade Commission ordered a razor-blade manufacturer to withdraw a television commercial passing off as a peach—a succulent and fuzzy one at that—the lathered billiard ball whisked soft and clean by its product. Instead of surveying the murky line between art and artifice, exploring the impact of commerce on the public airwaves, the white-haired tribunal of ice cubes cared only about how the lather held its fluff under the heat of thousand-watt studio lights. The lawyers on that one were tied up by minutiae as neatly as Gulliver.
These side issues, you see, have a certain interest, but to sell our client’s story we have to press on to the essentials, to the gravamen of the dispute. (I dote on terms like gravamen because they keep me alert to the fact that I belong to a profession that uses weighty forms of expression—in this case, one that also denotes weighty—where a light one, like gist, would do.) In the old days the search for the gravamen took hours. What with the judges sending clerks out to retrieve dusty treatises from their chambers and the reading aloud of troublesome passages from Mr. Chief Justice Marshall and Mr. Justice Story, the advocates went away with the warm feeling that the court had heard all there was to say and had settled something once and for all. No longer. There are too many disputes, touching every form of human madness, for leisurely reflection. And the rules change while you’re looking at them. Judges now are as much part of the machine as anybody else.
In almost two decades of practicing this craft of sharpening while narrowing the mind—as put by Burke, one of those commentators lawyers quote but never read—I have developed a decided preference for a hot bench, eager beavers who begin to hassle me about the core of the dispute before I’ve settled my notes and cleared my throat. These judges may be no wiser than their chilly brethren, but at least they allow me to feel I’ve done what I came for, leaving to the always lengthy brief all the unnecessary plot development, character analysis and what Fritz calls the weather. It may be the bias of one who has been hurt, but only a hot bench is secure enough to transcend the material.
In my family we usually assume the worst. We perform best under tension. When a situation seems too loose, it will occur to us to inject some stress. It comes naturally for me to take the offensive and serve notice that this will be one of those oracular, egocentric displays with which lawyerdom regularly befuddles and oppresses the laity. But don’t be alarmed. If I’m out to bruise anyone, it’s myself. The truth is—though Fritz will be furious that I put it this way—my compass probably won’t point far from the comfortable haunts of the same old crowd. We want to see ourselves as originals; more so as the world’s supply dwindles. Looking backward, I hope to encounter novelty and a steady percolation of the insight we typically overvalue. But I suspect even strangers spot just another moralizing Jewish lawyer who detests the more-sacrificing-than-thou connotations, a New Yorker who, despite ever-present longings to flee elsewhere, will die here. I live in a part of this ugly, demeaning but eternally agitated city that writers call polyglot—though walls not voices distinguish my neighborhood, invisible walls that keep us jammed together and far apart. (Saul Bellow, that chickenshit, quit and moved to Chicago.)
At the risk of breaking my own rules, let me say also that I am suspicious of words. Unless you’re Tolstoy or George Eliot, the fewer the better. Ultimately, words hide more than they reveal. The Wall Street wolfpacks who devil me in court use language to smother ideas, not to convey them; because their verbiage comes in a recognizable package, it is assumed that even a prolixity induced by rates in excess of a hundred dollars an hour must be taken seriously. The inflation of legalese has made litigation uneconomical for anyone who isn’t supported by a fleet of corporate jets or an open-ended foundation grant. Remember King Solomon, the baby, and the two would-be mothers? Well, the wise judge wouldn’t have seen the women’s faces for the procedural objections, the cunning affidavits mooting obscure jurisdictional twists. Truth is so elusive that anybody with a license to dispute can make a good case that reality is an abstraction. Our modern-day advocates, with the wordy accretion of centuries to draw upon, are just as capable of deceiving us as the tenacious rabbinical quibblers of old.
But there are other, more important reasons why I’m wary of words. It is the unnecessary padding of people having to fit their goods into preconstructed containers—movies that must run two hours even though they exhaust our patience after ninety minutes. The substitution of time for metaphor. People feeling that everybody has to get it, even if they have to write down and write out and surrender their quick here-and-gone vision, the vision of the age, for the turgid, lugubrious elaborations of meaning. Spelling things out doesn’t necessarily show respect to a reader. I’d rather dart about in confusion than stand around waiting for something to happen.
Baker was given a fair trial, as trials go. Twelve men and women—four of them black and two book editors (as every trial lawyer knows, the most sentimental jurors around)—decided he was guilty. Obitan did us in deftly, allowing all our objections to protect himself from reversal on appeal. Bad vibes do not constitute reversible error. The sole legal taint on the record was Obitan’s unwillingness to postpone the trial after Baker claimed his health had deteriorated. By sentencing time we had at least accumulated a hefty file of medical reports attesting that the extreme stress of prison could push Baker over the edge into a fatal seizure.
Sal searched the bodegas and taverns of the barrio, looking for clues to whether Baker was legit. He knew, of course, that even if Baker was just another ghetto hustler, we would still put on the same defense. But I wanted to know, and Sal didn’t seem to hold this private agenda against me. In fact, he soon made it his own, as if Baker’s essential goodness or warp would help strike the balance between the claustrophobia of a Queens childhood and the saturnalia of Southeast Asia. Sal does not talk about the war, though he knows of my interest, and I have decided not to push him. Whatever our different reasons, we have become more than Baker’s lawyers. The natural bias for or against the client has been replaced by a need to apprehend.
We prepared our sentencing argument carefully, hoping to press Obitan into accepting that Baker’s health and record of community service made jail time inappropriate. First we made our pitch to the probation officer, who usually wields the influence in a proceeding of this sort, but we were unsuccessful despite the dossier of character references and medical testimonials. From the beginning we got a cold shoulder from Obitan. His clerks never looked us in the eye; the bailiff declined to pass the time in small talk. Something had been said in chambers about this case that no one wanted to reveal. I considered the possibility of prosecutorial funny business, but the district attorney was as straight and tight as a violin string. The arson stories might have seeped in some other way. No one does as badly with law enforcers as a vigilante because he challenges their monopoly.
It finally surfaces as something simple and therefore unexpected: old age. On the bench Obitan shows signs of wear and tear. He has been at this work too long. Whether it is senility or distemper or the accumulated frustrations of judicial self-repression, he has moments of growling impatience, others when he seems furious that Baker denied his guilt, putting him to the trouble at his advanced years of holding a trial. The first time we argued that Baker deserved probation Obitan was ready to turn us away and send him to jail; the marshals were itching to grab him. I managed to get the sentencing adjourned on the transparent ruse (No. 14 in the Attorney’s Handy Deskbook of Trickery and Confusion) that there were additional medical tests to be brought to the attention of the court, even though the court wasn’t the least bit attentive. Gathering Baker’s up-to-minute test scores dragged on for months, and when we finally have to show up, Obitan still isn’t interested. He latches onto an opaque summary of Baker’s condition prepared by a physician chosen from a list of government-approved impartial experts, and starts ranting about the technical language.
“What does this mean?” he screeches, scowling at hangdog Baker across the table.
We are in chambers, too close to Obitan for comfort. The DA silently skims his legal file, flipping the pages as if looking for something, though clearly he’s hiding from the angry judge’s white heat. Two law clerks, a year out of school, lean back in their chairs against the bookcases, subtly dissociating themselves from their master; the clerk of court hunches over his docket; a stenographer, his eyes on the ceiling, listens to the sound and not the sense of the words.
The judge is addressing Baker, who hasn’t studied the three pounds of illegible doctor scrawl or been briefed by a cardiologist about his deteriorating condition. In a criminal court my job is to stay between my client and the judge; I try to deflect the question.
“It means, your honor, that he suffers chronic attacks of chest pain and shortness of breath, diagnosed as subendocardial infarction first evidenced in—”
“I asked him, counselor. Do you still work?”
“He hasn’t since—
“The defendant, the defendant.”
“I get relief now, but previous to the trial I worked for eight straight years.”
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
There is no hair on Baker’s face or head. He is blackness itself, wearing, in total disregard of my explicit orders, a fierce shark’s-tooth necklace that falls belligerently over the embroidery of his orange dashiki. Obitan’s mop of white hair reminds me, against my will, that he too was once a child. Beneath the flowing robe, he is turned out in pinstripes and blue broadcloth. Around his scrawny neck is a silky tie in a too-big collar. He looks wasted.
After hearing Baker repeat his claim that he meant no harm, was merely diverting resources under his control from one budget item to another in order to meet crying needs, and profited by not a penny for himself, the judge is ready to sentence. It will be what? Probably six stupid months. I have nothing to lose and once again try to get across my main points: no jail can he trusted to minister to the medical needs of my client; too heavy a prison work detail could finish him; in any event, the circumstances of his crime are not so serious as to justify risking his health and life.
To do this sort of thing right you have to be involved enough to show conviction, and detached enough to observe yourself and everybody else in the room. Sensing anger in the judge ready to rush out and flood the courthouse, I talk as briefly and quietly as I can. When I’ve finished, Obitan leans over his desk and glowers at Baker. For him I am not there.
“You people—”
But the judge never finished.
“Enough.” Baker rose from his chair. “Enough of this shit.”
For an instant I was afraid he’d lunge across the table and choke the judge where the turkey-gizzard neck met tie and collar. But he merely turned away, the chair falling to the floor. He took three steps—plodding, deliberate steps, while no one else moved—and fell like a toppled pine tree against the heavy door that guards the judge at work. The door popped open, then gently closed to meet Baker’s inert body.
Suddenly we were all on our feet. Sal got there first and grabbed Baker by the shoulders to turn him over. Obitan was busy pronouncing judgment. “Phony. Phony baloney. Bull turds.” With a wink at the clerks, he ordered: “Call the nurse.”
Sal took a moment to check the glazed eyes, then tested Baker’s pulse. Finding it shallow, he struck. Had he kicked Baker in the testicles, he could not have frozen the room more quickly than by his abrupt palm blow to the heart. Small in itself, the noise, when combined with the sight, was deafening. Immediately everyone exhaled, as if he had struck us all. He pressed his lips to Baker’s mouth, in the respiration technique he had learned in the service, and was still at the body when the ambulance arrived.
Last night my dream began at a butcher-block table set up smack in the middle of Central Park South. A group of us were seated at this table in distinctive bentwood chairs—original Thonets, no doubt. A truckdriver shook his fist and cursed us for blocking the street, but we dealt on. We were playing high-low with consecutive declarations, a game where calling last—high, low or high-low—is important. As my oldest friend Rudy skated the cards across the slick wood, Clare grimaced. With each card she frowned more, letting us know this wasn’t her game but she had to play. Gary Gilmore, the murderer, raised every bet. It made a mess of the percentages, but being dead he didn’t care. He had half the table to himself while we huddled together; he sat behind slanting steeples of blue and white chips, robust in a black T-shirt with a white cardboard heart pinned to his chest. Though I had a perfect hand—a straight flush and a six-four low—Gilmore rose from the table, scooped the chips into his Stetson and ambled away toward the Plaza. I pointed my index finger at his back. He turned, and we stared at each other across the traffic.
Sal is still hunched over his lawbook. I’ve made peace of a sort with my chair by curling up like an embryo. An umber lady with squinty eyes, and glasses hanging from her neck by what looks to be a shoelace, comes through the big doors to tell me that Baker is out of danger. I’m ready to go home and sleep it off. If tests confirm that he really had go home and sleep it off. If tests confirm that he really had an attack, I’ll use Obitan’s brutal remarks as the pretext for a motion to recuse the arbitrary old man from sitting on the case. The arrival of a creative thought, amidst the hospital-induced dullness, and the prospect that Baker may yet outlive his judge rouse me sufficiently to poke Sal with my foot.
“A cab. My treat.”
The frugality learned in his mother’s kitchen won’t allow Sal to accept. “It’s faster by subway.”
“I’m not interested in speed.”
We reach the street, where even breathing pure auto exhaust is an improvement, and catch a cabby heading north. Immediately he gets stuck in a mammoth jam near the Holland Tunnel. We sprawl across the seat.
“Sal, what do you think of judges?”
“Huh?”
“Judges—you know, the fellows in the black dresses. Do you want to be a judge when you grow up?”
“Hell no.”
“Why?”
“They sit on their ass all day.”
“How about their power to do good?”
“There’s that.”
“And bad.”
“Yes.”
“I feel like I’m talking to a typically deferential, respectful and obedient law student—which you’re not.”
“I was watching Obitan. Muddled and cruel as he is, in a way he was penned in by the rules. I’ll bet following the rules changed him and what he does. At least when he was younger.”
“You mean he learned things.”
“Maybe. But I’m talking about behavior. The system makes him less of a pig than he naturally is. He could have killed Baker. I mean, the man felt like killing him, but the judge had to hesitate—had to find a justification that would stand up in public. He knew he could get away with six months, even more, but he still had to find a reason.”
“And a better man…”
“It would cut the same way. A better man would be held back from doing something worthwhile. The law squeezes us together and puts us all in the same boat. That’s why I like it.”
How can I struggle with jurisprudence in a cab lurching from pothole to pothole up Eighth Avenue? The laws of the United States are flawed but not dishonorable. The pay is lousy but more than I ever earned. With the job comes instant approval from almost everyone I know, deference from those I don’t and even a little power. No other clod out there on the pavement, whether a self-satisfied theatergoer rushing to an early dinner or the dregs of the Western world loitering on the Minnesota Strip, would sympathize with a moment’s tragic ambivalence. Why hesitate? Judges politic like everybody else. I’ve spent so many years in the courts that I must like their tunnel-vision view of the world a little. I know the name of every case I’ve handled; I’ve played the game, not slavishly but by the rules, and a federal judgeship is like getting to manage the Yankees.
But my head is throbbing. If I’d eaten, I would roll down the window and add the contents of my stomach to the rest of the garbage. I am the only son of an only child. An only child, I submit, is a winner—must be a winner. This is my beacon. Where others are frightened that they are determined by such vital statistics, I exult. What I want will take place. Public doubts, yes; one must have them for form’s sake. Private doubts, until recently, have been rare. My cousin Philo says faith healers work. Healers have the gift, the belief in their omnipotence, and its force carries the patient along. But I am sweating in the back of a taxi. Sal is about to ask if I’m all right.
Mr. Baker remains an unknown to the judge I would want to be, the judge who would apprehend before he acted. This judge would not be satisfied with a rationalization when a reason was called for. Decent, demanding work is usually boring, but it frees us to be something; the angst begins when we dare ask what.
A few weeks after I finally delivered him to the marshals, my client sent me a note on the marginless copybook paper the government provides for inmate correspondence. The black lines on the paper reminded me of iron bars, and Baker’s calligraphy made each letter look like a tiny person trying to squeeze through.
“Dear lawyer,” he wrote. “You did your best with a hard case. Thanks for everything. Now that it’s over and we’ve said our goodbyes, I’d like to know you.”
Cards and Horses
THE FIRST SUMMER I worked, we drove north from New York in a used DeSoto, windows rolled down, heat beating up from the asphalt, radio full blast. The car had an immense engine that coughed beneath a sleek, stretched-out hood much too long for the body. The springs bounced, but the seats were faded plush; we felt invulnerable. Pulling into a rest stop on Route 19, the cowboys eased their mounts up to a stream on the Great Plains. Hills in the distance, the country at our feet, we bought Cokes and stood by the car, staring. I wondered what was going on in Shelly’s head. Hell, what was going on in mine? City boys staring at a cow, minds turning to mush.
In the Catskills our introduction to the business world was abrupt. Arnold gave us each a checkbook, a laminated identification card, legal release forms, yellow pads and a box of No. 2 pencils. Every morning we’d use a pay phone across the highway from our bungalow to call his girl, Nina, for a list of the claims that had come in the day before. A tennis-court fracture named Cohen at the Cozy Villa. A sprained ankle at the Manor on Route 28, name unknown. A pool slip at the Raleigh (while there, check out cracks in the macadam). Hot soup spilled on Marks at Crystal Valley. A complaint of food poisoning, moldy fruit salad, at the Fairhart Day Camp in Kerhonkson (Arnold wants a good look at their kitchen; the owner is not one of his favorite people).
Shelly was pushing Nina and getting nowhere. Despite her ponytail and corduroy jumper barely hiding rolls of baby fat, Nina was sleeping with Arnold. Shelly wouldn’t believe it: “Listen, sport, he’s forty-eight years old, five feet four, and wears cuff links. Nina is twenty-two and goes to a teachers college. You have a dirty mind. Let’s shoot some hoops.”
We’d play horse and twenty-one until the tourists staggered away from their cantaloupe, sweet rolls, cold cereal with fruit, Canadian bacon, eggs, bottomless coffee cups—American plan, of course.
“Guys, always hit ’em after a big feed,” Arnold had preached. “Stiffs settle faster with griddle cakes sloshing around their bellies. They never eat like that at home. They feel guilty.” He leaned back in his chair and blew cigar smoke over the desk that separated him from his college-boy hired hands. “Always see the manager first and get the story. Talk to bellhops and lifeguards. Then find the guest. Tell ’em Mr. Shmohawk, the manager, reported an accident, and the rules are that all reports have to be checked out.”
He was self-satisfied but eager to please; too eager—not as crude a man as he sounded, this Arnold LaBell. I pulled for him despite the cuff links because he took account of our greenness. He promoted a scholarship of people and money. Kind enough to want to get across that he hadn’t made a choice, his unspoken line was: fate put me here; what can I do?
“If they ask, say you’re from the Hotel Association; never mention Friendship Mutual. Nevah.” He pronounced the word the way Bette Davis would.
Arnold made most of his money from the automobile, persuading juries that whiplash was the scourge of the twentieth century. In the summer, when the courts slowed down, he dabbled in insurance. We were his eyes, arms and legs. He never felt quite right when he wasn’t making a profit. Put in the desert, he would have found a way to take a percentage on sand. But at least he was cheery, his greed diluted by mockery.
“Then you pull out your pad and get them to tell you what happened. ‘I’m gonna take this down in your words,’ you say.” Arnold held up the pad for emphasis as if we were mental defectives. “You write, ‘My name is Sandra Accident-Prone, I am a guest at the Lake Minnihale Club.’” He repeated, “I…am…a…guest,” pausing after each word. “‘After gulping down two whiskey sours, I tripped over a three-hundred-pound couch in a well-lit lounge, suffering minor contusions and no permanent injury,’ or whatever they tell you happened. Always write in the first person—that means I, for those of you who aren’t at Harvard,” He slipped Nina a smirk. “When they’ve finished, ask them to sign. It’s their statement, after all. Any questions?” But his look said, “How could there be?”
“Okay, suppose they won’t sign. Then act like you don’t give a damn, but tell them you must have their initials on each page so your boss will know you actually did the report. You’re clean-cut boys; they’ll sign.”
Arnold’s biggest account was the local harness track. He also owned a piece—a license to make money, as they say. In this county he had a piece of everything. His boys earned gold clubhouse passes, slick plastic decals for the parking lot, grand hellos from the Pinkertons. Shelly and I went to the track every night. Even when we had dates, we took them to the races. After dinner we helped waitresses from the hotels set up for the next morning so we could arrive in time for the daily double. At the track women were an encumbrance, asking stupid questions that distracted us from the serious business at hand and, worst of all, betting hunches—their birthdays or cute names. We tolerated them as cover. Even at Shelly’s stage of incipient addiction, he recognized the loss of esteem that would follow an explicit declaration of sex second to horses. We should be parked on some out-of-the-way mountain road, unbuttoning gravy-stained uniforms in the immense seats of the dark DeSoto, but there was always action not to be missed in the eighth race.
For Shelly, the track had the appeal of decadence, allowing him to pass as a Runyonesque insider, but I was attracted more by the control. By turning responsibility over to the wheel of fortune and losing any say in the matter, my position was enhanced—like a litigant forced to place the stakes of a dispute in escrow. The truth was, I felt safer with horses than with women. If my evening’s calculations went wrong, the track always offered a capsule explanation: a trainer who decided to run without blinkers, a horse impeded in the stretch, a boozing driver.
On Sundays I lay naked on my cot counting up the week’s score, rerunning the week’s races, vaguely disapproving of myself. Sometimes the voice of a parent asked if this was any way for someone with my future to spend his time. Shelly was not given to Sunday musings. He had little tolerance for introspection except when handicapping; he was happy only in motion. He dragged me off to a delicatessen in a shopping center strung out along the foot of a mountain. We settled down with roast beef sandwiches on puffy poppy seed rolls smeared with Russian dressing and drew black marker circles around the names of the horses we liked in the overnight entries.
“Lady O with Carmine Hutch,” he exclaimed. “Sprints the three quarters and then stops, but every fifth or sixth race she keeps going. Always happens when the price is long and she has an inside post. This time the horse comes out of the three slot with two dogs on the rail. Let’s wheel her in the double.”
Shelly’s passion carried me along. Other people’s enthusiasms have always fascinated me. The ultimate in acquisition is to use someone else’s energy. When we finally hit the track, I left Shelly to his double and bet the longest shot in the field. In our handicapping rivalry, we switched roles. When he calculated, I played the romantic; when I derived a law of history from the welter of detail in The Racing Form, he daydreamed and free-associated. He watched the race pogo-sticking up and down, using my shoulder for leverage. A furlong from the finish line he started beating me with his rolled-up program. Wrapped in his joy, we adjourned for steaks.
I had gotten the job with Arnold through the Old Yid network. Shelly’s father, Saul, was the super of a fading Broadway palace called the Bay of Naples. The lobby had a mural of Amalfi, a creaky elevator and, on an iron bench, a permanent copy of the Daily News always folded so you could see the headline. Saul did construction work on the side for an immigrant named Fenno Bryce, who had been born Isadore Berkowitz. Saul was thin and angular, Bryce was stocky, but their heavy accents were identical. They played in the tradition of vaudeville twosomes, with Saul assuming the Costello-Laurel part to Bryce’s Abbott-Hardy. Painting Bryce’s apartment on Saturdays, Shelly and I auditioned their who-had-it-worse-in-the-old-country routine. In Vilna they pushed Jews off the sidewalk; in Warsaw thugs roamed the streets, deflowering virgins. Bryce usually won the prize for suffering, his trump the claim that he had escaped from the Auschwitz transit yard.
Saul held his own until Bryce talked of the death camps. With his wife and Shelly, he had bribed his way onto a steamer bound for Cuba. With nine hundred other refugees, they held tourist visas bought at incredible prices. When they arrived in Havana, the gangway was sealed and the Cuban government issued a decree voiding their permits. In the steaming heat the ship began to smell like a toilet. The passengers threatened to throw themselves overboard. The government refused to budge and ordered them to sail. The day before the ship weighed anchor, several passengers took poison; others slashed their wrists. The ship put out to sea, sailing north, the captain stalling for time, waiting for word from a refugee-aid committee in New York. Off Florida they were shadowed by a Coast Guard cutter and warned not to land. The Cubans decided to let the refugees enter if they posted a five-hundred-dollar-a-head bond but withdrew the offer when the ship returned to Havana. Negotiations with the Dominican Republic broke down. Finally, Britain, France, Holland and Belgium agreed to take the Jews in. They returned to Europe. Most were rounded up when the German army swept across the Low Countries into Paris the following year, but Saul had taken his family off at Southampton. Six months later he was working on a boiler in Manhattan.
Shelly and I winked as the two men wrangled; their stories didn’t concern us, they might have come from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Nothing about Shelly’s innocent cowlick of sandy hair, his habit of practicing a private tap dance when no one was looking, suggested an encounter with history. Though he was my best friend, my mother and father had never met Shelly’s father. While the radiator hissed, Bryce accused Saul of using green wood on the bookshelves, setting out crooked parquet, covering the house with dust. Clomping around the paint-stained tarpaulin with a spoon dipped in a cottage cheese container, Bryce refused to let us work in peace. Needy for an audience, undeterred by my fantasy of enamel spattering unseen into his lunch, he spouted outrageous demands. He ordered Saul to resand the freshly painted window frames. Saul argued, but only to please Bryce. Their crisp insults had nothing to do with whether Saul actually would do more work on the windows. Shelly asked his father why Bryce hassled him. Saul shrugged it off: Bryce had lost a wife; he, thank God, had been spared. I envied Shelly his past, but he had no interest. When my father talked about the track, Shelly listened carefully.
Bryce’s company wrote insurance for the big Catskill and Florida hotels. He described it as the first big Jewish carrier and bragged to Saul that his kid would have a summer job as an adjuster. For personal injuries the Catskills were a high-risk area. In the insurance business, claims, not losses, count most. Whenever a claim is filed, the company has to put money aside to cover it until the courts decide the case seven years later. To come up with cash for the reserves, the company has to borrow. Borrowing costs money. The adjuster’s job is to settle promptly every claim short of a cracked skull. It’s worth a couple of hundred bucks to write sprains and torn ligaments off the books.
For me, Jewish history is inextricably linked to Hollywood. I watched the Holocaust from the balcony. In one memorable film the Germans burst in while a family of traitors dines on kidneys, their first meat in a year. Even the sedate hausfrau is kicked around. The Nazi officer has no more compassion than his men. He is thin and leather-boy slick. The SS officers arc always thin, probably a theatrical convention going back to Cassius. The soldiers, dressed in clumsy greatcoats, seize the resistance cell, hustle the family off to prison and certain death, but the American airmen go undiscovered, safe in a hidden attic room. Saul’s accent and the way he shrugged his shoulders embarrassed his son. I disliked Ernest Hemingway for the way he treated Robert Cohn. There were no hidden attic rooms on Riverside Drive.
It was the terrible fate of those who visited the resorts under Arnold’s care to be unaffected by their holiday. Where one might imagine release from the daily grind would free the spirit and allow the city-stifled self to emerge, quite the opposite occurred. In New York there was no choice but to put up with your lot—ride the subways, brush soot from your face, pay the bills. The mountains promised relief, but the resorts merely substituted something called Activities. Sports, games, chasing, mealtimes—all followed tracks straight and inescapable as any encountered by the most servile housewife or working stiff. Activities were summer chores. As if ordered by some invisible alarm clock, husbands commuted, children were delivered to counselors, wives lolled around the pools and overdressed for their canasta tournaments. It may be that the whole concept of a wilderness is flawed, something invented by city people and suburbanites after they lost touch with anything more evocative of the natural world than a rosebush. In the Catskills city ways could not be forgotten: no one went near the woods unless it was to search for a lost golf ball.
Yet the original impulse was to escape the humbling city routine. There were even vestiges of the aristocratic, evidenced by the roadsigns—this way to the Manor, two miles to the Villa, turn left for the Secluded Hacienda—and something of the pretense remained in the heavy tips, two-hour meals, men strolling the grounds with big cigars gently laying the groundwork for business deals they would not conclude until fall, the attempted seduction of any employee within grasp of a bed.
Most of all, the complaints. The complaints spoke of high expectations. Promised something different, led on to expect leisure, French service and the carriage trade, disappointed guests retaliated by bitching. Mattresses were too hard or too soft, roast beef was overcooked or raw. It was humid or buggy or shockingly cool. The rain came down in buckets or the air was parched. In these latitudes a successful hotel manager listened to cries of grief and injustice with the aplomb of a deaf-mute bent on pretending he had no handicap. The failures tried to correct what could not be amended; soon after the Fourth of July they came down with an incurable case of ulcers.
The disgruntled patrons made life miserable enough for the drivers, busboys and desk clerks, the frontliners stationed at the border between paying customers and their winter dreams of transformation, but a whole new order of frustration surged to the fore when they had to deal with me. After all, something really had gone wrong. “This vacation has been ruined by the hot coffee spilled on my new taffeta, also scalding my left arm from shoulder to elbow.” “… by the severe concussion due to the collapse of warped slats holding up a double bed.” “… by the sprained ankle resulting from improper maintenance of the sidewalk connecting the rec hall and canteen.” “Ruined” was a word I heard so often that I even lost a bundle on Archeologist, a cheap claimer who would be running still if he had ever started.
Many of these complaints were perfectly valid in both the legal and the moral sense. The equipment was rarely inspected, the college student staff inexperienced and untrained. Certainly negligence coursed the mountains like a plague. I didn’t mind the content of the complaints so much as the attitude that went with them. Reinforced by governing legal principles that compensated the injured only if they made a fuss and were free from fault themselves, the attitude transcended actual monetary loss. Someone else is to blame that I am not at the American version of the Château de Mercuès (though they wouldn’t have known the name), so pay me. I am entitled to this vacation on the house, so keep the bill, pick up the tab, give me a free ride. It may have made perfect sense legally, but it did something terrible to the participants, including me: it turned life into winning a negotiation.
In the beginning, as I drove the county roads, statement pad and checkbook neatly tucked away in a vinyl zipper case by my side, I had no thought but to serve my master. We spent a day each week talking into a dictation belt arid filling out forms for the main office. Arnold dipped into these files to check our performance—our numbers, as he put it—and afterwards we’d find congratulatory notes written on index cards taped to the dictating equipment, little cheers reading “Stupendo” or “Bombs away.”
I didn’t figure out until much later that Arnold always found time to praise us for a case that was really a gift (say, where a distraught mother released all claims arising from her daughter’s loss of two front teeth in return for our picking up the dental bill) so that he could really dig in and grouch over a blooper—some instance where the file reeked of collusion between hotel owner and guest. Owners were not above subtle suggestions to trusted customers that they carried enough insurance to support almost any claim, so long as the payments were split. Arnold was interested in catching the phonies; apparently it made his summer worthwhile. He didn’t care a fig about the good results except as packaging for his educational program, getting the pill of criticism down the hatch.
But from the start I dearly wanted his praise, treasured each “Stupendo,” ran into his office like a little boy asking his father, “Did I get it right this time?” As Arnold’s squire I approached claimants as if they were the enemy—and I suppose in a sense they were. What they gained, or so it appeared, Friendship Mutual lost. A zero-sum game. Our purposes were cross. Except that I just worked for Friendship Mutual; I was not the thing itself. It was possible for the company to prevail even if I floundered, but it took a while to get this straight.
I badly wanted to win, to win as much in the daytime as on my nightly visit to the track. I worked at it. I studied the importance of concession patterns—the reason given for moving from a hundred to two hundred dollars had to sound convincing. The firmness of my voice, the frequency with which I offered more money, the amounts I jumped, all affected the result. I came to know the thin line between verbal ambiguity and lack of candor, between bluff and lie. There was a time to raise the anxiety level—by silence or stonewalling or the wearisome broken-record tactic that had me repeating the same message until the complainant admitted defeat just to get rid of me. And there was the cultivation-of-trust ploy, a move that worked best with women. I would simply say, “How can I help you? Please tell me what I can do,” and they’d turn soft and cooperative.