I look down at my desk calendar. It has a big hole in it next Tuesday, but it would be nice to fill it up with some clients who pay their bills. If it weren’t for Andy and my rat-burner case (and she is beginning to call too frequently), I’d be running a one-man Legal Services program. Besides those cases, I’ve got fifteen clients (mostly women who want divorces) and have managed to collect a grand total of nine hundred dollars from them since I moved into the Layman Building.
“Go ahead and hand me the nicker,” I say irritably, “and quit trying to slide it up my pants leg.”
Clan snickers and hands me the folder, which is sticky as well as ragged. If I licked it, I could probably get a sugar high from all the candy Clan handles between meals.
I open it, and a single sheet of paper falls out. On a half-sheet of yellow legal paper Clan has written the words “Wants out.” I pick up the folder by my fingertips.
“Impressive amount of research,” I say and drop it into the wastepaper basket.
Clan, now that I’ve taken this turkey, props his own feet on my desk. “I got it all in my head,” he says, pointing with his finger at his thinning brown hair, now speckled with gray.
“Besides, you’re getting a nice fee.”
I get out a pad in the vain hope he will at least tell me how to get to the nursing home.
“Forgive me for being so cynical,” I say, looking for my pen, “but somehow I doubt if Mrs. Gentry’s got control over her assets.”
Clan, grunting from the effort, reaches across to the corner of my desk to where my red Flair pen has rolled and flips it to me.
“I was about to add,” he grins, “if you get her sprung.”
For the next fifteen minutes Clan tells me the story of his mother’s friendship with Mrs. Gentry, which has nothing to do with her case. Finally, since it is nearly the time the cafeteria opens, he gets to the point. A year ago, with the aid of the family doctor, Mrs. Gentry’s son hustled his widowed mother through a guardianship proceeding (she was slowly recovering from surgery), and had her transferred to a nursing home, where Dan’s mother met her. Instead of shriveling up and dying, as she was supposed to, she has made a full recovery, according to Clan.
“Have you ever seen her?” I ask, totally skeptical at this point. With my family history, I can’t imagine even living to sixty-five, much less thinking I’d be able to get it up in my eighties.
” She’s looks just like Dr. Ruth!” Clan cackles. ” And talks about sex ninety to nothing.”
I rub my head. I can believe the first part but not the second. Clan will hype any story, anytime.
“Is she really eighty-four?” I ask.
His face benign as a cherub’s, Clan beams at me.
“If she’s a day,” he says, struggling to his feet.
“That I can swear to.”
I nod. Meaning the rest is bullshit. I write on my calendar, “Dr. Ruth” and, determined to get something out of this, get up to go downstairs and eat lunch with Clan. I will go out this afternoon to the nursing home to get this travesty under way. As we pass the receptionist’s desk, Julia nods, and picks up a pencil and taps her teeth with it.
“Tweedledee and Tweedledum off to the chow hall again. Maybe we can get a direct phone line installed down there.”
There is no doubt in my mind who is Tweedledum. About the second week I started getting used to Julia’s malevolent comments and have come to accept them for the truths about myself they contain.
“Would you see about that, sweetie?” Clan coos at her.
Julia pushes her cheeks out at Clan and pats her poochy stomach. She is dressed today in mauve pants and a lavender silk shirt, reminding me of a big grape.
“Whatever you say, Porky,” she says, smiling at Clan.
“By the way,” she says to me, “while you were in the crapper earlier Mona Moneyhart called again. Should we be installing a direct line for her too?”
I roll my eyes at Clan. I’d like to trade him Mona. Somehow, I’ve got to learn to charge divorce clients by the hour if I’m going to earn any money. I say to Julia, “I’ll call her back after lunch.”
Julia pitches the pink message slip in the wastepaper basket by her desk. “It’d save time if we got a little cot for her and put it in the corner of your office.”
I nod at Clan, who is grinning now that Julia has shifted targets.
“Let’s go eat.”
In the cafeteria we are joined by Frank D’Angelo and “Ibnkie Southerland, attorneys from our floor. Frank, who is as wiry as Clan is fat, puts his salad down on the far edge of the table across from Clan.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Clan,” he says, watching Clan spoon in a mouthful of cherry cobbler, “it’s just that I haven’t eaten since last night, and it doesn’t look like you’re slowing down.”
Clan moves his hand toward Frank as if to grab his plate of mostly lettuce and cucumbers and then waves it away.
“It’s not worth fighting you for, D’Angelo.” He turns to Prank’s companion. ‘“Hinkie,” he says loudly, “how was your AIDS test?”
Tunkie Southerland is said to be so shy it’s rumored he doesn’t know whether or not he has been circumcised. A tall, clumsy man who wears bifocals even though he is at least a decade younger than the rest of us, he pulls his neck inside his collar like a turtle.
“Lay off the Tunk,” I tell Clan, who is looking around to see if anyone is laughing, “or he won’t write your next brief for you.” Tunkie (God only knows how he got his nickname-he won’t say) is the only lawyer I know personally who has had a case at the United States Supreme Court. At least he ghosted the brief. He writes beautifully, but watching him greet a client in the lobby is painful. If the client is a woman, Tunkie’s eyes actually begin to water. Why some people feel they have to become lawyers I’ll never understand.
“How’s your big case going?” he asks, changing the subject as he sits down next to me. Despite his timid demeanor, Tunkie dresses well. He is wearing a blue banker’s-stripe broadcloth shirt and a burgundy tie. If he is as timid as he seems, I wonder how he can bear to look in the mirror long enough to get his knot so straight.
Clan, who is gulping his lunch down with coffee still too hot for me to do more than sip, answers for me.
“Which one? He’s got two now.”
I let Clan explain and watch Tunkie’s face go crimson as Clan announces my newest client is eighty-four and was caught having sex in a closet.
“If I can get it up when I’m that age,” Clan finishes loudly, “I’ll go down to the middle of Main Street and let Tunkie sell tickets to it.” We all laugh, and even Tunkie smiles at such a ludicrous thought.
“How’s your murder case coming?” Prank asks, after Clan quits hooting at himself.
“Accidental death,” I say, wincing at my memories of my conversation with Yettie Lindsey yesterday. Instead of immediately confronting Andy with what she told me, I called Rainey at the state hospital and asked her to plug herself into the social-worker gossip line. She knows Yettie only on sight, but the state is too small not to find mutual friends or enemies in common.
“Sure it was,” Tunkie says, carefully spreading the cloth napkin that held his silverware onto his lap.
“The mother probably wanted her kid put out of her misery and paid this black dude to electrocute her.”
Improbably, Frank tries to rescue me.
“It’d be a lot easier just to forget you ever had a child like that.”
Clan wags his finger at all of us.
“A man might try to forget,” he says, “but a mother can’t. Too much guilt. At the age of seventy, my mother still called every week to tell me what to do.”
I say, laughing, “For good reason.” We talk generally about why people do things and decide no one has a clue.
Maybe it is as simple as, the principle of behavior modification:
we do what reinforces us. But if that’s true, what was the stimulus that led a black social worker to spill her guts to a white lawyer she didn’t know from a hole in the ground?
Unrequited love? A bad evaluation? If anybody can find out, Rainey can. Odd how she is willing to do
