A mahogany stand-up reading desk stood against one wall. An American flag with gold fringes was lodged on a pole in the corner. A framed black-and-white photo of a football team, the players and coaches sitting on bleachers, rested on an oak credenza, as did a partially deflated ball. Antique books with cracked golden bindings were displayed behind glass, and a portrait of Chief Justice John Jay hung over the fireplace mantel.
Truitt went on for a while about the pool memos the clerks prepare to help the Court to determine whether to review lower court cases. With little enthusiasm, he mentioned the importance of writing objective bench memos for him, fairly summarizing each party’s position, and listing similar cases that may have been omitted from the briefs. It was a mechanical speech he seemed to have given before.
Omigod! He’s bored. I don’t even have his attention. He’s already dumped me in the reject pile.
“Tell me about yourself,” Truitt said, leaning back in his leather chair and sneaking a quick look at his wristwatch. “Skip all the legal stuff. I’ve already read your transcripts and I’ve spoken to Judge O’Brien, who gives you a glowing recommendation. Tell me about Lisa Fremont, the person.”
He’s just being polite before showing me the door.
Lisa fought the urge to speak quickly, to cram a lifetime-and not an entirely honest one-into a minute. She took a deep breath to relax and began at her own pace. “I grew up in Bodega Bay, California.
He nodded and said, “ The Birds.”
“Right. They made the Hitchcock film there, but that was before I was born. I think of the place more as The Old Man and the Sea. My father was a fisherman.”
She paused, just as she had rehearsed, then watched as he nodded with approval. Tilling common ground, or rather, fishing the same waters, the son and daughter of humble men facing each other in the palatial Courthouse, one block from the Capitol, with the Library of Congress and the Senate offices on either side.
The Justice, the law clerk, and Joe DiMaggio… all children of fishermen.
“He was a shrimper mostly,” she said. “Crabs, too, depending on the season. For a while, he crewed on someone else’s boat, but usually he just worked alone.”
When he worked at all When he wasn’t drunk, sprawled across the convertible sofa with the popped springs, the sofa he hauled onto the front porch to her everlasting shame, the sofa where he lay, unshaven and reeking of sweat and beer and vomit, tossing bottles at passers-by, the sofa where on a dark night when no one heard her screams, he…
“It was a hard life,” she said. “Neither of my parents even graduated from high school. In fact, Mom was in tenth grade when she got pregnant with me. I knew I had to get out of there. I left home for San Francisco and went through a series of minimum wage jobs that convinced me of the need for higher education.”
“I don’t recall those early jobs on your CV.”
Let me orally refresh you.
“Just some waitressing, barmaid work, that sort of thing. One summer, I had a job at Yosemite, clearing trails.”
“Really,” he said, perking up, paying attention. “I spent a summer as a park ranger at Fort Jefferson.”
“Where’s that?” she asked, seemingly with real interest.
He told her that the Civil War fort was in the Dry Tortugas near Key West, but she knew that. She knew Sam grew up in Everglades City, that his father, Charlie, had piloted a stone crab boat and that he died of lung cancer at fifty-seven. She knew that Sam had camped out in Ten Thousand Islands as a young boy and fished off Shark Point. She knew he drew pictures of all the animals he spotted-water moccasins, manatees, ospreys, and alligators-and that he could imitate the caw of a mockingbird and build a fire from two pieces of wood. She knew he skippered a homemade airboat through the Everglades and built his own fishing hideaway in the islands at age sixteen. She knew he had won two hundred dollars in the eleventh grade for an essay about preserving the Glades and was rewarded with a trip to Tallahassee, where his picture was taken with the lieutenant governor.
She knew that the local Rotary Club had taken up a collection to help him buy books for his first semester at Wake Forest, that he worked two jobs and was a walk-on with the football team, which never did give him a scholarship. She knew he took a year after graduation to work with the Peace Corps in Central America, went to law school at the University of Virginia, and afterward spent two years with Legal Services, helping migrant workers in Florida’s sugar cane-fields, before a short stint in private practice and then on to Harvard to pick up an LL.M. degree.
Lisa Fremont knew all these things because she had read the three books and ninety-eight legal articles he had written and seven hundred sixty-seven newspaper and magazine articles that had mentioned his name. Thanks to the very same software that could find every reference to the phrase “capital punishment” in every judicial opinion over the past two hundred years, she could find all published references to Samuel Adams Truitt, including last August’s social columns in a Nantucket weekly where the newly appointed justice and his wife, Constance, enjoyed grilled lobster and sweet corn at Senator Parham’s summer home. For the early material that wasn’t stored on a hard drive, she had dug up copies of his high school and college yearbooks and student newspapers. Lisa Fremont was nothing if not a great researcher.
Now she maintained eye contact as Sam Truitt spun his personal history with the enthusiasm of a man who loves life and doesn’t mind talking about it.
At least I’ve got his attention. Now, be appealing but not seductive, smart but not arrogant.
After telling his abbreviated version of his trip from Everglades City to the Supreme Court, with various stops en route, Truitt said, “I appreciate the fact you’ve had some real jobs. I confess to having a bias against people who were groomed from infancy to become lawyers. It’s a great asset to have some life experiences.”
Does erotic dancing count? You wouldn’t believe what I used to do with my “great asset.”
“Do you have any underlying legal or moral philosophy?” he asked, and she was caught off guard. She knew that he’d written with admiration of the humanism of Jean Calvin, whose teachings provided the bedrock for the protection of individual liberties. She could memorize and take tests and research the law, but…
What do I believe?
It was the same question that plagued her last night. Though she wished it were otherwise, she didn’t believe the slogans on the pediments. At best she had an ideology that came from listening to Max Wanaker’s theory of enlightened self-interest.
Do unto others before they do unto you.
“I’m not sure I have a clear, discernible philosophy,” she said, sounding lame, hating her answer, knowing it disappointed him.
“If you were a judge,” he asked, giving her a second chance, “what moral and ethical framework would you bring to the courtroom?”
She bought time by finishing her Cuban coffee, feeling the caffeine rush. She needed to wing it, to spin bullshit into gold. Wasn’t that a large measure of lawyering? She’d won moot court at Stanford by keeping her poise and cleverly answering the unexpected question, but just now, she lost her concentration. Her mind flashed back to Max and the way he looked last night, how desperate he seemed about the case.
“ This is more important than you know.”
Why? And why wouldn’t he tell her more? Sure, the case was important. Jesus, nearly three hundred people had died. Damage claims could exceed half a billion dollars. But that’s why every airline carries massive amounts of insurance. Other than a quick spurt of adverse publicity from a megabucks verdict if Atlantica lost the case, what was the crisis?
Regaining her focus, Lisa was aware of Justice Truitt staring at her, waiting for her answer. “I’d just call them the way I saw them,” she said, using the sports cliche, falling deeper into the pit she had dug. The look on his face told her he was dissatisfied.
“Let’s try it this way,” he said, patiently. “What’s your view of Calvinism?”
She forced herself to focus. That she could be sitting here, in this majestic building, being asked to judge the work of a sixteenth-century French theologian struck her as both quaint and oddly moving. Sam Truitt, a man whose own words would be studied and critiqued by scholars a century from now, actually sought her opinion.
And I have none.
Oh, she could recite Calvin’s belief in the ultimate power of the moral law. She could ace any test on Aquinas or Aristotle, Bacon or Bentham. She was smart with what Max derisively called “book learning.”
But beneath it, she had no core, no body of beliefs that shaped her. She was an empty vessel, and realizing it, she suddenly felt chilled and frighteningly alone.
