“Did you see their credentials?”
“Of course I saw their credentials.” But, thinking back, I realize that I gave their wallets only a glance: who studies photos and numbers and the rest in any detail?
“I figured you did.” He hesitates, as though uncertain how to share an unpleasant truth. “Listen, Talcott, here’s the thing. Somebody came to see you pretending to be from the Bureau. Well, that happens to be a major felony. That means they have to investigate it. As a courtesy, they are putting it off until tomorrow. But tomorrow morning, a couple of FBI agents, the real kind, want to interview you. Here, at the office, at eleven. I can’t be there, because Edie and I are going to Hawaii for a few days, but Meadows and maybe a couple of my other people will. No charge,” he adds, a considerable relief but also something of an insult. He senses my distress. “Sorry to dump all this on you, Talcott. Really sorry. But after it’s resolved, I will make the calls for Kimberly. I promise.”
After it’s resolved, I am thinking as I hang up the phone. Meaning he will not lift a finger on Kimmer’s behalf until he sees which way the wind is blowing.
“What’s wrong, honey?” my wife asks, clutching my hand as though it can keep her from drowning. “Misha, what is it?”
I look at my wife, my beautiful, brilliant, disloyal, desperately if unhappily ambitious wife. The mother of our child. The only woman I will ever love. I want to make it right. I can’t.
“It’s not going to die,” I tell her.
CHAPTER 9
The following Tuesday, twelve days after the death of my father, I return to my dreary classroom, populated, it often seems, by undereducated but deeply committed Phi Beta Kappa ideologues-leftists who believe in class warfare but have never opened Das Kapital and certainly have never perused Werner Sombart, hard-line capitalists who accept the inerrancy of the invisible hand but have never studied Adam Smith, third-generation feminists who know that sex roles are a trap but have never read Betty Friedan, social Darwinists who propose leaving the poor to sink or swim but have never heard of Herbert Spencer or William Sumner’s essay on The Challenge of Facts, black separatists who mutter bleakly about institutional racism but are unaware of the work of Carmichael and Hamilton, who invented the term-all of them our students, all of them hopelessly young and hopelessly smart and thus hopelessly sure they alone are right, and nearly all of whom, whatever their espoused differences, will soon be espoused to huge corporate law firms, massive profit factories where they will bill clients at ridiculous rates for two thousand hours of work every year, quickly earning twice as much money as the best of their teachers, and at half the age, sacrificing all on the altar of career, moving relentlessly upward, as ideology and family life collapse equally around them, and at last arriving, a decade or two later, cynical and bitter, at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.
Or maybe I am just measuring their prospects by my own.
My family and I returned to Elm Harbor last Thursday after my brief interview at Corcoran amp; Klein with real agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cassie Meadows surprisingly mature and competent at my side. Kimmer went straight back to work, instantly resuming her manic pace and crazy hours, and has already made another trip to San Francisco, for the greater wealth and glory of EHP. The real FBI has had no success in tracking down the two men who confronted me at Shepard Street, but my wife has persuaded herself that they were reporters, looking for dirt. She does not care whether she persuades me.
Mariah, meanwhile, has a new theory. It is no longer Jack Ziegler who killed the Judge; it is a litigant who blames my father for rejecting some appeal; and she is undaunted by the fact that the Judge left the bench well over a decade ago. “Probably a big corporation,” she insisted last night on the phone, her third call in five days. “You have no idea how amoral they are. Or how long they can hold a grudge.” I wondered what Howard would say to that, but prudently bit my tongue. Mariah added that a friend of hers had agreed to search the Internet for possible hired killers. But when I challenged Mariah gently, she scolded me all over again for never standing by her in the clutch.
“Sisters are just like that,” said Rob Saltpeter, the spindly constitutional-futurist who is my occasional basketball partner, when I related part of the story while we sat in the locker room yesterday morning at the Y, the two of us having been slaughtered by a couple of off-duty cops. His eyes, as always, were serene. “But, the thing is, you have to remember that she would stand by you in the clutch.”
“What makes you say that?”
Rob smiled. At six feet five he has four inches on me, but I probably outweigh him by fifty pounds. Although not, yet, quite fat, I am more than a little bit overweight; he is terribly thin. Neither one of us is an impressive sight in Jockey shorts in a locker room.
“Just a sense that I get.”
“You’ve never even met her.”
“I have two sisters,” objected Rob, whose fundamental warmth is tempered by a zealous certainty that all families are, or should be, like his own.
“Not like Mariah.”
“It doesn’t matter what she’s like. Your obligation to be there for her is exactly the same no matter what. It doesn’t come from her behavior. It doesn’t come from what you think of her. It comes from the fact that you are her brother.”
“I thought we abolished status-based relationships about a century ago,” I teased, a typically silly lawyer’s inside joke. In a status-based relationship, the parties’ obligations are determined by who they are (husband-wife, parent-child, master-servant, and so on), rather than by agreement.
“Man abolished them. God didn’t.”
Nothing much to say to that, and I suppose I agree. Rob is, by his own description, an observant Jew, and he talks about his faith more than any other professor I know, including, to the squirmy chagrin of many students, in the classroom. Perhaps it is this oracular side of Rob Saltpeter that keeps us from becoming closer friends. Or perhaps it is simply that I am not a friendly fellow. To cover an unexpected surge of pain, I asked him for advice.
“Nothing to do but go on,” he shrugged, which is his answer for just about everything.
Well, fine. I am going on. Badly.
And so it is that on this, my first day back in the classroom, I find myself persecuting an unfortunate young man whose sin is to inform us all that the cases I expect my students to master are irrelevant, because the rich guys always win. Now, it is true that some poor fool announces this conclusion every fall, and it is also true that more than a few professors have earned tenure at some very fine law schools by pressing refined, jargon-chunky versions of precisely this thin theory, but I am in no mood for blather. I glare at the cocky student and see, for a horrible moment, the future, or maybe just the enemy: young, white, confident, foolish, skinny, sullen, multiply pierced, bejeweled, dressed in grunge, cornsilk hair in a ponytail, utterly the cynical conformist, although he thinks he is an iconoclast. A few generations ago, he would have been the fellow wearing his letterman’s sweater inside out, to prove to everybody how little it meant to him. When I was in college, he would have been first to the barricades, and he would have made sure everybody saw him there. As he is sure everybody is looking at him now. His elbow is on his chair, his other fist is tucked under his chin, and I read in his posture insolence, challenge, perhaps even the unsubtle racism of the supposedly liberal white student who cannot quite bring himself to believe that his black professor could know more than he. About anything. A light frosty red dances around his face like a halo, and I catch myself thinking, I could break him. I remind myself to be gentle.
“Very interesting, Mr. Knowland,” I smile, taking a few steps down the aisle toward the row in which he sits. I fold my arms. “Now, how does your very interesting thesis relate to the case at hand?”
