Yes, Max, I owe you, but maybe that makes me resent you even more.
"Sometimes you really piss me off," she said.
"I'm sorry," he said, backing off, sounding sincere. "You know how I feel about you …"
How? Say it!
How many times had he said the three magic words? Twice, she recalled, once after too much champagne and once when he thought he'd lost her.
In fact, you did lose me, Max. I was tired of sneaking in and out of hotels.
She had just started law school and felt like she was getting somewhere. So why was she stuck in this nowhere relationship? She wanted her independence, and Max was surprisingly understanding. He gave her time and space. He was secure enough to let her go, telling her he hoped she would return.
It was the best time of her life. She found Tony Kingston, or rather, he had found her. Discovered the baby-sitter had grown up. Lisa had taken care of Greg, Tony's son, since she was twelve, helping around the house, admiring the photos of the handsome naval aviator in his spiffy flightsuit. Tony had never been married, and when the child's mother-Tony's teenage girlfriend-took off, he was left with a son to raise. Lisa remembered her adolescent excitement when Tony came home on leave, duffel bag slung over a shoulder.
So strong and decent, so unlike my own father.
She learned enough psychology to know Tony was the father she had never had. But he was so much more, too. Tony didn't rescue her as Max had done; he treated her as an equal, something Max never did. Tony was everything. And then, suddenly, he was gone.
Just as Max had hoped, she came back. He told her she had changed, that he liked the old Lisa better. The old Lisa is dead, she said. He didn't ask who she had been with, and she never told. The past and the future both remained unspoken.
Now, pacing in the apartment overlooking the park, he said, "I'd leave Jill for you in a second if you'd ask me to …"
She let the bait dangle. Ten years ago, she prayed to hear those words. Now, they left her confused and troubled.
"God, Lisa, I love you. I always have."
Whoa! What did he say? And why now?
"Do you love me, Max, or do you just need me more?"
"When the case is over, I'm going to ask Jill for a divorce and we can get married."
"Max, please …"
"Okay, I won't pressure you. But you're right about one thing. I need your help. I wouldn't ask if I didn't. Hell, I'm begging you. This is even more important than you know."
"Tell me."
"I can't. Not now."
She thought about it. Hard as it was for Max to say it, he did love her. She never doubted it. And he had helped her when no one else cared whether she slept under a bridge or went hungry. Now he was asking her to choose between him and some flowery notions of right and wrong.
No one would ever know. It was just one case.
But what about her beliefs? What about the new, improved Lisa Fremont, to use Max's mocking phrase? Could she put her new ideals on the shelf just this once? And how deeply did she believe them anyway?
The marble statues and bronze doors notwithstanding, justice was an ethereal concept, a divine ideal, which like sainthood was rarely seen on earth. Justice was the pearl in the oyster. Keep on shuckin' and good luck huntin'. Despite the lofty notions she'd learned from the law books, her views were shaped by her own experiences. Weren't everyone's? What was it Justice Cardozo had said? "Try as we might, we can never see with any eyes except our own."
And what my eyes have seen.
Now, after four years at Berkeley, summa cum laude-thank you very much-three years at Stanford Law, magna cum laude with a prize-winning law review note, and one year clerking for a federal court of appeals judge in the D.C. Circuit, she had all the credentials. So why did she consider herself a fraud?
She wanted to believe, but damnit, Max had pressed the right buttons. She was a priest without faith, a pagan inside the holy tabernacle. To Lisa Fremont, the law was not majestic. The slogan carved into the pediment-equal justice under law-was a benediction for the Kodak-toting tourists. The law was as cold as the marble of its sanctuary.
Disregarding the lofty symbols and images, she thought of the legal system as a dingy factory with leaking boilers, broken sprockets, and rusted cogs. The law was bought and sold, swapped and hocked, bartered and auctioned, just like wheat, widgets … and girls who run away from home.
In the upcoming term, she knew the Court would be asked to consider nearly seven thousand cases but would issue fewer than one hundred rulings. Law clerks, whose first function was to summarize and analyze the petitions seeking review, frequently complained about the workload. No problem, Lisa thought.
If I get the job, I'll read them all. I'll plow through the research, draft the justice's opinions, and make his coffee, if that's what he wants me to do.
She'd know the legislative history of the statutes and the precedential value of the cases. She'd master the procedure and the substantive law. She'd write pithy footnotes and trace the source of a law back to Hammurabi. She'd prepare incisive pool memos for the judicial conferences and brilliant bench memos for her boss. She'd stay up all night with the death clerk on execution stays, and she'd be at work at 8 A.M. sharp.
She'd be prepared to search for the truth, to do justice.
She'd do all of those things in every case … except one.
The case of Laubach
