5
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Millie said. The sun was hot on the half-court asphalt behind the church. Her ribs and legs were still tender, but here she was. About to shoot a basketball with a Christian minister. If Helen could see her now…
“You sure you want to try this?” Jack Holden said.
“Yes,” Millie said. “But no quick moves.”
“I won’t even play defense on you.” He was in his shirtsleeves, the little bead necklace exposed. “A Supreme Court justice lofting them in Santa Lucia? This is historic.”
“How did you know I played?”
“I read a story about you once. Said you liked to play ball after court. I think that is so cool.”
Holden flipped the ball to Millie. The ball felt good in her hands. It had a thin veneer of dirt on it, giving her a good grip. She approached the free-throw line, set herself, and shot. The ball hit the back of the rim and bounced out. But no pain in her ribs.
“Good thing we’ve got all day,” Jack Holden said.
Cheeky fellow, she thought. “I do have other things to attend to, Mr. Holden.”
Holden recovered the ball and passed it to Millie. “More important than b- ball?”
“Amazing, but true,” she said, even as she spun the ball in her hands, readying herself to shoot.
“Tell you how we can make it more interesting,” Holden said. “How about we play a game of Horse? I win, you decide to let the Bible back in public schools.”
It was a joke, obviously, but still cut a little close. “You want to tear down the wall of separation right here?”
“I’ll give you two out of three, how’s that?”
Millie held the ball. “You are not what I expected,” she said.
“Is that a compliment?”
A warm breeze from the desert caressed Millie’s face. “I don’t know yet.”
“Shoot,” he said.
She did. And missed.
Holden ran for the ball, limping slightly, and returned it to her. “Before you make up your mind, I actually have a confession to make.”
Millie waited for him to explain. She was growing more curious about this man by the second.
“I did in fact give my sermon a little extra today when I saw you.”
“Extra?” Millie said.
“Extra oomph,” Holden said. “You know, energy. Like when an actor is out there doing Hamlet and discovers Spielberg is in the audience.”
“It was for my benefit, this oomph?”
“Yep. Before I tell you why, though, I need to tell you the second part of my confession.”
“There’s more?”
“Yeah, the worst part, too. I’m a lawyer.”
Millie tried to keep her face from showing stark surprise. “Well, I won’t hold that against you.” This was getting really interesting. “Where did you go to law school?”
Holden bounced the ball a couple of times. “Yale.”
Another stunner. “Who was your Constitutional law professor?” Millie asked.
“Larry Graebner.”
“Graebner! You’re kidding.”
“Life’s funny, ain’t it?”
More than funny. Incredible. “How on earth did you go from Yale to this?” She hadn’t meant it to sound condescending, though it did.
Holden, if he was at all offended, didn’t show it. Instead, a faraway look came to his eyes, with a tinge of sadness. “It’s kind of a long story.”
She found, suddenly, that she wanted to know what it was. “Go ahead,” she said.
“Not now. We’re about to play Horse.”
“Please,” she said. “I really want to hear it.”
Holden took a deep breath and said, “Okay, but only in the interest of full disclosure. I guess if I’m going to change the course of legal history through basketball, it’s only fair you know where I’m coming from. Let’s grab some shade.”
They walked to a bench under the church eaves. Holden spun the ball in his hands as he talked.
“After Yale I landed with a big-time civil litigation firm in New York. I was, as the saying goes, on top of the world. I had a wife and daughter, an apartment on East 86th. Season tickets for the Knicks. Bought all my suits at Bergdorf’s. And, idiot that I was, I had an affair. With a temp in the office. A nineteen-year-old actress. My wife found out about it and, bam, left me, took my daughter. I tried to find them, but Yolanda, that was my wife’s name, was good at what she did, which was to avoid me.”
He reached into his shirt and held the bead necklace in his hand. “My daughter was six when she made me this. It’s the only thing of hers I have left.”
Millie almost reached out to touch it. The whole story felt ineffably sad.
“Anyway, I dealt with it by using drugs. Cocaine, mostly. It was the eighties, after all. The city was covered in snow. It didn’t take long for the firm to boot me out. You know those stories they tell junior high school kids to keep them off drugs? All true. At least it was in my case. The low point came when a drug dealer shot me, tore a big hole in my leg. I almost bled to death.”
A shadow passed over Holden’s eyes, covering everything for a moment.
“Long and short of it, I got out of the hospital and had serious thoughts about ridding the world of one more loser. Me. Still couldn’t find my daughter. So I had nothing left. I found myself holing up in a thirty-dollar-a-week hotel in Newark called the Nazareth. I kid you not. The Nazareth Hotel. And one night that first week, when I was thinking about the best way to kill myself, some of the guys in the lobby were watching Billy Graham on TV. I sat down to listen. And I got hit with a laser beam, right here.”
Holden pointed to his chest.
“I mean, it was like somebody opened me up and poured hot liquid into me. I know this is a cliche, but he sounded like he was speaking right to me. Like he knew exactly what I needed, down to the letter.”
He paused a moment, seeming to gather fragments of memory. “Next thing I know I’m crying, I mean bawling like a baby. The other guys, old geezers mostly, are asking me if I’m having a heart attack. Funny thing is, that’s exactly what it was. An attack on my heart. And when Billy Graham gave that invitation, I got down on my knees on the cheap linoleum of the Nazareth Hotel and prayed for forgiveness of my sins.”
Millie remembered hearing testimonies as a little girl. For some reason, they never really reached her. They were usually laden with emotion and Millie always filtered them through a sieve of cold objectivity. She could not recall ever being moved.
Now, for some strange and uncomfortable reason, she found she was moved by Holden. He was not embellishing or ranting or spouting preacher-talk. He told his story from a deep place inside him and, through some miracle of human connection, it touched her.
