by D. W. Buffa
“I went back that next fall. I only had a couple of classes to complete. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be here. I came in with this class, but that isn’t how I ended.”
“What are you doing now?” I asked, bending my head forward to hear.
“When I left I didn’t think I’d ever come back. Then I decided I had to do something and that maybe I shouldn’t just throw it all away.”
“Are you here—in New York? Or did you go back home? Pennsylvania, wasn’t it?” he sipped on his drink, subjecting me to such a close scrutiny that I felt a little awkward. Did he want me to bring it up?—Or did he just want me to know that he knew that I remembered; that, like him, I’d never been able to forget.
“So I came back to good old Harvard. The next Fall. I might not have, except I knew that then…” His voice trailed off as he looked around, like someone who is not quite certain where he is.
“Except you knew that then…” I tried to remind him when he turned back to me, a blank expression on his lost, unfamiliar face. He blinked, then narrowed his eyes, looking at me as if he had already forgotten who I was. His head began to nod up and down. With a glance he hoped I did not notice, he looked at my name tag.
“I always knew you’d be different than the rest of these…” Breathing contempt, he surveyed the room. “I knew you’d do something worthwhile.” He smiled down into his glass. With his right hand he reached up and scratched his ear. “I’ve never come to one of these before. Have you? I wouldn’t have come to this one, except that… I thought maybe I had to. It’s the first time I’ve been back in the hotel.” His eyes became remote.
The crowd began to make their way to the dining room where at assigned tables of ten we would celebrate who we were and who we had been. And amidst all the understated pride and all the modest bragging, Jimmy Haviland would sit there, thinking about something that had happened half a lifetime ago in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, eight floors above, on a white winter day in New York.
“I thought I had to. Come back here. If he was going to be here, I had to be here, too.” Haviland gave me an odd look, as if he were sure I knew what he meant. “If he was going to be here, I had to. Don’t you think? You’re not surprised what happened to him, are you? I’m not. We knew that about him, didn’t we? The only thing surprised me is that he isn’t yet at the top. You watch, though. He will be.”
What was left of the crowd began to move with a kind of reluctant urgency toward the other room.
“I’ll see you again,” said Haviland, touching my sleeve as we went our separate ways.
I found my place at a table in the second row from the front. I tried to find where Jimmy Haviland was sitting, but there were too many people and there was not time. All the places on the dais were filled, all except one. The dean of the Law School, almost giddy with excitement that he was presiding over a dinner with the members of his own graduating class, made the short, formal announcement. Standing at the microphone, a huge smile on his narrow crimped face, he looked down at the curtained entrance at the far end of the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming another member of our class, Thomas Stern Browning, the vice president of the United States.”
CHAPTER 2
Thomas Stern Browning. The vice president of the United States. Everyone was on their feet, applauding, the ballroom of the Plaza engulfed in a crescendo of tumultuous, dignified noise, every eye straining to get a closer look at the man they had all come to see. There were probably not more than a few dozen who had actually known him, but as I watched the beaming self-assurance on their faces, that look of reflected glory by which they seemed to share the achievement, I imagined that most of them had made reference to the fact that they had not only been at Harvard together but had been in the same class. It did not matter that they might never have exchanged a word, they had been there together, and if some of them had become more famous than others, that only added to the memory they all shared of the place. They might not agree with his politics, they might not belong to the same party, but they applauded Thomas Stern Browning with the intensity, the heartfelt enthusiasm, reserved for the approval we give to one of our own.
With a kind of collective sigh, the force of its effort spent, the crowd settled back, taking chairs turned now at different angles, facing the front. A wistful, bashful smile trembled over Browning’s small oval mouth. He looked all around, a slow, searching glance, as if he wanted to make sure that he did not miss someone he knew. The smile became a little more pronounced. He lowered his eyes as if he could not otherwise stop from laughing at something enormously funny that had just crossed his mind. Abruptly, without warning, his head dropped to the side. His left hand came up to his hip. The smile became broader, more difficult to control. Suddenly, his head snapped straight up. His eyes sparkled with defiance.
“And if every one of you had voted for me, I could have had it all!” he roared to the crowd’s delight.
With his chin tucked in, he rolled his head to the side, directing a sly, sidelong glance at the dean who waited, helpless, with a nervous smile.
“And I want to thank Dean Conrad for the very nice letter he was kind enough to write congratulating me after the New Hampshire primary. But I kept waiting for the check,” he added with a grin framed with so much thoughtful kindness that the dean was allowed the easy escape of laughing harder than anyone else.
“Two years ago, when I announced my candidacy for the presidency, and during the long months that followed, in a campaign that took me from one part of the country to another, and sometimes into three or four states in the space of a single, endless day, there were few things that kept up my spirits more than the letters of encouragement I received from so many of you, men and women who, like myself, were among those fortunate few able to call Harvard home.” he paused, lowered his eyes, that same ingratiating smile bubbling on his mouth. It was as if he could barely contain this thing that was pushing up out of his soft round-shouldered chest. His head bobbed from side to side; his arms began to shake.
“And the delicate, lawyer-like precision with which so many of those letters disclaimed any interest—any ‘immediate’ interest—in having your name considered for the next opening on the Supreme Court was, I thought, modest in the extreme.”
Browning narrowed his eyes into a pugnacious glance. “I’m afraid I can’t do that much for anyone now.
I lost the South Carolina primary, and after that everything went downhill. And while I was glad to have the chance to run on the ticket and become vice president, there isn’t anything I can do to make sure that if there are appointments to make on the Supreme Court of the United States any of them go to men or women from Harvard. All I can do,” he said, breaking into a huge smile, “is to make damn certain none of them go to anyone from Yale!”
It brought down the house. The dean was on his feet, clapping his bony-knuckled hands like some deranged fanatic, leading the applause. What is it that makes the destruction of a rival more gratifying than even a victory of our own? Is it because we have always secretly envied, and perhaps feared, his strength? The only thing worse than not winning the prize is having someone else win it instead?
The smile on Browning’s face faded almost as soon as the applause began. I watched him closely, wondering how much he was still the same, always so much aware of the effect he had on others. He was reaching down onto the table next to him for a typed manuscript inside a black smoke transparent cover. His eyes never left the audience while he picked it up and spread it open just below the yellow lectern light. The crowd was wild with applause, reacting less to what he had said than to the way he had said it, the cheerful arrogant insistence that you were the best and that though you could never say that to outsiders you could say it among yourselves. Browning was waiting for them when they finished.
He began to read from the prepared text. Three sentences into it and you knew that whatever he did on other occasions, he had
written, or at least had edited, this one himself. There was none of that reliance on those familiar phrases that invoke all the things in which everyone believes. Nothing about what a great country this was, or how Americans had always risen to the challenge and always would. There was nothing about freedom and democracy and the God-given right of everyone to make as much money as they could. He did something quite uncommon for a man who held high office and, it was reasonably certain, had not yet surrendered all hope for higher office still: Halfway through a speech about the state of the law in America, Thomas Stern Browning told this audience of affluent and important members of the bar that the way they led their lives was all wrong.
“Let me tell you about the kind of lawyer we need more of today. We need men like Louis Brandeis—the inventor of what came to be called the ‘Brandeis brief.’ You remember, of course, what that was: a brief submitted to a court by someone not a party, because the decision reached in it would affect the community at large. It mattered, when a court had to decide an issue about whether a particular young woman had been compelled to work twelve or fourteen hours every day in an airless room, that the court knew how many women in this situation ended up exhausted, malnourished, beaten or dead. Brandeis supplied the kind of information that proved that what might otherwise have been thought an isolated situation causing no great harm was a cancer threatening the very existence of society as a whole.”
Browning paused, furrowing his brow. His head swept from side to side, an ominous look in his eyes. Taking one step back from the podium, he placed his hands on his waist. His shoulders hunched forward, he rocked back and forth.
“There are in this audience tonight some of the best lawyers in the country.” He lifted his head. A thin smile ran flat across his mouth. “And some of the most highly paid. I’m sure you’ve earned it. And now that you’ve earned it, now that it’s yours, you might start thinking about devoting some of your time to doing something a little more important than simply trying to make more. You might try to remember that there were once lawyers—men like Louis Brandeis—who thought the words pro bono represented a lawyer’s highest calling and not,” cried Browning with withering contempt, “some poor haggard wretch with her hand stretched out. Do you know—do any of you know—what Brandeis really did?”
Browning grasped the sides of the lectern tight with his hands. The tension in his short neck tightened, the muscles bulging out. His mouth turned down at the corners. There was anger in his eyes.
“Brandeis did not just do it all for free; he did not just give away all that time he spent writing, researching, consulting, on those famous classic briefs. He paid for his own time. He paid the firm of which he was a member for the time, the money he did not make. Do you understand me? Can I make it any more plain? Louis Brandeis was of the opinion that his time belonged as much to his partners as it did to him and that the twofold obligation—to the public interest and to them— could only be fairly met by reimbursing the firm for what he could otherwise have earned.”
Waving his left hand in front of him, Browning vigorously shook his head. “It was not always my view that lawyers—or anyone else, for that matter—should do anything except what was to their own financial advantage.” A shrewd smile stole across Browning’s soft, pliable mouth. “My grandfather did not build cars to give them away. It was only when I came to Harvard to study law—because to tell the truth I had not yet decided what I wanted to do—that I first encountered anyone who did not seem to think the same way. ‘I’m Antonelli’—that was the first thing he said, the roommate I did not know I had before he showed up at the dormitory door. ‘I’m Browning,’ I replied, wondering as I said it why I was following his example and whether we would live all year together and never learn each other’s first name.
“It must have been sometime that first week—the first week of our first year—when I asked him if he had yet given any thought to the kind of law he wanted to practice, what kind of lawyer he wanted to be. I assumed of course that he would say something about corporate, or tax, or perhaps, if he had more imagination than most, something about admiralty or international law. Instead, he said that he was going to be a criminal defense attorney. When I suggested diplomatically that I thought it really did not pay, he said he could not see what difference that could possibly make. As you can imagine, I knew then that I was in the presence of someone quite as strange as anyone I had ever met.”
Around the table at which I was sitting, faces turned, looking at me with new interest, as they listened to Thomas Browning describe someone I did not remember. He was changing things, giving them a subtle reinterpretation, lending the present an illusion of coherence by making it seem the inevitable consequence of the past.
“I took him home with me at Thanksgiving to see what my grandfather, who had a gift for the appraisal of men, thought of my new friend.” Browning paused, looked around the room, took a step to the side of the lectern, picked up a glass of water and drank. “Now, I don’t know how many of you remember old Zachary Stern.” Browning’s eyes were fixed on his hand as he put down the glass. “But he had a way of looking at you that made you think that you must have done something wrong. He gave that look to Antonelli—and it did not do any good at all. Antonelli thought my grandfather’s baleful silence was an invitation to say what was on his mind. Do you know what he said, this first-year law student from Michigan and even farther west? ‘We had one of your cars when I was just a boy. It kept breaking down and they could never fix it and my father, who was a mild-mannered man, said if he ever met the famous Zachary Stern he’d tell him a thing or two.’ I thought my grandfather was going to explode. He grew red in the face; his body tensed and shook; and then, suddenly, he laughed. Laughed, mind you! Zachary Stern, the man they said had never smiled. He laughed. And then he leaned closer and confided something I had never heard him confess before: ‘We had a bad year. Problems on the line.’”
Browning drew himself straight up. A look of baffled amusement spread over his face.
“‘What year was that, sir?’ Antonelli asked, the same way, I imagine, he takes a question of a witness on the stand. My grandfather looked at him, startled, and then laughed some more. ‘Now that you mention it, might have been more than one.’”
Women were looking at me with the lost affection that, had they only known, they would have lavished on the young man whose innocent bravery had brought the great and formidable Zachary Stern to heel. It was a wonderful story, made better yet by the masterful way he told it, with those rich, rolling periods, accompanied by just the right gesture and always, at each point one was needed, the perfect pause. It was a wonderful story, and not one word in it was true. Browning had not reinterpreted my conversation with his grandfather at their baronial Grosse Pointe estate, revisited it in a way that put me in a better light: He had made it up, all of it. I had never had a conversation with Zachary Stern. I never met him. I had not been invited there that first Thanksgiving; I was there the Thanksgiving after that, in our third year, the one after the summer in which the old man died.
I sat in the darkness, no longer a face in the crowd, but a silent, unwilling co-conspirator in this utter fabrication invented by Thomas Browning and given out as nothing more than the simple truth.
“I was always glad I brought Joseph Antonelli home with me that Thanksgiving; glad he had the chance to meet my grandfather a few months before he died. ‘Watch him,’ my grandfather told me. ‘He’s the kind who does well. It’s the ones who start out looking for money who seldom get rich.’ Then my grandfather added something that tells it all: ‘The money means nothing. It’s the work that counts. It’s what you can do with your head and your hands, the things you can build, the things you can change.’”
Browning looked out over that vast audience and in that rich voice that swept you up in it like a great, flowing river reminded them of what was important and what was not.
“We remember Zachary Stern for what he did, for bui
lding an industry, for changing the way we live, not for how much he was finally worth. I remember him of course for other things as well, none of them with greater gratitude than that lesson he taught me that last Thanksgiving of his life: that if you want to know which among you is going to do well, look for those, if you can find them, who want something so badly that if they had to, they would do it for no money at all. And that, I daresay, is why my friend is the most famous lawyer in the country and makes more in a month than most of us—especially those of us who work for the government—make in a year.”
The echo of his voice slipped into a silence so complete that the sound of a chair creaking under a slight shift of weight could be heard from far across the room.
“And every year he gives much of it back. He still takes cases no one else will, cases in which the accused has no money and no way ever to pay. And he does it—well, why does he do it? Because he can; because he knows how; because he was trained as a lawyer and remembers something most of us forget: that he never once heard from any of his teachers in law school that the justice of a cause had anything to do with how much it paid.
“I never did anything for the money, either,” he insisted with an innocent stare that produced first laughter, then applause. “It’s true, I started out with certain… modest advantages; but I tried to follow my grandfather’s instruction; I tried to follow my friend Antonelli’s example; I tried to think only about the work and not about the money—but while they both succeeded beyond anyone’s dream, the best I could do was wind up second, which in America, you know, is the same thing as last.” The grin grew broader, the effort at suppression part of the game. “But perhaps, on some future occasion,” offered Browning with a teasing sparkle in his eyes, “I may be able to appear before you without that awful word vice in front of my name.”