by Amanda Cross
“But little. These students are not your pampered darlings from Harvard and Yale, princes of all they survey. They’ve made it this far by the skin of their teeth, and they aren’t inclined to interfere with their eventual law degree and job. One can hardly blame them. That’s why I think the faculty needs to take a stand. Which was what Nellie Rosenbusch and I did.”
“Nellie Rosenbusch?” Kate asked.
“The woman faculty member who was killed by a truck. Harriet and I are very suspicious.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Kate said. “I don’t think I ever heard her name.”
“Nellie was a thorn in the faculty’s side. She was even beginning to get some of the women students behind her. They—the outraged faculty—used everything they could against her, they didn’t miss a trick, from sexual harassment to the silent treatment that I understand is what they do at West Point.”
“But she did have tenure?”
“Yes, she did, I should have mentioned that. She got tenure the year I did, and she got it because of me. We let it be known that her qualifications were as good as mine, in fact better, and that I was willing to join her in a suit claiming so. They decided the easiest way out of that was to give it to us both. She was the first tenured woman in the place, if you can believe it. And they thought once she had joined the club, so to speak, she would shut up and go away. But she didn’t.”
“And you think they killed her; shoved her under a truck and brushed their hands, saying ‘That takes care of that!’ ” Kate put down her fork. “Have you any evidence,” she said, “apart from motive, opportunity, and your deep suspicions?”
“It’s not circumstantial evidence, god knows. She landed in front of the truck, one of those high babies, and the driver never saw her. She wasn’t a very big person.” He paused for a moment.
“Is there any evidence that she was pushed?” Kate repeated.
“People waiting with her for the light think she must have been, because of the way she sort of collapsed all of a sudden. But no one saw exactly what happened. All eyes were on Nellie and the truck; all anyone remembers are the screeching brakes after she was hit. The police have done their best, but there’s damn little evidence really, apart from the fact that there’s no reason on earth why she should have fallen like that. They did the usual autopsy and there were no obvious health problems—heart attack, liquor, drugs, nothing like that.”
“I hope Reed and I aren’t expected to find out the truth about her death,” Kate said. “I know I’ve investigated things from time to time, but I want to make sure that we’re coming to teach a course and run a clinic. We’re not expected to run an investigation, are we?”
“Certainly not. My only hope is that in this course we may be able to spread a little basic feminism around, and suggest that if law and literature can speak to each other, so can law and life. As it’s lived, I mean, not as it turns up in the final published opinion. That’s why I want to go back and look at the cases we teach from the beginning, look at the depositions and the stories, not just at the briefs and the opinions. Maybe we can do a case one week and a novel the next. Something like that.”
“Well,” Kate intoned, “ ‘I’m more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society.’ Hannah Arendt said that; wrote it, in fact, to Jaspers. I’m inclined to agree. And a revolution at Schuyler Law sounds as near to the fringes as I can get without leaving academia altogether.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “we ought to talk about schedules. What day of the week are we going to do this?”
“It’s up to you,” Kate said, “seeing as how you’re taking it as part of your usual schedule. I can probably make it any day, as long as it’s the afternoon, or at least very late in the morning.”
“Good. How’s Wednesday?”
“The very day I would have preferred,” Kate said. “Wednesday is such a nice, middle day, so neatly balanced on both sides of the workweek.”
“Wednesday afternoon it is. If it’s all right with you, I’ll arrange the hour and the room. Now, shall we have an exam or a paper?”
“Oh, let’s have an exam,” Kate said. “I never give exams, and I read too many papers in my line of work. Besides, if we word the questions carefully, we may actually find out what they’ve learned from us.”
“I warn you, that may be a shock.”
“I’ve said my prayers. It’s too late now to worry about shocks. Are you planning to give me all those papers?”
“If you can bear it. They’re the cases I thought we might use, around which I hope you will drape the proper literary texts. Literary critics are allowable, if they can be read without a French dictionary.”
“Well,” Kate said, taking the stack of paper from him, “I’ll do my best. What are we calling the course?”
“ ‘Women in Law and Literature’ is what I thought of. Simple, direct, and allowing almost any discussion of anything.”
“And less likely to flutter the dovecotes than something with feminism in the title.”
“I see you’re getting the picture.”
Kate leaned back in her chair and gazed at him, openly and frankly. He looked back with those bright, blue eyes. Don’t worry, they promised, this isn’t going to lead anywhere but to a small, local awakening in a brain-dead law school. Your husband’s coming to dear old Schuyler Law, too; nothing to worry about for a minute.
This was all of course unsaid, but Kate heard it just the same. The trouble is, she told herself, I’m vulnerable now. Anything can push me off my center; anything can offer excitement of the sort that means one doesn’t really have to ask oneself what the hell she thinks she’s doing.
“Do you have an envelope for all these?” she said, lifting the papers.
“Sorry. Of course I do. Let me put you in a taxi.” He waved for the check. God only knew, Kate thought, what he made at that law school and if he could really afford this dinner. But the Oak Room with all its elegance had been his idea; perhaps the law school was paying. She had, when you came right down to it, been recruited, and perhaps he wanted to make an agreeable impression. Anything a step above McDonald’s would have done for her, or even someone’s office, but he could not have known that.
“I think I’ll walk,” she said as they waited for his credit card to be returned, “even having to lug all this.” She hefted the envelope he had given her. “Lawyers do churn out paper, don’t they? But I like walking after dinner. It clears the sinuses.”
“You think it’s safe?”
“Nothing’s safe. But Fifty-ninth Street and then Broadway is quite all right at this hour. I only walk on streets I know and trust, which is more than I can say about the people I teach courses with.” Her smile softened the words.
Together they made their way out onto Fifty-ninth Street. Kate hoped he would not offer to walk with her, and he did not. That he knew the evening had accomplished all that could have been accomplished, and that further conversation would be tiresome, spoke well for him. Well, she could hear Reed saying, legal cases should be a pleasant change from Middlemarch.
* * *
Reed didn’t say it when she got home, because she said it for him.
“Of course,” she added, “one can always start with Susan Glaspell’s ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ one of those basic feminist texts, ignored for years, which tells the whole story.”
“Even I know it,” Reed said. “The men bumble around, and the women work out what really happened, because they know how to notice things and interpret the clues. It’s about proud male assumptions versus modest female observation. Right?”
“Do I catch a disdainful note?” Kate said. “Now, don’t you start giving me trouble. What about your clinic?” she asked, neatly passing the buck.
“It is going to be prisons. One of the benefits left over from my DA days is that I have a ready path to the head of the Board of Correction and, it is hoped, from there to state prisons. Anyway
, with or without connections, it’s going to be the state prison on Staten Island, half men and half women. Of the women, perhaps a tenth killed their husbands. You know, Kate, it wasn’t until I realized, thanks to you, how at loose ends I was that the possibility of this clinic suddenly loomed as something I very much wanted to do.”
“If you say so; what exactly will you do in your clinic at old Schuyler Law?”
“The students will study about the criminal justice system and represent prisoners. We’ll take habeases and cases against the prison about conditions, like inadequate medical care and lack of safety. Eventually the students will appear in court, before administrative agencies like the parole board, for instance. Of course, we practice first, we have moots.”
Kate’s eyebrows shot up with humorous exaggeration.
“Really, Kate, if you’re going to teach in a law school, you have to pick up a bit of the lingo. Moots are practice trials, and moot court, my love, is a sacred rite of a law-school education. I suspect even dear old Schuyler Law has them.”
“How many students in a clinic?” Kate asked, ignoring the temptation to persiflage. Badinage was the spice of their marriage, and Kate enjoyed it, but sooner or later one had to get down to practical matters.
“I’ve said ten students at the most, but they’ll probably give me twelve to be sure I have an overload. It’s the sort of thing these guys would do.”
“You mean these poor prisoners’ only chance of getting legal help is ten or twelve first-year law students?”
“Second year,” Reed said. “And without those students and the clinic, they wouldn’t have any chance at all. Of course I go to court with them; usually the students are wonderful, but sometimes a professor, me, has to speak up in court and say ‘Let me add something.’ Not often, if all goes well.”
“Explain to me again,” Kate said, “who these prisoners are exactly. Besides battered wives and illegal immigrants. You see, I have been listening.”
“Often prisoners have been told to plead guilty when they shouldn’t have, or serious errors occurred at the trial. Most of them are guilty of something, but not necessarily fairly convicted or sentenced.”
“Why?”
“Because the lawyers assigned to them have more cases and fewer resources than they should and can’t manage; some of them don’t know shit from shinola, or didn’t care; didn’t take the time to work out what ought to be done. Many assigned lawyers are great; some aren’t. Not all ignorant lawyers are public defenders, either, though I may have left you with that prejudiced impression from my days at the DA’s office. A lot of public defenders are damn good. In fact, they tend to get better lawyers than the DA’s office, because public defending is not a step toward higher things. John F. Kennedy, Junior, chose to be a DA, not a public defender.”
“I’m with you so far.”
“That’s about it. Doubtless you’ll hear particulars as we begin our new legal life together. There are all sorts of problems like prisoners being denied visitors for some unlawful reason—a wife has a record, that sort of thing.”
“I still don’t see why you couldn’t do this in a clinic on your home ground if it interests you so much.”
“I helped out from time to time with different clinics—discrimination, Title VII, class suits, gay rights, the rights of assembly. I told you that the school didn’t want to let me do a prison clinic, but the terrible truth, Kate, may be that I was too conventional to press hard. It took Blair’s invitation to get me started. After all, I was an important person on the regular faculty. Such an important person that Schuyler is willing to invite me, even for a clinic they probably aren’t gleefully anticipating. You see, I am changing, and how right you were about what had become of me.”
“What day are you doing your clinic? Blair and I teach on Wednesday afternoons.”
“Really, Kate, one doesn’t do clinics on one day like seminars. When the trial’s on, or when you have an appointment to meet with a prisoner or a judge, you go. Every day is nearer the mark.”
“Well, you can report to me on prisons and I can report to you on feminist insurgency. At least we won’t be graveled for lack of matter”
“Kate, you can’t think we ever were lacking in conversation.”
“It’s supposed to be the inevitable destiny of married couples. We’ve noticed them in restaurants.”
“We have never for one moment run out of conversation in a restaurant.” He sounded quite put out.
“The question for now,” Kate said, reaching out to touch him, “is what literature Blair and I are going to read with all these cases. Do you think law is ahead of literature in the matters of women’s rights?”
“No, my dear Kate, it is not. But start with ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ and then take up the case of the woman in Florida who beat her husband to death in her nightgown—that is, she was in her nightgown, not her husband—after he took up with another woman and insisted on leaving her, and she was convicted by a jury of all men.”
“Are you making this up?”
“You overestimate me,” Reed said. “Hoyt v. Florida; she sued on the basis of having had an all-male jury, but she lost. The right to women on a jury was won later by a man from Louisiana appealing because there were no women on the jury. Making men the argument for equal treatment between the sexes is a good ploy. Ask your Blair Whitson about it; he should know.”
“He better,” Kate said. “And he’s not my Blair Whitson, he’s yours.”
She hoped Reed wasn’t going to worry about Blair Whitson. Why should I think he would worry about Blair Whitson, Kate asked herself, when he never worried about anyone before? Because I am worried about Blair Whitson, Kate ruefully admitted. And I never found out if he was married. Please god he is. Or gay, of course, she added. That would do nicely.
Kate had gone back to reread le Carré after Harriet had mentioned him with such enthusiasm, starting at the beginning with Smiley’s first adventures. She had paused, with sudden amusement, over a remark in one of Smiley’s later cases: “Not of course that she knew anything, but what woman was ever stopped by a want of information.” Touché, George, she thought, and especially now.
For the first time she was afraid of making a fool of herself, afraid of becoming involved in unlikely explanations with angular, suspicious people.
—JOHN LE CARRÉ
A MURDER OF QUALITY
Four
“AND this,” Blair said, “is the seminar room we’ll be using. I’m sorry it’s in the basement, but there aren’t many seminar rooms in this establishment. We’ll be a nice change, us and a few eager students around a table, you at one end, me at the other. We’ve got about twenty students, by the way.”
“And why are they taking our seminar?” Kate reasonably asked.
“Because they suspect it will be easier than some other electives, and they like me, not for my blue eyes but because I occasionally remember their names without looking at a chart. And I don’t call on them unless they raise their hands. You,” he added with a certain wry effort at gallantry, “are an object of curiosity, insofar as they allow themselves to indulge in that time-wasting emotion. And some of them will be the few really good students, returnees mostly, who come here bravely and go on to do fine things.”
“Thanks,” Kate said. “You’ve cheered me up considerably.”
It was Kate’s first day at Schuyler Law. The faculty was in the habit of holding a cocktail party, really a reception for the students, to mark the new semester; Blair had urged Kate and Reed to attend. “It’s supposed to be for the students,” he had explained, “and is compulsory for the faculty. In fact, the party’s developed into a kind of reunion of buddies, the sort I’ve always imagined is enjoyed by an army unit or a fraternity group now well into middle age. Many of the students do come, feeling the time was well spent if their absence might be held against them, but most of the second- and third-year students skip it, pleading other compelling engagements.”<
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Kate had arrived early to be shown the seminar room and Blair’s office, which they were going to share. “Visiting faculty women, however exalted, do not rate offices around here,” Blair said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“It’s you who should mind. Won’t I be an intrusion?”
“Any intrusion is bearable one day a week. In the case of this particular intrusion, I expect eagerly to anticipate that day.” They had made their way from the basement floor to the higher floor devoted to offices. Blair flung open a door, held it while waving her inside with a flourish, closed it, and sat down on a chair while pointing her to its mate opposite.
“My office,” he said.
Kate sat down and looked around with frank curiosity. When she had canvassed the books and the view, she let her eyes stray to a picture of a woman on his desk.
“Your wife?” she asked. It seemed the most direct and the best way, although to what she was uncertain.
“Yes,” Blair said. “But we’re divorced. She decided she preferred a lawyer who made a bit more a year—well, a lot more a year. I keep her picture there to dissuade me from any impulsive moves toward marriage. We’re quite friendly; she even admits that I’m more interesting than her present husband, and I refrain from pointing out the difficulty of finding anyone less interesting than her present husband. Enough of that. Shall we descend to the cocktail party? Perhaps if we were to arrive early, it would indicate a certain enthusiasm on your part that might well be worth the effort.”
“Surely they can’t object to me as much as all that?” Kate said.
“They object to you on the purest, frankest grounds of sexism. They’re much more worried by Reed and his clinic. Not only has it shown up the lack of other nonsynthetic clinics, it always makes the Schuyler faculty nervous when the students are in danger of getting ideas.”
“I hope we may prove a danger by inculcating ideas,” Kate stiffly said.
“Let’s hope.”