Other people

by Sol Stein

  Sol Stein

  Other people

  in memory of

  TONY GODWIN

  for whom this book was being written

  and for

  CHARLES L. BRIEANT, Jr.

  friend and mentor in the law

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful for the counsel of three editors who saw me through the several drafts of this book, Patricia Day, Michaela Hamilton, and Marilee Talman, and to Judge Charles L. Brieant, Jr., whose voluminous notes on the law once again went beyond the demands of friendship. Tony Godwin, for whom this book was being written, died suddenly during the early stages of the work, but his severe requirements continued to instruct me. I want to thank also Dr. Alan Tulipan, who graciously gave his time, and Sheila Silver, a chance acquaintance who sent me a long letter that turned out to be more important to my purpose than she could know.

  One

  Archibald Widmer

  When I telephoned Thomassy that morning in March of 1974 and asked him to lunch, I counseled myself to muster a casual voice. As I waited for him to get on the line, I thought the protections are gone. I had reluctantly perceived that civil and well-educated people now accepted gratuitous violence against strangers as ordinary. Therefore I had to conclude that George Thomassy had chosen an appropriate profession in criminal law and I had not.

  Thomassy misinterpreted my casualness. He was preparing for trial, he said, and wasn't taking time for restaurant lunches.

  "I wouldn't mind joining you for a sandwich in your office," I said, hoping my insistence wouldn't seem pushy.

  Thomassy said absolutely nothing. It wasn't ill breeding. I took it to be a technique for extracting the most information without the commitment of even an acknowledging word.

  "George," I went on, "I wouldn't trouble you about something trivial. It's about a case."

  "Yours?"

  I realized he thought that I had run into a noncivil aspect of some client's case and was seeking his advice.

  "The victim is mine, not the case," I said.

  He waited for me to go on.

  "It's my daughter, Francine."

  Again, no sound from him.

  "It's rather…"

  He could have said Go on.

  "George?"

  He acknowledged his presence with a sound, but no more.

  "Look George, hell, she's been raped."

  At last he spoke. "Does she know the man?"

  "Yes."

  "Jesus, she's just a kid."

  Any other lawyer of my acquaintance would have immediately said I'm so sorry.

  "Francine is twenty-seven."

  "When did this happen?"

  "Tuesday," I said.

  "Is she all right?"

  It was ridiculous for me to expect from Thomassy the ritual responses I could hear from my friends. His questions were not etiquette. He was already at work.

  "I said is she all right?"

  "Yes," I said. Then, "No. She's frightened. The analyst she's been seeing suggested she consult a lawyer. I guess I'm the only lawyer she knows. She hadn't intended to tell me."

  "Has she been to a hospital?"

  "Yes. No serious damage. To her body, that is."

  "Did they take the tests?"

  "I didn't think to ask." The truth is I wouldn't have known to ask.

  "Has she been to the police?"

  "Yes. They took some notes. She's worried sick."

  "Why?"

  "The man lives in the apartment over her."

  That was when Thomassy said, "All right, let's have lunch."

  "When?" I asked.

  "How about today?"

  I didn't know whether we'd been disconnected or Thomassy'd simply hung up. I hated the idea of calling back, but I did.

  "George, shall I bring Francine to lunch?"

  "No."

  "I thought I'd save you time."

  "I want to hear what she told you without her around."

  It's a different world, criminal law. "What time?" I asked.

  "Twelve-thirty's okay."

  "At your office?"

  "Meet me at Dudley's," he said.

  When I report to you that Thomassy is regarded by other lawyers like myself as the best criminal lawyer in Westchester County, what is it I mean by "the best"? When a man runs a mile faster than any living human has heretofore, he has achieved an absolute, but how few of life's activities — art, pleasure, the law — can be so precisely determined! I remember William York Tindall used to say that his idea of perfection was to be able to put his legs up after a fine meal and listen to Mozart while smoking a Romeo and Julieta cigar. I knew exactly what he meant, though Mozart was by no means my favorite composer, and since the cigar makers fled Havana, Romeo and Julietas are not the smoke we once prized. If I had to be restricted to seeing one painting for the rest of my life, even if it was a Rouault or a Rembrandt, I should soon weary of it, but I can think of a small collection, perhaps a dozen or so, that might keep my eyes content. However, if you have been involved in a crime, and you need to deal with the law, you'll find that very few private individuals can hire a battery of attorneys; you usually pick one, and if the matter is important, you narrow your choice to the best. Hence Thomassy.

  At Yale, even before I entered the Law School, it was made clear to me that all of the lawyers who inhabited the social echelon I came from without exception practiced civil law. Criminal lawyers, even the best, had a touch of taint. Their affairs caused them to associate not with the kind of people they would invite to their homes, but with labor racketeers, embezzlers, Sicilians, and worse. Moreover, criminal law was comparatively unremunerative except for those few lawyers who were primarily actors or outlaws.

  And so, since I knew what was expected of me, I prepared myself for a career of luncheons in executive dining rooms in which, even today, women are not permitted with grace, and for the gentle world in which adversaries were friends. When we met, we always talked of something else before we got down to business. The stakes in our kind of law are always measured, ultimately, in dollars. In criminal law, the stakes are usually a man's freedom, and under some conditions could mean a man's life.

  Nevertheless, I was fascinated by criminal law, and read the cases as if they were a form of specialized pornography contrived for my pleasure. I kept in touch with a few criminal lawyers so that, on occasion, I could derive some vicarious satisfaction from the brinksmanship of their cases. Above all, I maintained my now decade-long acquaintanceship with Thomassy, who practiced in the county in which I had always made my home. I sometimes thought, if my ancestors had come from Armenia instead of England, and if I had the perfectionist zeal that animates a man moving up from the bottom of the ladder rather than the ennui that lazies one at the top, I might have been like Thomassy. In America we toy with the idea that because we are a highly mobile society, we are not greatly stratified; it is supreme nonsense. In a way we are more class conscious than the Europeans because you cannot always pigeonhole an American by his accent or dress, and with newcomers you are compelled to watch carefully for the telltale nuance. However, in all classes we share one addiction: we admire winners. We root for the underdog so long as he is pushing for the top. Pity never excites us as much as triumph. We think of ourselves as sportsmanlike, but what we do is savagely tear down goal posts when our team wins.

  The very naive think winning unimportant. When trouble strikes, they are quick to change their minds. I was once involved in a matter that affected not only my client but also the national interest. The matter was out of my field because money was not the issue. Moreover, it was a matter in which the outcome could not be compromised; we either won or lost totally. I phoned Edward Bennett Williams in Washington, and though we had nev
er spoken before, within two minutes of hearing the subject of my concern, he said, "Come on down." He took the case and, of course, won it. But most criminal matters — the felonies that attract our interest in newspapers and worry us when they invade our neighborhoods — are tried locally, and one wants as advocate a lawyer who knows the individuals and customs of the courts in the immediate area. Like the nearly million other inhabitants of Westchester, if I were accused of a crime, particularly if I were guilty, I would want only Thomassy to represent me. I dread the possibility that Thomassy might become a judge and hence unavailable to me except as a friend. Besides, the quality one pretends to look for in a judge is fairness. That is not Thomassy's virtue. The boxers and ball players whom we adulate are known for their victories and not for their sportsmanship.

  Please don't misconstrue my intent; Thomassy has as many surface flaws as good leather. He doesn't pay attention to his clothes. A glen plaid suit for everyday wear, a dark blue suit for special occasions, a knit tie that shows up two or three times a week, cordovan wing-tip shoes that are rarely polished. I have observed him at dinner parties. He does not keep his left hand in his lap. He sometimes begins eating a moment before everyone else. If someone bores him, Thomassy does not dissemble. You'd think that the son of an immigrant would pay more attention to the tenuous signs of class, but Thomassy seems to lack interest in passing into the Wasp superstructure of lawyerdom. Yet there is about him none of that reserve from which some lawyers look down at humankind in trouble. He maintains the aspect of a calm observer, but one knows that sinew binds the bones of his lank frame, that he is a jungle fighter of Orde Wingate's class, a puma among the cats of criminal law.

  Thomassy claims he was born on January 1, 1931, at 12:01 A.M. in Oswego, New York. The circumstances were suspicious. The Oswego Herald had offered, in that depression year, a $500 prize for the first child born in the new year, and it is said that the doctor attending Thomassy's mother took a potentially dangerous step in keeping the child's head from emerging for a full five minutes in order that his parents might win the award. Nineteen thirty-one was interesting for other reasons than Thomassy's slightly delayed birth. That year Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law was a smash on Broadway. Across the ocean, Oswald Mosley formed a fascist party in Britain; Pierre Laval, of similar predilections, was elected Premier of France; German millionaires Hugenberg, Kirdorf, Thyssen, and Schroder undertook to support the Nazi Party; and Pius XI issued his encyclical on the new social order. In innocent America, Jane Addams and Nicholas Murray Butler shared the Nobel Peace Prize, and Jehovah's Witnesses greatly expanded their organization in anticipation of the apocalypse.

  My name is Archibald Widmer, and I will always remember the lunch with Thomassy that changed the course of his life.

  Comment by Haig Thomassian

  I talk to you the truth. I don't want to call the boy George. My wife Marya, may she rest in peace, herself named after the mother of Jesus, we are in this new country only four years, she gives birth to a son, and calls him George, an American name used by everybody, especially Greeks. He is son of successful horse dealer who owes money to nobody. He should have been christened Haig after me, or Armen after his grandfather. For me, George sounds like a foreigner.

  Look you, my hands are rough from work but my head is full of Armenian truth from centuries. Greeks call themselves what, the cradle of civilization, assfuckers! Armenians took civilization out of the cradle! Smart Jews, America is full of them, they learn from suffering, eh? When George was a boy, millions of Jews killed in Europe, smart ones, dumb ones. When I meet a Jew I tell him before this century began, 200,000 Armenians in Turkey, massacred! In Constantinople, 7,000 killed like pigs. In 1909, in Cilicia and Syria, 20,000 more Armenians butchered. During the Great War, the Turks — may their women die in childbirth — tried to force our women and children to take Islam, to make Moslems out of the first nation to be Christian in the world!

  In 1920,I have a good memory, this Woodrow Wilson, President of America, refuses to lift a finger to protect Armenia. My father says if America will not come to us, we go to America.

  Armenians are the greatest horse breeders in the world. What is a man without a horse? As soon as we earn some extra dollars, I give to my son, who must carry on this holy tradition, a pony. I go out with him Saturday, Sunday, ride, ride, ride, and what Georgie says? He is bored by horses. Sick! I show him how I always sell right horse to right people, how, if hurt horse is brought to Haig Thomassian, I make horse well, not shoot. I never give up. I take Georgie to cowboy movies. I show him wagon trains. I tell George who do you think pulled them, Jews? Horses made America. America needs horsemen. I tell George a man on a horse is a man not to be conquered. The kid's face looks up at me with pretend respect but his eyes say bullshit. I shout at him a horse means freedom, he looks away. His eyes are already on college, the city, somewhere else.

  I knew he would leave, but could I even in an old-country nightmare imagine he would change his name to Thomassy, an act of treason against his own father! He can blah-blah-blah in court, but what is he? An Armenian who cannot ride a horse is like a Jew. The cossacks slaughtered the Jews. Whoever saw a Jew master a horse?

  In 1969 my wife dies. George Big Shot comes to Oswego, at the funeral tells the story of Marya, her whole life from a little girl, and I ask him where does he know so much, not from me. He shakes my hand as if I am the boy. I tell him now is the time to move back, we have plenty crime in Oswego, good business for lawyers. He refuses me. I tell you, in his soul my son is a Turk.

  Sure, on my birthdays the telephone rings, his secretary says "George Thomassy calling," and I yell at her, "Thomassian, Thomassian!" Then I hear George's voice. I feel he wants to talk, ask questions about what I do, how I feel, but I give him the least words, "yes" or "no," until he gives up. Even if he becomes the biggest lawyer in the whole United States, to me, as an Armenian, he is nothing.

  ~~~

  Dudley's was a six-minute drive from Thomassy's office, an oddball restaurant on Rockledge Avenue in Ossining, wedged between houses that had seen better days. Around the corner from Dudley's was Liberty Street, which led to Sing Sing, and the caged vehicles carrying prisoners often passed Dudley's front door.

  Inside, you stepped into another universe, thick purple carpeting, antique signs on the walls, and cascades of living plants under a bank of plant lights artfully concealed in the skylight. On Fridays, in the old days, you were likely to find John Cheever at a table with friends, the folk singer Tom Glazer, editors wooing authors, middle-class women with a fondness for Dudley's very large lunchtime cocktails, and the oversize carafes of wine. The menu was eccentric — wildflower omelets in season, superb soups, a cheesecake that rivaled that of Lindy's in its heyday. Dudley's had imperfections: the washrooms were sometimes cleaned so casually experienced customers would do their washing up elsewhere; the bench seats sometimes gathered enough breadcrumbs to satisfy a pigeon. The young waitresses, as lovely as the cascading plants, sometimes served the host before serving his guest, but one didn't mind. It was an ambience that made Thomassy comfortable.

  Thomassy looked as if a make-up man had dusted shadows under his eyes. He had always seemed younger than his age, but now, despite his admirable energy, he looked forty-four. No longer the boy wonder.

  "How've you been?" I asked him.

  "I put on a blue sock and a black sock this morning. My secretary noticed."

  "You ought to get yourself a wife."

  "Thanks," he said and shut me off.

  I hadn't meant it as an intrusion into his private life. I suppose we were all aware of the succession of attractive women he squired about on occasion. One couldn't help wondering why Thomassy avoided anything resembling a permanent relationship. It was as if his women were cases also, occupying his attention for a time, then put out of mind.

  "Who's the analyst who suggested your daughter see a lawyer?"

  "Remember you gave me a reprint of an article on the
three types of human personality?"

  "I gave a lot of those away. What was the name of the psychiatrist?"

  "Gunther Koch," I said.

  "That's right," said Thomassy. "Now I remember."

  "You ever meet the man?"

  "No. Damn, it's a small world. I give you something to read, and your daughter ends up on his couch. How long has she been seeing this Dr. Koch?"

  "Maybe half a year or more. My wife and I encouraged her."

  "Why is she seeing an analyst?" Insomnia.

  "A lot of people have insomnia," he said impatiently.

  "Not like hers. She'd go weeks without a good night's sleep. Deep circles under her eyes. On only two or three hours' sleep some nights, you get desperate. She did. I suspect she was taking at least three Seconals a night for a month when Priscilla and I found out."

  "Who's her doctor?"

  "She didn't get them on prescription. Someone at the U.N. was selling them to her. Anyway, it was a palliative, not a cure. We encouraged her to see Dr. Koch to get at the source of her restlessness."

  "Was she that way as a child?"

  "Not at all. It started right after college. George, you sound like an analyst."

  "Any analyst who sounds lilce me ought to be fired. Did you ever witness a rape trial?"

  "No."

  "Read a transcript?"

  "No."

  "Everything gets dragged out."

  I hated the seamy things adversaries seemed to have to pull out of witnesses in criminal trials. It violated my sense of privacy to open boxes that should have stayed shut.

  "Ned, when it comes to cases of this sort, your daughter — and you, too — may bump into surprises. You don't like surprises."

  "I'm glad you understand," I said.

  "Sure you want to go further?"

  "I'm merely the Miles Standish here," I said. "It's not my choice."

  "You know Cunham?"

  "Only by name."

  "He's interested in cases that'll keep him in the newspapers."