The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  MR. MAMRY: A personal nature?

  MR. JORDAN: Phil—

  MR. MAMRY: No, Mr. Jordan. I’d like to hear. Go on, Mr. Harrow.

  MR. HARROW: Look. I was . . . I had a thing going with Sarah. With Mr. Mayer’s wife.

  MR. MAYER: These are lies and deceptions, your honor!

  MR. MAMRY: Mr. Mayer, please sit down. Mr. Harrow, what are you implying?

  MR. HARROW: Look, it never got physical. It was what you’d call an attraction from afar. A poetry sort of thing. Like in, do you know the opera—

  MR. MAYER: Poetry? You vile illiterate—

  MR. MAMRY: Mr. Mayer, I’ll ask you to leave if you interrupt again. Mr. Harrow.

  MR. HARROW: I . . . Mr. Arbitrator, I don’t know how to put this. Abbie over there, he and his wife were like, some kind of swingers. You know what I mean. Like, they engaged in—

  MR. MAMRY: Yes, Mr. Harrow. I too live in the twentieth century. I understand the term. I don’t claim that I understand the broader contextual relevance in this particular instance, but as Maimonides said, “We are like those who, though beholding frequent flashes of lightning, still find themselves in the thickest darkness of the night.” So please, Mr. Harrow, flash on.

  MR. HARROW: Well, I always just got this feeling that they were, how can I say it, swinging at me. I mean, that Sarah was. And I never had a reason to think that Abbie was anything but all for it. Hell, that was one of the first things he ever said to me. He said, “Take a chance with my wife.” I’m not making that up, Your Honor. “Take a chance with my wife.” But, well, I wanted to clear the air. I’m not a bad guy, and if I was going to get involved in that sort of thing, I was going to keep it, you know, classy.

  MR. BEN DAVID: In other words, Mr. Harrow, you’re asking us to believe that this sub rosa communication with your business partner’s brother—who was himself, per your claims—a business partner as well, was because of some kind of infatuation with the man’s wife?

  A: I’m not sure if I understood the question, but yeah. I mean, my point is that he seemed pretty okay with it.

  Q: Pretty okay with . . . ?

  A: My interest. I mean, I assumed he had some on the side as well. I mean, it was no secret that he and Sarah—that’s his wife—moved out here in the first place because he had some lady friend back in NYC. I always got the sense that he knocked her up. Talk about prophylactics, am I right judge? Which is what I mean when I say you’ve gotta keep this sort of thing classy. Cause that, well, that ain’t classy.

  Q: Mr. Harrow. Phillip. I want to make sure I follow you here.

  MR. MAMRY: No, Mr. Ben David. I’m going to intervene here. You’ve insinuated that Mr. Harrow here was attempting to cut his own business partner, Ms. Mayer, out of this deal to begin with, which, obviously, would . . . obviate certain aspects of their argument regarding Mr. Mayer’s responsibility to make either or both of them whole in this whole deal. Mr. Harrow contends that these backdoor communiques—the one for which you’ve submitted evidence, anyway—constituted an attempt, abortive or otherwise, to get permission to conduct an extramarital affair with Mr. Mayer’s wife, which, however distasteful or contrary to the . . . received morality of our times, would nevertheless constitute a strong argument contra that insinuation. Have I got that essentially correct? You don’t need to answer. Is there anything else?

  MR. BEN DAVID: No, Mr. Arbitrator.

  MR. MAMRY: Mr. Jordan, any redirect?

  MR. JORDAN: No.

  MR. MAMRY: All right. Is there anything else, Mr. Jordan?

  MR. JORDAN: We rest.

  MR. MAMRY: Good. Then let’s take a quick break. Once more, I must find myself the gentleman’s lounge. And we’ll resume with Mr. Ben David’s first witness.

  [RECESS]

  DIRECT EXAMINATION OF ABBOT “ABBIE” MAYER

  MR. MAMRY: And we’re back.

  MR. BEN DAVID: Could you state your name?

  MR. MAYER: Abbot Mayer. I go by Abbie.

  Q: And your occupation.

  A: I am an architect by training and avocation, a property developer by trade.

  Q: Your relationship to MH Partners?

  A: None.

  Q: None?

  A: Veronica is my sister, and Phil and I were friendly, and my firm did business with them.

  Q: What kind of business?

  A: You think a lawyer and a puffed-up backhoe driver can lay out a bedroom community or meet a modern municipal design standard?

  MR. HARROW: Bedroom community? You smug motherfucker, that was my suggestion.

  MR. MAMRY: Mr. Harrow, let’s try to conduct this hearing as if it’s entirely boring, shall we?

  MR. BEN DAVID: Abbie, I’m just going to ask you to describe in your own words what happened.

  MR. MAYER: Very well. As has been stated, my wife and I moved to Pittsburgh a number of years ago. And yes, Mr. Mamry, I’ll just go right out and say it, since my sister and her preposterous lackey over there wish to smear me with it, I came, in part, because I received a vision from God. It isn’t au courrant to talk about God, but I have a feeling, Mr. Mamry, that you are a believer, and perhaps you’ll have some understanding.

  I was never an especially religious man, but one day, sitting in temple—I was only there because of an obligation to my wife’s family—I was daydreaming and staring at a window when God spoke to me. Of course, God doesn’t speak; it’s as silly to imagine the Lord uttering actual words as it is to imagine that, because we are made in God’s image, He therefore resembles in some actual, physical way, a human being. As we are, body and soul, afterimages of the totality and universality of the Divine, frozen, sub-photographic images of a vastness of being that is and moves, so too is our language less even than an echo of the primordial verb of existence. God, I learned, doesn’t speak to men at all, but rather puts into their minds and hearts the knowledge of and belief in that which He would—if He did, if He even could, speak—have said.

  MR. MAMRY: That’s both deeply poetical and—it strikes me—wholly correct, Mr. Mayer. Also, entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand. Hashem may be the mover of all things, but yet he consigns to man alone the responsibility of conducting binding arbitration. I’m sure the Talmud has something to say about it. But for now, maybe we can continue with the narrative.

  MR. MAYER: Yes, well, as I said, I wasn’t a religious person; I suppose I’m still not in the strict sense of the word. I am not, in other words, an attender of services. And I might get more mileage if I just called it a realization or a Eureka moment or some other such banal neologism. I could say I was a man who, having achieved a serious measure of professional success as an architect, secretly hated his work and hated his life and at a sudden thunderclap of personal insight decided, as Rilke said, that you must change your life.

  But I cannot believe that this change came from within me. It came from without. It was implanted in me, emplaced. It is relevant to me. That is what I choose to believe. So you can all sneer if you like, or assert that because my wife and I weren’t the model of petit-bourgeois rectitude, that therefore all this God told me to do it mumbo-jumbo is self-serving and a lie. But why would I make myself look mad unless I truly believed? I would not.

  It is, however, also true that, yes, I came out here to make money. My sister was doing very well, and although the image of the architect is rather glamorous, I suppose, it is a difficult business. One depends on clients who have far too much to say about how you do your own job, and much of it is drudgery. I had managed to carve out a place as something more like an academic. In fact, I still lecture from time to time. But living one honorarium to the next is quite exhausting and precarious. It’s like being an actor or musician. Unless you are very famous or are fortunate to be employed in a particularly excellent company or ensemble full time, one year’s success can be the next year’s poverty.

  So there was an obvious attraction, and Veronica seemed happy to have me, to have a person who could speak a slightly mor
e elevated language of aesthetics and design than Mr. Harrow, over there, with his quote “classy developments.”

  It also happens, unfortunately, that this business required that I involve myself with a number of unsavory elements, that is to say, that I found both my sister and Mr. Harrow willing to undertake legal and ethical shortcuts in order to serve their—and, I admit, my—personal financial ends. This often involved deliberately underbidding on properties and using political connections to nudge or coerce reluctant owners to sell. I think they just implied that I was the one who had the close personal connections with these folks, which couldn’t be further from the truth, of course. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

  Well, I’ll admit it. I went along with this for a while, but eventually, it just got to be too much. Their greed—I don’t hesitate to use the word—was overwhelming, and their methods simply abhorrent to me. Now, they’d like you to believe that I slunk around and did this all with them, threw in with these flesh-peddlers operating under the guise of darkness, but I was perfectly up front. I told them that they could buy me out, pay me for my considerable work in acquiring these properties. I say considerable work. I wasn’t just, as they’d like you to believe, acting as a conduit for money not my own. I was the one who met with realtors, who examined maps, who laid out street plans, who spec’d designs for housing units. I worked my—excuse me, Mr. Mamry—my ass off. I said, here, pay me, find someone else to hold onto these, and I’ll step away. Which they were obviously reluctant to do, because, as I said, the very nature of these deals required a person like myself to act as, in effect, a front man.

  So, seeing that they weren’t going to cooperate in all this, I just said, to hell with it. I’d known Arthur—Mr. Imlak—socially for a while, and I knew he already had some property interests down in the Uniontown area. So I approached him, and he said he’d take pretty much all of it off my hands for a not at all unreasonable sum, a sum which, moreover, he said he could deliver in cash on the barrelhead, so to speak. And I made a quite generous offer, if I do say so, to Veronica and Phil, which was to split the whole deal fifty-fifty, and then she could go her way, and I could go mine. Which they turned down. The thing they’re neglecting to tell you is that in addition to the sale money, Art was offering—did offer—a cut of future royalties from gas and mineral extraction, so this whole business about taking a loss is totally bogus. They’re taking a loss because they walked away from a deal that I was perfectly within my rights to make. And that, as they say, is that.

  Q: Thank you. And—

  A: I’m sorry, but also, one more thing: Phil Harrow never fucked my wife.

  MR. MAMRY: Yes, well, and for I hope the last time, yikes. But okay. We’ll try to obey the rules of decorum by covering our profanities with insincere apologies for deploying them in the first place.

  MR. MAYER: Sure. Phil Harrow never—I’m sorry, Mr. Arbitrator—fucked my wife.

  MR. BEN DAVID: Abbie, you mentioned future royalties?

  A: Yes. Arthur can probably explain it in better detail. It’s a process they’re developing to extract gas from underground rock formations. Very promising, apparently. So there is the potential for millions in royalties down the road.

  Q: And you say they walked away from that?

  A: Extraordinary though it may seem.

  Q: Did you ever consider yourself under contract to hold these properties for MH Partners?

  A: I considered that one possibility. A better one came along. I was within my rights to make that decision. It’s not my fault that Phil and Veronica wanted to go another way. They should have bought the land themselves, then.

  Q: You never signed anything? You never promised anything?

  A: Not of that nature.

  Q: And insofar as they contend you sprang this all on them, you say that is not, in fact, the case.

  A: It’s not the case.

  Q: Thank you, Mr. Mayer. That’s all from me.

  MR. MAMRY: Cross, Mr. Jordan?

  CROSS-EXAMINATION OF ABBOT “ABBIE” MAYER

  MR. JORDAN: Mr. Mayer, do you own property in Fayette County?

  A: Yes.

  Q: And would it be fair to say that Mr. Imlak was instrumental in your acquisition of this property?

  A: That’s my sister’s theory. She is, as usual, exaggerating.

  Q: You didn’t buy this property from Mr. Imlak?

  A: Indirectly.

  Q: To what end?

  A: To what what end?

  Q: Let me rephrase the question. Why did you purchase this property?

  A: It seemed like a good investment. I was looking for a place to build a house.

  Q: A house that you saw in one of these visions of yours?

  A: You can be as snide as you like, but which one of us is an instrument of the Lord, and which is just a hack lawyer?

  Q: Is that a no?

  A: Yes. I perceived, in one of these visions of mine, as you so disdainfully put it, a highway rising along the face of a mountain, and off to the left beside it a clearing where I would one day reside.

  Q: And it is your testimony that these, shall we say, religious convictions—

  A: No.

  Q: No?

  A: I would not use that term.

  Q: Convictions, Mr. Mayer? You have no convictions?

  A: I would not use the term religious.

  MR. MAMRY: Once more into the breach. I think I understand that you’re trying to disestablish Mr. Mayer’s credibility by painting him as a religious nut. I take the hint. For what is, I hope, the last time, I’m going to remind everyone that this isn’t a court. There’s no jury to try to impress. Consider your efforts to impeach Mr. Mayer noted. Is there any other reason for this line of questioning?

  MR. JORDAN: There is, Mr. Arbitrator. It’s to establish collusion between Mr. Mayer and Mr. Imlak.

  MR. MAMRY: Oh, collusion. Oh, yes, good. A secret deal to undercut a secret deal. I have to tell you gentlemen, and lady, that this is one of the more unusual, which is not to say uninteresting, disputes I’ve had the professional pleasure to preside over in my days. I’m going to have a hard time splitting this baby indeed. Perhaps if I bash it, candy will fall out, like a piñata. Go ahead, Mr. Jordan.

  MR. JORDAN: Thank you. Mr. Mayer, would you answer the question?

  A: What was the question?

  Q: Isn’t it true that Mr. Imlak initially refused to sell you the property on which you later built your residence?

  A: I didn’t even know him at the time.

  Q: So you’ve claimed.

  MR. BEN DAVID: Oh, come on.

  MR. MAMRY: Yes, I’m inclined to agree. Mr. Jordan, we understand you’re calling Mr. Mayer’s story into question.

  MR. JORDAN: Isn’t it the case, Mr. Mayer, you proposed, as a quid pro quo to Mr. Imlak, that if he were to sell you this piece of property, you would be able to assist him in purchasing parcels of land pursuant to his own business interests at below-market values?

  A: No.

  Q: It isn’t?

  A: No.

  Q: Mr. Mayer, who is Sheryl Ellen Larimer?

  A: She’s a county commissioner in Fayette County.

  Q: Currently.

  A: Yes, currently. What about it?

  Q: Mr. Mayer, would you call her one of these, uh, unsavory elements?

  A: Well, you know what they say about politicians.

  Q: Is that a yes?

  A: It’s a maybe.

  Q: It was a yes or no question.

  A: And yet here we are. Stuck in the middle with you.

  Q: Mr. Mayer—

  A: Look, what do you want me to say? Sherri is a . . . You do business with the people in office. Sometimes the promised land is already occupied when you arrive.

  MR. IMLAK: Goddamnit.

  MR. MAMRY: I’m sorry, Mr. Imlak?

  MR. BEN DAVID: It’s nothing, Mr. Arbitrator.

  MR. JORDAN: Mr. Mayer, you said something interesting there. You said the land wa
s already occupied. What did you mean by that?

  A: Just that, that we bought . . .

  Q: Mr. Mayer, you think very highly of your intellect, don’t you?

  A: I hold myself in a healthy regard.

  Q: And yet, in fact, the man sitting beside you, Arthur Imlak, a far superior businessman, has been manipulating—

  A: Oh please.

  Q: —this process, and you, from the outset. Through his agent, this Sherri Larimer. Whose strong-arm tactics—

  A: Veronica, what did you tell him? What did you say you, you, you woman—

  Q: Don’t look at her, Mr. Mayer, look at me. I’m asking the questions here. Was it you who suggested a ploy to frame a local official, or was it Sherri Larimer? Do you know, Mr. Mayer, who this Larimer woman’s largest campaign contributor was? How long have the three of you—

  MR. IMLAK: Goddamnit!

  MR. BEN DAVID: Arthur.

  MR. IMLAK: Call a caucus, Dave.

  MR. BEN DAVID: Mr. Arbitrator, may I have a moment to caucus with my clients.

  MR. MAMRY: Client, Mr. Ben David. You only have one. Mr. Imlak, I understand, is just a witness.

  MR. BEN DAVID: Yes, of course. Client.

  MR. JORDAN: Mr. Arbitrator, he can’t confer with his client during cross!

  MR. MAMRY: Au contraire, counselor. I see Mr. Ben David isn’t the only aspiring DA in the room. Take five, as they say. I think we can all stand to cool down. Fan yourselves. Eat a Snickers.

  [RECESS]

  MR. MAMRY: During the recess, I spoke to both counselors, and it appears that we have reached an amicable agreement here. I mean amicable in the courtroom, the legal, uh, sense, since no one seems in any particular rush to fall into the other’s arms. Regardless, agreement is the point of this exercise. I suppose that renders the preceding . . . proceedings a waste of time, in a sense, but all things that end justly are worth the passage. It is remarkable, isn’t it, just how much truth the world can contain. Unless either party has a substantive dispute with the actual conduct of this arbitration? No? Okay, then. Obviously we can dispense with the usual post-arbitration briefs. Counselors, what I would like is for you to each submit to me a summary brief of the agreement we think we reached in sidebar. I’ll make sure that we are, in fact, in harmony, and then we will all go on our merry way, thank God. Usually we’d have forty-five days from the conclusion of the arbitration, but since there are no longer issues in dispute, shall we say thirty? In time for Shavuot.