“I think he’s humiliated. Sam said he small-talked the whole night about some water pipe the city’s installing in Connecticut Avenue, how it’ll improve the pressure throughout his neighborhood. Things like that. The cleanliness of the carpets in the lobby of his building.”
“It will get better for Rodney when my confirmation is over.”
“Did you know that journalists have been calling his chambers to ask him how he feels about his daughter sleeping with Manny Arroyo? Can you imagine what that must be like for him?”
Manny bit his lip. He moved around to the kitchen side of the counter, picked up his milky glass and rinsed it. Cassandra wanted him to think about what this experience was like for Rodney Sykes? Except it was not Manny’s job to worry about Rodney’s feelings, or anyone else’s. That’s fucking life, he wanted to say. Everyone gets humiliated and fucked over. And everyone has to find the strength to endure their suffering, alone. But he didn’t say anything. He put his glass in the dishwasher.
“Manny, will you be kind to him?” Cassandra’s voice cracked. “You’re going to work with him for years in very close quarters. You don’t have to like him, and God knows you’re right about his faults. He’s too slavish in all the ways you say. But he’s not a bad man. He was a terrible father, and he’s probably a terrible justice, but he means well. He has always meant well. I can’t bear for him to suffer.”
Cassandra rested her feet on the floor. She leaned forward in the chair, facing Manny, pleading for a father who had long angered her and let her down, just because of her relationship with him. The sacred bond between children and their parents. Carmen and Lonny would likely do the same for him, no matter if he fought with them, berated them, and controlled their lives. Would his unborn child fight for him, too, if Manny were so attacked? I can’t bear for him to suffer. Oh, the unbridled joy, the back-tingling, blinding pleasure of being a father again.
“I can promise you that I’ll be civil to Rodney for the rest of my life. I feel no animosity toward him whatsoever.”
Cassandra nodded. “Just don’t attack him unnecessarily. With sarcasm and all that.”
“Well, I’m going to disagree with him, and dissenting against wrong opinions is part of my job.”
“Just don’t make your attacks personal. That’s all I’m asking. Let your criticism be principled without being mean. You know the line. Go for his jurisprudence, not his character.”
“Rodney has a thicker skin than you think.”
“I’m sure he does, but I don’t care. Just give him some respect.”
Having said her piece, Cassandra sat back in the chair. Somehow she seemed vulnerable and aggressive simultaneously.
“All right,” said Manny. “I’ll try.”
Not until Manny stood beside Chief Justice Eberly in the Supreme Court’s private conference room, with his right hand raised and his left hand lying flat against a leather-covered Bible, did he consider the significance of the two oaths that he was about to take. The full Senate had hastily confirmed him a day earlier, 73–25, which he watched on CNN, but had only briefly registered. He was too busy organizing chambers, reading briefs, furiously trying to catch up on cases to be argued in the next weeks, and he had even spent his night interviewing young lawyers for his two remaining clerkships—they had to get started right away. Now Eberly’s long, jowly face was visible before him, and never again would Manny be interviewed or assessed for a job. Never again would he be held accountable to a more powerful person’s standards of decorum, right thinking, or suitable approach. He would have eight equal colleagues on the Court, but no one above him, not even the Chief, for the rest of his life. He was on the verge of becoming a Unitary Executive of the most unusual sort, in certain ways more powerful than any president, governor or mayor in the land. A lifetime appointment.
“Repeat after me,” said Charles Eberly.
Eberly intoned the lengthy general federal oath, phrase by phrase, which commanded Manny to swear his allegiance to the U.S. Constitution. Manny repeated it slowly, standing up straight, speaking in his deepest voice. Nothing quite like this satisfaction, his kids and parents watching from the far side of the conference table, standing beside his buddy Tommy Wellens from Baylor, Gordon Kale, and even Sonia, with her hand resting on Carmen’s shoulder.
He finished his recitation. Eberly congratulated him, shook his hand. “Now we go downstairs.” The Chief led him toward the door.
Manny’s mother approached before he could leave the room, teary-eyed, wanting a hug. “Not yet, Mama.” He held her small shoulders and gently thrust her away from him. “Nothing’s official until I take the second oath downstairs.”
His mother hugged and kissed him anyway.
“You don’t have to be so superstitious, Emmanuel. It’s happening. You can’t jinx it.”
On the stairs, Jeremy Rimm jogged up to meet him halfway, and then turned to walk down beside him, whispering. “I got Cassandra to take a seat in the front row. Give her a smile when you enter.”
Manny chuckled, shaking his head. “If you still need us to keep up the fiction, Jeremy, she should have been upstairs. You White House guys are off your game. That’s the kind of thing the press notices.”
“She was late. We had no choice.”
“Well, it certainly doesn’t matter to me.”
Dozens of cameras clicked as Manny followed the Chief Justice into the East Conference Room. A couple of powerful standing lights were positioned in the back corners of the room, bookending a wall of reporters. The place was filled but for a few empty chairs in the front row, reserved for Arroyo’s family. Cassandra was already seated in that row, wearing makeup and a dark green suit, with an inscrutable smile plastered across her face. Manny smiled and nodded at her, as requested.
Chief Justice Eberly stood with him before the huge fireplace, beneath Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of John Marshall. Eberly cleared his gravelly throat and launched into his set speech about how Manny’s official investiture would occur at an upcoming date, but that he was taking the judicial oath today so he could launch right into his copious work for the Court.
“Can I have the Arroyo family up here, please?” Manny’s mother, father and children approached, Lonny rocking back and forth with embarrassment, Carmen, as usual, happiest in the spotlight, beaming her broad smile, breaking hearts already, just shy of 15. His mother took the Bible from Eberly’s outstretched hand and held it out for Manny to place his left hand on. Again the future Justice raised his right hand in the air.
“Repeat after me,” grumbled Charles Eberly.
Manny swore his second oath, this one taken exclusively by federal judges, to administer justice without respect to persons, to give equal rights to poor and rich alike, and to faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon him as an Associate Justice for the United States Supreme Court. It didn’t take long, a minute at most. Manny finished and hugged his mother, earnestly now. Everyone in attendance stood and applauded, and someone whooped, Texas-style—had to be Tommy Wellens, that rascal. Eberly fanned them down and announced to the quieting crowd that there would be a reception down the hall in the Lawyers’ Lounge. He invited everyone to please join them to congratulate the new Justice.
As the room thinned out, Cassandra approached, tugging her green skirt down towards her knees, although it was hardly hemmed high. “Congratulations, Manny.” She gave him a brief hug, and he hugged her back. They had been civil to each other since that night—a brokered peace, of sorts—but he still wondered if was this a performance for the cameras. Or could it be genuine good wishes for a man she said didn’t deserve to be on the Court? She pulled away abruptly. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
“Not at all, Cassandra. Thank you for coming. I’ll see you at home.”
She tucked her purse tight against her side and scurried out.
Manny turned to follow the Chief Justice into the Lawyers’ Lounge, but then he caught Rodney Sykes’s wide-set, squ
inting eyes across the room. It was a shock to see Rodney, even though it had occurred to Manny that he would be at this ceremony. All the justices were present. Rodney was grayer and older than Manny remembered him—it had been years, after all—but it wasn’t just time’s passage. Justice Sykes looked older than he did in the Court’s annual photographs, and in his occasional C-SPAN appearances, and in his pictures in the papers. Rodney wore a handsome tie and navy jacket, his hair combed impeccably. No trace of tumult or humiliation, no obvious distress at being in the room with his scandalous daughter—who had probably not called him, and probably hadn’t said hello to him—or with Manny. Rodney approached, smiling opaquely. Photographers clicked away around them, capturing their meeting, pictures sure to be shared all over the Internet in a few hours, or printed in the back pages of national newspapers tomorrow morning, gossip columns, and SCOTUS blogs.
“Justice Arroyo.” Rodney shook Manny’s hand. “It is so good to see you again. My sincerest congratulations, and welcome to the Supreme Court.”
6
A PERSON’S A PERSON NO MATTER HOW SMALL
“We can cancel,” said Justice Sarah Kolmann, as her seated husband bent over their oak breakfast table and pressed his forehead against the surface, something she had never once seen him do in their 52 years of marriage. “We absolutely do not have to do this.”
Jonathan’s fleshy nose flattened against the wood, and Sarah—to her own horror—imagined that table as a coffin pressing against his face. But of course it wouldn’t be like that; Jonathan wouldn’t be lying facing down in his own grave. Sarah closed her eyes, blotted the terrible image from her mind.
“We can’t cancel,” her husband said into the wood.
“I’ll call them and say you’re not feeling well. They’ll understand.”
“The lamb’s cooking.”
“We can freeze the lamb, Jonathan.”
“That’ll ruin it.”
Jonathan lifted himself off the table, but slumped in his seat like a weary child. He brushed wisps of gray hair to the side of his forehead, picked up his big round glasses and slipped them on. He shaded his gaze with both palms, tunneling his vision, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Sarah, or at his beloved kitchen. “It’s not just that.” The fragility in Jonathan’s voice was so shocking that it shortened Sarah’s breath. “I mean, cancel for what? So I can sit around here and mope?” A dab of olive oil was streaked across his forehead. Flakes of dried mint were stuck to the skin above his eyebrows, and hanging from the hair he had just brushed away.
Sarah had been standing at the counter making salad. She wiped tomato viscera and seeds from her hands with a dish towel, and moved into the breakfast nook. She sat across from Jonathan and brought the towel to his head. “You have some oil and mint, Jonathan, right here, on your—”
“I don’t care.” He swatted his hand at the encroaching dish towel as if it were a bothersome fly—a reckless gesture for this dignified man.
“It’s a lot for anyone to absorb.” Sarah squeezed and wrung the cloth in her lap. “You’re not expected to get back to normal in a day. I do think we should cancel tonight. That’ll give us time to process it.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I want to cancel, Jonathan. I don’t think, I …” Sarah cleared her constricting throat. “I doubt I can do this myself.” She was whispering now, and her shoulders sagged. An attacked porcupine would roll its spine, collapse inward and lie on the floor in a ball. Her face flushed. To think like this, to demonstrate no strength at all—it was such an embarrassing response to misfortune. This meekness, this trembling, fiddling her bony old hands in front of her, she didn’t want to do it, didn’t approve of it. But Jonathan wasn’t like this. Jonathan was ebullient and gregarious; he charmed senators and business tycoons, stockbrokers and justices, stage actors and socialites; he was sanguine in adversity, and never so morose as to require her support. What was happening to him? And her? Could they crumble under the weight of misfortune? How could Jonathan, of all people, think about canceling New Year’s Eve?
He peered at Sarah through his oversized glasses. Jonathan’s eyes reminded her of that odd double-barreled cannon outside City Hall in Athens, Georgia, which Sarah had seen after her lecture at Georgia Law: twin barrels aimed at her. She imagined them firing. Suddenly, Jonathan reached across the table and snatched the cloth out of her hands. He brushed his forehead and hair, rubbing the oil into his skin, sprinkling bits of mint onto his lap. “You’ll be fine tonight.” His voice sounded steadier. “We’re not going to cancel.” He was bolstering himself. He hadn’t been angered by her show of weakness. He was reviving, now, as of course he would—becoming himself again.
“I don’t know.” But Sarah knew that wasn’t true. The strength had already returned to her limbs.
“I’ve made my decision. We’ll go on as expected.”
“It’s not a law we have to do it.”
“It’s a tradition and that’s important. Did I get all the mint?”
Sarah pointed to a missed flake on his forehead, and nodded once he had wiped it away. Her husband deftly folded the dish towel into a perfect square, and stuffed it into the breast pocket of his jacket. “There.” He stiffened in his seat, and offered her his warmest smile. The thick, cotton towel bulged absurdly, its light blue stripe clashing with his navy silk tie. “How’s that?”
“Elegant.”
“Did you expect anything less?” Jonathan yanked the cloth from his pocket and tossed it on the table. “We’ll have a fun night. I promise that.”
“You don’t have to fake anything, Jonathan.”
He nodded, unconvinced. “Do me a favor, will you? Take the lamb out in five minutes, coat it with that vinegar-mint, and put it back in the oven. Maybe lower the heat 25 degrees. I’d like to lie down for a bit.”
“Of course,” Sarah leaned across the table and kissed her husband’s forehead.
As Jonathan shuffled toward the swinging door, Justice Kolmann retreated to her knife and cutting board, mimicking equanimity. She chopped tomatoes until she was sure he wouldn’t return, and then put her knife down and pressed her hands flat against the board. The refrigerator hummed, the oven’s fan whirled. Her modest kitchen had never felt larger. What would it be like to cook in here without him around, without his jokes or joie de vivre, without the luxury of his instructions? How would she know what to make? She picked up the knife and scraped chunks of tomato into a juicy red line. Better to wash and cut the endive than to succumb to these morbid imaginings.
The thing no one understood, thought Sarah, as she removed the steaming pink lamb from the oven and brushed it with her husband’s marinade, was how much she depended upon the open communication of her marriage for her happiness and sanity. “Normal people would crumble under your pressure,” her friend Norma had said, years ago, while flipping through a pile of hate mail that Sarah received in response to an abortion rights opinion—one of her strident affirmations of Roe v. Wade. “Oh, that stuff’s just part of the job,” Sarah replied, aware of how casual she sounded. “You get used to it.” “No, you get used to it,” Norma countered. “That’s exactly how you’re different from most people: you weather these things unfazed.” But that wasn’t right. Norma, her best friend, didn’t know her at all. Neither did her colleagues or relatives, who made similar observations now and again about Sarah’s strength and independence, her apparent contentment with her isolation when traveling or working in chambers. The truth was Sarah didn’t weather anything by herself. The day Sarah received those death threats, she scurried home, panicked, painfully self-conscious, and gabbed at length to Jonathan, lying in his arms at two in the morning, trembling and unable to sleep, asking him if they should install bullet-proof glass in their apartment windows, if she should be worried about venturing to the grocery store unaccompanied, if perhaps she should ask her clerks next term to do all her errands and domestic chores until the threat died down. At that moment she di
d not resemble the great feminist lawyer who had shattered the glass ceiling, the progressive advocate for women’s rights and preeminent judicial mind. Even a friend as close as Norma Schechter probably could not conceive of Jonathan stroking her hair and patting her back in bed, whispering in his rolling, smoky voice: Don’t panic, Sarah. Pro-life groups are all bluster. You’ve got to have a little strength. If Jonathan died, Sarah thought, as she extracted the good china from the dining room’s credenza, Sarah feared she would respond as her mother did when her father died, by sleeping only two hours a night, waking in a panic that the plants weren’t properly watered, or that the furnace was leaking toxic gas and would kill her as soon as she fell back asleep. Wondering if she could accomplish even the smallest tasks without his support. Of course, like her mother, Sarah would appear to carry on as normal, venturing to Court, aggressively interrogating lawyers from the raised bench, negotiating in conference and ruling stridently on cases, neither complaining nor acknowledging any inner angst. Her mother returned to work in the family’s tiny shmata store the day after she had buried her father, smiling at customers, soldiering on. His death didn’t even faze her—that’s what Sarah overheard a neighbor saying in their Brooklyn neighborhood. All the neighbors probably thought the same thing. Her father, David, must have seemed like an insignificant man, like a sleeping dog in the corner of Silverstein’s, with his bad heart and wheezy breathing and even worse business acumen, greeting customers with his meek little nod and welcome, welcome, which he repeated every time a person entered their store. Devorah was the obvious boss, servicing customers, budgeting, hiring and firing the occasional employee, ordering inventory and paying bills, while David was merely the host. The two rarely spoke to each other during the day. So how bad could it have been for her when he died? She might have been relieved, for all anyone knew. But Devorah Silverstein, much like her daughter, the famous Supreme Court Justice, drew strength from her husband’s steady love, his stoicism and optimism, his quiet, sage advice delivered late at night in bed, his magnificent cooking and housekeeping. She relied on him in all sorts of ways that never quite matched the gender stereotypes of her era, and she never recovered from his death. Nightmares, panic attacks, insane worries about poorly watered plants and faulty furnaces, meteors hitting earth, ax murderers, tropical viruses, all of that and more would plague Sarah when Jonathan died and left her alone for good. Justice Kolmann knew it. She was sweating and fighting back tears as she set their table with their Jensen Cactus silverware.
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