Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  “Tuppin, however, is not such a thinker.”

  “Sir?”

  “Magistrate Tuppin is of the ‘Dirty Hands’ school.” Kavin smiled, waiting for my inevitable comment. Everyone knew Tuppin to be an impeccable man—even, his enemies sometimes charged, a bit of a dandy.

  “I can’t imagine the magistrate having any part of his anatomy less than perfectly sanitary at any time, but I do take your meaning, sir,” I answered.

  “If you want to impress Tuppin,” Kavin said, “come down from your ivory tower, Portal.”

  I wasn’t sure where this was leading, but I didn’t really care. Walking down University Avenue on a spring afternoon in the exclusive company of a distinguished law scholar, discussing the legal leanings of an eminent colleague . . . The scene filled me with a heady sense of excitement. This was my world now, and it was only going to get better.

  Of course, this walk with my professor through the streets of the city was not unusual. Kavin and I had done it before. There was even a winding lane on the university campus called Philosophers’ Walk. Kavin had once told me the meaning of the word peripatetic—literally, “walking around”—a name given to Greek teachers of antiquity whose students followed them through the streets of Athens as they wandered about dispensing tidbits of knowledge. Today, however, Kavin was not wandering. He walked with purpose. I was beginning to suspect what his purpose was, and the thought filled me with happy hopefulness. We proceeded single file now along sidewalks that had, in the past few minutes, become jammed with dinner-hour shoppers, most of whom were talking in the high-pitched, staccato cadences of Chinese. Our pace slowed as we moved through open barrels of spiky-branched brown lichee nuts, tables of curled sheets of dried fish, baskets of squirming blue-legged crabs. In window after steaming window, glistening red barbecued meat, ducks with bills intact, racks of lean pork ribs, bulbous tentacled sea creatures hung from sharp iron hooks. Peeking in one window, I saw a huge cauldron of soup—with a chicken’s foot in it! If Kavin was going to offer me something to eat here, I was going to have to decline. I had never eaten Chinese food in my life. Nobody in my family had. Which perhaps equaled the number of people in Chinatown who had eaten ravioli, lasagna or linguine.

  Kavin stopped, not at one of the many restaurants advertising their fare on long strips of paper pasted to the walls visible through the open doors, but at some sort of pharmacy with shelf upon shelf of colorful jars and boxes and rows of herbs hanging from rope strung across the shop ceiling. He must have shopped here before, because he went straight for a waist-high bamboo basket filled with small packages wrapped in beige, brocade-like paper. Each of these was bound with a strip of white paper with black Chinese characters beneath a seal much like the gold seal I’d seen on a legal document.

  Kavin grabbed a pile of these packages, five or six of them. When he gave the Chinese man at the counter a dollar, the man gave him a handful of change.

  “What are they, Professor?”

  He reached into the bag, took out one of his treasures and handed it to me. “Smell it,” he said. I held the package to my nose. The exquisite scent of sandalwood mingled with the odor of the rain.

  “Sometimes,” Kavin commented, “a poor man can get more for a dime than a rich man gets for a dollar.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, deeply gratified that Kavin’s example of the miracles of bargain-hunting involved Chinese soap and not Chinese soup.

  We turned off Dundas at Elizabeth Street. I wondered whether Kavin would point out the virtues of another handy set of poor people, my own Italian relations and countless others like them, as well as their neighbors, eastern European Jews, who had populated these precincts before the Chinese, when the area had been called “the Ward.”

  “The Ward is gone now,” the professor said as if reading my mind. “But something greater rises in its place.”

  It wasn’t hard to see what he meant. At the end of Elizabeth, just a short block south of the teeming old shops of Chinatown, rose two curved concrete towers, one twenty stories high, the other nearly ten stories higher. This was New City Hall, in the final stages of construction. At the rear there was not a single window in the stark, ribbed exterior of this gigantic cement parenthesis, but in front, the twin-curved structures were all glass and appeared to cup a large, clamlike concrete shape, low to the ground. I couldn’t quite figure this building out, but had been assured that it was a highly efficient design capable of accommodating the government offices of the burgeoning metropolis, and I believed it.

  Professor Kavin and I crossed the equipment-strewn plaza in front of the construction site and, my eye seeking color amid all the gray, I stopped to gaze up at the green copper roof of what would from now on always be called Old City Hall. It was a massive, four-story building in brownstone, its Victorian Romanesque solidity only somewhat alleviated by the soaring bell tower with its four-faced clock that began to toll the hour of five even as I stared at it.

  “Who are we going to see?” I asked the professor. He didn’t answer, just gestured at a wooden door on the west side of the building and held it open for me as I slipped in behind him.

  Nobody knew the word “multitasking” in 1965, but everyone who worked in Old City Hall had the concept down pat, for in the two wings of this building, which covered a whole city block, all the functions of municipal government were carried out on the same premises as all the functions of a major downtown courthouse.

  Which might explain why a string of shabby men, linked by handcuffs to a police officer, was snaking past the startled eyes of a young woman in full bridal regalia standing in front of a door marked “Wedding Waiting Room.”

  “Someone is confused,” Kavin said. “The police cells and the Crown attorney’s office are on the east side, not here on the west.”

  As if he’d heard the professor, the cop attached to his charges clicked across the black-and-white-tiled floor and opened a door leading to a central courtyard, a paved square walled on all sides by the building. Into this courtyard, day and night, passed the Black Marias, paneled trucks that rounded up prisoners from the city streets and dumped them into the ever-waiting police cells.

  Every morning except Sunday, when judges and criminals alike were expected to be in church, the Magistrates’ Courts of Old City Hall were in session. Magistrates had the power, with the consent of the accused, to sit on any nonjury trials except those in which the charge was murder, manslaughter, rape or treason. In the afternoons special courts of various sorts were held, but now, at five, most of the courts were down for the day. Though we didn’t exactly have the huge building to ourselves, Professor Kavin and I met very few others as we climbed the marble stairs.

  By now, I was fairly sure that Sheldrake Tuppin must have agreed to see me and that Kavin was leading me to him. A flash of alarm made me breathless as we ascended. I was by no means fully prepared for this meeting. What if Tuppin asked me the specifics of what I was working on? What was I working on? Neither my brother’s potential draft dodger nor Gleason’s fugitive corpse was going to help me out here. I searched my mind for some compelling legal issue from among the thousands of pages of cases I’d read. Nothing.

  As if sensing my discomfort, Kavin turned and smiled. “You should eat less spaghetti, Portal. Climbing stairs would be easier if you were thin. And you should convince yourself that what a man thinks will always be more impressive than what he has or does.”

  With that useless advice, we continued our climb. Old City Hall had been built in the 1890s as a monument to municipal and judicial power in an age of imperial splendor. Though it wouldn’t be for much longer, in 1965 Canada was still without a constitution of its own and its allegiance was to Queen Elizabeth II. The magistrates were the Queen’s appointed minions, though few of them had ever seen her except on TV. And their prisoners were Her Majesty’s prisoners. So it was fitting that glass, stained, etched, beveled and plain; marble, Italian and otherwise; wrought iron, swirled into wreaths and c
risscrossed into grills; and wood, carved, dovetailed, molded and joined, should compose the materials of the old courthouse.

  Past the Finance Department/Enforcement Branch and Arrears Office, the County Sheriff, the Grand Jury Witness Room, the High Court of Justice Assize Court, the chambers of Moore and MacRae, Timmins and Denton, Donley, McDonagh and Rogers, I followed Myron Kavin until, at the northwest corner of the building on the third floor, we reached a twelve-foot-high door that opened onto a corridor of nine similar doors. Each was of dark, red-hued wood, possibly northern maple, with the rich patina of years of use. Eight of the nine were graced by transoms and gold numerals—344 by the entrance of the corridor to 351 in the far end. The ninth door, the one without a transom, bore black numerals that said 221B.

  Kavin was clearly delighted by my confused surprise. “His Worship is quite the Sherlock Holmes fanatic,” he said. “But this isn’t London or Baker Street or even a real room. This is nothing but a broom closet.”

  Door 351 sprang suddenly open with enough force to bounce it against the wall. “Come in. Come in. Why are you dawdling out there like a couple of alley louts?” The voice was hoarse; perhaps a better description was gravelly. But there was an undercurrent to it, not merry or jolly but good-humored nonetheless.

  “Good afternoon, Your Worship,” Kavin said. He bowed his head a little and Tuppin received the honor, as though accustomed to the deference of lesser men. “You said you wouldn’t mind if I brought my star student to meet you, sir, and I’ve taken you up on the offer.”

  Kavin’s star student! I was flabbergasted to learn the professor held so high an opinion of me. I was also afraid I’d soon disabuse him of it. I remembered that Kavin once told me that silence is one of the barrister’s tools. Perhaps I’d be wise to utilize it now. I smiled, but Tuppin didn’t see. He was looking at my mentor. The old man’s eyes were full of pleasure as he gazed on Kavin, who, I realized, must once have been his star student.

  “Your Worship, Mr. Ellis Portal. Portal, His Worship Magistrate B. Sheldrake Tuppin.”

  He was lean and mean, was Sheldrake Tuppin, with a soldier’s ramrod bearing and a boy’s protruding ears. Some jokingly called him “the hanging magistrate,” though it was never his job to sentence a man to execution. At a time when public inebriation was one of the most commonly encountered and thoroughly detested street crimes, he was undisputed lord of the vile No. 24 Court, the Liquor Court, the “drunk dock.” He would throw a man in jail if he didn’t like the smell of him.

  But he called every drunk “Mr.” He never kept an accused waiting, wallowing in fear. He was never rude, never haughty, never belligerent, never incomprehensible, even to men far less educated than he, which most men were. I already knew the only two things a lawyer had to know when appearing before Sheldrake Tuppin. The first was that you had nothing to fear if your client was not guilty. The second was that you had little to hope for if he was.

  “Sir, it’s an honor.”

  “Ah,” Tuppin said, drawing a finger along the taut plane of his cheek, “Portal.” His eyes raked me from head to toe. “I take it you’re the young man who thinks I can’t do this job without help.”

  “Sir?” I said in alarm.

  “Aren’t you the fellow determined to become my amanuensis, my sidekick, my intent-on-pleasing, hard-panting wee pup?”

  Realizing I could answer neither yes nor no to this question, I glanced nervously around his chambers, which looked exactly as I’d imagined Holmes’s 221B Baker Street. Scholarly, Victorian, male. I jumped when I saw a spot on the wall marked with a series of what looked like bullet holes made by a pistol of some sort, spelling out the initials ER—Elizabeth Regina, the Queen.

  “Yes, Your Worship, I am.” I gulped, and Tuppin made a sound I later learned was what, with him, passed for a laugh.

  “Well, son,” he said, opening an ornately carved wooden box and extracting three long cigars, “following me about is not going to teach you anything you didn’t learn at your mother’s knee.” He handed one cigar to Kavin and one to me. I had no intention of smoking it. I slipped it into my pocket and kept it—for years, actually. The magistrate and the professor went through a complex cigar-lighting ritual. When they were both puffing away, Tuppin abruptly commanded me, “Go over to the window and tell me what you see out there.”

  There were many occasions in my early twenties on which I felt a distinct lack of respect from my elders and so-called betters. The time was coming, as my brother never tired of pointing out, when people over thirty would lose the automatic respect of those younger than themselves. But, close as it was, that time had not yet come. Like a dutiful boy, I walked over and looked out. On the street below I could see a few police officers outside the northern gate. I couldn’t see the gate itself. Mostly there was nothing down there but people leaving work to go home, just as there’d been on University Avenue. “I see ordinary people, sir,” I said hesitantly. Clearly anything Tuppin might ask would be a test. And anything I answered would contribute to a pass or a fail.

  “What you see, young man, are plain, decent men and women. There are far more of them than there are criminals or litigants. Most of those people will see a lawyer only once or twice in their lives—when they buy their house and make their will. Sometimes I look out that window and realize that the day I walked into law school was the day I bid goodbye to those decent folk and their ordinary world.”

  Coming from a man who spent his days being respectful to drunks before tossing them in the slammer, this regret for mundane days gone by should have sounded somber, but I thought Tuppin’s tone almost gleeful.

  “Get back here and sit down, lad.”

  Once again, without protest, I did as I was told.

  “You’ve heard stories about me, I suppose?” The magistrate studied the glowing end of his cigar as if he’d never observed such a phenomenon before. Highly unlikely. One of the stories I’d heard about Tuppin was that he had once smoked a cigar that cost a thousand dollars. I glanced at Kavin, who was grinning like a pet owner waiting to show off some marvelous trick.

  “I have heard,” I said, “that when you are in session on the first floor of this building and men are brought up from the cells in leg irons, you require the guards to carry the chains so they don’t clank or drag on the floor and—”

  “Why do you suppose I do that, Portal?”

  I waited before I spoke. I’d not yet taken advocacy lessons, but I already knew that words framed by silence carry more weight. “In order to show respect to the court and to the accused by preventing sounds that could prejudice the presumption of innocence,” I finally offered. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kavin nod reassuringly.

  “Nonsense!” Tuppin shouted. “The fact is I’m hard of hearing. I can’t have chains rattling about and feet dragging when I’m trying to hear what’s being said in front of my bench. Besides, those lazy louts of guards do nothing but sit around all day. They need the exercise to keep them trim. Fat guards are useless.”

  I shrank back, wishing I could disappear into the pattern on the silk brocade of the chair’s upholstery. I didn’t have the nerve to glance at Kavin. I didn’t want to witness his surprised displeasure. I kept my eyes downcast.

  Which is why I was shocked to hear both Kavin and Tuppin begin to laugh.

  “You’re a bit of a scaredy-cat, aren’t you, lad? You’re going to have to learn to look up and argue, boy,” Tuppin said. “The floor is not going to testify to a thing.”

  I smiled tentatively. Tuppin almost smiled back. “Magistrate Bigelow,” Tuppin intoned, “a wiser man than I, once said, ‘In the profession of law, the cardinal virtues of courtesy, consideration, dignity and patience are in importance of first magnitude.’ You can’t go wrong remembering that. You might also remember,” he added, “that the smaller a man is, the heavier the responsibility of the law to guard his rights, whether he be a man in chains or the fellow who guards that man.”

  He took a stron
g pull on the cigar. In the seat beside me, Kavin was puffing away looking as if he were in heaven. I blinked my eyes. They were beginning to sting.

  “On the whole, Portal, the profession of law is like any other. A money man is going to make money. A better man is going to make a name for himself. The best man is going to make a difference.” His gaze met mine. His eyes were blue, hard and cold, but there were laugh lines at their corners. “How do you propose to make a difference, young man? More to the point, what do you think I could have to do with it?”

  I fought the urge to fidget. As if I hadn’t been reading about him for weeks, none of Sheldrake Tuppin’s legal victories came to mind. He was waiting for an answer, but I couldn’t think of one. All I could think of was my mother and father. How all my life they’d seemed to pin their future on my intelligence. Where was that intelligence now?

  Into the embarrassing silence of the room came the melodious chimes of the City Hall clock marking the quarter hour. “Your Worship,” I finally said, “I come from decent and law-abiding people not much different, I guess, from those people down in the street. But I know that not everyone has the privilege of living such a life.” The image of the woman at the morgue came to mind. “I just want to use the law to help people who may not be aware that the law exists to serve us all.”

  “Noble sentiments glibly expressed, Mr. Portal. But what do these notions have to do with me?”

  With him? A man whose long line of educated ancestors stretched back for generations—men of business and the law, men born and raised in the New World? He could command respect not only from the lowly who were brought before him but also from the exalted who were his brothers on the bench. He had so much, read so much, wrote so much. What did my ideas, my feelings, my future have to do with him, indeed? Simply this: I believed I could become as good at law as he was and I wanted my chance.

  “The worth of a man, Magistrate Tuppin,” I said, “is not determined by where he has come from but by the place to which he has arrived. All I want is the opportunity to start my journey—to move toward where I deserve to be.”