The Trials of Kate Hope

by Wick Downing

  He grew up in Glamorganshire, somewhere in Wales, which I’d love to see someday. His family was so poor that he had to work in a coal mine when he was fifteen. When World War I broke out, he fought in the trenches in France. “That was easy for blokes like me,” he told me. “We were used to mud and cold, and preferred being outside to working in a tunnel thick with coal dust. The air tasted good—until they filled it up with gas.”

  He’d glowered when he said that. “Kate darlin’, an army of men is far worse than a pack of dogs. Some people think that, in war, gas is good tactics; but the cost in misery and suffering can’t be calculated. It would never occur to a dog to fight another dog that way, to poison the very air that all God’s creatures take for granted. Dogs don’t have the capacity for that kind of madness. Gas destroys a man’s lungs and leaves him gasping for air the rest of his life, like a rat in the ocean that can’t get a purchase before he drowns.”

  “Were you gassed, Grampa?”

  “I was. It’s the reason I came across the water and all the way to Colorado, where the air is good and clean. Although at times I think I was sent here to meet your grandmother.” He smiled as a tear trickled down his cheek. “I see you in her, Katie. There’s a magic about you that’s just like the magic that was in her. But of course you’re the image of your mother.”

  I had no idea what he meant about magic. That Grandmother Hope was a witch and I was too? And everyone thinks I look like my mom except me. She’s taller than I am, has blue eyes instead of my green ones with brown flecks, and is blond. But we both have lots of teeth that show up well in photographs, the way my grandfather’s dimple kind of lights up that photograph of him.

  He started practicing law in the 1920s, after marrying Katherine Margaret Simpson, my grandmother. She died before I was born. I’m named after her, but everyone called her Maggie instead of Kate. I cannot even imagine what her life was like, as Maggie. What would it do to a grown person to be called something as horrible as that all her life? I stopped making jokes about it, though. Once all I did was suggest to Mom that it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that Grandmother Hope died so young. With everyone calling her Maggie, what were her options?

  Mom made me sit two inches from her face and threatened me with death if I ever said anything like that again. Grandmother Maggie was a strong woman, full of heart and conviction, Mom told me. She’d also been sweet, gentle, and beautiful, and Grandfather was totally destroyed when she died.

  Grandfather didn’t stay destroyed for long, though. He went back to his practice with my dad. But when Zozo and Law were killed, he was destroyed forever, he thought, and gave up the law for good.

  Then he turned Mrs. Bartram away when she came to him for help, and she died two weeks later on Denver’s streets. He beat himself up badly over that, even paying for her funeral—but couldn’t forgive himself, or the legal “machine,” either, that routinely denied poor people lawyers. “She couldn’t afford one,” he said to my mom and me, “and died because she had no place to stay. Is that what justice is all about?”

  That was the only thing he talked about for two months—until Mom said, “Dad. You’re making me tired. If you don’t like it, do something about it.”

  He looked as if someone had put snow down his back. Then he pounded the table with his fist. “Annie! You’re right!”

  He didn’t return to the practice of law for the money, often giving his clients more money than they paid him for his services. He even sold that great old house he’d lived in for fifty years, and got an apartment in an old hotel, downtown, that was close to his new office.

  He didn’t dress the way he used to, either. Sometimes when he came to work he’d forget to shave, and the suits he wore were rumpled and stained with tobacco juice. He chewed tobacco at the office, instead of smoking a pipe, and would shout at people who disagreed with him—something he’d never done before—and kick things if he tripped over them. That happened a lot, because he couldn’t see.

  But Mom loved the old man, and so did I. We liked the fact that he had his life back, even though Mom worried about him because some of the people she knew—lawyers who had known my dad—thought he was crazy.

  There were times when he’d make me cringe and die of embarrassment, but I knew he wasn’t crazy. In fact, to his clients he was a knight in shining armor, or Prince Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia, infuriated by injustice and oppression. When poor people were “stomped on” by the legal system for the sake of profit, Grandfather became furious. “The law isn’t a business!” he’d shout. “It’s a profession! The lawyers of today have given her a terrible name. They treat her like a product that’s for sale to the highest bidder!”

  To Mrs. Roulette, he was a constant source of worry. Every time he left the office for the courthouse, she wondered if she’d ever see him again. His confidence in his ability to go from one place to another hadn’t changed at all through the years, in spite of the fact that now he couldn’t see where he was going.

  I was ten when he went back into law. One of the first things he did was ask Mom if I could come down to the office, after school now and then, to help out. He’d take good care of me, he told her. I’d be nice and safe with him. I loved the idea—it got me out of the house—and Mom finally got used to it too. How could she say no?

  I loved being the old man’s eyes. I’d walk him to court, and later he showed me how to look up cases. When I read them to him at first, I didn’t have a clue what any of it meant. But then it started making sense, and I’d ask him questions. Often he’d analyze a case for me, showing how the law could help his clients, and it was fun. Then he showed me how to use legal indexes and statutes and the state and federal reports of cases to find “the law,” meaning the answers to legal questions—and one day he asked me to brief a point of law for him. I had to look up the cases on both sides of a legal issue, then summarize each case by writing down its facts, the reasons the court used to decide it one way or the other, and the law of the case.

  He thought my brief was “adequate for a twelve-year-old,” but he expected improvement. “It’s objective enough, and you got the citations right. But it could use a bit of life. You need to keep the judge awake.”

  With him helping me, I started writing all his briefs, and a few months later he showed me how to write motions for court orders. They weren’t hard at all, the way he explained them to me. “They’re prayers,” he said. “The judge is God. You’re asking God to use his power to help you out.” We’d sit sometimes in his office and talk about his cases, and when he came over for dinner on Sunday, Mom would listen to us with her patented smile, now and then interjecting some common sense. “She’s my clerk,” he told Mom one Sunday. “In the old days, that’s how the young pups became lawyers. Course Kate won’t ever be a lawyer, because she’s a girl.”

  The first time he’d told me why I’d never be a lawyer, I was eleven, and it didn’t occur to me to disagree with an eccentric old man with perspective. I didn’t want to be a lawyer anyway, and neither did any of my friends. We’d stopped playing with dolls, but none of us thought about the future. We were into soccer, and hanging out at Aylard’s Drugstore with boys, and the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones.

  When he said it again, at another Sunday dinner, I got angry with him. The Friday before, he’d shown me pictures of Mary Lathrop, a famous Denver lawyer in the 1870s. “Where does it say a girl can’t be a lawyer?” I asked him.

  He laughed. “The fact is, you can be one if you want to. You may be only twelve years old, but you think like one already.”

  At work he started introducing me to women lawyers—even though it would take him out of his way, because there weren’t many women lawyers for me to meet. I definitely had the impression that I was being maneuvered, but I didn’t resent it. All he wanted was to give me something to think about.

  But a few months later, another idea lodged in that massive head of his. He’d just signed a motion I’d writt
en, which asked the district court to stop a landlord from unfairly evicting one of his clients and cited the law on the subject. “This is right on point and don’t waste words,” he said. “It’s good, Kate. You know something?” When he peered at me, I wondered what he saw. “You could be a lawyer now!”

  “Grandfather. I’m thirteen,” I reminded him.

  “You look it up and see if I’m not right.”

  All my friends at Hill Junior High were totally into themselves, and so was I. Would being a lawyer make me a geek, or, like, distinctive? I kind of held my breath as I did the research—and was almost relieved to find out he was wrong. I couldn’t be a lawyer. A person has to pass the state bar examination first, I told him. Only graduates of law schools were allowed to “take the bar.”

  “There’s more ways than one to skin a cat,” he said. “All you’ve done is find out how they do it now. But that isn’t the way it was in the old days, Kate. Find out how it was then, and see if those old laws were repealed. That’s what a lawyer worth his salt would do.”

  So I went back to the books, and I found this old law that had been passed and adopted in 1867, when Colorado was still a territory. It said that if a person got a “certificate from one or more reputable counsellors at law,” stating that he’d been “engaged in the study of law for two successive years prior to the making of such application,” he could be examined by a “standing committee” appointed by the Supreme Court to “examine all applicants, for license . . .”

  In other words, take a bar examination.

  That old territorial law became a state law. But even if it hadn’t, the Colorado constitution had a section that said all the territorial laws would remain in effect until repealed. So although other laws on the subject of bar examinations were passed, that old territorial law had never been repealed. I told the old judge that it was still on the books, and he started whooping with glee.

  “What do you think, young lady!” he bellowed. “Have you learned enough law to pass the bar? I could use a partner like you!”

  I was not enthusiastic, to be honest. But the expression on his face was the same as the one in his baby picture: total focus. “I can try.”

  The State Bar Examiners refused my application—which bothered me a little, because I’d looked it up myself and knew the law—but it was a relief, too.

  It didn’t just bother my grandfather, though. It made him mad.

  He took them to court, and argued that I was smarter than most of the “pups out of law school” because my native intelligence hadn’t been “ruined by a college education.” My mind “hadn’t been distorted and configured into something acceptable to the Establishment. It’s open, Your Honors, to what most lawyers have forgotten. Justice!”

  He won the case—which didn’t worry the Bar Examiners at all. They knew I didn’t have a chance. That made me mad. I took a bar refresher course, taught by a lawyer on weekends for two months. He passed out outlines filled with legal principles on all the subjects we’d be tested on, such as torts, and civil procedure, and criminal law, and wills and estates. But it wouldn’t be enough to memorize them, he said. We had to understand them, know how to use them. He wanted us to work together in study groups during the week.

  No study group for me, though. I worked with my grandfather, who wouldn’t give up on a subject until he was satisfied I knew all about it—“and where it fits in the fabric of the common law,” he’d say, “which ain’t common at all. It’s a living thing, in spite of all those who want it to die.”

  The bar examination was way more difficult than the hardest test I’d ever taken in school. It lasted three whole days! But I passed it. The Supreme Court swore me in on March 22, 1973, which it says right on my Certificate to Practice Law.

  FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD LAWYER, said a headline in the Post. GIRL, FOURTEEN, A LAWYER, said the one in the News. The media were there when I was sworn in by the Supreme Court, and that night I saw myself on TV I was smiling Mom’s great smile and wearing a black dress with a carnation pinned to it. But I kind of looked like a tuna surrounded by sharks. And at school, instant change. My friends thought it was pretty cool, but some of my classmates treated me like a freak, and two of my teachers asked me for legal advice!

  The shingle on the front door of Grandfather’s office has made it worthwhile, though. It’s back to what it was before my dad was killed: HOPE AND HOPE, ATTORNEYS.

  Chapter Five

  “WHO’S THERE?” Grandfather yelled weakly, not sounding well at all. His sad old voice had to struggle to push through the door. “Don’t make me guess who it is.”

  “Me, Grampa.” I call him Judge at the office, but this wasn’t the office, and I wanted to pet him or something, make him all better.

  “Kate darlin’.” He opened the door and staggered backward, almost falling down. “Come in.”

  His face was red enough to erupt into flames, and his skinny white legs dangled, like a puppet’s, under a yellow bathrobe. His pale blue feet, in worn-out slippers, looked icy cold. But the silver hair swirling around his head seemed to shoot off sparks, and the eyes that peered out of his face were so bright and alive you would swear they could see through walls. “How are you feeling?” I asked as his bony old hands reached out for things they recognized, and led him to the sitting room.

  “Not a hundred percent,” he admitted. “It’s a good thing I’m as mean as I am, Katie. I’m too mean to die.”

  He had three rooms on the seventh floor of the Shirley Savoy Hotel. People said that for fifty years it had been one of the finest hotels in Denver. Now it was just one of the oldest. Grandfather liked it because it was only four blocks from the office and he could walk to work, “for the exercise.” Mother hated it because when he crossed Broadway he was a moving target. Mrs. Roulette and I hated it too, but so far, in spite of a few near-misses, no one had hit him.

  I sat down and opened the briefcase Mom had given me when I passed the bar. “As soon as you’ve signed this, I’m calling a doctor,” I told him.

  “No you’re not.” He dropped wearily into a chair and let his chin fall on his chest. “I’m sick enough now, without some doctor making it worse.” He crumpled into the cushions and his eyes drooped shut. “Just let me hear what you have on Alvarez so I can get back in bed.”

  I pulled the file out of my briefcase—and he fell asleep. He drops off like that at the office, too, only to bump awake five minutes later, all full of himself and feisty. Maybe he doesn’t need a doctor after all, I thought, thumbing through the motion and thinking about the case as I waited for him to wake up.

  Mr. Alvarez was born in Mexico, but lived in Colorado on a work permit with his wife and five children. His big goal in life was to become a citizen of the United States so that he could make a decent living and take care of his family. But he’d been charged with theft. If he got convicted, he could no longer live in this country. The federal government would deport him and his whole family back to Mexico, and a life of poverty.

  He’d been charged with stealing tools from his employer, but it was a lie, and we had a witness who could prove it. The witness wouldn’t be at the trial, however. Also a Mexican citizen, he’d been caught working without a permit and had been deported!

  The Judge had asked me to write a “motion for an indefinite continuance.” It said the case should be continued until our witness came back to Colorado—even though it would be illegal for him to come back. It was a stupid motion, I thought, for lots of reasons. The biggest one was simple: there’s no such thing as an indefinite continuance. I made the mistake of telling the Judge what I thought.

  “Write it!” he’d shouted at me, which he does when he forgets I’m his granddaughter. Usually he’s as old-fashioned as a horse and buggy, even opening doors for what he calls “the gentler sex”—when he can find the knobs. “You might learn a thing or two,” he’d said. “That is, if you aren’t careful, I know there’s no such thing as an indefinite continuance. Every j
ackass knows that. So say in the motion that there ought to be.” Then he’d frowned in my direction, which was his way of apologizing for yelling at me. “You don’t know, young woman,” he’d said. “It could make perfect sense, to a judge.”

  He woke up. “Kate?”

  “Hi, Grandfather. Welcome back.”

  “Don’t get snippy now. How long is that motion?”

  “Four pages.”

  “That’s about right,” he said. “Any longer and the judge won’t read it.” He clutched his stomach. “Are you satisfied with it?”

  “It’s not great, Judge. But it’s arguable.”

  “Any authority?”

  He was asking if there was a case out there somewhere I’d found that could support the motion. “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, does it make sense?”

  “Not to me,” I told him honestly. “It could to a judge.”

  He snorted at that. “Give me your pen, darlin’,” he said. He signed it and tried to push himself out of his chair. “You’d think a man’s internal organs would improve with age, the way wine does. Too bad they don’t.” He started to lose his balance, but I was quick enough to help him. “What does that Willow woman want?” he asked, leaning on my shoulder and letting me slip an arm around his waist. “She was in the office Friday, but she left before I could talk to her.”

  “Nothing important,” I told him as my stomach froze with panic. I wanted to ask him what I could possibly do for her, but didn’t. The last thing he needed right now was another problem.

  We shuffled toward his bedroom. “Poor lonely old bag of bones,” he said. “All she’s got in this world is a dog.”

  We moved near his bed. “Grandfather, let me fix you something to eat?”

  “Thanks, darlin’,” he said, finding the edge of his bed with his hand and sitting on it. “But I’d throw it up after a while, and it would smell.” He chuckled for some strange reason known only to the male members of the human race, who think it’s funny for a person to throw up and cause a smell. “Besides, how will I know I’m well if I keep myself stuffed? It’s when a man gets hungry that he knows he’s well.” He shrugged off his bathrobe, revealing purple boxer shorts, and stood up long enough to let the bathrobe fall to the floor. “Leave it there, Kate, so I know where it is and can find it.”