by Susan Isaacs
Jazz could not suppress his next yawn. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”
Two days later, Lee took her five o’clock cup of yogurt into Will’s office. He responded by getting a cup of coffee. “How’s the Yancy appeal coming?” he asked.
“Fine.” She stirred up the fruit on the bottom a little too vehemently. “I liked Maria.”
“Good,” Will said. Knowing something more of an intimate nature was required, he added: “She liked you and Jazz.” He waited a fraction of a second and gave her: “I liked Jazz too.”
The following week, they went out to a Chinese restaurant, ostensibly to discuss whether she had any thoughts on training the new assistant D.A.’s. But she and Will had been finding some excuse each Wednesday or Thursday for months. Just dinner: Lee could not acknowledge to herself that these evenings were the high points of her week. Their discussions covered a lot of ground: They bickered about politics and delved into legal issues. They discussed everything from how to marinate salmon to their personal lives, although “personal” was a relative term.
Will spoke with respect and affection and some degree of annoyance of his parents, of their ambition for him, and how he felt that no matter how much he accomplished, they were never quite satisfied. He went into some detail about the pain of growing up smart and black but isolated from any black community, a child of servants on the Giddings estate; and of being pressured by his parents to take whatever guff Mr. Giddings’ twin sons, boys his age, dished out. To Lee, the twins sounded like everything Will was not: white, stupid, and incredibly mean-spirited. That was as revealing as he got. When he talked about Maria, it was more travelogue than disclosure: We went here; We ate in this restaurant; We heard this orchestra.
Lee, on the other hand, held nothing back, in part because for the first time, she had a friend who truly wanted to listen and had the time to do so and whom she trusted. She told Will about her early life, not just the outline of it but the texture, about her parents and sister and how she had always felt both her I.Q. and her weight were twenty points too high to allow her to be loved by her family. She confided in him all about her early obsession with Jazz, and they talked about what it meant in the marriage. Will was not just a polite listener; he was a rapt audience. He even relished all Lee’s updates on Valerie: standing up by herself, sitting beside Lee and pretending to read The New Yorker aloud—in her baby gibberish—and the gleeful, devilish look in Val’s eyes when she first tasted chocolate.
“Will,” she said, so quietly he looked up from his hot and sour soup. “What about you and Maria?” The couple at the next table turned to stare, but whether it was because Lee and Will were white woman with black man or because they sensed an important turn in the conversation, Lee could not tell.
“What’s there to talk about?” he asked.
“You know, we’re friends. I don’t hold back. Now maybe the average mature woman or the average shrewd lawyer wouldn’t be so open. But I have absolute confidence in your friendship.”
“Good,” he said, and crumbled the crispy, greasy noodles he usually disdained into his soup.
“I wish you had the same confidence in mine.”
“Lee, you’re making a big deal over nothing. What you see is what you get with me. I don’t have any secrets. There’s no mystery.”
“What about you and Maria?”
He took a slow sip of soup. “I love her.”
“Does she love you?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Yes. But I don’t think we’ve ever gotten to the point where we’re in love with each other, at least not at the same time. That’s why we never married. I guess deep down, we’re a couple of romantic saps. We want it all. That’s that.”
“That’s not that. That can’t be.”
“It is.”
“I want to know how you feel?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. About anything. About not being married. About not having children. About being a Republican, for God’s sake. How could you have retained your sanity during all those years of Silent Majority crap?”
“It’s not that I don’t think about things,” he said cautiously.
“Are you the only person in the world who doesn’t have an inner life?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want to know you. Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
Will put down his soup spoon. “My biggest regret is that I’ve never had children. My secret ambition is to write a book about a case the NAACP brought in ’38, where the Supreme Court ordered the admission of a black into the University of Missouri Law School because the state hadn’t provided a law school for blacks. You want something else? I think tarragon is an overrated herb.”
“You know all that isn’t what I’m talking about.”
“I had a brother who died when he was nine. I was six. Leukemia.”
“I’m so sorry. Was it painful for you?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course it was. His name was Timothy. Timmy.” He looked away.
So they talked about other things throughout the meal, especially about cooking, as they often did, and Will told her how much he liked shopping for food in Chinatown. After they paid the check, he mentioned that he was very serious about going to China for a couple of months to study cooking. Lee was amused. “When are you going to be free for a couple of months?”
“Soon.”
“What do you mean? I can’t believe you’re actually going to take the time—”
“I’m leaving the office, Lee.”
“What?” She didn’t get it. “Leaving the D.A.’s?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” He did not answer right away. Lee hugged herself as if she were cold, but it was summer. She felt frightened. I don’t want to be left alone. Don’t go! Ridiculous! Would any male lawyer feel like this? Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! she wanted to plead. What’s going to happen to the two of us? How could Will want to go someplace she wasn’t?
Crazy, her reaction. She knew that. But she could not imagine a morning without Will opening the door of his office at nine-thirty on the dot and her strolling in with a bag with two cups of coffee and the one buttered sesame bagel they shared. Why, after spending his entire legal career at the D.A.’s, would he choose to quit? Especially now that she was there? “What made you decide to leave?” she managed to ask.
“There’s a new chief of Homicide.”
“What? Who?”
“Jerry McCloskey.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“I suggest you do believe it. Huber wants to run for governor in ’82. I’m the one person getting in the way of his patronage plans. With Jerry in there—”
“The man’s a nincompoop, for God’s sake!”
“Well, Lee,” Will said, and he reached out and took her hand, something he had never done before, “he’s going to be your nincompoop.”
The first six months after Will left the office were utter misery, and the next six months were so bad that Lee considered quitting the law altogether. However, she did not want to give Woodleigh Huber the pleasure of replacing her with one of his dum-dum cronies. Also, she sensed neither she nor Val would thrive if she became a full-time homemaker. Oh, it was tempting, but in her heart she knew she would come to loathe fresh-baked bread. She would never finish the complete works of Dickens. And a girl can crochet just so many afghans.
So she stuck to it, trying to compensate for her loss of spirit by throwing herself into her cases with increased vigor. Which is how she and Chuckie Phalen wound up screaming at each other. He was defending the owner of a cesspool service company, one Jimmy Durk, whom the grand jury had indicted for beating to death Marlon “Buck” Toomey, a service station owner who had refused to do any more work on Durk’s truck until an outstanding bill had been paid. The beating had been witnessed by Durk’s assistant, an eighteen-year-old with a history of drug use.
; The fight had begun with Chuckie’s outrage that Lee was charging his client with murder, not manslaughter. “There was no intent to cause death!” he shouted. It was not too loud a shout because his lungs were constricted with emphysema. It was, however, angry and antagonistic to the extreme.
“Of course there was. The kid saw Durk banging Buck’s head against the car lift over and over and shouting at the top of his lungs—”
“‘I’m gonna kill you’ is just an expression, and you know it!”
“Murder in the second degree, Chuckie.”
The fight had gotten worse when Chuckie discovered that Lee had taken the eighteen-year-old witness under her wing, getting him enrolled in a drug rehabilitation program, arranging with the minister of his mother’s church to pay for tutoring so the young man could earn his high school equivalency diploma, getting him a part-time job as a janitor with a furrier in Cedarhurst, a man Jazz and her father knew from the Furriers Industry Council.
Chuckie stormed over to Lee’s desk two days later. “You baked the kid cookies!”
“Brownies. So what?”
“‘So what?’ she says! ‘So what?’ You’re buying his testimony against my client. So what about that, Mzzzz. White?”
“I’ll make you a batch when the case is over, Chuckie,” she replied, not even bothering to look up. “Now stop it. You’re not going to change my mind.” If she had looked up, she would have seen that her opponent had gone from purple-faced to white with rage, and that his jaw was set in stone.
So it did not occur to her an hour later, when Woodleigh Huber’s secretary called and said the Boss wanted to see her, that it had anything to do with Chuckie Phalen and People v. Durk. She only knew that she hated every sprayed-in-place white hair on Huber’s head, hated his pale blue telegenic shirts, hated him for putting an incompetent, time-wasting, jurisprudential know-nothing bootlicker like Jerry McCloskey behind Will’s desk.
“Come in!” Huber called out in his big, 60 Minutes voice.
Lee opened the door and saw Huber positioned before his flags and, standing across the desk from him, Chuckie Phalen. She gave Chuckie the beginnings of a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding smile before turning her attention toward the man all the assistant D.A.’s except her called Boss. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Huber?”
“Are you out of your mind?” Huber roared. Shaken by his vehemence, Lee took a step backward. “Making all sorts of calls on a cooperating witness’s behalf? Getting him a job?”
“What’s wrong with getting him a job?” she inquired.
“What’s wrong?” Huber cried out.
“It’s like giving him money,” Chuckie prompted.
“Shut up, Chuckie,” Lee said. She was no longer mildly amused by his running to tattle. She was angry, so angry that for once her stomach did not hurt. She turned back to Huber. “What I did was entirely proper.”
“Then you’re even worse off than I imagined, if you don’t get what was wrong! What you did was outrageous! You stepped over the bounds of proper prosecutorial conduct.” He was booming, as if speaking to a great gathering without a microphone. Lee understood, then, that it was a performance. In part for Chuckie. More, to show her he had no loyalty to her. She was not part of the team. He could not fire her for cause, but he could make her want to quit. “What you did is a discredit to law enforcement!”
She started to say: I’m sorry, but I don’t see it that way, but all she got out was “I’m sorry—”
“Being sorry is not enough!” Huber must have moved, because the flag of the State of New York fluttered. “You’re off this case!”
“Mr. Huber, this is—”
“One more word out of you …” He let the threat hover in the air, then turned to Chuckie. For Huber, Lee was no longer in the room. “Chuckie, Jerry will call you the minute he’s reassigned the case. You have my profound apologies—”
Lee slammed out of his office.
The following day, Jerry McCloskey told her she was no longer in Homicide. If she wanted to, she could remain in the office, but because she had shown such lack of plain old common sense, they did not think she should be trying murder cases. Or even felony cases. The following day, she was assigned an unlawful-dealing-in-fireworks trial.
A week later, she walked out of the District Attorney’s Office.
Chuckie Phalen must have heard Lee was packing up because he was waiting on the Courthouse steps, breathing hard. “I’m sorry this happened.”
She knew the Old Boys liked lady lawyers to be ladies, so she said: “Fuck you. Fuck the horse you rode in on.” Then she added “Ass-kissing snitch,” and kept walking.
“What you posit is not without merit,” Chuckie conceded. She turned. He fluttered a not-very-white handkerchief. “See? Now listen to me, Lee—and notice I didn’t call you ‘Sis.’ I know you don’t like that. I blew my cork and went up to Huber’s to blow off a little more steam. I had no idea he’d lace into you like that, especially in front of me, that self-serving windbag. You know what that was all about last week, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” Lee replied coldly. “And he got what he wanted, didn’t he? I quit. Maybe he’s not such a moron after all.” She walked away from Chuckie, but when she saw he was trying to catch up with her and the effort was too much for him, she slowed her pace.
“Buy you lunch?” he inquired, nodding in the direction of the silvery lunch truck parked around the corner.
“No, thank you.”
Chuckie was gazing down at the framed photos poking out of her overstuffed tote bag. One that she herself had taken, Jazz and Kent at a Knicks game. Another of her and Jazz with the five pups of Ginger’s latest litter. And a picture of Val, queen of the jungle, amid her stuffed animals. “Beautiful. How old is she?”
“Almost two.” She could see him working very hard to hide his discomfort: a mother leaving a child that age to go to work.
“Wonderful age. Lovely child. Don’t suppose you want to go over to TJ’s, have a snort with me?” Lee knew the Old Boys meant by that a jigger of Scotch; cocaine was merely something their clients trafficked in.
“No, thanks. Too early for a snort. And even if it weren’t, Chuckie, I don’t want to drink with you right now.”
“I understand,” he said, and let her walk away. But he was waiting as she turned back to see if he was all right. “Lee!” he called out in his reedy voice. “Stick around. We’ll open a bottle of glue.” Weighed down by her attaché case, her tote bag, her shoulder bag, and a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag filled with copies of her appellate briefs and extra pairs of panty hose, she found herself returning to him. “Come in with me.” At first, she thought he was suggesting TJ’s Taproom again. “Come work for me, Lee. It’ll be fun.”
“I don’t want to work for you, Chuckie. I don’t want to work for anybody.”
“Come on, Sis, wake up and smell the coffee. You know how many firms will hire a female to do trial work? You should jump up and down and clap your hands and say ‘Goody-goody’ that I’m making you an offer.”
“I’ll find something. Or I’ll go out on my own.” Her possessions felt very heavy, and she had to prevent herself from looking over at the courthouse, in the direction of the District Attorney’s Office, wondering if there was a way she could talk her way back in, knowing there was not.
“And who’s going to refer cases to you?”
“I hope you will, Chuckie. And I have a few pals.” Lee knew Chuckie was aware that she was considered Will Stewart’s protégée, and she had no doubt there were rumors of another sort of relationship between them as well. After a six-week trip to China, Will had returned to become a name partner at one of the biggest firms—and certainly the best—on Long Island.
“Will Stewart’s doing civil stuff. Is that what you want to do? Rake in the money doing corporate litigation? Is that the kind of law you want to practice, each aide trying to suffocate the other under reams of paper? Working ten years on a case, never getting int
o court? I don’t see how your pal stands it. With me, you won’t get rich, but you’ll get the real McCoy.”
“I can get the real McCoy without you.”
“Bushwa!”
She knew she would never go to Will with her hat in her hands. She wanted him as a friend, not a patron. And Chuckie was right. How many lawyers would refer criminal cases to her? Corporate? The thought of doing corporate litigation made her want to take a nap. “Thanks, Chuckie. I appreciate your—”
“Aw, don’t give me that hooey. Put down your things, would you, so’s we can talk properly.” She set down her shopping bag, tote bag and attaché case. This was nuts, she thought. Out of a job for five minutes and dickering over a new one on the courthouse steps. Take time to smell the roses. Get a subscription to Foreign Affairs. Go to the Frick and look at Dutch masters. “What do you want?” he inquired.
“A partnership.”
“A partnership? You’re talking through your hat! You’re still a kid. You just got your walking papers from the D.A. You’re not being realistic. Here I was thinking: This girl’s got a head on her shoulders. I guess I was wrong. You’re living in a dream world.”
“We try it out for a year. You pay me fifty thousand dollars.”
“What? That’s crazy.”
“That’s a bargain. You’ve got a huge practice, Chuckie.” She did not mention that he was ill and it was common knowledge that he desperately needed help with his caseload. She did not have to. “After a year, we’re partners.”
“What’ll you be asking? Ninety percent of the take?”
“What do you think is fair?”
“Twenty,” he muttered. “I’m the founder. I built it up.”
She really was embarrassed about haggling with him. After all, she didn’t need the money. Everyone knew she had a successful husband. Allow an Old Boy like Chuckie his male pride.
Not if she was going to be his partner. “Thirty percent, and fifty percent of any work I bring in.”
“You’ve been smoking that funny stuff, Sis.”
