by D. W. Buffa
I think I liked Elliott Winston because he reminded me of the way I had been at the beginning, when I was young, and enthu-siastic, and convinced of the importance of what I was doing. I suppose that is not quite true. I had only looked innocent: Elliott really was. Maybe that is why I liked him so much: He reminded me of something I wished I had been.
No one wanted to hire him, at least no one in the firm of which I was then one of the senior partners. There was nothing personal about it. Elliott had clerked for me the summer before his last year of law school. Everyone liked him, and everyone thought he would become a very good lawyer, but Elliott had not gone to one of the nation’s best law schools, and that, for most of the twelve partners who had gathered in the conference room, was an insurmountable objection.
“Elliott Winston wants to be a criminal defense lawyer,” I tried to explain. “That’s what I do, and I’ve never once had a client—
or a judge, for that matter—ask me where I went to law school.”
“You went to Harvard,” one of the partners remarked.
“And when I graduated I knew less about practicing law than anyone who went to night school. I certainly knew less than Elliott.”
“Perhaps,” the partner replied, furrowing his brow, “but Harvard trained you to think like a lawyer.”
I looked at him, a wry smile on my face. “Which side of this argument are you on?”
No one thought it funny. They had all gone to the best schools, and they had all graduated in the top tenth, or the top fifth, or in the top two or three of their class. It was who they were, part of a hierarchy, a legal aristocracy bent on preserving its identity by a rigid policy of exclusion.
Pointing at the stack of resumes on the table, I challenged them. “Find me one person in there who will be a better lawyer—
a better criminal defense lawyer—than Elliott Winston.”
“There isn’t one person there who did not graduate from one of the top law schools in the country.”
“That wasn’t my question,” I insisted.
“We have a reputation to maintain,” another partner objected.
I wanted to say, “A reputation as a place where everyone sits around telling each other how great they were before they were admitted to the bar!” I seized instead on what he had said and pretended to agree.
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, maintain the reputation of the firm as the place everyone wants to go because we hire only the best. I think I know something about what it takes to be a criminal defense lawyer. I’ve been through all those resumes,”
I said, nodding toward the stack. “They’re very impressive, but there isn’t one of them I’d take ahead of this kid. I know him. I know what he can do. He worked for me. He’s the best clerk I ever had. He put in longer hours, had more initiative, more energy, and more imagination—more of the things that can’t be taught in a classroom—than most of the associates we already have.”
I was at my persuasive best, and it had no effect whatsoever.
Elliott Winston had not gone to Harvard or Yale, or Stanford or Michigan, or any of the other places whose prestige would apparently be threatened by his presence. On the vote, he was rejected ten to one. Michael Ryan, who had started the firm and built it from nothing, had not said a word and did not vote. Fidgeting constantly with his hands, always grinding his teeth, Ryan watched everything with a kind of malevolent stare.
“We brought Antonelli into the firm because we needed someone who could do criminal law. He wants to hire Winston as an associate. I think it should be his call.” His eyes darted down first one side of the table, then the other. “Anybody disagree?” No one looked back at him. “All right, then. Elliott is hired. Let’s move on to something else.” Every partner had a vote; Ryan had the only one that counted.
Elliott could not believe it. After I told him a second time, he made me repeat it again just to be sure.
“I didn’t think I had a chance,” he cried. “They never hire anyone who didn’t go to one of the best law schools in the country. Wait till I tell my wife!” he exclaimed before he hung up the telephone.
At the time I doubt I even noticed that his reaction seemed to prove me wrong and the other partners right. There were people impressed with where they had gone to law school. But then, Elliott was young, and one of the hazards of youth is to be impressed with all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons.
Though they never came out and admitted they had been wrong, there was not one among the partners who had voted against him who would not, six months later, have voted for him.
Of all the associates we hired that year, Elliott was everyone’s favorite. He made them all feel important. There was nothing disin-genuous about it. He thought they were important. They had gone to the great law schools in the country; he had never spent more than two days at a time outside the state. Whenever he had the chance, he asked them what it had been like, going to a place he had only dreamed about. For all their sanctimonious insistence that the best lawyers were the ones who kept their clients out of court and their own names out of the newspapers, the only thing they liked more than talking about themselves was having an audience that listened to every word as if it were the revelations of a prophet. When we gathered in the conference room to make the final decisions on the next year’s crop of associates, there was a great deal of grumbling about the failure of the hiring committee to find any more like Elliott Winston.
I never saw anyone work harder. He was always the first one there in the morning and almost always the last one there at night. If I came in on a weekend, I usually found him in the law library, his feet stretched out over the arm of the chair next to him, a thick volume of the Oregon Reporter open in his lap. He did anything you asked, whether it was to run down the street to file a motion with the court clerk or research the latest opinion of the United States Supreme Court, and he did it with such cheerful eagerness he made you think you had done him a favor.
In a way I suppose it must have seemed to him as if we had.
For all the incredibly long hours he put in, they were not any longer, and they were certainly more interesting, than what he had done working the night shift in a warehouse while he was going to law school during the day. With a wife and two small children it was the only way he could go at all. It would have been better for him, better for his children, better even for her, if he had never tried, or, if he had to try, had given it up as more than he could do. How easy it is to say that now, as if anyone could have known what was going to happen.
I still don’t know why it happened. There was nothing inevitable, nothing preordained about it. He might have spent an entire career and except for an occasional courtroom appearance never become acquainted with Calvin Jeffries. He would not have met him at all had it not been for his wife.
Sometimes on a Saturday, when he knew there would not be anyone around, Elliott would bring his two children with him to the office. The boy was then about five and his sister four. They were remarkably well behaved. They would sit at the conference table, drawing on the back of the discarded pleading paper their father had pulled out of the bins, keeping perfect silence while he studied the advance sheets on the latest appellate court decisions. The first time I saw them there, he explained that their mother, a nurse, had sometimes to work on weekends. I learned later that she was employed at a small hospital in Gresham, just east of Portland. The administrator was one of Calvin Jeffries’s few close friends.
That is how it all started, how they all met, how the circle of those three lives came to intersect. That was all I knew, and I only knew that because Elliott mentioned one Monday that he had had dinner with “Judge Jeffries” that weekend. He must have seen the look of confusion in my eyes. “My wife knows him. Not very well,” he added. “He comes by the hospital once in a while.
The head administrator is a good friend of his.”
I was curious. “So he invited you to dinner?”
<
br /> “No, not quite like that. The administrator—Byron Adams is his name—invited us. There were maybe ten people. He told Jean he thought I might enjoy meeting the judge.” He thought it had been an uncommonly thoughtful thing to do.
“And did you?”
“Did I what?” he asked, a blank look on his face.
“Enjoy meeting Jeffries?”
“He was great,” he replied, gushing with enthusiasm. “He told me anytime I had a question I should just drop by. Anytime, he said.”
The smile on his face dissolved. He hesitated, as if he was not sure he should say what a moment before he had been eager to share. I was certain from his expression that it was something Jeffries had said about me. “Go ahead,” I told him. “It’s all right. I don’t mind.”
“He told me about the time he had to throw you in jail for contempt.”
The way he said it made it sound like a schoolyard prank, something that was worth all the trouble it got you into as a kid because it was such a great story to tell when you were all grown up.
“Is that what he said? He had to throw me in jail for contempt?”
Elliott was too glad that he had not done anything wrong in telling me what Jeffries had said to pay any attention to the tone with which I had said it.
“Did he tell you about the trial?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “What kind of trial was it?”
I started to tell him, then thought better of it. Why should he have to take sides in a war that had nothing to do with him?
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, dismissing it as something of no importance.
As he turned to go, I heard myself say, “Be careful around Jeffries.” He glanced at me over his shoulder, expecting an explanation. I just shook my head.
“Be careful.” What could that have meant to him, young, ide-alistic, a lawyer who believed he could help people, thrown together with a legendary judge who had taken a personal interest in him. First a firm that never took anyone who was not from one of the best schools, now a judge who would not give the time of day to the best known attorneys in the city. Elliott Winston was on top of the world. He was indestructible and all I could think to say was “be careful.” He must have thought I was out of my mind.
He might have been right. He worked hard, as hard as any associate I had ever seen, but he also had a life outside the law.
He had two healthy, gorgeous children and a beautiful wife, and his career was off to a better start than he could ever have imagined. I was not married, had never had children, and while I knew hundreds of people I could think of only two or three I really regarded as friends. Surrounded by the anonymous faces of courtroom crowds, I spent my days doing everything I could to become the closest acquaintance of the twelve new strangers that made up the next jury I had to persuade. I went home each night to an empty house and only on rare occasions thought there was anything wrong. Young and affable, bright and decently ambitious, Elliott Winston was living the American dream, while I lived alone, still searching for something I could never quite define. Had I known that one of us would one day find himself making this drive, I would have thought it much more likely to be he.
Elliott would not have waited nearly so long to do it. He always moved quickly, without hesitation, without any of those second, qualifying thoughts that cowards call prudence and use to excuse their failure to act at all. It was one of the advantages of having lived a blameless life. He never had to question his own motives or examine his own conscience. He could do whatever he decided to do and know that he was doing the right thing.
Perhaps it was more likely after all that, as between the two of us, I would be going to see him instead of the other way around.
I had meant it when I promised myself I would go to see him, but my calendar was full. There was a trial that lasted a full week instead of the three days for which it had been scheduled. There was a brief to research and write on a complicated issue on which no two courts had been able to agree, and I had only a few days left to do it. There were a dozen trials I was supposed to be getting ready for, and a dozen more after that. There were a thousand things to do and no time in which to do them. I had a million reasons not to go and I kept inventing more. I was afraid of what I would find, afraid of what I would feel. I gave myself a deadline of the last day of March and tried to convince myself that waiting until then was an orderly way to proceed instead of just another excuse for delay. On the morning of the thirty-first, I got in my car and began the drive, telling myself that I could always change my mind and turn back.
It was the second week of spring and it was as cold as any day we had that winter. Slate gray clouds ran across an angry sky, fleeing in front of a towering black thunderhead. The rain began to fall, light at first, then a hard, relentless downpour. Then, suddenly, it stopped, and there was nothing, not a sound, not a breath of wind, only an eerie half-lit calm. A single quarter-inch piece of ice rattled off the windshield, then another one, and then another, and the hail hit like machine gun fire. Cars swerved across the freeway as drivers turned on their lights and put on their brakes, and some of them tried to pull off onto the shoulder. It was over in a matter of minutes. A shaft of sunlight broke through and gave a silky sheen to the wet surface of the road. Across the valley to the west, the lowlying hills of the coastal range were covered with clouds. Before I had driven another five miles, the sky had turned black again.
Half an hour later I turned off at the third Salem exit and stopped at the traffic light. Across the street, an old man with weathered skin squinted straight ahead as he shuffled toward the entrance of a pancake house. A step behind him, a plump woman with short, iron gray hair gestured with her hand, talking rapidly.
He held the door open for her, a blank expression on his face, nodding as she passed in front of him.
I drove through a section of small wood frame houses built in the 1950s and 1960s, single-story houses bunched close together, with green grass lawns in front and square fenced yards in back.
When they were new, children could ride their bicycles in the street and no one thought about locking their doors at night.
Now there was too much traffic and everyone locked everything they owned. Finally, I reached Center Street and found what I was looking for.
You did not need to know the date it was built; you knew as soon as you saw it that this was something out of the nineteenth century. There must have been a certain pride of construction when it was finished, a belief that something spectacular had been achieved. It is hard to imagine what old buildings looked like when they were new. Even when a fortune has been spent on their restoration, it is like seeing a very old woman dressed in expensive clothes: She may look elegant, but she will never look young. The photographs that were taken of it at the time are old themselves, grainy black and white shots of stone and marble and brick, an enormous public building rising up in the middle of a place where, as yet, scarcely anyone lived. And always and everywhere, the people whose pictures were taken, staring into the camera, somber, sullen, as if each of them carried in their souls the secret of their own damnation. You could see the same thing in courtrooms all over the state, old enlarged photographs showing the early settlers, with grim faces and dead eyes, standing near the covered wagons that had brought them across the prairies and over the mountains. The women look meaner than the men, and the men look demented; the children look as old as their parents, and their parents look like they have already died.
My imagination was too much at work. Everything here reminded me of death, or things worse than death. Lining the street, large leafless elms, grotesque black shadows set against a hard leaden sky, looked as if they had been torn out of the earth and set upside down so their roots would wither and die in the harsh arctic air. But more than anything else, it was the building itself that gave me this awful sense of emptiness and despair, this sense that nothing had any meaning. It ran along the edge of the street, not more than twenty feet aw
ay, for the equivalent of two city blocks, a three-story brick fortress with a metal roof joined together with pinched, overlapping seams, like the old buildings of Paris. The yellow paint had in places faded white and in others peeled away, leaving behind bare bricks bruised with splotches of brownish purple covered with moss and mold. Supported by heavy three-sided braces, rotting wooden eaves extended the roof out over the walls. In vertical rows, narrow windows, some of them six feet tall and not more than a foot and a half wide, let in the outside light through a dozen small wood-framed glass panes.
At the far end, below a grass-covered knoll, I turned into the long circular drive. There were two street signs at the entrance, one for each of the narrow paved roads that bridged off from one another. Bluebird Lane and Blue Jay Lane. At the top, a third road led down the other side, through a cluster of tall firs, past two tennis courts laid out end to end and separated by a rusting chain link fence. The nets were frayed and one of them sagged to within a foot of the playing surface. Large puddles of water had collected in the hollows of the cracked cement. The road, little more than a pathway, disappeared into another clump of trees and came out a little farther on at a row of clapboard houses with dormer windows. The road was called Bobolink Way. I wondered who had given each of these small streets the name of a bird and what must have been going through their minds.
I parked at the top of the knoll in front of the entrance to the three-story brick building I had just come around. Unlike the rest of it, this part, which was four stories instead of three, had been newly painted, a vibrant yellow trimmed in harvest brown. At the top was a cupola with four false windows. Whether they had been painted over or whether there had always been wooden panels there instead of glass, I could not tell. The roof above the cupola was shaped into a narrow spike, and on top of that was a flagpole with a round orb on top. Freshly painted, the roof was already leaching rust.
