by Amanda Cross
When she was in the car, she opened the book of poems, hoping he had at least signed it. He had done more than that. For Kate, he had written, who cared about Nellie and doesn’t ask too many questions.
Kate closed the book with, she was surprised to realize, intense emotion. She had to wait for tears to recede from her eyes before she was able to drive away.
Kate was late getting home and tired from the drive to the airport, the plane trip, the drive from the New York airport, and the simultaneous sense of being glad to have met Rosie, brave in his grief, and foolish in having turned a terrible accident into murder because she thought some men capable of murder. She and Reed sat with their drinks; Kate was glad to be silent for a while beside him; she would tell him about the visit to Rosie, but not yet. She had to get used to it in her mind first. What she was used to in her mind, however, was the dreariness of Schuyler Law.
“I know you will do good with your clinic, and maybe my spouting literature in counterpoint to law will give someone an idea, but I can’t help wondering why we had to do all this in so crummy a law school. Why did we have to end up in such a depressing place? Surely most other law schools are a lot better. Please say they are.”
“It’s pretty astonishing, Kate,” Reed said. “It started me looking around my own law school. And then there’s Harvard. Where they claim that the reason they haven’t got a tenured black woman is because there simply isn’t one good enough for Harvard. Meaning, freely translated, she doesn’t teach law the way they think law should be taught. And speaking of Harvard, I’ve brought you a book to read.”
“Ah, the intellectual’s solution to everything. What book is it?”
“You sneer at books! You must be tired. You know as well as I that they have changed the world and may be all that can.”
“Sorry, Reed. I’m feeling foolish, and when I feel foolish I get argumentative; foolishly, of course. What book have you brought me?”
“It’s about the Harvard Law School, and no, it’s not the one by Scott Turow. It’s called Broken Contract, by a guy named Kahlenberg.1 If you don’t want to read it and be plunged into further dismay, I’ll tell you its main point. Public service, the ideal with which most Harvard Law students and, one supposes, students at other like institutions, enter the study of law, is abandoned by these students in large numbers. Partly it’s money; corporate law offers huge salaries compared with public service law, and many law students have large loans to pay back. Partly it’s that Harvard Law cooperates with corporate law firms, who are their wealthiest alumni and contributors, in directing the students that way. Mostly, however, it’s that students early discover that power does not lie in public service; such jobs rarely lead to political appointments, let alone the good life, elegant working conditions, and a place in the power loop. Harvard Law School, like the others in the same rank, preach service but make sure their graduates are not deluded by the sermons.”
“The author of this book seems to have convinced you,” Kate said. “Maybe he’s wrong, or has an ax to grind, or just hates Harvard, a not uncommon emotion.”
“Maybe. But he quotes a speech from the then-president of Harvard, Derek Bok. Ten years earlier, in the first Reagan years, Bok had given a speech deploring the rush to corporate law. He expressed regret at how the brightest students had diverted their talents to ‘pursuits that often add little to the growth of the economy, the pursuit of culture, or the enhancement of the human spirit.’ The author calls Bok ‘the master of inconsistency,’ because when it came time to appoint a new dean of the law school, which was divided between the liberals and the neoconservatives, Bok threw his weight behind the ultraconservative candidate for dean, a leading spokesman for the right. As a result, gifts to the law school soared by sixty-four percent.”
“Schuyler Law,” Kate said, after a pause, and in rather hopeless tones, “is not Harvard Law. There isn’t and never was any ‘left’ there at all.”
“There’s you and Blair and me, and Bobby helping me. Have a little gumption, Kate, please. You don’t usually become quite this damp and hopeless.”
“Reed, there’s a battered woman in your prison named Betty Osborne. I mentioned her after that wonderful faculty reception. She’s the one who shot her husband, a law professor from Schuyler, because he was beating her. Couldn’t you use the battered woman syndrome to get her a retrial?”
“Kate, the prisoners have to request our help. We can’t go in and recruit them; that’s not how it works. What brought her to mind all of a sudden?”
“Nellie’s brother. He mentioned that Nellie had been concerned about her. Please try and do something. If she will let you help her, it may be the only result of my impulsive trip to New Hampshire.”
“You got a book of poems.”
“So I did.”
“Kate, if you will cheer up, I’ll promise to have a word with Betty Osborne. I can’t make her request our help, but I can let her know we’re there. It’s a bit irregular, but I’ll do it. On one condition: that you cheer up, right now. At least, pretend to cheer up and stop me worrying about you. I don’t want to go back to thinking you’re in a phase, as your mother said.”
“It’s a bargain, Reed. I don’t feel much like talking cheerful. Could we try being cheerful in bed?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Reed said, glad to make her smile.
1Richard D. Kahlenberg, Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School. Faber and Faber, 1992.
Please don’t ever imagine you’ll be unscathed by the methods you use. The end may justify the means—if it wasn’t supposed to, I dare say you wouldn’t be here. But there’s a price to pay, and the price does tend to be oneself.
—JOHN LE CARRÉ
THE SECRET PILGRIM
Seven
KATE returned to Schuyler for her seminar the next day, reassured by Reed’s promise to learn what he could from Betty Osborne. She reported to Harriet the substance of her New Hampshire visit: Nellie had not been killed. Harriet listened, in the women’s room, to Kate’s account, and seemed unimpressed.
“No doubt the brother’s right,” she said, “technically speaking. They killed her all the same, the bastards. Why is it that men with retrograde opinions have no manners? They come into the secretaries’ room and order me and the other women around. Sometimes they come in, looking for a fellow conspirator, and if he’s not there they say, ‘Oh, there’s no one here.’ I’ve trained the women to sing out in unison, ‘There’s somebody here; there’s a bunny rabbit underneath the radiator.’ It’s had a surprisingly good effect.”
“Men like these,” Kate said, “have good manners to women they consider their social equals. They’re only rude to women over whom they have power. That’s the explanation of most sexual harassment, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Of course I’ve noticed. At least I’ve been able to maintain an atmosphere of no bottom smacking or cheek pinching in my secretaries’ room. ‘Go home and pat your wife,’ I say to them. Really, Kate, there’s been a change. They creep in the door now, and behave like lambs once inside. They have definitely decided not to mess with me. And they don’t want to be rid of me, because I get the work done. This is known as having them by the short and curlies: hands and hats off, boys, I say.”
Kate, considerably cheered by Harriet’s grip on things, went down to the seminar room where Blair was waiting. Blair, too, seemed to feel that things were looking up. A good deal of what Kate and he had been saying seemed, suddenly, to have taken root. As a result, instead of discussing legal and literary treatments of rape, Kate and Blair found themselves this afternoon being questioned about the law school itself.
While they were still, at the beginning of the seminar, parrying questions and trying to decide without the benefit of consultation how to deal with this new openness, a male student strode to the door of the classroom, locked it with a key he had with him, and stood facing the class.
“No one leaves till I say so,” h
e ordered, “and no one telephones.” He glared at the young woman who had had the phone on the last occasion. Blair looked at Kate and both simultaneously recognized that the last attempt to incarcerate the class had gone awry, and this student, or whoever had planned it, had seen the trick fail. The call to the police had gone out too fast. This time the student was better prepared; he had decided or been ordered to lock the door himself, and he had done so. He now faced Blair in a confrontational stance that was, Kate realized, what was meant by squaring off.
“I’ve had enough of your goddamn bullshit,” the young man said to Blair, “and I’m going to show you how real men behave. If there’s one thing I hate worse than fags, it’s straight men who let women tell them what to do.” And he launched himself at Blair, punching him first in the stomach and then, as Blair bent over in pain, in the face. Kate and everyone else in the room stood as though paralyzed. In the lengthy moment it took Blair to collapse on the floor and the student to leap on him, Kate realized that outside of movies and television, she had never seen any men she knew personally fighting. The whole thing resembled a staged fight for a characteristically violent film of the day, providing guns and knives had been, for some eccentric reason of plot, avoided. All this was the thought of a second: she was uncertain what to do.
The students in the class, however, if less literarily inclined, were more practical. One of the young women picked up a chair, hoisted it above her head, and brought it down on the back of Blair’s assailant. Obviously, a young woman who worked out, which Kate did not. Nonetheless, grasping the strategy, she and others grabbed chairs and began shoving them onto the belligerent student, still on top of Blair. The effect was confused but effective; the student rolled away from the chairs, and Blair grabbed him.
In the extraordinary (to Kate) manner of the indestructible men in films, Blair started punching the student, who was considerably taller and heavier, until the student, in his turn, was lying on the floor with Blair hovering over him, waiting for him to get up. At that moment Kate remembered the student’s first name, which was Jake. (Blair had insisted on running the class on a first-name basis, and Kate never did learn which last name went with whom until almost the end of the semester.)
Blair, tired of hovering, pulled Jake to his feet and slammed him against the wall, where he held him up with one hand, while threatening him with the other, should he move. Jake seemed either worn-out, or biding his time. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Blair asked, shaking him as though a reasonable explanation might just possibly fall out.
“I’ve been taping this bullshit class,” Jake said, shaking himself loose but carefully not suggesting any further violence. “I’ve been listening to all this propaganda, cases where guys rape girls because the damn girls can’t make up their minds even when your balls are blue. And what the hell are girls for anyway? You people, you and this crazy dame, are polluting the whole atmosphere of this law school and of the country, and I intend to put a stop to it. That’s what the fuck I’m doing.”
“Give me the key,” Blair said, holding out his hand.
After a moment’s consideration, Jake handed it over, hatred oozing from him like sweat. Blair unlocked the door, but did not open it; he pocketed the key.
“How many of you knew that this guy was taping the class?” he asked. He motioned Kate to the seat next to him and sat down. Jake leaned against a wall. “Lean over there,” Blair said to him, pointing to the farther wall. “I want to be able to see you. Or sit down, if that position is compatible with your profound dignity. But keep your hands on the table.”
Jake sat down, reached into his pocket as Blair rose menacingly to his feet, and then slid the tape recorder across the table toward Blair. “You can keep this tape,” he said. “I have plenty of others. With copies.” He sneered.
Blair removed the tape and put the recorder in his jacket pocket. “I’ll return it when this class is over,” he said. “Don’t forget to ask me for it. Now, as I was saying, how many of you knew this class was being taped?”
For a time there was silence, long enough for Kate to wonder what Blair would do next—she herself hadn’t, she realized, the least idea of what to do—when a young woman spoke up.
“I knew,” she said. “I encouraged him. He seemed to be a real guy, not like the other so-called men in the class—well, that’s what I thought then,” she added, looking around apologetically. “I mean, Jake was going with a friend of mine and she thought it was a great idea. I’m not so sure I still think so. Anyway, I’d started reading up on the law on taping without permission. It’s complicated, but I thought one’s motives should come into it. I mean, you know, well, I didn’t think Jake would want me to tape some of his conversations about this class. Would you, Jake?” she added, turning toward him. Jake started to snarl something, and then stopped.
“What really got to me,” the young woman, whose name was Tilly, went on, “was that he somehow got hold of a picture of Kate, Professor Fansler, and attached it to one of the worst kind of centerfolds from Hustler, or some such porn magazine. He passed it around, and everyone sort of laughed at first, and then some of us began to wonder if we’d really like someone to do that to us, and if it was really fair. I mean, Kate never pretended to be a sex object, did she? It seemed like taking Jake’s head and putting it on the picture of a guy with a tiny little prick, if you know what I mean.”
Smiles around the table indicated that they knew what she meant. Neither Kate nor Blair smiled. It all seemed far more crude and violent and intrusive than anything they had imagined possible in a classroom.
“Did Jake show this composite centerfold to anyone on the faculty?” Kate asked. The women around the table exchanged glances. “I take it,” Kate said, “that silence means consent. Why is it I’m so certain the faculty found it screamingly funny?”
Blair looked at his watch and exchanged a glance with Kate, who looked at hers and nodded. “We’ll call this class over for today,” he said. “If anyone tries again to lock that door or any door with me on the other side of it, I promise you your future in any kind of law practice will become singularly difficult. Everybody out.”
They left the room slowly, as though sensing that the situation had not been satisfactorily resolved, as indeed it hadn’t. When they were gone, Kate and Blair, still seated, looked at each other and, almost simultaneously, sighed.
“I’m sorry you had to put up with that,” Blair said. “You’re taking it with remarkable equanimity. You are all right, aren’t you, Kate?”
She was silent for a moment. “I am all right, thank you. And I find I’m wondering why. I mean, that’s a pretty brutal thing to do to any woman. But the mean boys in Hustler and Playboy have been playing that trick for a long time now. And a woman-professor friend of mine even had the same treatment, far more skillfully carried out, from a right-wing journal. The idea isn’t shocking anymore; it’s on a par with being told that all feminists hate men and won’t wear makeup. I don’t imagine this little job was done very skillfully. It isn’t the picture, Blair, it’s the hatred and the fear. The degree to which some men are threatened by feminism. But it doesn’t make me fearful and vulnerable anymore, it just makes me first angry, and then thoughtful—wondering what the threat really is.”
“That’s simple.” He got up and stood behind her chair, putting his arms over hers and then massaging the back of her neck and shoulders. “They’re afraid that their natural and unquestioned position at the top of the ladder is becoming less secure. The ladder’s shaking, and they are in grave danger of falling off the top.”
“You don’t seem worried.”
“Maybe because I don’t find the top as appealing as some. I’ve decided I don’t care a great deal for the guys who make it up there.”
“You sound like Harriet,” Kate said, getting up. “Thanks for the massage; I was tense.”
“Better than sounding like our dean,” he said. “Let’s go.” They walked tog
ether back to Blair’s office, where, seated on opposite sides of the desk, they smiled at each other.
“I didn’t know you could fight like that,” Kate said. “Do all men do that? I’ve spent so much time with literary types that I never noticed, and missed out on all the action. I’ve never seen Reed hit anyone.”
“I was a street kid long ago,” Blair said, “and I’ve stayed in shape. He hit me in the stomach, which I wasn’t ready for, but I had hardened those muscles, almost automatically, in anticipation. I’m what they call an A-type, so I’ve had to learn to be ready for what comes.”
“An A-type,” Kate repeated. “You mean the sort who can’t stand waiting on line, and finishes everybody’s sentences, and fights over parking spaces—that kind of A-type?”
“More or less,” Blair said. “Except, as you may have noticed, I’ve tried to stop finishing people’s sentences, at least most of the time. The question is, what in hell are we going to do about Jake?”
“I haven’t an idea in the world, at least not at this moment,” Kate said. She stood up, anxious to get away from all this and especially from the excruciating fact that this revolting masculine display had made Blair sharply, noticeably attractive. I’m responding to cavemen, she thought. What the hell is the matter with me? This damn place is driving me bonkers, that’s what it is, and turning me into someone who ought to want to be in a centerfold. Well, anyway, able to respond to the sort of man who responds to centerfolds? Oh, shit, as Jake would say.
“I think we should make sure that guy’s actions do not go unreported to his potential employers,” Blair said. “I mean, if they think he acted in a manly and proper fashion, they’re free to hire him, and good luck. But other types should be warned.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “I think he did us a favor, really. He’s turned some of the students around more effectively than we might have done without his help. I think he’s the sort who’s his own worst enemy.”
