An Imperfect Spy

by Amanda Cross

  “And if I were a character in a Hardy novel, I would try to get my conviction thrown out?”

  “I think so.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “Tell me why.”

  Betty lit another cigarette and sat back, blowing the smoke ceilingward. “Have you read my case?”

  “No,” Kate said. “I haven’t. I’m sorry. I was just told, a short time ago, that you wanted to see me, and that I had to come right away or permission for me to see you might be postponed. So here I am, sympathetic but uninformed.”

  “My husband taught at that law school, the same one that now has that clinic. Pretty funny, don’t you think?”

  “Very,” Kate said. “Tell me about him.”

  “That’s it, you see. I got a job there, at the law school, as his secretary. His secretary had to be smart, and flexible, and intelligent enough to know what was going on in his life. He was connected to a law firm as well as teaching, and needed someone to keep track of things. What he needed, of course, was a wife, as both of us figured out before long. He didn’t bother mentioning, however, that he’d had a drinking problem. He’d been to AA, but he reverted under the strain of the new relationship. I think that’s how they put it.”

  “Who put it?”

  “His wonderful colleagues at Schuyler Law. Have you met any of them?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, “not a madly attractive bunch.”

  “I call them a scary bunch. I mean, nice as pie when you first meet them, but covering each other’s asses, and their own, was the first order of business. And the last, of course. They testified that I drove him crazy, cheated on him—I didn’t, but they manufactured evidence—and generally made the court believe that I not only got beaten by Fred out of a kind of sad desperation on his part, but that I was lying about him, and so on. I wouldn’t let them put the kids on the stand, which I guess was noble but dumb. It was those law-professor colleagues of Fred’s who did for me. That, and what the appeals court kept calling imminence, which means he wasn’t beating me to death at the time I shot him. Of course not. I waited until the bastard passed out, and then I did it.”

  “Where did you get the gun?”

  “From this guy I knew—well, I’d known him before. He was a graduate student, in political science. We met when we were students; he was a friend. I ran away once, and he was the only one I could think to go to. I knew where he had lived, and he was still there. He got me the gun. He said, ‘Next time he goes for you, shoot him.’ I never asked where he got the gun. They’re not hard to get, are they?”

  “No,” Kate said, “they’re not. And that was the guy you were supposed to be being unfaithful to Fred with?”

  “They hired private detectives, those colleagues of his. They followed me. I used to go to see my friend with the kids—I hated to leave them alone or worse, with their father. They made that into something seamy. He was a friend, that’s all. I should have had a woman friend, I guess. I had had them, but they all married and moved away. I was only at the graduate school for a year.”

  “Where did you grow up, come from?”

  “Massachusetts. I left there a long time ago.”

  “What I’d like,” Kate said, lighting one of the cigarettes and cursing herself, “is to persuade you to go ahead with a habeas corpus, a term I’ve only just got my mind around. Talk to Reed and his students, however it works, maybe only one of his students, maybe only Reed, I don’t honestly know, but do it, go with it, take a chance.”

  “I don’t need custody of the kids,” Betty said, as though she were only catching up with the conversation on some sort of replay. “They’re in school; they’ll both probably be in college by the time I get out of here, if I ever do. It would be up to them if they wanted to see me. I keep remembering them as younger. As they were. I’d just have my own life to go on with. Suppose I wanted to go back for a Ph.D. Would you help me?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “That’s the first question you’ve asked me that I can answer with any assurance of knowing what I’m talking about. And, I think if you express a desire for the clinic’s help, you can have it. Notice I said ‘I think.’ But there’s a good chance. Think about it.”

  “I will. I’ll think about it. Could you send me another copy of your book on Hardy?”

  “Of course,” Kate said. “But what about Hardy himself? Shall I send you some of his novels?”

  “No. I can’t bear reading novels, not good novels. I like reading literary criticism, but of course there isn’t any around here.”

  “I’ll send you a selection. That’s too bad, about not reading novels, I mean.”

  “They’re too powerful. They make me feel too hopeless. And I don’t like the escape ones, which a few of the women here read. But literary criticism is, well, like a veil I watch literature through. I don’t want to read about anyone killing anyone, or even hating anyone. Or loving anyone. Peculiar, I guess.”

  “Not really. Do you watch television? Do they let you?”

  “We can, at certain hours. But I don’t like that either. I try to keep my brain from going soft.”

  “And there is no one to send you any books?”

  “My friend sends them, once in a while. But I haven’t known what to ask him for. You’ve reminded me.”

  “I’ll see that you get the books,” Kate said, “and I’ll be in touch. Or, if they don’t allow me to come back, I’ll send you messages through the clinic or write you letters by regular mail. I think that’s allowed. And you write to me if you feel like it.”

  “Maybe I will. Thanks for coming. I think I asked for you because I thought you wouldn’t come, but I’m glad you did. I think I’m glad. I’ll let you know. You’ll hear.”

  Driving back, they didn’t talk much. Bobby kept her eyes on the road and the even heavier traffic. “I think she’ll ask the clinic to take up her case,” Kate said, when they were almost home. “I hope so. Perhaps you can see her soon, if you put her name on the list and get the coordinator’s permission, and all the rest of it.”

  “We’ll try,” Bobby said.

  They drove a bit longer in a silence punctuated only by the action of gears and brakes. Kate leaned back against the headrest and, as was her habit, let the day roll through her mind, like a film she could stop when something puzzled her.

  “How did she know to ask for me?” Kate said suddenly, just as Bobby undertook a particularly tricky maneuver into another lane. “How did she know you knew me?”

  “She heard Reed’s name,” Bobby finally said, when they had achieved the other lane, which immediately ground to a halt. “From some other prisoner, probably, or maybe she caught sight of him in the prison and asked who he was. As soon as she heard his name, yours, of course, followed like night the day.”

  “Why should it have?”

  “Because as a student, I suppose, she was interested enough in you to find out all she could about you. Students often are that interested, you know. Finding out you were married and to whom hardly required rare detective talents.”

  “Reed seems to have been the key to today’s conversations between us,” Kate said. “I mean you and me. I hope all goes well with you, I really do.”

  “But sometimes,” Kate muttered under her breath when they finally reached their destination, “I wish we’d never heard of the Schuyler Law School.”

  I invested my life in institutions—he thought without rancor—and all I am left with is myself.

  —JOHN LE CARRÉ

  SMILEY’S PEOPLE

  Nine

  BEFORE the following week’s class, Reed had been able to report to Kate that Betty Osborne was considering reopening her case. Blair and Kate approached the room with a sense of being ready for anything, except, as Blair pointed out, being locked in.

  “On my insistence, they’ve removed the lock, I’m glad to say,” Blair told her. “Enough is enough. After you,” he added, holding the door for Kate with her briefcase.r />
  It was fortunate that Kate and Blair had prepared themselves for the unexpected, because it soon became clear that the class had moved into a new phase and was ready to take on legal questions involving gender at full blast.

  The class had read Bradwell v. Illinois for today; it was the Supreme Court’s first case (1873) concerning a woman’s claim to full participation in society, as Herma Hill Kay had put it. Kate had been very taken with Herma Hill Kay, who had written the casebook on sex-based discrimination and who was now dean of Berkeley’s law school. Myra Bradwell had applied for a license to practice law, which the Illinois Supreme Court had denied her because she was female. Bradwell was a lawyer, and her husband, who supported her law career, wished her to join him in his law practice. In denying her this right, Justice Bradley explained, in a concurring opinion, that “the paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now on the Supreme Court, was a coauthor of the first edition of the caesbook. Ginsburg added a wry comment on Bradwell: “Although the method of communication between the Creator and the judge is never disclosed, ‘divine ordinance’ has been a dominant theme” in decisions justifying sex-based discrimination.

  The class today was to discuss the role of religion in legal discrimination against women in Bradwell, several cases previously read, and Jane Eyre. As it turned out, Kate had spent longer on Tess of the d’Ubervilles with Betty Osborne than this class would spend on Jane Eyre. The class wanted to discuss the Schuyler Law School, and the rights of women and minority students therein.

  “All right,” Blair said, pushing his books and papers aside. “If a class can’t discuss real life once in a while, it’s not a class, it’s a habit,” he said. Kate wrote for a moment on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk toward him. It said: There may be other tape recorders running. Blair contemplated the note for a minute, scribbled on it, and passed it back while calling on the first student. “Let’s have a little order, however,” he said. “One at a time, at least at first.”

  His note read: I’ve got tenure and you’re out of here at the end of the semester, so.…

  But order was hardly to be maintained. The students had selected a spokesperson, a young woman who had marshaled her thoughts and was ready; but it was, clear, from the palpable energy emanating from the group who could hardly sit still, let alone remain silent, that feeling was running high.

  They did let her begin. “No woman has ever been chosen as Law Review editor,” she said. “You might not believe it, but we never noticed that until you came, Kate. They always said it was the guy with the highest grades, but last year there was a woman who was sure she had the highest grades; we thought she was just a pain in the ass, but now we wonder.”

  Kate, like the rest of the class, looked questioningly at Blair. She knew from Reed that the editor of Law Review used always to be the student with the highest grades, but that not terribly intelligent (in Kate’s view) criterion had given way to someone with high grades and something else—energy, originality, daring, interesting origins. Schuyler Law, it seemed, was not only following the old custom, but cheating at it.

  Nor was that all. The women students had begun exchanging stories of faculty moves on them, each woman considering herself alone in this until they had begun to talk to one another. “Women talking to one another are dangerous,” Kate said when some comment was demanded of her. “That’s why men liked to isolate us in separate houses and make us identify with the men rather than with each other. Women comparing notes frighten men. Auden said that somewhere. That’s one of the reasons, though not the main one, women were supposed to be virgins at marriage: the men didn’t want any basis for comparison.”

  “I also get the feeling,” another woman student said, “that the faculty feels that since they had to let women in, if only to have enough students, they might as well get good use out of them.” Blair grinned at Kate and pointed to her note. Kate shrugged her shoulders, returning the smile. Then everyone started speaking at once.

  “Hold it,” Blair shouted, standing up with his arms straight out, “hold it. I think we better go around the room, starting with you.” He pointed to a young woman in the back and at the center of the table. “Then we’ll move around to the left. You each have one minute to speak, so collect your thoughts. A minute is longer than you might imagine. Abigail?”

  Abigail was a self-contained young woman who had struck Kate as competent and likely to do whatever would serve her own ends best. Not that Kate usually read character across a room, but it was a type she had known all her life. They went along with convention, and convention these days meant you could become a lawyer, but you would still be married in white, have a child in the first few years of marriage, and give it the husband’s name. Any questioning of these items would be damned as useless, silly struggles. Abigail was not a woman who dealt in symbols.

  “I’m not a feminist,” she began, confirming Kate’s guess. “But since we women pay as much as the men here, I think we should be treated equally, and not as though they were doing us a favor letting us in. That is how we feel, because of the way we are treated in class, because we are never spoken to seriously by the faculty, because we are never elected to any committees or posts. Some of the men students might elect us—not many, but some—but the faculty discourage them from supporting women. We’ve established that.” Having said this, she stopped. She might not be inclined to stick her neck out, but she knew her rights and wanted them, as Kate had surmised.

  Next to her was a young man who had been clearly unhappy in the class and, while not as outraged as Jake the door locker, was obviously fed up. He had so far contained himself, Blair later explained to Kate, because he, Blair, was his chief faculty adviser and able to help him in many ways. But by now he had clearly had enough of Kate.

  “What makes you think you know any more about literature than we do?” he asked her, pointedly and rudely. Blair started to object to the tone if not the question, but Kate stopped him.

  “What makes you think you, or Blair, know more about law than I do?” Kate asked.

  “We’ve studied law,” he said. “Anyone can read. As it happens, I’ve read a lot.”

  “Have you read Jane Eyre for today?” Kate asked.

  “Sure,” he said, although he knew, and he knew Kate knew, he had read it, if at all, sometime in the past.

  “Why, then,” Kate asked, “do you think the book ends with the word Jesus?”

  He shrugged. “They all believed in religion in those days. They paid it lip service.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Kate said. “But how then do you account for Jane’s answer to Mr. Brockle-hurst when he warns her that if she is bad she will go to hell when she dies?”

  “I don’t account for it, I just listen to you blab on about it.”

  “Exactly,” Kate said. “We both read, we both read and study texts. Yours are law texts, mine are literature. It’s possible to read literature attentively and intelligently without studying it, and as I understand it, people used to be able to become lawyers by reading law while practicing it in a lawyer’s office, no schooling needed. Isn’t it just that we can’t all do everything, so we learn from one another?”

  “That’s shit,” he said, still sitting in place, looking, Kate thought, as though he might quite literally go up in smoke.

  “Please feel free to leave, Ted,” Blair said. “But just go; don’t stop to try to beat me up, and don’t try to lock the door behind you. Do not pass go; do not collect two hundred dollars.”

  It was unclear whether Ted was going to follow these orders, or sit and stew. To everyone’s relief, however, he gathered up his books and stomped out.

  “Next?” Blair sweetly said.

  Somehow that outburst had helped the class to reveal what was on their minds; and, having spent their anger vicariously, they could talk calmly. Their complaints were a
ll on the same theme, with variations. There ought to have been a woman faculty member appointed to replace Nellie Rosenbusch. Problems particular to women ought to be discussed. Rape and marital problems ought not to be the stuff of male humor in class. Faculty members should not flirt with women students, let alone come on to them.

  Here there was an objection voiced. “Plenty of women law students have married their professors,” a young woman near Kate remarked. “My friends tell me there are examples in every law-school faculty, men, that is, whose wives were their students. I don’t think we ought to get too sweeping about this.” The students all looked to Kate for her answer.

  “Relationships are one thing,” Kate said. “Sexual harassment is another. I can’t really believe any of you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. But at least in literature departments where I have been, there are graduate students who want to marry professors who are already married; sometimes, often, these professors leave their wives and marry the student. The student often learns soon enough, having become the wife, that some other graduate student will try to displace her. Perhaps that doesn’t happen anymore, however,” she added. “I’m sometimes not quite up to date about current mores.”

  “Well,” the young woman said, “I think we make too many laws about everything.”

  “I think so, too, sometimes,” Kate said. “But in attempting to make the laws against harming certain people, we do inform ourselves about the possibilities of such harm. So the debate serves its purpose, although I end up on your side.”

  The young woman, to Kate’s pleasure, smiled her agreement. God, Kate thought, how much we want them to appreciate us, to admit, however silently, to having learned something.

  Eventually, they got around to a young man who would be almost the last person to speak. Kate metaphorically held her breath; she liked him, and hoped he would not go the way of the other two outraged young men, though if he did so, he would go politely.