by Sonia Taitz
“The kids’ course isn’t just for the money, Abby. I do it because I like teaching, and . . . .” he trailed off. “I don’t do it for free, you may be relieved to know,” he continued. “They pay a hundred bucks per two-hour lesson. Each. That way, they tend to take the work seriously. The parents, I mean.
“By the way, speaking of money, I’m good for both of our breakfasts. Even if you do eat like a—what shall I say?”
She found herself laughing. “A pregnant fallen woman?” Tim laughed mildly along. He had beautiful teeth, of course. “I’ve actually got to get home now,” he said, tossing some bills out on the table.
“Wanna come with me?” he added casually, as he stood up from the table.
“What? No!”
“It’s not a proposition. I live right around the corner. If you still feel dizzy, you can come back and lie down on my very comfortable sofa. I’ll watch over you until you feel better, then walk you back to the One train.”
“You’re taking a lot for granted,” said Abigail. “I might be dating someone else.”
“In your condition?” he teased. “Who’d be interested in a pregnant lady?”
“I don’t know,” she replied humbly. “I guess someone sort of—unusual.”
“At your service,” he answered. “I’m not remotely usual.” Tim watched Abigail as she rose to her feet. She was normally voluptuous, and pregnancy, she sensed, cheeks reddening under his gaze, only italicized these attributes.
“I don’t need sofas,” Abigail said, as he held the door open for her. She felt a lot better after having had some food. “I need to get going.”
“To work?”
“Where else?” she said.
Tim could probably think of many other options, but Abigail was a fast one, tearing away to the subway as though nothing could stop her anymore.
2
The bar association library was like a second home to Abigail. The dusty smell, the dark wood, the sibilance of rustling pages—all these spoke of order. Things were set down, black on white, printed and beautifully bound. Even cases about disasters and their consequences were concluded with jurisprudential calm, the language itself majestically padded. The pages of the old Federal Supplements flipped quietly, with whispered good breeding, dispensing answers and dispelling chaos. Computers had their obvious place—speed, efficiency—but in this traditional milieu, many lawyers still preferred the dignified heft of these grand volumes. Abigail used both, but she felt most like a member of the bar when she flipped through the tomes. In her unusual field, it was good to be eclectic and thorough.
And it was wonderful to be in a profession with such a deep sense of its rich tradition. The library, her office, both so luxuriant and spotless, so hushed with elite purpose. Her own upbringing had been much rawer. Abigail’s parents had always lived modestly. They were fearful of poverty, which (they often repeated) they’d both known firsthand. No one but her mother had ever cleaned their home. Like a servant she had toiled, scrubbing the toilet, slapping a long-haired gray mop to and fro around the floors. Owen thought maids were nothing but migraines—money down the drain and pilfering to the bargain. He didn’t trust outsiders.
“I know how the poor look at the rich,” he’d say, twisting his face into a sneer that looked almost stagy. “And you don’t want people looking at you like that in your own home.” Abigail’s mother hadn’t minded the housework. She’d been brought up to cook and wash, iron a blouse, darn a sock. Her own immigrant parents had been nothing if not practical. On her mother’s watch, their home was spotless, down to the last piece of cutlery.
Abigail knew her parents’ story so well it was like a fairy tale to her—with the attendant obstacles to be overcome by the heroes’ noble efforts. Like her husband, Clara Milch was born an outsider to the easy American scene. Her parents, she often told her daughters, had lived in a displaced people’s camp in Germany after the war, a temporary world of homeless Holocaust survivors. A distant cousin had sponsored her family, eventually setting them up in a refugees’ enclave on the Lower East Side. That was where Clara had been born into the world. This displacement and the sudden rescue were both ideas Abigail was never allowed to forget, and the lesson had sunk deeply into her. You had to be safe, she understood. It was a frightening world. You had to be vigilant.
The story of her parents’ romance was another major part of the family lore. At twenty, a secretary living with her parents, Clara Milch had met Owen Thomas. He was her building’s new superintendent. Mr. Thomas was younger than she, Abigail, was now—only twenty-five. From photos, she knew he’d been red-faced, big-handed, curly headed. Clara had been leaning out of her second-floor window. Abigail imagined her mother looking at the immigrant kids bouncing balls against the walls of the narrow brick courtyard. She imagined her father looking up (like a ruddy Romeo) and calling to the pretty girl above him. But she didn’t need to imagine his first words. Abigail knew them and never forgot them, not even now, in her safe, American life.
“Watch yourself,” her father had said. “You might fall all the way down.”
Then he had disappeared. A moment later, Clara had heard a knock on the door. The knock was so loud, it had initially frightened her. Police? Eviction? When she told the story to her children, there was always a tremor in her voice at this part of the story. But it was nothing bad at all. The young curly haired man was there, hat in hand, and he said, “Let me fix that safety grille so’s it can hold.”
His first words, face-to-face, were to offer a service. A good deed just like Tim’s, Abigail realized with a thrill. Just like Tim lifting her up from the hard ground and holding her up.
“Oh, yes, please, sir, you’re very kind,” Clara had answered. (Abigail could hear her mother’s over-correct diction; she could always imagine her deferential stance, which she never quite lost.)
“My name is Owen,” he had said. “Please feel free to call me that.”
The fairy tale had gone well after this initial meeting. It had apparently taken Owen no time at all to fall in love with the dark-eyed girl, an outsider like himself. (“None of this constant dating and getting nowhere, like today,” Abigail’s mother would often remind her.) In time, the good young man had won the lady’s trust. Owen Thomas had impressed Clara Milch with his practical skills, his helpful deeds, and his simple, solid values. He knew what her folks had been up against, he’d said; he knew what the Old World was about, firsthand. Battles and boundaries, and all that petty hatred. He, too, had lost a language and a culture.
Their black curls mingling, Clara and Owen had fallen in love. It was a kind of mutual relief, a double rescue, Abigail thought. He would keep her safe, and she would make him strong with her trust in him. Despite the wishes of Abigail’s maternal grandparents—they had hoped to perpetuate their ravaged Jewish customs—Clara and Owen had married, at City Hall. They wanted a fresh start in the New World, together.
Clara had borne three children in quick succession: Elizabeth, Abigail herself, and Anita. Anita, the youngest, had become a suburban housewife, house-proud in Woodmere, Long Island. “Annie gives me the honor of teaching her,” Clara would say, proud to pass on her knowledge of how to bake a babka, how to fold a sheet, still warm from the iron, in just the right way. Elizabeth and Abigail, however, turned out to be “career girls.”
“You’re so busy, you have no time for this kind of work.” Abigail often heard her mother’s words in her ears. By “this kind of work” she had meant handiwork, sweat work. She had meant work that left a tactile impact, however brief and forgettable, on the cozy life of a family.
“Let your mama do it.”
She had let her mama do it, glad to have someone like that behind her as she raced ahead. It was harder and harder to appreciate motherhood in these modern times, when her very humility seemed like a lack of ambition. But Clara’s illness, cancer, had made Abigail more aware. Her mother had gradually become too tired to do all the things she had always done. And Abigail’s hom
ey world, the world she had always taken for granted, unraveled.
After suffering for years, Clara Milch Thomas had eventually died in a hospice. Tended by women, loving strangers who knew their work as well as she’d known hers, she had vanished back into the earth. Not long after, Owen Thomas had retired from his real estate business, packed up, and moved to the Sunbelt.
Now he lived in North Miami Beach, at the Versailles Hotel and Condominiums, with a woman called Darlene Shanks. Clara, Abigail thought, would have considered this woman cheap. All the more reason, then, to treasure her own promising career, which lifted her out of the realms of the sad or sordid.
Her big sister used to question her about her choice of practice. “How could you deal with those morbid issues?” Elizabeth had wondered. “Plane crashes? Widows and orphans?” Abigail was nonplussed. There was nothing disturbing in these matters, from her point of view. By the time she got to them, the whirlwinds had settled. Broken bodies were gently buried, plane parts retrieved, photographed, and cataloged. If time healed all wounds, law translated them into claims for hard cash, money damages for inchoate pain and suffering.
If only, thought Abigail, the real world were more like that: “actionable.” When her mother had died, suffering, there was no possible “action,” no “upside” to the matter, no “making the client whole.” Abigail would take mechanical malfunction over biological disaster, any time. At least it had an ostensible cause, a starting point for debate from side to side. At least there were attempts at restitution.
Liz was a private banker. In her world, as in Abigail’s, tough men and tougher women marched and barked all day and long into the night (with time out for power yoga and polytheistic Brahmin chants), then did it again the next day. The pay was magnificent, more than most people make in years toiling as nurses, teachers, or home care attendants. (Mama’s attendant had been up all night with her toward the end, wiping, turning, and lending an ear to her fretful imaginings.) Liz wore Armani, La Perla, Louboutin, Peretti. She kept a pair of Siamese seal points called Rupert and Framboise in her half–town house condo on the Upper East Side, and a dappled mare called Dare Me in North Salem.
At forty-three, she had pretty much decided never to bear children. Still, the possibility of adoption, when her career flamed out at fifty or sixty, remained. Liz’s husband, Art Gruen, a well-known essayist, had persuaded her that a needy child might be a rewarding addition to their future lives. For now, however, with years of bond work ahead, Liz didn’t think she could give the child enough of herself.
Shunting children off on babysitters, she told Abigail, seemed annoying, if not pointless. “I’m not great at delegating,” she’d say. “I’d go mad thinking, ‘Is she doing it right? Is she giving her all?’ and knowing that she probably isn’t. I mean, who are these people? From what I’ve seen, they’re not like us. They seem to be either snotty or slow, sometimes both.” From what she’d casually observed, Liz was equally put off by the British nanny type (with her crisp vowels and compulsive rule-making) and the warm Jamaican childcare worker (whose grammar left much to be desired).
Notwithstanding these arguments, Abigail did plan to shunt her future child off on a caretaker, knowing that with enough time and patience, she could find a perfectly good one. People had relied on “help” for centuries. And what did babies need anyway? How much did it take to keep them out of traffic, feed them, play peekaboo? Abigail, who had never so much as touched a baby (she’d been appalled when her little sister Anita was born), knew she wouldn’t mind delegating those dreary tasks.
What mattered was the firm to which, after tough years in law school, she had given seven even tougher years of dogged labor. Abigail would demonstrate how motherhood need not ruin productivity. It was infuriating when men—even in these modern days—would still whisper, “She’s never coming back full-time” when a female associate got pregnant. It was even more annoying when they were right, depending on what you meant by “coming back.” Even if the women returned to the office (and many did not, guiltlessly absconding with the training they’d been given), they were often distracted, ambivalent. Partly there, partly elsewhere, either literally or figuratively. And “elsewhere” was with that child, a being who seemed to transform women into brand-new creatures with pasts erased and all their goals reshuffled.
Abigail Thomas was not one of those women. Focus was her forte, and she would show them all. She was ready for the fight. Never again would men dare think women were not up to the job once their mammaries flowed. Never again would male partners assume that “career” was a relative term, dependent on emotional weather. She was a proud soldier, and she would not desert at any point.
During her fifth month, Abigail had been called in to speak to Bertram Fudim, the senior partner in her area. They openly discussed his worries—that after she’d given birth, she would “change,” reverting to stereotypical female type (warm, worried, self-sacrificial) despite the years that her firm had invested in her. As Abigail protested that her work was “everything” to her, Fudim held up his large, hairy hand.
“You and I know this a taboo subject. The personal arena.”
“No, it’s fine. I’d actually love to address this.”
“I’ve said too much. Some ladies would sue. Can of worms here.”
“Feel free to open the can. I’m not one of those people. Those ‘ladies,’” Abigail said, wincing slightly as she repeated his dinosaur term. “I get what you’re saying. I’d be saying it, too. And I’m here right now to show you—”
“You can show me when it happens. Wait ’til then.”
“No, you wait,” she said defiantly. Such chutzpah would be crazy in most other contexts, but Abigail knew that men like Fudim appreciated gutsy women. That was the point of this awful conversation, wasn’t it? To prove that she could take a rude, crude battering?
Bert Fudim had enormous dark brows, and they flew up expressively. Had she gone too far? Was her tone too gutsy? Would he slam her down? In the dramatic pause that followed, Abigail’s eyes traveled the room, following the angles of beige carpeting and mahogany wainscoting, desk and armchair. Dust motes bounced in the air near the window, buoyed by the air-conditioning. Their dance, Abigail thought, was both endless and slightly sad.
“Turn around, Ms. Thomas,” barked Fudim suddenly.
Swiveling her upper torso around the gravid roundness of her middle, Abigail saw a large samurai sword, hanging from the wall behind her.
“Gift from a client in Kyoto. Hara-kiri come to mind?”
“Context?”
“Giving birth.”
“I’ll let you cut the cord with it,” she joked.
“It won’t do the trick, dear,” said Fudim kindly. “Those cords go very deep. And that’s my point. Speaking off the record, ’cause I like you, OK? Pregnancy, childbirth, the whole nine months? No matter what you hear, let me give it to you straight—it’s the true hara-kiri. Blood and guts. The killer.”
“Oh, no, Mr. Fudim, certainly not,” said Abigail, laughing nervously. Was he referring to her inability to handle labor? She’d be aces at that. True, with a Caesarian, you could pick the date of birth to coincide with a weekend, or better yet, a holiday, but she’d handle baby’s exit either way.
“I’ve got the best prenatal care,” she rattled, almost happy to share these strategies with another practical soul, “and I’ll be going to Lamaze class, so I’ll be in control of my labor—and—what’s wrong?”
Fudim was glaring.
“You don’t know what I’m talking about!”
Abigail blurted, “Oh, hara-kiri—did you mean symbolic—uh, suicide? Career down the drain and all that? No, please, with all due respect, I refute that stereotype about women getting hormonal, not wanting to leave home and put in the hours. We’re not animals, ruled by some primitive nurturing ‘instinct.’ We’re enlightened professionals, with seven years of higher education behind us, not to mention the invaluable work experience and
training. Why would I ever throw it all away?”
Fudim got up from behind his ridiculously large desk and walked over to the door. He shut it. Then he came back and hovered over Abigail’s shoulder. She was seated in a deep leather armchair, her arms wrapped around her middle.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, stepping away to draw a cigar out of a humidor. He held it up in midair. “Oh—I’m sorry—should I not do this?”
“What, smoke a big cigar?” said Abigail. “No, no, of course it’s fine.” That was surely a test, to see if she was tough enough. Well, she was, although she couldn’t speak for the baby. Maybe she’d just breathe shallowly.
Fudim took his cigar over to a small guillotine, chopped off the end, lit it, and sucked slowly, finally releasing a plume of strong smoke. “Let’s talk about career suicide. Off-record, still.”
“Of course! I appreciate your frankness,” said Abigail, who knew that most partners wouldn’t touch these subjects—gender, sex, pregnancy—with their risk of nuisance lawsuits. Wouldn’t engage, wouldn’t discuss, wouldn’t admit. She loved how frank Fudim was being in her presence. She felt like his secret protégée.
“I know this is all about personal choice and privacy and all that nice, impractical ACLU, Legal Momentum crap—”
“It’s actually a penumbra, they call it,” said Abigail, ever the apt student. “An emanation from the First Amendment, the one that guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” There was that peculiar word again, “happiness.” “Coupled with the Fourth Amendment regarding illegal search and seizure,” she continued, “taking what belongs to someone, their secrets, for instance—”
“Took constitutional law in law school, did you?”
“Yes, Mr. F., I did.”
“Well, you’re not in law school anymore!” he bellowed.
Abigail’s body jolted in the armchair, and her fetus kicked.
“You’re in the school of real life,” continued Fudim, lowering his voice. “And this is where A leads to B even if Oliver Wendell Holmes and his Harvard ass don’t like it. You’ve got some memory for legal principles, kiddo. Me, I only remember that if a client dies, will or no will, the relatives are gonna get ugly. Money talks and greed screams. Did you know that?”
