Solomon and Lord Drop Anchor (solomon versus lord)

by Paul Levine

  She rose from the chair and gave him a polite, how-are-you smile. “I’m Lisa Fremont” said the stunning woman in the navy double-breasted blazer. Her handshake was firm, dry, and warm. She had a fair complexion, eyes nearly as blue as her blazer, golden red hair, and what appeared to be a great figure underneath the conservative outfit.

  No way will I hire her. No fucking way. Too good looking. Way beyond attractive. Connie would kill me.

  “I see you’ve met Eloise,” he said, gesturing toward his secretary, a plump woman in her sixties who was perched in front of a word processor, eyeglasses dangling on a rhinestone chain looped around her neck. “Elly was with me in private practice, at legal services, at Harvard, and now here. She keeps track of my appointments, corrects my misspellings, and warns me when I have gravy on my tie.”

  “At Harvard, you didn’t wear a tie,” Eloise said, without looking up from her keyboard, her voice disapproving. “Blue jeans and chambray shirts, you looked like a cowboy in a Marlboro ad.”

  “Elly remembers when I couldn’t find the courthouse door.”

  “His first trial was a pro bono criminal case,” Elly said, momentarily stopping her typing. “His presumably innocent client stuck a firecracker into the ear of a friend.”

  “A couple of drunks in a bar,” Truitt explained.

  “Boys will be boys,” Lisa said, easily working her way into the story.

  “Exactly,” Eloise agreed. “So here’s young Scrap-that was his nickname before he got so high and mighty-dancing around the courtroom like Fred Astaire, cross-examining the victim.” She dropped her voice a couple of octaves and sang out, “Isn’t it true, Mr. Fiore, that you suffered no permanent injuries?”

  “And the witness looks at me,” Truitt broke in, “and says-”

  “I beg your pardon,” Lisa interrupted, cocking her head and putting a hand to her ear.

  Truitt looked at her in astonishment.

  “That’s right!” he said, impressed.

  The story was meant to loosen up the applicant as well as test for a sense of humor. This was the first time anyone had the courage or intuition to beat him to the punch line. It did not occur to Sam Truitt that Lisa already knew his often-told tale from reading an obscure legal newspaper that had profiled him.

  If only you weren’t so distractingly, maddeningly beautiful I could be as chaste as one of the chief’s monks in the monastery, but with my reputation, he’d still think I was shagging you.

  Nearly all the 532 resumes Truitt had received were from qualified candidates. Top students from the best law schools, they could all write, research, and analyze. For his three clerks-he was entitled to four but wanted a smaller staff-Truitt sought a team with camaraderie. They’d have to put in long hours, but they should also be able to have a beer together. He admired hard workers, and perhaps because of his own background, appreciated those who did not have a law school education handed to them as a legacy. He also wanted at least one woman, and someone from west of the Mississippi.

  So far, he had hired two men. Victor Vazquez came to Florida from Cuba with his parents on the Mariel boatlift, attended Miami High, worked two jobs at Tulane, then earned a free ride at the University of Michigan Law School, where he was editor in chief of the Law Review. Next was Jerry Klein, whose IQ was off the charts and who had dropped out of medical school to enroll at Yale Law because he thought it would be fun. He won the job by telling Truitt that the only difference between the two professions was that lawyers merely rob you while doctors rob you and kill you, too.

  “I think W. C. Fields said that,” Truitt responded, testing the chubby young man.

  “Actually it was Chekhov.”

  “I know,” Truitt told him. “I just wanted to see if you’d correct me. You’re hired.”

  Either Klein had chutzpah, or he lacked the natural instincts to be wary of correcting his boss. Either way, Truitt liked him. He sensed that Lisa Fremont had the same self-confidence. Only difference, the obese, pimply Klein looked like a sausage stuffed into an ill-fitting suit. This goddess standing before him looked as if she just stepped off the cover of Cosmopolitan.

  Ten years ago, hell five years ago, he would have relished the sexual tension, the flirtatiousness that is a constant companion in the workplace. But there was a difference between a university faculty and the Supreme Court. The chief justice, bless his scurrilous heart, was right about that. The tabloids would love to have another scandal as juicy as the President and the intern.

  Truitt was determined to be polite but brief with Ms. Lisa Fremont, then dismiss her and continue the search for the female equivalent of Jerry Klein.

  “Let’s go into my office and talk,” he said. “If you’re up for it, Elly makes a potent cafe Cubano. Any that’s left over, we send to Cape Canaveral for the booster rockets.”

  “Sissy,” Elly called at him.

  “I’d love some,” Lisa said. “I missed my morning coffee.”

  It was the first lie she would tell that day, but by no means the last.

  ***

  Sitting primly with legs crossed in an antique chair more handsome than comfortable, Lisa sized up Sam Truitt’s office. It had that messy, genius-at-work look. Trial transcripts, pleadings binders, the official records of a hundred cases covered the mahogany desk, a brown leather sofa, and portions of the plush blue and gold carpet. Somewhere on that desk or on a wooden cart nearby, Lisa knew, would be the consolidated cases of Laubach et al. v. Atlantica Airlines. There would be copies of the pleadings, the summary judgment dismissing the cases, the one-sentence affirmance in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the plaintiffs’ petition for certiorari, and the Supreme Court’s four-to-four decision-prior to Truitt’s confirmation-to hear the case. Although it would take five of the nine justices to overturn the summary judgment, under the Court’s time-honored Rule of Four, a majority had not been necessary to grant review.

  Lisa had already read the file, courtesy of Max’s lawyers. She knew the facts. She knew the law. All she did not know was how to convince anyone-much less the humane and sensitive Sam Truitt-to close the courthouse door to nearly three hundred grieving families. But that would have to come later. First, she had to get the job, and she was beginning to feel the butterflies. She tried to chase a recurring thought-that she didn’t really belong here. That all the higher education, and the fine clothes and the superficial gloss that came from flying first class and staying in penthouse suites couldn’t hide who she really was. Draping a streetwalker in mink didn’t make her a duchess.

  All this time, I thought I’d come so far, but have I? Why do I feel like the same scared kid who ran away from home?

  She feared that Sam Truitt would see right through the facade, that she would be humiliated and never get the job. For a moment, Lisa felt lightheaded and thought she might faint. Then she sipped the demitasse of Cuban coffee, waiting for the caffeine to surge into her veins. As she half-listened to the justice explain the law clerk’s duties-all of which she knew-she forced herself to calm down and concentrate.

  Max is counting on me, and I can’t fail him.

  She studied the chambers, looking for clues to Sam Truitt, the man. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered one wall. The books contained every decision of every federal court since the founding of the Republic. The latest edition of the United States Code, the federal statutes, were there, too, as were the tens of thousands of regulations of federal agencies. A computer at the desk was linked to databases that could research in seconds what would have taken days or weeks in earlier times. In the corner, half-a-dozen cardboard boxes remained to be unpacked.

  A mahogany stand-up reading desk stood against one wall. An American flag with gold fringes was lodged on a pole in the corner. A framed black-and-white photo of a football team, the players and coaches sitting on bleachers, rested on an oak credenza, as did a partially deflated ball. Antique books with cracked golden bindings were displayed behind glass, and a portrait of Chief Ju
stice John Jay hung over the fireplace mantel.

  Truitt went on for a while about the pool memos the clerks prepare to help the Court to determine whether to review lower court cases. With little enthusiasm, he mentioned the importance of writing objective bench memos for him, fairly summarizing each party’s position, and listing similar cases that may have been omitted from the briefs. It was a mechanical speech he seemed to have given before.

  Omigod! He’s bored. I don’t even have his attention. He’s already dumped me in the reject pile.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Truitt said, leaning back in his leather chair and sneaking a quick look at his wristwatch. “Skip all the legal stuff. I’ve already read your transcripts and I’ve spoken to Judge O’Brien, who gives you a glowing recommendation. Tell me about Lisa Fremont, the person.”

  He’s just being polite before showing me the door.

  Lisa fought the urge to speak quickly, to cram a lifetime-and not an entirely honest one-into a minute. She took a deep breath to relax and began at her own pace. “I grew up in Bodega Bay, California.

  He nodded and said, “ The Birds.”

  “Right. They made the Hitchcock film there, but that was before I was born. I think of the place more as The Old Man and the Sea. My father was a fisherman.”

  She paused, just as she had rehearsed, then watched as he nodded with approval. Tilling common ground, or rather, fishing the same waters, the son and daughter of humble men facing each other in the palatial Courthouse, one block from the Capitol, with the Library of Congress and the Senate offices on either side.

  The Justice, the law clerk, and Joe DiMaggio… all children of fishermen.

  “He was a shrimper mostly,” she said. “Crabs, too, depending on the season. For a while, he crewed on someone else’s boat, but usually he just worked alone.”

  When he worked at all When he wasn’t drunk, sprawled across the convertible sofa with the popped springs, the sofa he hauled onto the front porch to her everlasting shame, the sofa where he lay, unshaven and reeking of sweat and beer and vomit, tossing bottles at passers-by, the sofa where on a dark night when no one heard her screams, he…

  “It was a hard life,” she said. “Neither of my parents even graduated from high school. In fact, Mom was in tenth grade when she got pregnant with me. I knew I had to get out of there. I left home for San Francisco and went through a series of minimum wage jobs that convinced me of the need for higher education.”

  “I don’t recall those early jobs on your CV.”

  Let me orally refresh you.

  “Just some waitressing, barmaid work, that sort of thing. One summer, I had a job at Yosemite, clearing trails.”

  “Really,” he said, perking up, paying attention. “I spent a summer as a park ranger at Fort Jefferson.”

  “Where’s that?” she asked, seemingly with real interest.

  He told her that the Civil War fort was in the Dry Tortugas near Key West, but she knew that. She knew Sam grew up in Everglades City, that his father, Charlie, had piloted a stone crab boat and that he died of lung cancer at fifty-seven. She knew that Sam had camped out in Ten Thousand Islands as a young boy and fished off Shark Point. She knew he drew pictures of all the animals he spotted-water moccasins, manatees, ospreys, and alligators-and that he could imitate the caw of a mockingbird and build a fire from two pieces of wood. She knew he skippered a homemade airboat through the Everglades and built his own fishing hideaway in the islands at age sixteen. She knew he had won two hundred dollars in the eleventh grade for an essay about preserving the Glades and was rewarded with a trip to Tallahassee, where his picture was taken with the lieutenant governor.

  She knew that the local Rotary Club had taken up a collection to help him buy books for his first semester at Wake Forest, that he worked two jobs and was a walk-on with the football team, which never did give him a scholarship. She knew he took a year after graduation to work with the Peace Corps in Central America, went to law school at the University of Virginia, and afterward spent two years with Legal Services, helping migrant workers in Florida’s sugar cane-fields, before a short stint in private practice and then on to Harvard to pick up an LL.M. degree.

  Lisa Fremont knew all these things because she had read the three books and ninety-eight legal articles he had written and seven hundred sixty-seven newspaper and magazine articles that had mentioned his name. Thanks to the very same software that could find every reference to the phrase “capital punishment” in every judicial opinion over the past two hundred years, she could find all published references to Samuel Adams Truitt, including last August’s social columns in a Nantucket weekly where the newly appointed justice and his wife, Constance, enjoyed grilled lobster and sweet corn at Senator Parham’s summer home. For the early material that wasn’t stored on a hard drive, she had dug up copies of his high school and college yearbooks and student newspapers. Lisa Fremont was nothing if not a great researcher.

  Now she maintained eye contact as Sam Truitt spun his personal history with the enthusiasm of a man who loves life and doesn’t mind talking about it.

  At least I’ve got his attention. Now, be appealing but not seductive, smart but not arrogant.

  After telling his abbreviated version of his trip from Everglades City to the Supreme Court, with various stops en route, Truitt said, “I appreciate the fact you’ve had some real jobs. I confess to having a bias against people who were groomed from infancy to become lawyers. It’s a great asset to have some life experiences.”

  Does erotic dancing count? You wouldn’t believe what I used to do with my “great asset.”

  “Do you have any underlying legal or moral philosophy?” he asked, and she was caught off guard. She knew that he’d written with admiration of the humanism of Jean Calvin, whose teachings provided the bedrock for the protection of individual liberties. She could memorize and take tests and research the law, but…

  What do I believe?

  It was the same question that plagued her last night. Though she wished it were otherwise, she didn’t believe the slogans on the pediments. At best she had an ideology that came from listening to Max Wanaker’s theory of enlightened self-interest.

  Do unto others before they do unto you.

  “I’m not sure I have a clear, discernible philosophy,” she said, sounding lame, hating her answer, knowing it disappointed him.

  “If you were a judge,” he asked, giving her a second chance, “what moral and ethical framework would you bring to the courtroom?”

  She bought time by finishing her Cuban coffee, feeling the caffeine rush. She needed to wing it, to spin bullshit into gold. Wasn’t that a large measure of lawyering? She’d won moot court at Stanford by keeping her poise and cleverly answering the unexpected question, but just now, she lost her concentration. Her mind flashed back to Max and the way he looked last night, how desperate he seemed about the case.

  “ This is more important than you know.”

  Why? And why wouldn’t he tell her more? Sure, the case was important. Jesus, nearly three hundred people had died. Damage claims could exceed half a billion dollars. But that’s why every airline carries massive amounts of insurance. Other than a quick spurt of adverse publicity from a megabucks verdict if Atlantica lost the case, what was the crisis?

  Regaining her focus, Lisa was aware of Justice Truitt staring at her, waiting for her answer. “I’d just call them the way I saw them,” she said, using the sports cliche, falling deeper into the pit she had dug. The look on his face told her he was dissatisfied.

  “Let’s try it this way,” he said, patiently. “What’s your view of Calvinism?”

  She forced herself to focus. That she could be sitting here, in this majestic building, being asked to judge the work of a sixteenth-century French theologian struck her as both quaint and oddly moving. Sam Truitt, a man whose own words would be studied and critiqued by scholars a century from now, actually sought her opinion.

  And I have none.


  Oh, she could recite Calvin’s belief in the ultimate power of the moral law. She could ace any test on Aquinas or Aristotle, Bacon or Bentham. She was smart with what Max derisively called “book learning.”

  But beneath it, she had no core, no body of beliefs that shaped her. She was an empty vessel, and realizing it, she suddenly felt chilled and frighteningly alone.

  The justice waited for her reply. The easiest course would be to agree with his well-known written work. But she knew that he hated bootlickers. She needed to get back on track, back to the job she had promised Max she would do.

  Oh Max, what have you gotten me into? I can’t hack it here.

  Struggling to control her emotions, she pushed away the anxiety and the dread. “You probably don’t agree,” she said, haltingly, “but I’ve never thought that there is a natural law arising independent of governments. I take the view that all moral obligations are artificially realized, imposed by governments.”

  “Aha!” he said, rising to the challenge, and in fact rising out of his chair and beginning to pace in front of the credenza. “You’re with Hobbes! You’re a bloody Royalist.”

  “He was more realistic than Calvin,” she said. “Hobbes understood that moral obligations require laws, not the goodwill of men. It’s the sovereign that sets the rules, not our own consciences.”

  She gave him a half smile and cocked her head. In another setting, it would have been flirtatious. Here, in the midst of a polemical quarrel that Cromwell and Charles the First might have had, if they spoke at all, it was an intellectual challenge.

  “I think you have it backward,” he said. “‘We, the people-’“

  “To coin a phrase,” she interrupted, beginning to feel more comfortable in the ebb and flow of a dialectic debate she was prepared to win or lose, as the situation required.