A Fighting Chance (5 page)

He smiled, and as he picked up a couple of cartons, he said he was thinking about his mother and how embarrassed she was whenever she borrowed money from him to pay for groceries. “We didn’t eat things like fresh strawberries.”

I knew we would be bound to each other forever.

In short order, I had my thirty-first birthday, bought a white cotton sundress that could double as a wedding gown, and married Bruce Mann. I kept Jim’s last name because I thought it would help make life a little easier for the kids.

In an act of recklessness that still startles me a little, Bruce left his job at the University of Connecticut. He moved to Houston to build a family with the children and me (and Mother, Daddy, Aunt Bee, and Buddy the Pekingese). Fortunately, the University of Houston gave him a one-year temporary job. But UH also made it clear they didn’t plan to keep him on, so we started our married life with a big problem. Bruce could stay in Houston and end his career before it ever really started, or I could give up my teaching job and my life in Houston and follow him somewhere else.

Our first year together was tough, but not because of the usual challenges faced by new families. I knew I wanted to build a future with him, even if it meant upending everything I’d built in Houston. So from the first day, we were desperately looking for teaching jobs that would keep us in the same city. For months we got no bites at all, not even nibbles. Then lightning struck. We were both invited to teach the following academic year at the University of Texas at Austin. This wasn’t just any law school; it was one of the best law schools in the country. UT made it clear that for both of us, this would be a “visit,” a sort of nail-biting, year-long tryout for a permanent job, but we didn’t care. It was the big time—and a chance to be together.

We were alive for one more year, with Bruce teaching legal history and property classes while I taught courses about money and finance. We sold the house in Houston, loaded a U-Haul with our stuff, packed up the kids, and rented a house in Austin. Mother, Daddy, and Aunt Bee would stand by, waiting 160 miles away in Houston to see if we got lucky as we all anxiously hoped for the best—two steady jobs in the same city.

Teaching Without a Textbook

If I’d been smart, I would have kept teaching the classes I already knew how to teach. But my curiosity got the better of me, so before we moved to Austin, I called the dean at the University of Texas and offered to teach a course I’d never taught before: bankruptcy.

Why the interest in people who go bankrupt? When a family files for bankruptcy, they are essentially admitting that they’re dead broke and unable to pay their bills. There are a few twists and turns in the law, but basically a family keeps a small stake and then gives up pretty much everything else they own—their savings, their stocks and bonds, sometimes their home or their car. In return, the family’s old debts are wiped out and they get what they most need: a fresh start, a chance to start over without a pile of debts pulling them down.

When a family goes bankrupt, it is a moment of great defeat and, often, personal shame. For many, it is like going before a judge and declaring to the world that they are losers in the Great American Economic Game. I wanted to know what drove them to the edge of disaster and why they had tumbled over. I wanted to know who those people were, what they did, and exactly what had gone wrong.

I think I was looking for an answer to a question I couldn’t quite ask out loud, maybe because it was a little too personal.

I felt like my family was mostly safe now. Bruce and I didn’t have secure jobs yet, and sharing the responsibility for two children, three old people, and an aging dog required patience and some creativity, but I knew Bruce had my back and I had his. But I also knew what it was like to be afraid, to fear that whatever you had built could be taken away. Bankruptcy was a terrible admission of failure, and I wanted to believe that everyone who filed had done something terrible or stupid or had lazed about and never tried to make anything of themselves. I wanted to know that the work-hard-and-play-by-the-rules people might not get rich, but they didn’t need to be afraid. And I wanted to know that they never, ever went bankrupt.

Teaching bankruptcy in the early 1980s presented a special challenge. A new bankruptcy law had recently gone into effect, the first major reform since the Great Depression. The new law did a lot to strengthen bankruptcy protection for families in trouble, and help them get back on their feet.

The difficulty was how to teach this new law. I thought it was pointless to teach the old law, but nobody had yet published any good textbooks that addressed the new one. When the dean at UT took me up on my offer, I faced a little panic over the corner I’d put myself in: for the next year, while trying out for a job, I’d be teaching a class I’d never taught before, with no textbook to show me the way. Not smart. Exciting, but not smart.

My solution was to teach the bankruptcy class by turning it into something like a giant game of
Jeopardy!
I gave everyone a copy of the new law, and I took the class through each section, teeing up the issue: If [a phrase in the law] was the answer, then what was the question? In other words, what problems did the lawyers and senators think they were solving when they wrote these new laws? It wasn’t the standard way to teach a class, but I’m pretty sure that everyone learned the statute inside and out.

Not long after I started my new course at UT, one of the world-famous professors who had advised Congress about the revised code happened to visit the university, and he agreed to talk to my bankruptcy class about the new law. Dr. Stefan Riesenfeld was in his seventies, bent and small, with wispy gray hair circling his balding head. He was a learned man—he spoke four languages, had written or edited about thirty books, and still had a thick German accent that made him seem like a perfect copy of the brilliant scientist from every 1950s sci-fi movie. He was tough and direct, famous for yelling at students, “You have mashed potatoes for brains!” and other forms of encouragement.

Dr. Riesenfeld gave a few opening remarks to my class, talking about his work on the new laws and describing conversations with well-known members of Congress. When a student asked about the families in bankruptcy, he explained that the people who filed were mostly day laborers and housemaids who lived at the economic margins and always would. He seemed to suggest that a lifetime of poor choices had landed these folks in bankruptcy courts, and these people had little in common with my students and their friends and neighbors.

Then I asked the obvious follow-up question: How did he know that people in bankruptcy existed mostly at the economic margins and would always be there?

I smiled at my students with a confident, wait-till-you-hear-this look. I figured he would give us some inside information about some giant study that Congress had commissioned or the reams of research his fellow professors had done.

No dice. Instead, Professor Riesenfeld (I couldn’t possibly call him “Stefan”) dismissed the question with something along the lines of, “Because everyone knows that.” Then he added an afterthought: “Vell, every
expert
knows that.”

I missed the barb. Even so, I probably should have shut up at that point. This was my first bankruptcy class, and he had thirty or more years of experience. I was trying out for a job, and he was a famous professor with a long list of honors. But I just couldn’t stop myself—I wanted to know.

“Uh,
how
does everyone know that?”

Now he was clearly irritated. He took a deep breath. Everyone just
knew
. That was it. According to the professor, at least, that had been the basis for the new law.

My God. I felt like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
. Professor Riesenfeld was a giant in the field, a man of deep learning and vast experience, and he really didn’t know what was happening on the ground. And if he didn’t know, then I figured no one else did, either.

How could anyone be sure that what had gone wrong in these families’ lives was the result of their own bad choices? Were they not willing to work hard? Were they wild spenders? Were they any different from me and from my family?

And there was one more question I’d never thought about before: What the heck was Congress doing passing laws if they didn’t actually know what was going on?

I don’t remember anything else Professor Riesenfeld said during the class that day. At the end, I thanked him for coming, and my students applauded politely. But I do remember that as he walked out of the classroom, my teeth hurt. Here I was, teaching the bankruptcy code to a classroom of future lawyers, yet I couldn’t answer the most obvious question:
Why
were these people broke?

Sore Points

The year of visiting ended, but we didn’t get the job offers we had been hoping for, so we packed up and moved back to Houston, where I started teaching again. Then, a year later, UT law school reconsidered and offered me a permanent job as a tenured professor. So we packed up a U-Haul yet again and moved back to Austin. This time Mother, Daddy, and Aunt Bee came too, and they settled in a duplex with Mother and Daddy on one side, Aunt Bee on the other. Buddy the Pekingese died, and Bonnie the cocker spaniel moved in. The kids switched schools for the fourth time in four years, and we added a golden retriever puppy named Trover to our family. Gradually, Bruce and the kids and I settled into Austin. Bruce coached soccer. Daddy helped me plant roses. Amelia joined the church youth group, Alex was an acolyte, and I was a substitute Sunday school teacher and a reliable source for chocolate-oatmeal bake-sale cookies. Jim was still in Houston, and the kids went to visit him from time to time.

We had a new house, with a sunny kitchen on the back. Over time, Bruce quietly took over most of the cooking, and I pitched in with what I did best—mostly cakes and pies, and the occasional pot of mac-and-cheese. I loved working alongside him, with music on the stereo and Trover sprawled out in front of the refrigerator and the kids thumping around upstairs. There were moments when the sun would slant in and Bruce would smile, and I would think my heart might burst with gratitude for all the good things that had come to me.

We might have stayed in Austin forever if not for one thing: Bruce didn’t land a permanent position at UT. Instead, he got a job at Washington University in St. Louis—also a terrific law school, but it was 825 miles away. Barely missing a beat, he set up a tiny apartment in St. Louis and began flying back and forth every week. He continued to coach Alex’s soccer team, and we all showed up to cheer on the junior high orchestra, listening hard to catch Amelia’s clarinet. We pieced together lives that were as nearly normal as possible, but everything turned on his making the connecting flight at the Dallas airport. Meanwhile, we kept job hunting, but finding two professorships in one city was tough.

Not long after we moved to Austin, my oldest brother, Don Reed, received terrible news: his wife, Nancy, was diagnosed with leukemia. For twenty years, Don Reed had lived the life our father had always dreamed of—he was an air force pilot, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After moving around for all those years to wherever the air force sent them, including six years when he was sent back and forth to Vietnam, Don Reed and Nancy had finally bought a home and settled down in Grapevine, Texas. Now Nancy was sick—really sick.

Mother, Daddy, Bruce, and I drove to San Antonio every few days to visit her at the military hospital, and I doubled down on my prayers. Nancy was determinedly cheerful, but one day she grabbed Bruce’s sleeve and spoke to him in hushed tones, asking him to write her a will. She wanted Don Reed and the boys to know how her possessions—her wedding ring, her piano, her share in her daddy’s farm—should be divided up and where she wanted to be buried. She told Bruce not to worry about her. She just wanted to take care of my brother and their boys, leaving them with no questions and no doubts. A few days after she signed the will, she died.

My brother John had his own health troubles. He had worked construction nearly all his life, and as he approached fifty, the wear and tear on his body was starting to add up. Then the oil bust of the early 1980s wiped out a lot of new construction projects in Oklahoma, so jobs were much harder to come by.

David had also been hit hard when the market for oil collapsed. Over the years, he had built a business that delivered various supplies to oil rigs dotted across the state. The oil boom had made him rich, but the bust brought his business crashing down. He always said that he’d be fine if his customers could pay him, but they were out of money, too. He still got up at four thirty in the morning and worked himself into the ground, but he couldn’t save his business. The forces that swept away billions of dollars in wealth around the globe wiped out my brother as well.

We knitted our multigenerational, multicity family together. Mother, Daddy, and Aunt Bee still helped out with the kids, although they did less babysitting and more driving here and there. We cooked together a couple of times a week. Now that Don Reed was a widower, he visited us more often, and holidays involved all three brothers and their families. David’s daughter was just a little older than Amelia, so she came to stay during summer vacations. We helped one another in whatever ways we could.

Mother worried about my brothers and me—that was always her way. But Daddy enjoyed watching my career begin to take wing. Unlike Mother, Daddy never seemed to worry that I would ruin my children because I was a Working Mother or that I would end up single and miserable. In truth, I think he found it pretty miraculous that his baby girl had ended up in the world of colleges, libraries, and tree-lined campuses. He was glad to tell people I was a law professor and, if given half a chance, happy to tell them that I wrote articles and gave speeches and won teaching awards. He was proud that I made good money and nearly busted his buttons the first time I was quoted in the newspaper.