Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (23 page)

Her hands stopped fluttering over the keys, and she looked up at him gratefully. “Fine, Judge,” she said. “My cold’s almost gone.”

He sat down behind his scarred pine desk in the corner of the room and looked at the morning mail, which his secretary had opened for him. The top letter asked for an appointment the following Saturday or any evening, if that would not be too inconvenient. “I’d like to talk to you about settling the estate of the late Mrs. Florence Rath,” the letter said. “I have also been told that you might be able to advise me on the possibility of subdividing her land into one-acre lots eventually. . . .” The letter referred to the will Sims had sent to Bernstein and concluded with advance gratitude for any help Bernstein could offer. It was signed, “Thomas R. Rath.”

Bernstein had just finished reading the letter when the telephone on his desk rang. His secretary answered it, using an extension on her own desk, and said, “It’s for you, Judge. He won’t give his name.”

“Hello?” Bernstein said.

For a moment there was no answer but the humming in the receiver.

“Hello?” Bernstein repeated.

“I want to talk to the judge!” a heavy voice replied.

“This is Judge Bernstein. Who is this calling?”

“Are you the judge that handles wills?” the voice asked.

“Yes, I’m the judge of the Probate Court,” Bernstein said briskly. “Give me your name, please.”

“My name is Schultz, Edward Schultz,” the voice said, “and I have a claim to make. . . .”

Bernstein listened to Schultz for a long time. When he had hung up, he picked up Tom’s letter and reread it. His stomach was beginning to hurt, as it always did when he saw he was going to have to arbitrate a fight.

Thomas Rath, he thought–the grandson of the old lady. Saul Bernstein remembered old Florence Rath well. He had first seen her more than thirty years ago, when his own father and mother had moved from a tenement in Brooklyn to open a delicatessen in South Bay. It had been a small delicatessen, not at all the kind of establishment that Florence Rath had patronized, except on holidays when it was the only store open. Florence Rath had often telephoned the store on Sundays to ask casually for a small jar of cheese or a can of anchovies to be delivered to her house, which had been more than six miles away from the store. More than once Saul Bernstein had bicycled up the long steep hill and around the two sharp curves by the outcroppings of rock to deliver a bottle of olives, or some other item which brought a profit of about a nickel, and often the servants who received the delivery had never bothered to see that he was tipped.

Saul Bernstein remembered many things about Florence Rath. Once she had come into his family’s store. That had been in 1931, when the depression had been at its worst, and his father had been almost at the point of giving up the store and going back to New York to look for a job. The heat in the store had been turned off for reasons of economy, and Saul Bernstein’s parents had stood behind the little counter all day wearing heavy coats, mufflers, and gloves and slapping their hands against their shoulders to keep warm. The store had been damp and had smelled of mildew, and a few jars had broken when their contents froze. Saul Bernstein hadn’t been in the store much himself in those days, for his family had insisted that he and his two brothers spend as much time as possible in the high school, where it was warm, but on this particular Sunday when Florence Rath came in, his mother had been lying in her little room upstairs ill, with her husband taking care of her, and Saul had been in charge of the store. Florence Rath had been dressed in a long fur
coat, and while she waited for him to bring her a box of mixed nuts, she had complained. “Why don’t you keep this place warm?” she had said. “Are you trying to freeze your customers to death?”

“No, ma’am,” he had replied and had felt obliged to add, “The furnace broke–we’re having it fixed.”

Saul Bernstein had a long memory. He remembered when he had been a young lawyer, only a year out of school, and a hardware merchant had come to him and asked him to collect a bill from Mrs. Rath for some expensive garden tools which the merchant said she had ordered and never paid for. That had been in the days when Bernstein had been spending most of his time sitting patiently in a tiny office, hopefully listening for the footsteps of possible clients in the hall and trying to forget the advice of his best friends, who told him that he ought to go into New York to practice law, because there was no place for a Jewish attorney in a small, hidebound Connecticut town notorious for its prejudice against Jews. The hardware merchant with his claim against Mrs. Rath had been Bernstein’s first client, for the simple reason that all the other lawyers in the town had refused to handle his case. Bernstein had been glad to get it, and he had burned with righteous indignation at the thought of the rich old woman at the top of the hill ordering tools from the poor merchant and refusing to pay for them. He had almost gone charging to the top of the hill to berate her, but an innate caution had stopped him, and instead, he had made inquiries around the town and discovered that Mrs. Rath was famous for paying her bills the day she received them. He had found from the hardware merchant that a gardener of Mrs. Rath’s had bought the tools, and further investigation had shown that the gardener had been discharged by Mrs. Rath two days before the purchase of tools had been made. And so Bernstein had turned the case over to the police, who eventually had extracted payment from the gardener, and he had felt that on his first case he had learned a lesson: to investigate thoroughly.

All this had happened long ago. Since then Saul Bernstein had prospered in the town of South Bay, despite the predictions of his best friends. He had grown reasonably rich, and respected, and might have been happy except for one thing: he detested justice almost as much as he detested violence or cruelty of any other kind.

He had found this out in 1940, when he had been made judge of the Municipal Court. One of the first men to appear before him had
been a truck driver who had got drunk and driven his truck into a tree. The man had been about forty years old, with a red face and dismayed blue eyes, and he had pleaded for mercy. He had explained that his job depended upon his driving license, which would be taken away from him if he were convicted of drunken driving, and standing there in court, full of hurt dignity, he had said his wife was pregnant, and that he didn’t want to lose his job.

“But this is your second offense,” Bernstein had said. “According to the record, you were convicted of driving while under the influence of liquor only two years ago.”

“That’s why I can’t be convicted now!” the man had replied desperately. “I’ll never get my license back again!”

And he had asked for mercy, but Bernstein had been in the business of giving justice, and with his stomach aching, he had given justice, and the man had turned away with a look of utter despair on his red, forlorn face.

It is not an easy thing for a judge to find he detests justice, and Bernstein had not admitted his discovery to himself for a long while. He had not faced it until 1948, when he had had a choice between becoming Probate Judge in South Bay, or going on to a higher court. There had been some temptation to leave South Bay, for in spite of his new eminence, his wife had not been asked to join any of the women’s clubs in town, but he had chosen differently for two reasons: the idea of having to judge cases involving long prison sentences, or even the death penalty, appalled him, and he had evolved the theory that justice is bearable to the judge only when it is based on complete knowledge of the disputants as well as the law. He had a horror of sentencing men he knew almost nothing about. In South Bay, where he knew almost everyone and had plenty of time to devote to each case, Bernstein was able to withhold his decisions until he had assembled complete information. Rarely was he put in the position of having to decide what was justice for strangers.

So Bernstein had chosen to stay in South Bay and become the judge of the Probate Court, which was primarily concerned with the orderly disposal of papers rather than people. And somewhat to his own astonishment, he had become enormously powerful in the town, for people had found that hating justice as he did, he dispensed it extremely well, and they called him in on disputes of all kinds, even those which had nothing to do with the Probate Court, and when,
after delaying as long as he could, Bernstein delivered his opinion, it had a weight in the town more than that of any other man. He and his wife were rarely asked to cocktail parties or dinners, but he was almost always appointed moderator at town meetings, or on any occasion, formal or informal, where impartiality was needed, and few people knew how his stomach hurt when he raised his pudgy hand and said, “Yes, yes, I understand, but let us now examine the other point of view. . . .”

Now as Judge Bernstein reread the letter he had received from Tom Rath and recalled the conversation he had just had over the telephone with Edward Schultz, the gnawing in his stomach grew worse and worse. Disputed wills were always painful, almost as painful as divorce cases. They brought out the worst in everyone, Bernstein knew from experience. On the surface this case was simple: a rich young heir was apparently trying to cut out a faithful old servant. Usually things turn out to be exactly as they appear on the surface, Bernstein had found, but not always. He wondered what young Thomas Rath was like–probably one of those commuters who did their shopping in Bermuda shorts, sporting a cigarette in a long holder, he decided–old Mrs. Rath would be apt to have a grandson like that. And this man Edward Schultz, who had sounded rather lunatic over the telephone, what sort of man was he? Which of the two men would be pleased by justice?

But more than a dispute over a will had been dropped on his desk that morning, Bernstein reflected. If Rath got the land, he apparently intended to try to subdivide it into one-acre lots. The Rath estate was in a “Triple A Zone,” where no estate of less than ten acres was supposed to exist. That meant that if Rath got the land, there would be a zoning fight. Bernstein had lived in South Bay so long that he could predict the intensity of any dispute, if not its outcome, and he thought, “Not a zoning fight now–all we need is a zoning fight now!”

Sometimes it was almost a disadvantage to have lived in a town so long, because Bernstein knew all the people in the local government so well that he could foretell how they would answer almost any question, and without moving from his chair could conduct a fairly accurate public-opinion poll, a process which was often disturbing. Now he imagined what the various leaders in South Bay would say if Thomas Rath asked the Zoning Board to let him divide his land. Old John Bradbury, chairman of the Zoning Board, would
explode at the very thought. He would immediately tie the whole question up with the controversy over whether to build a new public school. “Twenty acres with one house will bring in one family which will use a private school,” old Bradbury would say exasperatedly. “Twenty acres with twenty houses will bring in twenty families, all of whom will expect the town to educate their children!”

And old Mr. Parkington, whose estate was near the south side of the Rath property, would have a double reason for apoplectic objections. As a member of the Zoning Board he had been one of the people who had instituted the ten-acre area in the first place, “to preserve the rural beauties of South Bay,” and for more than fifteen years he had conducted a personal crusade against any effort to change the zoning ordinances. His reaction to having land so near his own converted into a housing project would be picturesque, Bernstein reflected grimly, and hoped he wouldn’t have to see it.

The worst part of such a fight would be, Bernstein thought, that the arguments in favor of allowing Rath to subdivide his land would be as apoplectic as the arguments against it. Bob Murphy, who since 1931 had been a member of the Zoning Board, would use the case as an excuse to continue his unending battle against what he termed “the privileged few.” And old Mrs. Allison, the fourth member of the board, would undoubtedly agree with everyone on both sides of the controversy, but would end by voting for young Rath, because she would be almost sure to judge him the underdog.

If there had been a fifth member of the Zoning Board, Bernstein could have foretold how the case would go with little possibility of error, but there was no fifth member. The post was vacant and seemed likely to remain vacant for a long time. It had been vacant ever since Harold Mathews, a tight-lipped Yankee who had decided each case on its merit, had died a month ago, for every time anyone had been suggested to take Mathews’ place, a great fuss had been made by those who believed the new member would weight the board against them. Sooner or later a new member would have to be named, but meanwhile even Bernstein couldn’t predict how zoning cases would be decided. All he knew was that there would be a bitter fight, the very thought of which made his stomach ache worse than ever. How violent Schultz had sounded over the telephone! “
I want justice
,” he had said. I wonder how many murders have been committed, and how many wars have been fought with that as a slogan,
Bernstein thought. When they say they want justice, they always want someone else to get the sharp end of it. Justice is a thing that is better to give than to receive, but I am sick of giving it, he thought. I think it should be a prerogative of the gods.

T
HAT
T
UESDAY MORNING
Tom perfected the latest draft of the speech he was writing for Ralph Hopkins. The whole text, which was now about thirty pages long (“We can cut it later,” Hopkins said), had come to seem a sort of penance from which he would never escape, an endless tract, a meaningless lifework.