Storm Tide (9 page)

“For lunch?” she asked, but was quickly on her feet, searching the refrigerator.

“Understand,” Gordon said, “and I should never tell this to a politician, but people don’t care what you do. It’s what you do
for them
. Johnny Lynch took care of people. He saw that every nitwit who couldn’t find a trade drove a truck for the town. If you couldn’t make your taxes, Johnny had a word with the tax collector. He intervened when you were in trouble with the bank.”

“He was Chairman of the Board,” I said.

Gordon seemed impressed that I knew. “He took care of your wife if you went to the army.”

“That’s never been proven.” Judith set the glasses and the bottle on the table.

Gordon winked. “Johnny had friends on the Selective Service Board. One of his girlfriends was married to a boy who’d left her. Summer of ’sixty-nine. ’Seventy?” he asked Judith, who shrugged, working on the cork. “When the boy showed up in Saltash again and started making trouble, what do you think happened?”

“He got drafted?”

“Johnny Lynch was King David in this town. And do you know why? Because people wanted a king.”

When the wine was gone and the sun filled the space between the clouds like a pink neon fire, Gordon led me outside, literally by the sleeve. “Help me with something, will you?” Four rolls of roofing paper, four pallets of asphalt shingles, were piled at the foot of the drive. Gordon asked me to carry them up the dune. As I lifted the first, he turned
his back to the house and slipped a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket. “Ever do any construction?”

“Some,” I said. I had worked for my father-in-law in Florida. Not a period in my life I cared to talk about.

“After you played baseball.” He watched my reaction. “Davey Greene, the Pitching Machine. I used to take my son to watch you play.” He led me up the slope. “Wind lifts these damned shingles like feathers. Finish one roof, start another. One a year, every year. Used to do it by myself, if you can believe that.” He stopped outside a cottage with a peaked roof.

I managed one roll on each shoulder, all four up the dune in two trips. I couldn’t carry more than one pallet of shingles at a time. On my last trip up, number six, I was laboring like an old mule. Gordon was waiting for me, smoking his pipe, staring at the purple silhouette of the peaked roof. “Don’t mention to Judith I was smoking. She won’t let me buy cigarettes, but she doesn’t know I have a pipe. So are you going to do it?” There was no question what he meant.

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a line drawn right down the middle of this town.”

“If this is about the dike, it’s not as simple as that. People stand on both sides,” I said.

“And where do you stand? With Johnny Lynch?”

I didn’t like him trying to push me. “Why don’t you run?”

“I’m an old man.”

“So is Johnny.”

“But he’s desperate now, don’t you see? He’s fighting for all he’s worth. Johnny’s been in and out of court for years. He never invested his money. Why bother? Saltash was a money farm. He could always grow more. Now all he’s got left are those lots in the river valley. As long as the dike stays closed and the land stays dry, he can build. To make sure it does, he needs the Board of Selectmen. He’s got two votes, we’ve got two. You’re the tie breaker.”

“That’s a lot to drop on my shoulders.”

“From what I hear, you’ve got some pair of shoulders.”

What did Judith say about me when they were alone? How much did he know?

“Will you do it?”

Was he making me some kind of deal in exchange for his wife? “Why me?”

“You’re bright. Fair-minded. You’re perceived as neutral.”

“Tell me something, Gordon, have you people asked anybody else?”

“Oh, yes. Maybe twenty people.”

“And they said no.”

“Every one.”

Judith insisted on showing me around. Putting on a goose down parka, she led me down a lowland path through the pines. “He liked you!” She skipped ahead like an excited little girl and drew me into the forest. As the sun disappeared, the scent of pine sap overwhelmed. I walked faster and faster to catch up. “I thought it would work out,” she said over her shoulder.

I liked him too, which didn’t make screwing his wife any easier.

About fifty yards ahead, I made out a clearing, a gap where the trees opened to the twilight. As we neared it, Judith began to run. She stopped abruptly at the gate to her garden. It was an enormous square, protected by a wood and wire fence. On top of each fence post was a painted wooden finial, some red and white, some yellow, green and red, or orange striped with black like tigers. There were bamboo tripods for growing pole beans, the withered vines now frozen like brown lace; all kinds of structures made out of bicycle spokes and hammered fenders, torn nets salvaged from the sea, a huge scarecrow with a rusted muffler torso and arms of copper pipe. There wasn’t a plant left growing and yet it was alive, a frozen circus on the edge of a marsh.

Judith took my hand and led me to a small A-frame beyond the garden, with a double bed inside, a desk, a computer and files. “I work here. I fixed it up when Gordon got sick.” The room smelled of her perfume and cedar; it was still warm from an earlier fire. She touched her finger to my cheek. I moved toward the door.

“You don’t want to be with me now?” she asked.

“But he’s at the house. Suppose he follows us.”

“He’s taking a nap. He doesn’t object.”

“I can’t believe he doesn’t care.”

“He loves me, David. He wishes me happiness.”

I was not proud of myself. I thought a better person would resist. But as she kissed my eyes, I found her zipper. As she sought my lips, I cupped her buttocks and carried her to the bed. As her husband slept, I licked her sex like an eager puppy.

“It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “We won’t be like anything you’ve ever done before. Can you understand that? Can you give up how you think people are supposed to love? How they’re supposed to live? Because we’re not going to be what people expect. We’re not going to live that way.” Judith clung to me with a strength that belied her size. “But I’ll promise you something. If we’re honest with each other and if
we have patience and respect, we’ll live more happily than anyone you’ve ever known.”

I wanted to believe Judith. I would have conceded anything she asked. But what I thought I was agreeing to, a kind of consensual adultery, fell wide of the mark. I didn’t understand what Judith and Gordon had in mind because it was unthinkable.

J
UDITH

    Law school was like camping in a wind tunnel. After the first two weeks, Judith hardly knew who she was. She was no longer Yirina’s daughter, she was no longer the child of shame and romantic mystery, whose mother had three different passports in different names hidden in her underwear drawer, kept although they had long expired. Nor was she the adult she had felt herself to be after her divorce. She was a tired cranky frightened child, assigned seats, given hours and hours of unintelligible fudge to learn in minute detail, at the mercy of tyrannical professors, sleeping at first six hours a night, then five, then three and then hardly at all. She felt ugly and drawn thin as paper. Her skin looked sour and blotchy. Her hair was usually dirty. She lived on food that Yirina would not have considered fit for consumption, pizza and bad Chinese takeout. She ate cafeteria food and fast food. She no longer spoke like a human being. When she opened her mouth, legalese came out. All she thought of were torts and contracts, opinions and citations. Her passion was pleasing professors who despised their women students; she loved only her grades. She had no culture. She had no heart. She had only a headache that never went away and fatigue that drained color from the sky.

She lived for the approval of cold distant daddies, the professors who taught enormous classes. The first time she was in the hot seat, called upon to discuss the fine points of a case, her throat closed and her voice emerged squeaking like a mouse in mortal danger. Who was she? She was her grade point average. She was her first brief. She was what her professors pronounced her. What was she doing inside the baroque castle of the law? Like K., she was guilty already. Like K., she would be punished no matter what she did. How could she, the child of illegality and secrecy, make her way in the law? But its very power attracted her. She wanted to live in that castle of power. She wanted to bring that power to those who most needed its help.

Yirina had always been powerless. Judith did not want to be. She saw her classmates in the second year gravitating toward the corporate law firms. That was where money and prestige were. By the time she interviewed for a job for the summer between her second and third years, she looked much like all the other savvy law school women. She wore a gray suit. She had bought that and a navy one at a discount barn in
New York. She had good earrings from Yirina. She put herself together and got a job for the summer in a Boston law firm already looking over students for associates. Prestigious large firms were beginning to court women, under pressure from antidiscrimination legislation. Her grades were as high as any woman in her class. She interned at Tremont, Smith and Cordovan, where there were forty-two partners and a hundred-odd associates. It was an unusual firm, in that there were two women partners. Both were divorced and neither had children. They worked twelve to fourteen hours a day.

All the associates seemed to put in at least a sixteen-hour day. Not infrequently they worked all night, they worked weekends. They dressed well, they made good money, but there was no intimacy in their lives. If they were married, they probably made love twice a month. If a woman had children, sometimes she became part-time; then the others spoke of her as if she had died. “Adrienne was a good lawyer,” they said elegiacally. “Too bad.”

For what did these people destroy themselves, burn up their years? Money. Not power. She did not see any women with power. Even the two women partners were less powerful than any of the male partners. They were not rainmakers; they did not count. One had created a valuable niche for herself as a specialist in pension funds. Little that happened here seemed useful. She found most of the partners nasty and overbearing.

The summer was no vacation, as much as she loved Boston, and she did. It was less tropical in the summer than New York and somehow more manageable. She had little time to play tourist but knew she wanted to live there. After a couple of years in the Midwest, it felt sunnier, saltier, brisker. She worked as fiercely as she had in school, but in addition, she had to look presentable every day. She had to shine. That summer job between the second and third years was supposed to be the forerunner of the job she would take when she graduated. By the time the summer was over, she knew that she was not going to follow the high path. She would not go into corporate law.

She decided on family law, as Mr. Vetter had long ago recommended, but she was also drawn to criminal law. She could easily identify with people on the fringes of society, with the illegitimate, the poor, even the violent. She went after a job with Legal Aid.

The veteran lawyer who interviewed her asked before the interview was five minutes old, “Do you think you can handle child abuse? Domestic violence? The seamy side of the city the way you can’t imagine it.”

“I want to do this work. I think it’s important.”

“Do you have any idea what you’ll really be doing? It’s not Perry Mason. It’s sleaze. You’re dealing with the riffraff of the city so they can go back on the streets. You’re dealing with crazy old ladies and crack mothers and kids who think cockroaches are decoration. You get all of five minutes to prepare a case and you’ll be handling sixty cases at a time.”

“I can do it,” she said. “I grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Those riffraff were my neighbors. They’re human to me and I can talk to them. I can learn quickly.”

She was hired, although her interviewer told her he didn’t expect her to last eighteen months.

After graduation from law school, Judith received the last of her bequest from her father, Dr. Julian Silver, one thousand dollars upon finishing her schooling successfully. “I thought we might consider that your schooling was successful,” Mr. Vetter said. “On the law review. Honors. Your father would be proud of you.”

“Would he? I never understood him. I was always a little afraid of him.”

“His own daughters were never what he imagined they would be. You are. You’re beautiful as your mother and bright and capable. I think you’ll go far.”

She did, immediately. As a present to herself, she took a charter flight to Europe with two friends from law school, Hannah and Stephanie. Hannah was the real beauty, blond, willowy and well-connected. Her father was a state senator. She would be interning in Washington. Stephanie was going into a big firm in Chicago. She was tall, a little gawky but extremely hard-driving. Judith could not imagine what she would be like on vacation. Hannah, Stephanie and Judith had gone through law school in a study group with two other women off already to their new jobs, dividing up assignments before exams, trying to carry each other through the grind.