Testimony and Demeanor (20 page)

Five years was beyond her. We stopped talking about it. But I had listened to her on the subject. And when we ran into some guy she knew at the art gallery, and he walked around with us, saying this and that about the pictures, I listened to him too. I finally spoke up myself about one I liked, saying it looked like Portsmouth in a fog. The two of them exchanged glances. I hadn’t said I thought it
was
Portsmouth in a fog; obviously it was some place in Portugal since the painter’s name was da Silva. They began to make remarks after that—“I
think this one is a geodetic survey.” “No. A Coca-Cola bottling plant in Secaucus.” I said I had to get back to work, but the other fellow left first.

“Don’t mind him,” she said, as though it had been all him. “He takes this all very seriously. Pure art, and you have a very literary taste.”

“You mean
literal
,” I said.

“No,” she said. She brushed something off my shoulder. She didn’t explain. She asked after some college friends of mine she’d known, and then she left.

I minded. Why is it that dumb people with “taste” get away with it and smart people without taste don’t? I am patient and I run my own life. What the hell.

Yesterday I felt how boxed in I am. Or maybe boxed out. Today another partner, Mr. Charles Pelham, popped in. I have nothing to do with him as far as work goes. He just dropped in and started talking. There was a while when some of the associates used to wander by and look in as though the corridor was a zoo. I could get rid of them. Mr. Pelham can get away with it, I suppose. But I don’t have to like it. A regular cross-examination.

He asked me—inter alia—if I was religious. I said no.

He said, “That’s what Franklin Roosevelt said. Said he preferred not to think about those things. Odd, don’t you think?”

Odd is right. He asked me if I was a humanitarian, aesthete, epicurean, adventurer. A few others I can’t remember. Then he asked me if I’d ever wanted to be a woman.

I said, “Are you asking me if I’m homosexual?”

“No,” he said. “That would be a different question. That question would be ‘Are you a homosexual?’ This question is ‘Have you ever wanted to be a woman?’ But perhaps I should ask first, ‘Have you ever considered at length what it would be like to be a woman?’ ”

Nope.

“And yet you have imagination.”

I said, “I don’t know.” I was getting sore. “I’m probably a robot.”

He brightened up. “Would you like to be a robot?”

When I didn’t answer, he said, “If you can save various of our clients millions in taxes you surely have imagination. I’m not one to despise our work here. In fact, I think the tax structure of this country ranks with the pyramids. If you simply consider the labor … Later generations will surely wonder at us, as we wonder how on earth the Egyptians ever got those stones to the top. And taxes are as metaphysical as any theology. Angels on pins aren’t a patch on us. And we’re so various. A warp and woof of contending nominalism and realism. If one only had the swiftness of mind to see it all at once, to compass it, I imagine it would be as intricately alluring as a Persian carpet. I’ve often thought that only Proust and our tax structure stand up to a good Persian carpet. Don’t you think? I mean, in one sense the tax structure is art—a subsuming of the infinite muddle of human activity under a single rubric, as though it had a single purpose and could be ordered by a mind hewing to the line of a single vision. Everything that everyone is doing this very instant in this part of town has tax consequences. Do you ever feel the impact of that? But I imagine you have your own comparisons. I once was possessed by the thought that our tax officials were like Satan in the Book of Job. Congress is like God. And the taxpayer is Job. Then Satan answered the Lord, Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made a hedge about him and about his house and about all that he hath on every side?’ and so forth. ‘… and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.’ You see? ‘And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power’? And that is the tax system. But I imagine you have your own comparisons.”

I began to look down at my desk and up at him and down at my desk again. He mumbled something and popped out. I
should have said taxation reminded me of a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Secaucus.

But as I think of it, I get the impression that although he was talking ninety-nine percent of the time, he was trying me out, fishing for me. The trouble is he was using too fancy a lure. If he’d just asked me how I did in law school. Or how I liked New York. Good old worms like that. But he’s too good a talker to bother with anything easy. Like Cardozo writing an opinion. You don’t know what it means but you remember it.

“…  not merely honor but a punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.” I’ll never forget it, but I’ll never use it, and neither will anybody else.

Being able to work in a concentrated way is a great advantage. I shouldn’t have complained. I knocked off everything projected for the next three days in one single day. I got into it for three hard hours, and just when I felt myself slowing up I bore down for another three, ate a sandwich, and put in another three just coasting downhill toward supper. Ate, walked around the block, and rounded out the day with a last three which could have been two but I didn’t want to get careless. I won’t have to touch a thing I did today. I may have to take a half hour to explain the memo to Mr. Leland so he can explain it to the client, but it’s all there. All there in one neat package. I was worried that I’d been slowed up. No one else in the world could have done that piece of work in one day.

Mr. Pelham dropped by again. I’d just got back from presenting the memo to Mr. Leland. Mr. Leland was impressed, so I wasn’t bothered by the prospect of Mr. Pelham being cute again with his cultural quiz. But he started off in low. For him, that is. He actually asked me how I’d got along in law school. And he waited for an answer.

I told him that what gave me whatever edge I’d had—since I was clearly no Frankfurter—was a capacity for work and for organizing other people’s ideas. Right away I saw there were some minds which were quick and subtle. Some of them could grind too, and they went on to be
Law Review
. But some of them had no organizing power. They were happy to break up a problem in class. Suggest all the difficulties. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure I understood all of them. But having done all that work out loud—scored a few points for wit and elocution—they’d be tired of it. Maybe bored. That was
their
problem. I picked up the pieces. Not all the little cute ones. Early on I figured out that if you put too fine a point on an argument it’s likely to arouse suspicion. Ingenious but unsound, as the saying goes. Which means baloney is baloney no matter how thin you slice it.

The other thing I found out was not to waste time with my gut reactions. It was amazing to see how many bright guys kept on getting wrapped up in long-winded arguments, as though this or that case was the last chance to reform the country. Ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, even in textbooks, are narrow questions. You don’t have to start with the Bill of Rights every time.

There was another way that guys who might have started out smarter than me went wrong. They wouldn’t finish the question. They would find all the issues and go on and on about the rights and wrongs, but they’d forget that at the end you’ve got to be exact about who gets what. People don’t go into court to improve their minds.

But the main advantage came from not resisting the process. There were a few who could still be the fair-haired boys of the faculty in their defiance of the assumptions necessary to the workings of the law—in fact, a little fair-haired defiance is itself necessary to the workings of the law school. But many more people foundered because they were afraid they might be brainwashed away from some mental set they’d grown fond
of—sometimes it was some political ideal, but more often it was some notion of themselves as too complex and humane to fit into the mold of just being a lawyer. A mere lawyer. To me there was nothing mere about it.

When I got through with this explanation—and it’s not a bad outline of how to overachieve with a B mind—Mr. Pelham said he couldn’t wait to hear more tomorrow but now he had to go. He left. But there isn’t any more.

Now comes Mr. Pelham to—to what?

Mr. Pelham: “Deferred expectations bother me more than anything. Going to law school, if one is serious, is tedious. One banks on the future. And three years pass. But the hopes that practice will be zestfully different are soon dashed. One’s manhood is not fulfilled. The new deferment is for five years. In five years the increment of skill, authority, and seniority will have made one’s life one’s own again. And I suppose thirty or thirty-one is not too late to start in. And yet it seems to me that people not only acquire the habit of work, which is not so bad—I rather like work, about half of the time—but they also have acquired the habit of deferring their expectations. Perhaps indefinitely. Occasionally one sees our young partners acquiring an energy for some project. They go to Washington or to an international conference. They are radiant and eager, but they are on a short tether. They return. There are others who never leave. I think they spend their real feelings in the bosom of their family in some umbrageous suburb. But either way everything is moderate. Moderated. That great leap forward will not be. But then, I suppose this is true in general. Immigrants used to defer their expectations to their children. Orwell once said that working-class Englishmen were middle-aged in their thirties because they gave up living for themselves, surrendering unconditionally to their jobs and families. In fact, he said they even
look
old. You can always find someone worse off.

“But adventure … Don’t you have the feeling that there was a class of people—perhaps in the eighteenth century, perhaps in the seventeenth—who could imagine no other way to live but toward an adventure that would illuminate their lives? When did they succumb? When did we succumb? I sometimes suspect adventure declined because of nineteenth-century genius. Nowadays no one dares to build a monument to his own passion—be it family, nation, creed, romantic love—because one knows that before long someone with a Ph.D. in Darwin, Freud, or Marx will come along and dissect it as an example of something doomed, repressed, unnatural. I have nothing against dissection or even vivisection. No brief against the academics at all, but rather against those who are intimidated. They are frightened of shadows. What they need is more disbelief. If one is frightened of being a pejorative example, one only has to believe his own sayings instead. I yearn to hear someone say, ‘My life is superb by no standard but my own adoration of it. I am not improving the world, I am not the wave of the future, I am not aiding any scheme of history or nature.’ ”

Mr. Pelham stopped abruptly. “That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Reminds me of what’s-his-name. ‘Black as the night that covers me. Di-da-da-dum from pole to pole. I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.’ Terrible. Roosevelt liked it—publicly at least. But I was doing well until then. Up to ‘by no standard but my own adoration of it.’ ”

I checked around and found that Mr. Pelham doesn’t do this to anyone else—not recently anyway.

My days have been peaceful for two weeks. Mr. Pelham has been in Japan (a Japanese conglomerate is one of our clients). I found I missed his visits. But today he got back and gave me a good half hour on the Japanese. Boring? I’m telling you. A few headnotes: Japanese forms of prayer. Japanese childhood.
Japanese food. Japanese attitudes toward career. Failure of psychiatry in Japan. About five minutes per item. But he kept it moving along. He said he thought I would like the Japanese.

Maybe he wants me to work for him when I get through with Mr. Leland. Not on my program if I can help it.

Today—a week after Japan—he gave me a lecture on paternity. His attitude toward it. Sort of a moot point since he isn’t married and is over sixty, I’d guess.

Mr. Pelham: “I would have liked to have a son who was extremely gifted in, let us say, music or painting but whose attitude toward his work was so intense that he refused to discuss it. And perhaps he would be somewhat inarticulate anyway. By way of reaction to his father. However, having known him for, let us say, twenty-four years, I would be in a unique position to perceive his state of mind as it emerged in his work. I would know almost all the variables. Imagine the possibilities of appreciation in that situation.”

Mr. Pelham paused, as usual, just before winding up, and, as usual, wound up with a crack at himself. “Yes, I would have been a great stage mama lurking in the wings.”

Apparently when he’s doing business he doesn’t talk this much.

Today for the first time he showed up twice. The second time was just for a minute as I was leaving for supper. He caught me in the hall and asked me what I read. I told him detective novels. He seemed to be waiting for more, so I told him (which was true when I was at law school and couldn’t get to sleep) histories of military campaigns.

“Seven Pillars of Wisdom?”
he said. “Francis Parkman?”

“World War Two,” I said. “I don’t know why.”

“How interesting,” he said in that you’ve-flunked-your-cultural-quiz
way. If he thinks I’ve flunked, why doesn’t he go talk to one of the three-piece suits custom made in London?

He brought me a book today that he said was a Japanese general’s account of the taking of the Philippines. Now I’ll have to read it.

I asked him why he thought I’d like the Japanese.

A: “Because technical progress didn’t disrupt their inner life, although now they couldn’t live without it.”

Query that.

I whipped through the book last night and it wasn’t bad. Well detailed. The author wasn’t afraid of details. A lot of American accounts are boring precisely because all they want to talk about is hitting the beaches so they can sell to the movies. This Japanese general went into decision-making when you only know a fraction of the variables and you’re not sure
what
fraction. There were unfortunately a lot of fragments of poems, which might have helped if I knew the whole thing, as I suppose the reader is supposed to. “The clouds linger by mountain peaks.” That sort of clue. Thanks a lot.