The Little Death (3 page)

“Can
you say you’re happy?”

“No,
can you?”

“No,
but there are substitutes.”

I
didn’t need to ask him what his substitutes were, I knew. Work was at the top
of the list. In fact, work was the whole of his list. It had been mine, too,
but recently I’d lost a big case and word had it I was burned out. Maybe I was,
but if so, what was my alternative to work? I had never thought to cultivate
any. The waitress came around and I offered her my cup for coffee, promising
myself I would sit down later and think about the future, hoping it would creep
up on me before I had the chance. I told Aaron about my jailhouse interviews.

“Hugh
Paris,” Gold said, “that name is familiar.”

“Think
he trades stock on insider information?”

“Maybe
he’s rich.” I shook my head. “You’d be surprised,” Gold continued, “at the
number of the rich in our little town. They may not control their money, or
know exactly where it comes from, but it dribbles in, from trusts, stocks,
annuities.”

“Whether
or not he was rich,” I said, “I wish he’d talked to me. He looked like he was
carrying a secret he needed badly to unload.”

“Another
missed possibility?” Gold asked as he reached for the check. I let him take it.

*
* * * *

It
was a little after eight when I got to my office on the fourth floor of the
courthouse. There were already people waiting in the reception room, thumbing
through the inevitable packets of official looking papers that criminal
defendants seem to generate as they go through the system. The receptionist
had not yet come in, so they stopped me as I walked through and I tried to
answer their questions. Finally, I made it to the door that separated us from
our clients. I walked down the narrow corridor, made narrower by the presence
of file cabinets, for which there was no other space, pushed against the walls.
I passed my small, sunless office and headed toward the lounge.

Frances
Kelly, the supervising attorney, sat at a table with the daily legal journal
spread out in front of her. She let a cigarette burn between her fingers,
lifting it to her lips just as the ash fell, dropping on the lapel of her
jacket.

She
looked up at me as I poured myself some coffee. “Did you know Roger Chaney?”
she asked.

“Not
well,” I answered. “He left the office just as I was coming in.”

“Excellent
lawyer,” she said. “He and I trained together, shared an office. He helped me
prepare for my first trial.”

“Is
there something about him in the journal?” I asked, sitting across from her as she
lit another cigarette.

“He’s
being arraigned today in federal court in San Francisco,” she said, “on a
conspiracy to distribute cocaine charge.”

“Roger
Chaney?” I asked, incredulously. “I thought you were going to tell me he’d been
elevated to the bench.”

“With
Roger,” she replied, “it could’ve gone either way.”

“Are
the charges true, then?”

“I
know he had a very successful practice defending some big dealers, and he was
making a lot of money, but that was never the lure of the law for him.”

“No?
Then what?”

She
rose heavily, an elegant fat woman in a linen suit with black hair and
beautiful, clear eyes, and ambled to the coffee urn. “He was an intellectual
virtuoso,” she said, “convinced he could talk circles around any other lawyer
or judge, and he was right. But the courtroom isn’t the real world.”

“He
thought he could get away with something?”

“We
must presume him innocent,” she said, piously, “but he had that kind of vanity.”
After a second she added, “So do you.”

She
headed for the door and motioned for me to follow. We went into her office, the
only one with a window. Outside, a thin layer of smog rose in the direction of
San Jose, but the view to the brown hills surrounding the university was clear
as they rolled beyond the palm trees and red tile roofs.

Frances
was saying, “I sometimes think really brilliant people shouldn’t be permitted
to practice law. They get bored too easily and cause trouble.”

“Are
you about to pass along some advice?”

She
laughed. “I just wanted to know how you are, Henry. You’ve been with us three
months and we haven’t had much chance to talk.” She referred to my forced
transfer from the main office in San Jose to this branch office. The topic of
conversation, my mental health, now came into focus as sharply as the yellow rose
in the vase at the edge of Frances’ desk. I was annoyed by both.

“Considering
that my transfer was against my will, I’m fine.”

“I
had nothing to do with the transfer,” she said. “You’re not being put out to
pasture, just given a rest after your last trial.”

“Which
I lost,” I said. “That was the real reason I got kicked down from felony trials
to arraignments.”

“The
jury convicted him,” she said, “and no one faults your work which, considering
the circumstances, was excellent.” I didn’t know whether by circumstances she
referred to the fact that only a few I.Q. points separated my client from a
vegetable or the fact that he used an axe handle to bludgeon his elderly
parents to death. A series of coroner’s photographs passed through my mind.
Pained by the recollection, I touched my fingers to my forehead. She caught the
gesture and tactfully looked away.

“The
circumstances were of no interest to the jury,” I said. “They sent him to Death
Row.”

“That’s
on appeal.”

“And
I was farmed out here, to rusticate.”

“You
object to my company?” She expelled a gust of cigarette smoke that passed
through the sunlight like a cloud.

“But
seriously,” I replied.

“To
rest,” she said, “from the pressures of trial court. I could see the burn-out
on your face when you first got here.”

“Send
me back,” I said. “I’ve done nothing but interview clients for other lawyers
and sit in arraignment court haggling with the D.A. over public nuisance cases.”

“Whether
you go back is not my call.”

“Whether?”
I demanded. “Not when? Call San Jose and tell them that I didn’t crack up,
after all. Tell them I’m burned out from the other end. I mean, you all think I’m
demoralized or exhausted from my work, but I m not. It’s the rest of my life I’m
burned out on. This job keeps me going.” I heard the tremor in my voice so I
cut myself short.

“I’m
not proposing to take your job away,” she replied. “Everyone in the office
knows you’re one of the best lawyers we have.” She put out her cigarette in an
onyx ashtray and lit another. “The office has just hired a dozen new lawyers,
most fresh out of law school. They’re looking for someone to train them. The
job is yours if you want it.”

“That’s
the second-best offer I’ve had this morning,” I said. She looked puzzled. “It’s
nothing. I don’t see myself as a teacher.”

“You
have so much to pass along.”

“I’m
thirty-three, Frances, not sixty-three. I’m not ready to sit on the veranda and
tell war stories.”

Think
about it,” she said. She noticed me looking at the rose and she plucked it from
the vase and handed it to me.

“And
if I don’t take the job, my exile continues.”

“The
rose is from my garden,” she replied.

“My
favorite flower,” I said, standing.

*
* * * *

In
my office, I dropped the rose into the trash can and sat down. There was a pile
of cases to be reviewed before I went down to arraignment court that afternoon.
There was also a list of clients to be interviewed and advised, and cases to be
assigned to other lawyers. I opened the first file and thought, immediately, of
Hugh Paris sitting in his cell downstairs, And here, I told myself, I sit in my
cell upstairs. I dismissed the thought as self-pity compounded with a pang of
lust. But the little room was too warm, suddenly, and I could not concentrate
on the papers before me.

I
got up and went into the bathroom where I washed my face in cold water. Looking
at the mirror, I studied that face carefully. I pressed my fingers, lightly,
at the comers of my eyes, smoothing out the wrinkles and I looked, almost,
twenty-five again. I could quit and start over, I told the reflection in the
mirror. My eyes answered, start what over? What is there?

Another
lawyer came in, and I turned from the mirror, said hello to him and went back
to my office.

The
morning dragged on as I shuffled files from one side of my desk to the other.
Outside my office, I heard the babble of voices as the other lawyers
interviewed clients and witnesses or hurried off to court shouting last minute
questions about a legal issue or a particular judge’s temperament. I felt the
excitement but did not share it.

There
comes a point in the career of every criminal defense lawyer when he realizes
that what keeps him in practice are his prejudices not his principles.
Suspicion of authority and contempt for the platitudes with which injustice
too often cloaks itself can take you a long way but, ultimately, they are no
substitute for the simple faith that what you are doing is right. It came to
me, as I sat there buried in papers, that I had lost that faith.

I
left a message with Frances’s secretary that I wanted to see her after lunch,
then went off to a nearby bar and had a couple of drinks. As I sat on the bar
stool cracking peanuts and sipping my bourbon, my thoughts veered back to Hugh
Paris.

It
was nothing as trivial as lust. Seeing him had precipitated this crisis because
I had not been able to help him, though I wanted to. And, after all, what did
my help amount to? Getting someone less time in jail than otherwise or even
getting him off were often temporary respites in long-term downward slides.
That was the extent of the assistance I could offer — dispensing placebos to
the terminally ill.

Frances
was in her office when I knocked at the door. She beckoned me in and I sat
down, swallowing the mint I’d been chewing to mask the bourbon on my breath. It
was important that she not know I had been drinking.

“Frances,
I’ve made a decision.”

“You’ll
teach the class?”

“No.”
I gripped my hands together in my lap. “I’m quitting.”

“What?”
She stared at me.

“I
called San Jose and told them. I wanted to tell you, too. I wanted to thank you
for your many kindnesses—” I stopped. The air between us buzzed with
inarticulate feeling.

“Henry,
you can’t mean this. Take a few days off, a few weeks if you want. Travel.”

I
shook my head. “I hate traveling. I have no hobbies. I’m thirty-three years old
and all I know about life is what I learned in law school or the inside of a
courtroom. And it’s pathetically little, Frances.” She reached for a cigarette.
“I know I’m a little old for it, but I believe I’m having an identity crisis.”

“That’s
no reason to quit your job,” she replied.

“This
is more than my job, it’s my life. And it’s not enough.” I rose. “Do you
understand?”

“No.
Do you?”

“Not
very clearly.” I sat down again. “I met a man in the jail this morning, an
inmate. I wanted to help him, to offer him some kind of comfort, something
human. But all I knew how to do was deliver speeches.”

“We
offer people what no one else can give them,” Frances said, “a possible way out
of their trouble. Is that so insignificant?”

“Of
course not, when it works. But so often it doesn’t, and anyway,” I laid my
hands on her desk, “what does that give me?”

She
sighed. “Well that’s the key, isn’t it? If you’ve reached the point of asking
that question then whatever you’re getting from it is obviously not enough.”

“Wish
me luck.”

“No,”
she said. “I’ll wish you’ll change your mind.”

“I
won’t.”

“All
right,” she said, “then good luck.”