Allegiance (6 page)

“He'll be back soon,” I say, and the lie tastes like metal on my tongue.

Josephine ignores that. She has risen from the table and is at the kitchen window, looking out into the garden. There is the twilit tennis court, there are the roses and rhododendrons. But I know she is seeing something else. The camouflage netting of a Tiger tank, the backswept wings of a Stuka. Her son in olive drab and the glinting tip of a Japanese bayonet. On the sill her hands clench and release, grasping for something that isn't there. “If it's not him, it's someone else. Someone else's mother.” Her eyes turn down. “Someone else's son. I can't wish that on them.” Her voice drops to a whisper. I can barely hear, but she is not speaking for me. She is speaking for the fates, who hear even the faintest words. “But I do.”

Black steps to her and puts a hand on her shoulder. “Lamb,” he says. When she turns, her face is empty, and she walks right past him, out of the room and up the stairs.

There is nothing I can do for Sterling, but suddenly I feel it would be enough just to suffer with her. I want to beat my head against the wall, feel blood run down my face. Anything to be a part of the struggle. But I am on the sidelines, and grief is a place she goes alone. “I should go.”

“Sit down,” Black says. He comes back to the table. “She has moods sometimes.” He takes the steak from Josephine's plate to his own, cuts a piece, and begins chewing as though it is the most important thing in the world. “First case I had, you know what it was about? A litter of pigs.”

“At the Supreme Court?”

“No, son.” Black rolls his eyes. “When I was in Birmingham. I got my start as a lawyer there. Some fellow's sow wandered onto my client's land, paid a visit to his hog.”

“I should—”

“Then she left, of course. Females. But I got him half the litter. Pressed the hog's parental rights.”

“I've got to get back to the certs,” I say.

Black chews for another moment, looking at me. “They'll be there tomorrow.”

“And so will new ones. Sorry, Judge, I'm not as fast at it as you are.”

Finally he nods, releasing me. “Keep at it. You'll get better. Remember, exercise helps.” He raises his fork, a chunk of leathery meat speared on the tines. “And you should eat more steak.”

“YOU DOING OKAY,
buddy?” Phil Haynes's fine features crinkle with concern.

I look around the lunchroom. “Of course I am.” At a table in the corner, Gene Gressman sits by himself consuming simultaneously a thick sandwich and the day's paper. The noises he is making suggest that each is subject to the same lip-smacking appraisal, or perhaps that there is some degree of confusion between the two. “It's just . . .”

“What?”

“What am I doing here?”

“You're eating lunch.”

“Yeah.” I poke a slice of chicken with my fork. “And I'm playing tennis. And doing certs. It doesn't add up to much.”

“It's still summer,” he says. “The good cases will be coming. And certs are important. There's the Pledge of Allegiance . . .” His voice trails off. “Something else is on your mind.”

I nod, confessing.

“What is it?”

“I don't even know, really.”

“You can tell me.”

I hesitate. “Something just seems off.”

“What do you mean?”

I bite my lower lip. How to express it, when I don't fully know myself? “You remember when I first got here, you told me the cafeteria was no good, I should go out for breakfast?”

Haynes nods.

“So I went to Eastern Market.” The market is one streetcar stop past the Court, a large brick building a few blocks east of the Capitol. Crates of apples and peaches crowd the sidewalk, green lettuce lies on beds of ice. “There was a guy there.”

“Several, I'd expect.”

“Not in the market, in the back. I went out the wrong door, ended up by the loading docks. And he came in after me. Guy in a gray suit.”

“So?”

“He looked at me funny.”

“Well, you weren't supposed to be there.”

“It wasn't that kind of a look.” I try to bring the scene back in my mind. “It was more like he was scared. And he didn't tell me I shouldn't be there. He just turned right around and walked away. Ran, almost.”

Haynes lifts a beet to his mouth. The fork clicks on his teeth. “I gotta say, pal, you're not making a whole lot of sense here.”

“Well, I remembered him because it seemed so odd. That he'd be scared of me. And then last night I saw him again.”

“Really?”

I nod. After dinner at Black's house, I went back to the Court and spent an hour doing certs. When I left, my head filled with legal argument, I walked four blocks toward the trolley before I realized I'd forgotten my hat. I turned around to go back, and there was a man half a block or so behind me. He turned too, ducking away. I only caught a glimpse of his face, but something seemed familiar. And then, as he moved out of the streetlights and vanished into the shadow, I realized what it was. The gray suit receding, passing from one pool of light to another. That was the man from Eastern Market.

“You might have noticed,” Haynes says, “that there's more than one guy with a gray suit in this town.”

“I really think it was him.”

“So you think he was following you? Why would anyone do that?”

“I don't know. But we just had the saboteurs' case here. What if there are more of them?”

“Oh,” says Haynes. He nods his head. “I get it now. You feel like you missed out. You want some connection to the war. So you imagine the Nazis are after you.”

“Someone is.”

“Or maybe you're worried you don't deserve to be here. Black made a mistake in choosing you. You think everyone's staring at you, like they know you don't belong.”

I frown. “I don't think that about everyone.” On the other side of the lunchroom, Gene Gressman's newspaper rustles. Suddenly I am sure he is listening to us. I lower my voice. “But right now, for instance—”

Haynes doesn't let me finish. “Something like that. You're inventing things to make yourself feel special.” He flutters his fingers in the air. “People following you. You must be important if they're doing that, right? It helps you feel like you deserve the job.” I must look skeptical, for he leans closer and puts a hand on my arm. “You're here for a reason, Cash. Don't ever doubt that.”

“I'm not doubting it,” I say. “But the way that guy looked at me, there was—”

Haynes interrupts again. “No, there wasn't.” His smile is back, easy and confident, and he pats my shoulder encouragingly. “Trust me. No one's trying to get you.” He picks up his own newspaper, scans the headlines, and grunts.

“What?”

“Two Japs shot trying to escape from a camp in New Mexico. Look, you need a little break. Drive back home for the afternoon.”

“I have too much work.”

“Justice Black will understand. Say you need to see your girl. It'll do you a world of good. Just do me a favor, pal. Don't go around telling too many people you've got Nazis on your trail.”

HAYNES IS RIGHT
about one thing, I decide. It is time to get away from the Court, to get back to something I understand. Three hours' drive to Haverford, another three for the return—I won't have much time there, but it will be worth it to see the look on Suzanne's face.

But she is not home. Gone into town, the housekeeper says, but expected to call in. “Tell her to meet me at the eagle,” I say. Already my plan is coming apart. Another half hour to drive into the city, who knows how long before Suzanne gets the message. I assured Black I would not fall behind on my cert work. As I get back into the car, I feel a twinge of pain in my neck.

Montgomery Avenue takes me east toward Philadelphia, right past the Merion Cricket Club. A pair of stone pillars marks the gate; behind them I can see the red brick of the clubhouse, the peaked windows with cricket bats crossed in stained glass. The flags are flying, the white MCC on a field of dark maroon, and next to it the stars and stripes. Off to the right lies the great lawn, chalked for tennis. For a moment my shoulders loosen. Everything feels right again.

I remember the childhood Easter egg hunts on the great lawn, my first steps on the squash courts, the afternoons spent watching our stars. And the evenings, with the red summer sun sinking low and the voices of the young at play rising from the deep-shadowed lawn. The brick glowed; the day's heat ebbed from the wooden decks. Inside old men read in silence, sunk into
leather chairs, wreathed in smoke from pipes and cigars. We were the boys in white ducks, the girls in flowered dresses, gardenias in their hair. We ran about the clubhouse laughing madly; we turned audacious waltzes across the ballroom; we wandered outside into the heavy dusk, alone or in pairs, losing ourselves in the scent of cut grass and the small white flowers of the privet. I felt sorry that my dancing friends would become the fat Scotch drinkers who eyed us from tables, the old men shivering in their red-striped club blazers, the widows with gorgeous jewels and crumpled paper skin—sorry, though in my heart I still believed it impossible. I never wondered what they thought watching us.

The past gains sweetness as it recedes, our golden cohort forever on the edge of adulthood. That was summer, burnished by loss. Those things are no longer in my world, replaced by hours in the law school library, caustic professors, memorized rules. And now the sweltering streets of Washington, the cool marble corridors of the Supreme Court. A strange man behind me on the street. Summer and then fall and now the smoky taste of winter in the night.

Coming up on the river, I can see willows standing along the bank, boathouses, and on the water itself an eight-man shell skidding like a bug. There is the familiar golden temple of the Art Museum, and the silhouette of Center City, John Kelly's brickwork rising crimson against the blue.

It isn't a Manhattan skyline; no buildings go any higher than the peak of William Penn's hat, where he stands atop City Hall. Nothing in the world passed Penn's hat until 1908, when the Singer Building went up in New York. Now the point that marked Philadelphia as the top is a self-imposed limit holding us back. But that is the idea. “The city does not know what it is now,” Judge Skinner told me. “Only that it is not New York.”

I park the car near Suburban Station, step out onto Pennsylvania Boulevard, and head east. This is the way I used to walk to the Judge's courthouse, when I would come from the University to see him hurl lightning across the room. Philadelphia runs twenty-four blocks east to west, people say, but only five north to south. Every place you hear of—every club, restaurant, theater, and shop—is just around the corner. It is enough to make you wonder what's in the rest of the city. But Philadelphians do not wonder. We stay in the great country to which we owe our allegiance, which stretches five blocks
by twenty-four and out along the railroad tracks, the Main Line colonies and the Center City motherland. And all around us, like the black space of a photographic negative, lies the vast, unapproachable America that tells us who we are not.

One block south to Market Street. Already I can feel sweat starting on my face. The heat grips you and wrings your water out; it pulls damp spots onto the hatbands and jackets of passersby. Now I stand before the granite mass of Wanamaker's Grand Depot. Inside, the marble floors are cool. The central atrium rises seven stories, a tower of air carved from the stone. It is home to the world's largest pipe organ, brought from the St. Louis World's Fair. By the console on the ground floor is a ten-foot bronze eagle, which I admire for almost an hour before Suzanne arrives.

She is wearing a deep green skirt and has pinned her hair up. It is a more serious style, but she isn't old enough to look serious. She just looks beautiful.

“Cash!” she cries as she approaches. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“Well, you did.” She throws her arms around my neck and kisses my cheek. “What shall we do now?”

Her hair smells like a summer in Maine. “I don't have very much time.”

Suzanne does not seem to hear me. “I know,” she says. “We'll go up to the Crystal Room and have tea.”

I can feel my face tightening. “I can't. I have to go back to Washington.”

“You just got here.”

Haynes was right, I realize. The work is important. There will be big cases. Even the certs matter; they're my chance to help decide which cases the Court will hear. “No, you just got here. I've been standing around for an hour.”

A different look comes into Suzanne's eyes. “Well, I didn't know that.”

“What were you in town for, anyway?”

“Shopping.”

“You don't like to shop.”

“There's not much to do with you away.” She shakes her head. “Cash, this isn't what was supposed to happen.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know we're at war, and you're doing something important, and it's not
just drive-ins and ice cream sodas for anyone anymore. But I miss you. I miss your voice and your hands and the way I feel in your arms. I was so scared for you, and then I was so happy, and now it seems like all this was just another way of losing you.”

She turns away. From behind I can see her long and slender neck, a curl of hair that has escaped the bobby pins and lies, fernlike, on the nape. Suzanne dabs at her eyes and I look off to the side. Men in uniform pass in the background.

“I know it's hard,” I say. “It's hard for me, too. But this is my chance.”

“Your chance for what?”

“To do something more.”

Suzanne turns back now. Something flickers in her green eyes. Before I can tell whether it's pity or anger or sorrow, it is gone again. “My father said that to you,” she says. “I mean, the Judge did. But you know, Cash, everyone wants something more. It's not what people want that makes them different. It's what they're willing to give up.”