An Imperfect Spy (10 page)

“She was battered all right,” Harriet said. “Any number of the secretaries saw the evidence; so did Nellie. They all say he was such a bastard you could hardly believe.”

“But beloved by his colleagues at Schuyler no doubt.”

“No doubt. I’m told they testified on his behalf at her trial. They’re a tight little bunch there. Isn’t it
wonderful how mediocrities support one another? I can never understand whether they’re afraid of nonmediocrities or can’t tell the difference.”

“Most people can’t tell the difference,” Kate said.

“I can,” Harriet snorted, “because, after all, I’m a gutsy aging woman. And as Donald Hall put it in his recent book of poems, Timidity encourages death and never prevents dying.’ My motto; well put.”

“It may be a fine motto for an older person,” Kate said. “I don’t think it’s very good advice for an adolescent boy living in an inner city.”

“I hate people who are always ready with a comeback,” Harriet said, reaching for the bottle. “The only problem with you, Kate, is that you’ve never come up against a group of bonded males swollen with mediocrity enjoying power and set upon defending their turf. Maybe you’ve read about them in the newspapers; they’re in the navy, they’re in the Senate, they’re in IBM and every other business. Did you happen to read about the dead feminist lawyer whom the
Law Review
boys at Harvard thought it so amusing to parody, with great cruelty, after her murder; they parodied Nellie at Schuyler in much the same way, doing their damnedest against individual women, dead or alive, and against feminism. I’m accused of exaggerating; but these men are so defensive they can’t see where they’re wrong, or even admit they might be mistaken. I don’t know how much damage they did in my long-abandoned English department, but
I think I can guess how much damage they can do in a law school.”

“Life must be brutal in that secretarial room, to make you so angry. I’m afraid I just find them pitiful rather than dangerous. And not all conservative men are mediocre,” Kate added, although she would have been hard put to understand why she was arguing with Harriet, whose lightness was eerily recognizable.

“Well, I do get carried away,” Harriet said, smiling. “Protectors of the honored past may not be mediocre, but they are threatened, and threatened men are dangerous. They have had power for so long, they have been on the top of the hierarchy for so long, they can’t believe that any justice can be involved in their loss of that cozy, high place.”

“How and where,” Kate asked, “do you read Donald Hall’s latest book of poems?” She really wanted to know.

“In the public library. You can sit there and read and no one bothers you. It takes a while to get the books, of course, but I make lists and wait. I can’t take them out; you need a card for that, and I’m determined to have used my phony name and documents only once. Anyway, I like reading in libraries, even the impoverished libraries New Yorkers are stuck with. I also read A. N. Wilson’s biography of C. S. Lewis, about how his colleagues at Oxford hated him because he was both brilliant and wrote popular books, so that even he, a man, frightened
them in their comfortable niches. I made a note of it.”

Kate smiled as Harriet rummaged in her bag for her notebook. She found herself overcome with affection for Harriet, not least, she thought, because it was such fun arguing with the woman. Harriet retrieved her notebook with a satisfied yell, and flipped its pages. “Here we are,” she said. “Wilson remarks that Lewis’s works ‘were far more interesting and distinguished than anything which his rivals for the job had produced. They, however, were safe men, worthy dullards, and this is usually the sort of man that dons will promote.’ Dons and American professors, law or literature, it doesn’t matter.”

“Does that make Blair a dullard?” Kate asked.

“Good question,” Harriet said. “I don’t know. Sometimes when they hire young men, they make mistakes, and think because he has the right color, religion, sexual orientation, and education, he’ll fit in. Ninety times out of a hundred, maybe more than that, he does. It pays, you see. Blair may just possibly be in the ten percent. After all, he was a friend of Nellie’s, and he did get Reed to run a clinic; he is teaching with you, a renowned woman of perversity, and a course called Law and Literature at that. But he could, at any time, decide not to risk too much. Remember A. N. Wilson’s words: ‘Where mediocrity is the norm, it is not long before mediocrity becomes the ideal.’ ”

* * *

And so the semester got under way. Reed, it seemed to Kate, worked considerably harder at his clinic than she did on her course. Preparation for only one course a week was child’s play, compared with her usual schedule, but the truth was that the class itself presented far more difficulty than Kate was used to. Blair explained it concisely: “We’ve given them permission to speak of their experiences, in and out of law school, which no other class has done. So, naturally, they take out their angers on us. Rather like parents with adolescent children, or so I would imagine. And rather like parents, we would dearly like to kick them from time to time.”

Kate’s reaction to the class, however, was less that of agonized parent than despairing academic. At least, she wryly thought, the old boys who run Schuyler Law classes by the Socratic method don’t find their students arguing with every second sentence uttered.

It was not long after that something ominous happened.

Blair and Kate had finished teaching their class. Many of the students stayed on to talk to one another, or to the professors, but there were always a few who hurried to the door at the earliest possible moment. Today, however, the door was locked, and could not be opened Nor did banging upon it produce any response whatever.

The room in the basement of the building had only one door and recessed windows, below grade and behind bars. The men who had tried to leave banged on the door, and soon began to kick it. Blair
and Kate tried the handle themselves, recognized the uselessness of trying to force it open, and suggested, not without a certain pleasure, that everyone go on screaming as loudly as possible. Kate turned to Blair.

“Aren’t there cleaners who come in the evening?”

“I think so; I’ve never really clocked them. And who knows if they penetrate to the basement.” Looking around, he could see that the students were beginning to look alternately angry and afraid, a dangerous combination.

“Aren’t the cleaning materials kept in the basement?” Kate asked.

“No,” one of the students answered. “They’re kept outside the entrance to the library. I’ve noticed them there when I was going out of the library for a smoke. For all we know, they may only clean the basement once a week, if then.”

“Or once a month,” another student said.

Kate, who was aware of a certain rising panic in herself, easily enough disguised and repressed, worried about the same response in the others, perhaps stronger and less easily restrained. She caught Blair’s eye and could see that he was equally, and similarly, worried.

And then, as suddenly as it had started, the situation righted itself. One of the women students removed a cellular phone from the huge bag she carried about with her. “Who shall I phone?” she asked.

“Nine-one-one,” came a chorus of voices.

After that they waited for the police, watching
through the dirty windows and the bars. The police arrived and tried with a crowbar to force open the door; that failing, they removed the hinges. It occurred to Kate that they might have called a locksmith, which would have been more seemly. But no doubt the police were better for preventing panic. They had a bullhorn.

“All of you get to the back of the room, as far away from the door as you can get. Who’s in charge of this class?”

“I am,” Blair said, after exchanging a glance with Kate. After all, Kate thought, he does belong here; he is, rightfully, in charge. She appreciated Blair’s consideration of his answer rather than his natural assumption of leadership. She looked at him so steadily, she momentarily forgot about the locked doors.

“Okay,” the bullhorn continued. “You, the one in charge, get everybody, I mean everybody, up against the wall farthest from the door. You got that?” Blair yelled back that yes, they got it, but it was doubtful if they could hear him.

They couldn’t all fit against the wall, so they made two rows, the outer one pressing back against the inner one in a way that clearly added a certain spice to the whole adventure, which had, by now, with the arrival of the police, taken on the appeal of a lark.

“Ready?” the bullhorn thundered.

“Ready,” Blair shouted, whether audibly to the police or not they could not tell. It certainly sounded loud enough to Kate to be heard in Staten Island.
There was a moment of absolute silence, no one seemed to breathe, and then, in a wholly anticlimactic way, the door fell away. The police triumphantly entered, and the adventure was over.

But not entirely over, it soon appeared. The students left hastily, and with good humor—“always has been a class full of surprises,” one of them said—and then the police entered the room. Again they asked who was in charge.

“We are,” Blair said this time, pointing to himself and Kate. “We are.”

When the police finally left, having taken their names with much other tedious information, Blair and Kate found themselves in a hilarious mood. “Come on up to my office,” Blair said. “I haven’t yet told you, but I keep a bottle there for moments exactly like this. Although,” he added as they moved toward the stairs, “most of the moments requiring strong liquors are usually not as amusing as this, or as easily resolved.”

“I wonder if it’s really resolved,” Kate said, when they had each got a drink and laughingly clinked their glasses. “Somebody locked that door. Perhaps we had better be careful they don’t lock this one,” she added, getting up to open it.

“Don’t,” Blair said, catching her hand and stopping her. “Don’t open it just yet. Let’s enjoy our lucky escape.” He pulled her to him, gently, it might almost have been by accident.

“I’m going,” Kate said, and went. Then of course she had to come back to collect her coat and her briefcase.

Blair smiled amiably. “Okay,” he said. “Not to worry.”

But Kate was worried. And not about locked doors. Well, she assured herself, about that, too. Naturally.

Five

R
EED
, meanwhile, having written up the directions for the students taking the clinic, had found himself an assistant. She was a third-year student at Reed’s law school, on her way to an associate’s job at a Wall Street law firm and happy to spend the intervening time, while her law studies dwindled to a close, assisting Reed with his clinic. She had told him that she was assuaging her conscience by working with women in prison, and Reed told Kate that whatever her motives, she was a godsend: smart, organized, able to keep the students to their schedules without insulting anyone.

Reed asked her to have dinner with them—in a restaurant, of course, they entertained nowhere else—and Kate found the young woman delightful: down-to-earth, vigorous, obviously one of those exhausting
individuals who jogged and pulled on machinery to strengthen their upper bodies, but frank and spritely, with a boyish charm and a girlish giggle. Her name was Barbara, but “everybody calls me Bobby.”

“You don’t look like the sort who would want to work in a corporate law firm,” Kate said. “Not that I have the slightest idea really what type that is. More conventional, I thought, more given to suits with long jackets and short skirts, with their hair cut to look windblown.” Bobby’s hair was longish, gathered up on either side with combs, which, occasionally relinquishing their hold, allowed her hair to fall forward over her face.

“Oh, I shall have to conform,” she said. “I might have been hired for my brains, but they’ll only keep me for my conventional attitudes. As to why a corporate law firm, there are three reasons—money, money, and money. Loans to pay off, that sort of thing. Besides, since I hope to work for the president one day—Democratic, of course—I thought I should know how business firms operate.”