An Imperfect Spy (13 page)

“She was happy when she got the job at Schuyler,” he said. “She knew it wasn’t a great law school, or even a good one, but she liked the fact that some of the students, particularly the women, were older and serious and putting a lot on the line to be there, unlike most of the kids at the fancier places. Also, she wanted to be in New York, something I never understood. She wasn’t into isolation, the way I am; she wasn’t solitary by nature. We met often—she’d come here for the weekend, or we’d meet somewhere outside New York; I hate the city—and we talked on the telephone a lot. I always sent her my poems.”

“I tried to buy them,” Kate said. “In the end I found them in the library. If you know where I could get a copy, I’d be grateful. I like your poems.”

“What do you like about them?” he asked, suspicious.

“You have a voice,” she said. “I like to hear the poet’s voice in poems. Is that old-fashioned?”

“Not by me. Nellie said that—you have a voice. Funny; and you never knew her.”

“No. Yet when Blair speaks of her, I get a sense of what she was like, of what she was after.”

“Blair was nice to her. At first I thought he was just another man she was carrying on with, but he really did seem to understand what she was up against. He did support her; of course, there wasn’t anybody else except the students, and she was there for them, not them for her. What was it you wanted to know about exactly?”

“Anything about Schuyler, about her time there—her impressions, her suspicions, her reactions, her plans. Anything at all that was connected to the law school.”

“She was appalled at first, and then angry. I don’t think she had really faced what men like those in the faculty were like. Nellie really believed that if you treated people with honor, they recognized that and honored you in return. It may sound naive, but nothing in her life up to then had dislodged that faith. Of course she had met some shits, but if she was working with people anywhere, they always seemed to recognize her—well, her sincerity, I guess, and her integrity. That sounds a fancy way to put it, but that’s what she had and that’s what she thought would be perceived. Not at Schuyler, not a chance. I pointed out that people
without integrity couldn’t recognize it; liars can never trust anyone, that stands to reason. By the time she saw what they were like, the men on that faculty, she became unhappy, and then angry. I told her to get out, but she stayed through her tenure fight, Blair was great about that, and then I really thought she might leave, she had some feelers out.” He paused, as though making up his mind. “It was then,” he finally said, “that she began to suspect they were not only reactionaries, but mean reactionaries.”

“Isn’t that a tautology?”

“Not necessarily. I don’t suppose reactionaries are any meaner to their nearest and dearest than anyone else. It’s the way they treat people who are out of the loop that marks them as mean. And Nellie was certainly out of the loop.”

“Far enough out to be killed?” Kate asked. He seemed a man who didn’t mind direct speech, and he certainly seemed a man who wasn’t likely to want to sit around chatting all day.

“You mean, did they push her under that truck? Is that what you suspect?”

“It seems to be a possible suspicion, at least to those who knew and liked her. And to the police, who went so far as to check alibis, which were, incidentally, notably lacking.”

“That was before they found out about her health. I had to tell them. Look, Kate, I know you came up here to do what you could for Nellie, now that she’s dead. And you came to the right person; your instincts can’t be faulted. I’ve lost the person who
meant the most to me, who always meant the most to me, and I’m hoping that solitude, hard physical work, and poems that let me speak of my mourning will see me out of this. I’d love to pin her death on those bastards, but the fact is she just blacked out and fell in front of that truck. I pity the poor driver, I really do.”

“Blacked out?”

“Need we go into the medical details? She had an affliction, an illness, it got worse rather than better, but she handled it with medication and determination. Its most dangerous symptom was that she would black out, lose consciousness, and, inevitably, fall. She’d got that symptom under control, or the doctors had, but there’s no doubt she blacked out and fell in front of that truck. I’m damn sure the stress those men caused her led to an intensification of her illness and thus to her death, but I don’t think we can call it murder, if that’s what you’re after.”

“I see,” Kate said, feeling a fool, rushing off in all directions like Nancy Drew to prove murder, when all she could prove there was what was equally evident in New York: the faculty of Schuyler Law were, on the whole, an unattractive bunch—well, a bunch of mediocre shits, she thought, taking refuge in strong language. So he’s here trying to put his life together, and I’m asking fool questions.

He seemed to sense her mood. “Don’t feel bad about coming here,” he said. “I’m glad for a chance to talk about Nellie. I know I’ve got to find some
center for my life, but at the moment I just try to keep the terrors at bay. And thank you for not asking if I was married, or living here alone, or what Are you married?”

“Yes,” Kate said.

“You don’t wear a ring. Nellie always said she wouldn’t wear a ring either, if she married.”

“I don’t wear a ring, use his name, or depend upon him financially. He’s a lawyer, by the way, but not a neoconservative, and this semester he’s actually doing a clinic for Schuyler Law, where I teach law and literature with Blair.”

“What kind of clinic? Nellie said they didn’t have clinics at Schuyler.”

“They didn’t have real clinics, so to speak. They had synthetic clinics, which are useful, but don’t help people or plunge the students into actual legal situations. Reed’s clinic is working with prisoners who want to contest their cases, or who are being held in prison improperly, or are being mistreated there.”

“Nellie worried about someone in prison, the wife of one of the law professors. She’d met her only once, I think, but said her case should be retried because the lawyer she had at the time hadn’t known of some syndrome.”

“The battered woman syndrome. One of the law professors mentioned her to me at their semiannual reception; his view was that she’d murdered his colleague and friend, and deserved to be in jail, if not on death row.”

“That’s the woman, I guess. What’s the battered woman syndrome, or don’t I want to know?”

“As I understand it, which doesn’t say much for my defining it properly, it has to do with the fact that self-defense can be considered a justification for murder if the murderer felt her life in danger at the moment she struck. You pull a gun on me and I, faster on the draw, shoot you before you shoot me.”

“I see you spent your youth watching Western movies,” he said. Kate smiled. It was the first remotely relaxed comment he had made.

“With battered women, however,” she continued, “they wait until the batterer is asleep or watching television or chatting with someone at a bar. Then they kill him. To defend such a woman against a charge of outright murder, the law has tried to explain that a battered woman doesn’t dare protect herself at the moment she is being battered; if she has the courage at all to protect herself, she will wait until the man is at his least dangerous.”

“I get it. Well, Nellie hoped someone could reopen this woman’s case, so maybe if you can get your husband’s clinic to do that, you won’t have dragged yourself all the way to New Hampshire in vain.”

Kate understood that the conversation was over. She rose, and he rose with her.

“Thank you for talking to me,” she said.

“Thank you for caring about Nellie even though you never met her, for coming all this way, and for talking to me straight without either questions or advice.
I’m sorry you didn’t know Nellie; you would have liked each other.”

As they moved toward the door, the front door this time, he said, “Wait a minute,” and vanished into a room. He reappeared with a book. “My poems. Thank you for going to some trouble to read them.”

“Thank you,” Kate said, meaning it.

When she was in the car, she opened the book of poems, hoping he had at least signed it. He had done more than that.
For Kate
, he had written,
who cared about Nellie and doesn’t ask too many questions
.

Kate closed the book with, she was surprised to realize, intense emotion. She had to wait for tears to recede from her eyes before she was able to drive away.

Kate was late getting home and tired from the drive to the airport, the plane trip, the drive from the New York airport, and the simultaneous sense of being glad to have met Rosie, brave in his grief, and foolish in having turned a terrible accident into murder because she thought some men capable of murder. She and Reed sat with their drinks; Kate was glad to be silent for a while beside him; she would tell him about the visit to Rosie, but not yet. She had to get used to it in her mind first. What she was used to in her mind, however, was the dreariness of Schuyler Law.

“I know you will do good with your clinic, and maybe my spouting literature in counterpoint to law
will give someone an idea, but I can’t help wondering why we had to do all this in so crummy a law school. Why did we have to end up in such a depressing place? Surely most other law schools are a lot better. Please say they are.”

“It’s pretty astonishing, Kate,” Reed said. “It started me looking around my own law school. And then there’s Harvard. Where they claim that the reason they haven’t got a tenured black woman is because there simply isn’t one good enough for Harvard. Meaning, freely translated, she doesn’t teach law the way they think law should be taught. And speaking of Harvard, I’ve brought you a book to read.”

“Ah, the intellectual’s solution to everything. What book is it?”

“You sneer at books! You must be tired. You know as well as I that they have changed the world and may be all that can.”

“Sorry, Reed. I’m feeling foolish, and when I feel foolish I get argumentative; foolishly, of course. What book have you brought me?”

“It’s about the Harvard Law School, and no, it’s not the one by Scott Turow. It’s called
Broken Contract
, by a guy named Kahlenberg.
¹
If you don’t want to read it and be plunged into further dismay, I’ll tell you its main point. Public service, the ideal with which most Harvard Law students and, one supposes, students at other like institutions, enter
the study of law, is abandoned by these students in large numbers. Partly it’s money; corporate law offers huge salaries compared with public service law, and many law students have large loans to pay back. Partly it’s that Harvard Law cooperates with corporate law firms, who are their wealthiest alumni and contributors, in directing the students that way. Mostly, however, it’s that students early discover that power does not lie in public service; such jobs rarely lead to political appointments, let alone the good life, elegant working conditions, and a place in the power loop. Harvard Law School, like the others in the same rank, preach service but make sure their graduates are not deluded by the sermons.”

“The author of this book seems to have convinced you,” Kate said. “Maybe he’s wrong, or has an ax to grind, or just hates Harvard, a not uncommon emotion.”

“Maybe. But he quotes a speech from the then-president of Harvard, Derek Bok. Ten years earlier, in the first Reagan years, Bok had given a speech deploring the rush to corporate law. He expressed regret at how the brightest students had diverted their talents to ‘pursuits that often add little to the growth of the economy, the pursuit of culture, or the enhancement of the human spirit.’ The author calls Bok ‘the master of inconsistency,’ because when it came time to appoint a new dean of the law school, which was divided between the liberals and the neoconservatives, Bok threw his weight behind the ultraconservative candidate for dean, a leading
spokesman for the right. As a result, gifts to the law school soared by sixty-four percent.”

“Schuyler Law,” Kate said, after a pause, and in rather hopeless tones, “is not Harvard Law. There isn’t and never was any ‘left’ there at all.”

“There’s you and Blair and me, and Bobby helping me. Have a little gumption, Kate, please. You don’t usually become quite this damp and hopeless.”

“Reed, there’s a battered woman in your prison named Betty Osborne. I mentioned her after that wonderful faculty reception. She’s the one who shot her husband, a law professor from Schuyler, because he was beating her. Couldn’t you use the battered woman syndrome to get her a retrial?”

“Kate, the prisoners have to request our help. We can’t go in and recruit them; that’s not how it works. What brought her to mind all of a sudden?”

“Nellie’s brother. He mentioned that Nellie had been concerned about her. Please try and do something. If she will let you help her, it may be the only result of my impulsive trip to New Hampshire.”

“You got a book of poems.”

“So I did.”

“Kate, if you will cheer up, I’ll promise to have a word with Betty Osborne. I can’t make her request our help, but I can let her know we’re there. It’s a bit irregular, but I’ll do it. On one condition: that you cheer up, right now. At least, pretend to cheer up and stop me worrying about you. I don’t want to go back to thinking you’re in a phase, as your mother said.”

“It’s a bargain, Reed. I don’t feel much like talking cheerful. Could we try being cheerful in bed?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Reed said, glad to make her smile.

Seven