An Imperfect Spy (6 page)

T
HE
next morning, when Kate had got herself up, fed, and ready to face the day, she found a message on her answering machine from Blair Whitson, who reminded her that he was the one who was going to teach the course with her at Schuyler Law and added that he was eager to meet with her. How about lunch today at the Oak Room of the Plaza? He gave his number.

Kate called it, getting his message machine. Kate had got quite used to this exchange of machines, and even thought there was a good deal to be said for it; it allowed tedious arrangements to be made without superfluous interchange or chat, and if one screened calls, it gave one some control over whom one talked to, and when. Also, at least for Kate, the fact remained that if you had something serious to
say to a person, it was better said across a table in a pleasant restaurant or, at any rate, face-to-face rather than over the telephone. Machine messages thus happily tended to postpone conversations to the place of meeting. She left a message on Blair Whitson’s machine to say she never went out to lunch, but how about dinner tonight in the Oak Room? If yes, say when. If no, say when and where. Reed was going to be busy all evening, and the Oak Room at the Plaza always pleasantly revived in Kate the change from the years when they wouldn’t let women in to dine with the men. One needed to assure oneself from time to time that some things do change and, more important these days, stay changed.

She went off to a faculty meeting that she felt required to attend even though she was on leave, and returned to find the completion of arrangements mechanically recorded: 7:30 tonight at the Oak Room. He would recognize her. How? Kate wondered. The table was reserved in his name, should he be delayed.

He was not delayed.

He was at the table when she arrived, stood to greet her, helped her to seat herself, and asked what she wanted to drink. Then he sat down, and Kate reflected that he was certainly the most improbable male revolutionary she had ever encountered. But then, Reed had said he had only recently become a revolutionary; all he wanted, after all, was a real clinic and a law and literature course.
Perhaps at Schuyler, at least as Harriet saw it, that was sufficient to qualify one as a revolutionary.

Blair in fact looked, if one had to resort to typecasting, like an admiral who had reached the pinnacle of his profession young. No, she thought, rather like the captain of a ship plying northern seas in the kind of films they used to make about World War II.

Kate lowered her eyes and sipped her drink. A most unfeminist question and unfeminist thoughts: was she really wondering why a man that, well, that
manly
, should be worried about literature and the law, let alone women and the law? One day she would ask him. Looks, after all, she reminded herself sternly, told one little of significance.

“I came to law rather late,” he said, as though he had read her mind. “Before that I did nothing but ‘mess about with boats.’ Isn’t that a literary quotation of some sort?”

“
The Wind in the Willows
, I think. Ratty perhaps. Mole was the one with windfalls from aunts. That’s
my
favorite phrase.”

“It’s wonderful to have a literary mind. Anyhow, one day I decided, if I’m going to help fix up the mess in this country, I better stop messing with boats and learn the law. Or maybe I tired of the naval hierarchy and decided to explore the legal hierarchy instead. So here we are, discussing how we can do a little to revive the faculty of the Schuyler Law School. They’re so far entrenched in old ways of thinking, and so self-satisfied in their entrenchment, that I don’t put it past them to think that those
who bother them, or want to change their golden ways, should be snuffed out. That is, if ridicule and nastiness have failed. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” Kate answered. “Would you mind telling me how you were able to recognize me?”

“No problem. So nice to be able to use that phrase, since so often there
is
a problem. I went to hear my old pal Reed Amhearst lecture on one of the newest wrinkles in criminal law; you were pointed out to me afterward as his lit-crit wife; you had come to hear him. I remembered that when I had to think of a literary type to help me teach this course. I thought, you see, you might be more amenable to adventures in legal realms because of your husband. And then with him doing the clinic, I thought we might as well take up nepotism as well as revolution. Would you like another drink or shall we order?”

“Let’s order, by all means,” Kate said, feeling rather breathless. First it had been Harriet, now Blair. Reed was going to do a clinic for them while she was teaching a course, and so far everyone they’d met had been surprising. Was that a good sign?

When they had ordered, Kate sat there, feeling somehow the pawn of destiny, and admiring his hair, straight, with some gray beginning, and lying thick like an animal’s pelt; his vivid blue eyes, blue, no doubt, from staring at the sea, looked at her, smiling. You’ll be writing romantic fiction next, she told herself.

Without waiting for their food to arrive, Blair Whitson apologized for launching into the topic of their proposed course immediately, and then launched. “The fact is,” he said, “if we’re going to do this course, we’ve got to start planning yesterday. Sorry to pressure you, but isn’t life, at least academic life, always that way? First it’s don’t do today what you can put off to tomorrow, and then it’s hurry up, this stuff was needed yesterday. I’m sure you understand what I mean. I know, I know,” he added before Kate could respond, although for once she was thinking and hadn’t got yet to a response, “I’m pushing you. Of course I am. The class starts late next week. We can muddle through the first meeting with reading lists and gab about papers, participation, the usual. But after that, of course, we’re going to have to say something both literary and legal.”

“Simultaneously?” Kate asked. She leaned back in her chair and took in the scene. The Oak Room at the Plaza, when you got right down to it, was an odd place to plan a revolution, or even a course on literature and law. For some idiotic reason, Kate thought of a story she had heard about Marlene Dietrich arriving in some elegant dining place just like this wearing white tie and tails. “We do not allow women in trousers,” the maître d’ had proclaimed. With which Dietrich took off the trousers and tossed them aside. It helped, of course, to have gorgeous legs.

“As near simultaneously as possible,” he answered.
“I don’t mean we have to both talk at once, but that we both talk on whatever the reading is—literature or law. Is that all right with you?”

“Sounds lovely,” Kate said.

“Do I catch an ironic note?” he asked. “I was told you wear irony the way some women wear perfume.”

He had begun to flirt, a younger man with a woman just the right number of years older.

“It’s a good defense,” she said. “Against many things. Oddly enough, the only thing I find it difficult to be ironic about is the misuse of words for no decent reason.”

“What words, though I hardly dare to ask? I probably misuse them all.”

“Since you ask,
disinterested
to mean
uninterested; transpired
to mean
happened;
and a recent candidate,
serendipitously
to mean
by chance
. Now that I have established myself as a pedant, have you had any ideas about particular texts, or legal briefs, if that’s what they’re called?”

“Yes, I have,” he said, obviously trying to remember if he had misused these words, and producing some papers just in time almost to collide with the waiter serving their first course. He handed her the sheets of paper. “These are the legal readings I thought we might use.
Michael M
. v.
Superior Court
, for instance, is a case of statutory rape which might go with some novel or other. About the rights of a woman to say no and mean it.”

“Jude the Obscure,”
Kate said. “I think this is
going to be possible. But isn’t reading a case—how long is a case?—and a novel all at once rather a monumental assignment?”

“That’s what we need to work out. I was hoping you would turn out to be an authority on shorter works of fiction. Or even chapters, if one can suggest so unliterary a practice.”

“Give me a minute,” Kate said. “I’ve no doubt we can work it out, but could we look for a moment at the larger picture? The law school, I mean, into which we are going to shoehorn this fascinating course.”

“Of course. Shall I start at the beginning, anyway, the place where I come in?”

“The beginning is often a good place to start,” Kate said solemnly. “I somehow get the impression that the Schuyler Law School is not exactly the cat’s pajamas, but no one has told me why, apart from the fact that it isn’t Harvard or Yale. Fact and frankness will be welcome.”

“Fair enough. I’m really delighted that Reed is going to do a clinic for us. You’re more luck than I had dared to hope for, or to imagine that the guardian angels of women’s rights and minority culture might grant.”

“Let’s get to the angels later,” Kate said. “Let’s start with where you come in. Although,” she felt constrained to add, not believing in angels, but not wanting to offend any should they somehow hover, “Reed’s doing the clinic certainly does seem to have taken a certain amount of intervention on your part,
and if the angels helped, so much the better. Proceed, please.”

“Let’s begin with the faculty,” he said. “All male, and all certain that what they don’t know and believe isn’t worth knowing. I hardly have to describe them, except that they are beginning to smell the danger of new ideas and are rallying the troops. Or, as they say where I used to live, the wind is rising.”

“Well, I gather it’s not a law school anyone thinks of as prestigious,” Kate said between mouthfuls. “Is this the same dynamic as in terrible schools in English novels; the worse the school, the crueler the teachers?”

“You may be right; I did spend two days with
Nicholas Nickleby
when it was on Broadway. But law schools are a little different. Unprestigious, Schuyler Law may be, but most of the faculty got their degrees at Harvard Law or Yale Law or Chicago Law and have been floating on that fact ever since. Maybe they published a casebook; they haven’t published anything else. They don’t really
think
, in my opinion, but they insist on all the old ways that have served so many years and ought to go on serving in a sane—that is, white—male world. Almost half the students are women, of course, and many of the students are minorities, but that’s all the more reason to imbue them with the law as it should be practiced.”

“Have there been many rambles from the women and minorities?” Kate asked as her main course was served. “Are the masses stirring?”

“But little. These students are not your pampered darlings from Harvard and Yale, princes of all they survey. They’ve made it this far by the skin of their teeth, and they aren’t inclined to interfere with their eventual law degree and job. One can hardly blame them. That’s why I think the faculty needs to take a stand. Which was what Nellie Rosenbusch and I did.”

“Nellie Rosenbusch?” Kate asked.

“The woman faculty member who was killed by a truck. Harriet and I are very suspicious.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Kate said. “I don’t think I ever heard her name.”

“Nellie was a thorn in the faculty’s side. She was even beginning to get some of the women students behind her. They—the outraged faculty—used everything they could against her, they didn’t miss a trick, from sexual harassment to the silent treatment that I understand is what they do at West Point.”

“But she did have tenure?”

“Yes, she did, I should have mentioned that. She got tenure the year I did, and she got it because of me. We let it be known that her qualifications were as good as mine, in fact better, and that I was willing to join her in a suit claiming so. They decided the easiest way out of that was to give it to us both. She was the first tenured woman in the place, if you can believe it. And they thought once she had joined the club, so to speak, she would shut up and go away. But she didn’t.”

“And you think they killed her; shoved her under
a truck and brushed their hands, saying ‘That takes care of
that
!’ ” Kate put down her fork. “Have you any evidence,” she said, “apart from motive, opportunity, and your deep suspicions?”

“It’s not circumstantial evidence, god knows. She landed in front of the truck, one of those high babies, and the driver never saw her. She wasn’t a very big person.” He paused for a moment.

“Is there any evidence that she was pushed?” Kate repeated.

“People waiting with her for the light think she must have been, because of the way she sort of collapsed all of a sudden. But no one saw exactly what happened. All eyes were on Nellie and the truck; all anyone remembers are the screeching brakes after she was hit. The police have done their best, but there’s damn little evidence really, apart from the fact that there’s no reason on earth why she should have fallen like that. They did the usual autopsy and there were no obvious health problems—heart attack, liquor, drugs, nothing like that.”