Lawyer for the Dog (2 page)

“I never
could
win you over.” There's a catch in his voice that makes me nervous.

“Don't start.”

“Anyway,” he continues, “Mrs. Hart alleges that her husband has committed adultery. He counterclaims habitual drunkenness. They've been married for almost forty years.”

“So, they must be at least in their sixties?”

Joe nods. “She's living in their beach house, Sullivan's Island. He's in the house downtown … East Battery.”

“What about assets?”

“They won't be starving anytime soon. The real estate alone is worth a fortune.”

“I don't get it. This seems like your standard rich people's divorce. Some boozing, some playing around, assets to be valued and divided—probably close to fifty-fifty—maybe some alimony, but no minor children, no custody battle. So what do you need
me
for?”

“It's the dog, Sally. They're fighting over the dog.”

“The dog is just personal property. No different, in the eyes of the law, than a car or a chair or a pair of candlesticks, right?”

“This dog is different,” he says. “He's tying up the case. He has the potential to tie up my whole docket. This dog needs a lawyer.”

“I fail to see how throwing another lawyer into the mix is going to—”

“Actually, what I have in mind is a more like a guardian ad litem. Somebody to protect the interests of the dog, do an investigation, make a recommendation to the court, just like in a custody case. And somebody who just might shine the light of reason on the situation. I'm going to appoint you on my own motion, unless they object,” Joe says.

“This is ridiculous!”

“There's a hearing Monday, ten a.m. You might want to do a little research beforehand. If this were
your
dog, wouldn't you want the best for him?”

“I've never even … I mean, it's been a long time since I've had a dog.”

“I remember. One of your cardinal rules for an uncomplicated life: no dogs. No houseplants. And no more husbands.” He smiles. Everything dear about him is in that smile. I stand up to go. I want to get away from the flush rising up my neck to my cheeks.

“But you do have a lot of common sense and a low tolerance for bullshit, which is why I need you on this case,” Joe continues. “By the way, how's your mother?”

“She has Alzheimer's.” My mother has lived with me since the diagnosis two years ago.

“I'm sorry to hear that. Give her my regards, would you?”

“And you give my best to Susan.”

“I would, except we're separated.”

“Oh, Joe, I'm sorry. When?”

“A couple of weeks ago. It's a long story. I won't bore you with it.” I know him well enough to know he really means
Please listen,
but I can't stay. After all this time I still feel our breakup like a sharp pain, an old wound that flares up just when I think I'm fully healed. “Thanks for doing this, Sally.”

“You take care of yourself,” I say. We shake hands, and I'm almost out of the door when he says, “His name is Sherman.”

“What?”

“The dog's name is Sherman.”

 

Lost Something

I don't have children, but I'm not childless. My mother is my child.

Every morning I wake her and make her breakfast. I coax her into finishing her scrambled eggs, bribe her with the promise of a Milky Way if she'll take her pills. On weekdays I settle her in front of the TV with the morning paper, which she pretends to read until Delores, the sitter, comes at eight. Delores is a cross between a saint and a drill sergeant, with infinite patience and a no-nonsense toughness that my mother respects. Without Delores, we'd be lost.

Even so, I call home two or three times a day to make sure things are going okay. After work I fix my mother's dinner, rotating her old favorites: spaghetti and meatballs, baked chicken, pork chops. I don't eat these things anymore, but I like having someone to cook for. Most of the time she has a good appetite, but every now and then she refuses to eat. “Don't wait,” she says, pushing her plate toward me. She means, “Don't waste.”

“I'm a vegetarian, remember?”

But of course she doesn't remember. After dinner I help her into the shower, help her lower herself onto the plastic chair she uses so she won't fall. I wait close by until she finishes, retrieve the soap when she drops it, make sure she washes thoroughly. After the shower I sit her on the end of her bed and help her work her arms through the sleeves of her nightgown, tuck her in, and then I read to her, her old favorites—
Travels with Charley, The Wind in the Willows—
until she falls asleep.

On weekends Delores is off, and though I sometimes use another sitter, my mother doesn't like her, so I spend most of my time at home. If I have work to do—which is almost always—I put Mom in front of the TV or let her listen to Frank Sinatra with earphones.

Sometimes we sit on my little balcony overlooking Charleston harbor. The balcony is a blessing, which makes up for living in this otherwise charmless high-rise. I give my mother the binoculars, and she'll watch the sailboats and the container ships go by while I work at my laptop.

She has good days and bad days. On her good days she can be talkative, even comprehensible, but this is a bad day and she is mostly silent, every now and then uttering a single word—“bird” or “flag” or “boat,”—and then I'll look out at the water, too, grateful that her mind can still connect to an object and name it. Occasionally she'll say something that seems to come from nowhere, like “Isn't it a mystery?” or “Forgot my umbrella” and rather than confuse her with a query, I simply nod and say yes.

Most Sunday mornings I drive her to Grace Episcopal Church for the eleven o'clock service. We sit near the back in case she wants to leave before the service is over, but most of the time she can make it through the whole hour. She has trouble remembering the prayers and she can't follow the words in the hymn book anymore, but sometimes I hear her humming along. I can't tell how much of the sermon she understands but at least she seems soothed by the sound of the minister's voice, or perhaps she's pleased just to have her daughter sitting next to her in church.

Her doctor has warned me that these relatively peaceful days won't last forever, that her “spells”—outbursts of agitation or anxiety in which she cries for no reason and paces back and forth in front of the TV, or wakes at night screaming—will come more often, and that she may stop eating.

“What will you do then?” Ellen asks. Ellen Sadler is my best friend, a prosecutor with a heart, as close to a well-balanced person as I've ever known.

“I guess I'll have to buy those liquid supplements. I think she'd like the chocolate.”

“No,” says Ellen, “I mean, when you can't keep her at home.”

“I can't think that far ahead.” This isn't true, because of course I've thought about it. The truth is that I hope my mother will die before I have to make that decision. I can hardly admit this to myself, much less to my friend. And it isn't just that I want my mother to die for
her
sake—how many times did I hear her say she wouldn't want to live if her mind were gone?—but I want her to die for
my
sake, because I'm not at all sure I'm capable of mothering my mother much longer, and I promised her I'd never put her in a nursing home.

“Well, you know I'm here for you,” says Ellen. And she is, of course, but even Ellen can't put herself in my place, can't imagine what it's like. Nobody can, unless they're living it. “Are you coming to the book club meeting?” she asks.

“I haven't read the book.”

“Come anyway. You haven't been in months,” she says. “Want me to pick you up?”

“I'd have to arrange for the night sitter…”

“You can't just hole up every night with your mother,” Ellen says. “She wouldn't want that for you.”

Ellen is right, of course. But then almost nothing about my life is what my mother wanted for me.

My mother wanted me to get just enough education to carry on an intelligent conversation, but not so much, God forbid, that anyone would ever mistake me for an “intellectual.” She wanted me to be able to earn a living, but only on a temporary basis while I supported a husband through law or medical school, or in case of dire emergency, such as sudden widowhood. “You'd make a wonderful administrative secretary,” she'd say, “or a teacher.” She'd gone back to teaching after my father died. But—though she never actually said this, I knew what she thought—it would be a bad idea for me to think about a
career.
“Those women can be so … oh, you know … men don't like them.”

My mother wanted me to have children—two or three, more than that would be tacky—and do volunteer work with the Junior League and church committees and learn to play a civilized sport that would keep me from getting fat. Tennis or golf, maybe, with stylish outfits.

She wanted me to have a nice house, kept spotless by a maid who'd come no less than twice a week, and a big yard full of azaleas and camellias, tended to by a black man who knew to knock on the back door if he needed something but did not expect to be invited inside.

What she wanted for me was what she'd always wanted for herself.

*   *   *

The night before the first hearing in
Hart v. Hart
, Mom and I sit on the balcony at sundown. I do some research on my laptop while she watches a Navy cruiser head out toward the ocean. When it's time to go inside she says, “Lost something.” She's always losing things—the TV remote, her purse, her toothbrush—but this time she points to the photograph that has slipped out of the file and fallen to the floor.

I reach down to get it. “Want to see my newest client?” I ask her. “His name is Sherman.”

She studies the photo, runs her index finger over the dog's face: lively dark eyes, long whiskers, pert black nose. Then she hands the photo to me. “I'm so sorry…” she says, her voice, as always these days, a little shaky.

“What, Mom? What are you sorry about?”

“Our dog…”

“We don't have a dog.”

“Brownie.”

“That was a long time ago. Don't worry about it. You thought you were doing the best thing for him.”

“He might … He might come back.”

“No, Mom. He won't come back. You gave him away, remember?”

But of course she doesn't remember.

 

Love Gone Bad

In a country where half of all marriages fail, we're still pretending divorce doesn't exist, and Courtroom 4 of the Charleston County Family Court reflects that. It's a cramped room—nothing like the grand space of the “big court,” the criminal court, which has a different set of judges and a great deal more prestige. Family court is a world unto itself, a court with an inferiority complex, and though the county has just spent millions on renovations, no amount of money can change that. It's a place of sadness and secrets, booze and bruised faces, battered lives. There are no juries here, just the beleaguered judges who sit day after day listening to the latest installment of “Love Gone Bad.”

My ex-husband Joe, who's been a judge for ten years now, says family court is where we hide our dirty laundry. In the criminal court, we air it out. During particularly gruesome murder cases the benches are packed with people. Here in family court, though the proceedings are technically open to the public, there's a tradition of secrecy and barely enough room in the courtrooms for the litigants and their lawyers.

It's strange: The most sensational and gruesome murders may shock us, frighten us, but they don't
shame
us, because we think of the accused on trial downstairs as not at all like us. He's another kind of being, a “monster,” a “maniac.” He's evil. We tell ourselves we could never do what he's accused of. The sins that truly threaten us, that fill the transcripts of the family court, are the private betrayals, the quiet little violations that go on every day in our homes and families. If we haven't yet committed sins like these, we know we're capable of them.

I sit on one of the two benches behind Mrs. Hart and her lawyer, Henry Swinton. On the other side of the courtroom are Mr. Hart and Michelle Marvel. We rise when the court reporter comes in and expect the judge to follow, but the reporter's just retrieving a file from the last hearing, so we'll wait some more. Mrs. Hart and Henry Swinton ignore me, conferring with each other in whispers and mumbles. Michelle Marvel takes this opportunity to shake my hand. Her lips open to reveal her very white and remarkably straight teeth, teeth made even more startling by her thick red lipstick.

“This is my old friend Sally Baynard,” Michelle says to her client, although we are not and have never been friends. “Sally, this is Rusty Hart.” Mr. Hart doesn't look capable of committing adultery, though I try not to jump to conclusions. Everything about him has gone gray: his eyebrows, which need trimming, his sparse hair, even his eyes. The buttons of his gray jacket strain against the push of his belly.

“Baynard,” he says to me, “Isn't that the judge's name?”

Michelle Marvel jumps in before I can answer. “We can talk about that later, Rusty.” She pulls him back to his seat. Mrs. Hart and Henry Swinton are still whispering, their heads almost touching. They could be a couple, though I know Henry's at least a decade younger. They both have the same impeccable rich-Southern-White-Protestant taste in clothes and trim, well-maintained bodies.

At last the court reporter opens the door behind the bench. “All rise,” she says. Joe follows close behind in his rumpled black robe. He once told me how much he hates the robe. What he really means is that he hates his job. He thought it would be a stepping-stone to a judgeship in the big court. It wasn't. His family connections won't be enough anymore, and he dreads the politicking and the necessary self-promotion.