The Just And The Unjust (31 page)

'No, no,' Judge Coates said. 'I hope you won't do that — not tell me things. I didn't say quite what I meant.' He drew a breath. 'My brain's injured,' he said, 'that the size of it. That's natural. I really wouldn't take my own advice. I wouldn't advise you to.'

However reluctant to face facts, apparently he had just succeeded in facing something in his own mind. Abner, though he kept his face quiet, looked at him with distress.

'It hasn't had much effect on my memory,' Judge Coates said. 'That was a surprise to me. It's the thought process. Think of one thing; and then something else comes up, and I can't keep from going off on that. I can't pull up when it's enough; the ideas push right on in. What I mean is, when I hear something like this high school business, I think like any man; well, that's deplorable. But then I don't stop; it goes on and on. I can only say, it makes the heart heavy. But just not knowing it, wouldn't help matters; it would have to not happen.' He laughed shortly and wiped his mouth. 'Well, if everybody reformed, I suppose you'd be out of a job.'

Abner looked at him thoughtfully. 'I'm out of a job anyway,' he said. 'I'd be glad if you wanted to advise me about that. I don't know how well I advised myself. I told Jesse I wouldn't run in the fall.'

Judge Coates reached over to get a cigarette and Abner jumped up. 'No,' said the Judge. 'I ought to do everything I can for myself, Mosher says. Sit down.'

Putting the cigarette in his mouth, he got a match lit, showing a certain skill, with one hand. 'There,' he said, 'you couldn't do that. Why, I think maybe you're wise not to run. You've had an experience that ought to be useful to you always; but it isn't very pleasant work. On the other hand, it does keep you in the public eye, and in touch with people. If you have an ambition to go on the bench, that's important. I suppose you haven't. I don't know why you should have. It's an idea that appealed to me—three generations of us. But I'd be dead and gone long before then anyway. What did Jesse say?'

'He said he guessed they could get someone else.'

'Seem disappointed?'

'I don't know, really. I know I've never liked him, so I suppose he never liked me.' Abner shrugged. 'I guess he expected me to say yes. He probably figures that the job pays a pretty good salary, and I wouldn't want to miss that. I could use it, all right; but not if I had to owe it to Jesse.'

'Did you tell him that?'

Abner laughed. 'Pretty nearly,' he said.

'Then, if it hadn't been for how you felt about Jesse, you would have run in the fall?'

'I guess I would. I don't like politicians. I've tried to; but I don't.'

Judge Coates said, 'If you want to get away from them, you'll have to get away from human society, there wouldn't be any society without them. It's attempted every now and then. Some so-called reform movement made up of people who aren't politicians sometimes wins an election. Either they learn how to be politicians pretty quick, or they don't last. I'm not sure we could do without Jesse.'

'I know,' said Abner. 'There seems to be a certain amount of dirty work that has to be done; and somebody has to do it. But I don't have to be the one.'

'I've known Jesse do things I wouldn't care to do,' Judge Coates said, 'but I've never observed a human activity in which the practice is the same as the theory. Perhaps the labourer is worthy of his hire.'

'I don't know about that,' Abner said. 'I don't know that he ever did anything that you could call criminal. But if a friend of his gets into trouble, Jesse would like to be able to call up and fix it. Not with me.'

'Yes,' said Judge Coates. 'It's a kind of modern benefit of clergy; rich medicines out of poisonous ingredients, a merciful mitigation of the general law — they don't give you Blackstone any more, I suppose. Well, it's your loss! The proposition is that circumstances do alter cases. If a friend wants to borrow five dollars, most men, if they have it, will give it to him; but most men would refuse a stranger. I don't know that taking circumstances into consideration is necessarily the same as selling justice.'

'I don't see why it isn't,' Abner said. 'It may not be done for money; but a contract of sale can be a contract of sale on the basis of a valuable consideration, can't it?'

Judge Coates said, 'And who determines whether the consideration is valuable? Who accepts the value? It isn't the buyer. When a man indicates to you that he wants something you can supply, you decide whether he can have it or not, and on what terms. It takes two to make a bargain. You know what you get and what you give. You remember the story of the judge who was offered twenty-five thousand dollars for an opinion favourable to the plaintiff. He threw the man out and when his colleagues sympathized with him over the insult he'd been offered, he said to them: "Gentlemen, I didn't worry about the insult; you can't insult integrity. What worried me was that he was getting too damned close to my price." Speaking of money, how are you going to be fixed, Ab?'

'I don't know exactly. I guess I'll be all right.'

'What did you make last year? I mean, in private practice?'

'I'd have to figure it out,' Abner said. He spoke with ill-ease, for that was not true. Arlene Starbuck's bookkeeping system was one she got from a handbook on law office management, and it was meant to order the affairs of a firm of the size and importance of Paul Bonbright's Frazier, Graham, and Rogers. In addition to the ledger, there was a cash journal with twenty-six or seven columns covering two loose leaf pages. When Abner's business was displayed this way the effect often seemed comic to Abner; but Arlene was serious about it; and it did serve its intended purpose of showing at a glance (or at a bookkeeper's glance) where you stood. At the end of the year when Arlene closed the books and solemnly carried over the credit balance into what she called the Undivided Profits Account, Abner knew to a penny what he had made.

His father said, 'You don't seem very cheerful about it.'

'Been a hard day, I guess,' Abner said. 'I was examining that Leming fellow — he was scared of Marty. It takes it out of you.'

'Where did you have dinner?'

'Oh, we went down to the Black Cat. It's a road house Howard Bessie's running.'

'Have a row with Bonnie?'

'No,' Abner said. 'What made you think that?'

'People do have rows.' Judge Coates pressed out the cigarette. 'You have many good qualities, Ab; about as many as anyone I know. But you have some that might be a little exasperating too. It's a good thing to be steady and level-headed; but the defect of the virtue can make you seem a little remote, or apathetic. Phlegmatic, maybe. Women don't like it.'

His father's penetration, when it was directed at other people, had often impressed Abner, so it would be right to assume that when directed on him the points offered would be good. Nevertheless, though a gentle one, it was a criticism not easily brooked. Abner said, 'Would they like it any better if I went around trying to act like Harry Wurts? I guess that's what's called mercurial, or something. There are some women who don't like him.'

'No. I couldn't say I'd want to see you be like Harry,' Judge Coates said. The bagged skin under his jaw quivered a little. 'You've been a great satisfaction to me, Ab. Children aren't, as a rule, you know. I've seen enough to realize that I'm very fortunate that way. I ought to let well enough alone.' He paused and wiped his mouth.

'When you get to be my age,' he said, 'you have a feeling, and the vainest feeling in the world, that you'd give a lot to have known some of the things you know now when you were young. You wouldn't have. You wouldn't have listened to them. But that doesn't stop you from wanting to tell younger people about them.'

'I'd like to hear them,' Abner said. He was tired; but if his father wanted to talk, listening to him was one small thing Abner could do; and it was true that he would like to do it.

'No,' said Judge Coates. 'It's a form of meddling. And, of course, what seems right and good to me seems that way and is that way because my feelings are different. I value different things. I can give you an example. I sit on the porch there and look out and I've seen not so many less than seventy springs. I was sentient, I had eyes — better ones than I have now. Yet I hardly ever saw anything; all kinds of things I might have been observing and enjoying. I think to myself: Ab's doing just what I used to do. If I could only tell him, so he'd Start now, he'd have years of the kind of pleasure I missed. It seems so easy. But, of course, it's impossible because it mixes cause and effect. What I'm really doing is busying my mind; and when the mind's busy you're happy. To say you ought to sit in a chair and look at the garden is absurd. You don't have to.'

'Still, I might try it,' Abner said.

'No, no. I'm afraid you'll come to it sometime, and you can remember I said it. Same way about Bonnie. I don't want to meddle there, either. You know I'd like to see you marry her. And why? Because she's a remarkable girl. She'd make you a wonderful wife. It takes a lot of experience to judge about such things, and I say to myself: The damned young fool! Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away, richer than all his tribe —'

'Sounds like Shakespeare,' Abner said.

'It is Shakespeare! Didn't you ever read
Othello
? "And say, besides, that in Aleppo once, where a malignant and a turban'd Turk — "' His formidable voice was weakened and obscured; he mouthed the words loosely: '"Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog, and smote him — thus ..."'

'Gosh!' said Abner.

'Yes,' said Judge Coates. 'Hasn't much to do with the case, has it? Well, you'll have to do what you want to, Ab.'

'If you think I don't appreciate Bonnie, you're wrong, sir,' he said.

'Well, I hope you do,' the Judge said. 'You'd better go to bed. You look tired.'

SIX

1

ABNER's office was a small white-painted wooden temple behind the Centennial Block. The little pediment with fan-slatted ventilator, the ornate wooden entablature on four Doric columns, faced Derry Street; an alley paved in cobblestones and barred to vehicles by iron posts planted in its entrances on Court and Broad streets. The building stood behind, and belonged to, the Childerstown Savings Bank, whose janitor mowed the strips of lawn around it in summer; and whose steam pipes had been extended to heat it in winter. It had been the office of a Lawyer Coates for more than sixty years.

The peculiar form was due to the fact that it stood originally not behind the bank in the Centennial Block, but as an appendage to the Derry house, a big temple built under the influence of the Greek revival of the 1830s. Abner's grandfather, that Judge Coates who came back from the Civil War and hanged men without loss of appetite, held a mortgage on the Derry place; and after the main house burned, about 1870, he acquired the land and the little building, which had been used as a consulting room and pharmacy by old Doctor Derry. The land was sold to the savings bank when the block was put up in 1876; but Abner's grandfather retained a ninety-nine year lease on the building.

Though not in every respect convenient, changed values made this lease very advantageous. One nuisance: that the rooms had to be heated in winter by Franklin stoves, Abner's father had taken care of with the extension of the steam pipes. Another: that there were no washroom facilities and when Arlene had need of them, it was necessary for her to shut the place up and go over to the bank, Abner planned to do something about that the first time he got a little ahead. This was a change of attitude; for, when Abner began to practise, the old office struck him as absurd and a little embarrassing, and he was resolved to move as soon as possible. He would not have occupied it at all, except that his father seemed to expect him to; and, until Abner made more money, it was of course silly to give up quarters which, after all, did serve his purpose; and which, even with an extra charge for the steam heat, cost him only about a third of what he would have to pay for rooms in a modern building.

Abner's change of attitude began when, as time passed, a number of country people came to him with small businesses because they or their fathers had come to that same office to see Abner's father, or even his grandfather. They did not know where else to go when they needed legal advice. At the other end of the scale of sophistication, a lawyer named Menken, up to consult with Abner about local holdings of an estate that his firm represented, exclaimed with pleasure when he saw the temple. Far from finding the arrangement ridiculous or pitiable, he said that he found it entrancing. By commenting on them, Mr. Menken pointed out details to Abner that Abner had not particularly noticed before — the proportions of the building, the panelling of the rooms,, the fine iron work and brass of the Franklin stoves. Abner thought Menken somewhat effeminate in his interests and affected in his speech; but when he was gone, Abner could not help viewing in a new light the things that had been pointed out. Noticing these things, Abner began to see that the visitor was right; that he had something here that he would be foolish to give up.

2

Sometime during the night, those thin clouds that veiled the moon above the courthouse tower had thickened. When Abner awoke in the grey morning, he could hear steady rain on the long slate roofs and the gush of water in the spouts. Rain fell straight and quiet from a low misty sky. In the open windows of Abner's bedroom the unstirred air was warm and moist.

At ten minutes of eight Abner put his car in Hollis's Garage, beyond the bank; and, buttoned in a raincoat that was too warm, went past the shining iron posts and down the wet cobbles between the windows of the bank building and the blank brick wall of Wister's store. The oblong of clipped grass about his office was a beautiful refreshed green. He went up the worn stone steps and found the door already open. Arlene, in a transparent pink rain cape with a hood that covered her hat, was just putting down the telephone. 'Oh, Mr. Coates,' she said, 'that was Mr. Gearhart. Do you want me to call him back?'