NOW THAT HE WAS back to practicing law, my father hired me to come in and listen to his voicemail. Three days per week, I would go to his home office, dig through the piles of dress shirts heaped on his desk, the stacks of shoes, the silk ties, find the phone, punch in the code, and listen.
On my first day, there were ninety-seven messages: court clerks telling him that he had missed a hearing; judges threatening him with contempt charges if he failed to appear; clients calling from the hallway outside the courtroom (Stanley, where are you?); prisoners calling from a pay phone in jail. The prisoners would leave three, four, five messages in a row, one right after another, reciting stories of false arrest and mistaken identity not even they seemed to believe. Still, they repeated them over and over like the scripts of a daydream. Mr. Siegel, please call my mother. She’ll tell you what really happened, and then you can tell the judge. He’ll listen to you.
Stanley, I’m in Rikers. You’ve got to visit me so I can explain.
Lawyer Siegel, I need to talk to you. When can I reach you? You’re never there.
These clients were different from the old ones: they were assigned by the courts because they couldn’t afford a private attorney, and the state paid their fees—very low fees. There were rambling complaints about asthma and diabetes and blood pressure, about unemployment and poverty. Just listening, my head started to hurt from the misery. I jotted down their names and court dates, and then I went downstairs to the McDonald’s across the street, where my father was waiting for me.
Stepping inside that McDonald’s was like walking into an urban wormhole outside time: homeless people with shopping carts; teenagers playing hooky; taxi drivers who looked as if they had worked the night shift in a trance and then forgotten to return the cab; children sitting next to their nannies, examining the toys from their Happy Meals; patients from the methadone clinic down the street, nodding out. The employees behind the counter attended the silver machinery as if they were manning the boiler room of an ocean liner headed somewhere distant and lonely.
He was at a table, sipping coffee with a contemplative expression. I sat down across from him, opened my notebook, and ran through my notes, the cases and court dates, the threats from judges, and then I told him about the prison calls. “Don’t you ever listen to these?” I asked. “Some of them were pretty old.”
He took another sip. “Why do you think I hired you?”
“I should be charging you a lot more,” I said.
“You know it’s bullshit, right? There is no new evidence.”
I knew that. You didn’t have to be a lawyer to recognize the illogic of their stories, the element of theater. They didn’t expect you to believe it, exactly, but they couldn’t not try, either. “There must be something you can do,” I said. “Even just get them sentenced faster.”
My father closed his eyes. “Nothing’s going to help them.” The truth was that he couldn’t learn to love these new clients as he had once loved the old ones; he didn’t want to be needed in that way anymore—maybe it was too frightening.
“Let’s go fill out some vouchers,” he said. He got up and went over to the drink station with its condiments and cups, and began filling his pockets with little blue packets of Equal, the artificial sweetener—grabbing big handfuls, unconcerned about who might be watching. Upstairs, in the apartment, he would make himself cups of instant coffee, mixing in the Equal with a look of great satisfaction. There seemed to be a particular sweetness to stolen sweetener.
Later, when he was in the hospital after his final collapse, one of the psychiatrists there would speculate that it was coffee and cigarettes, along with the amphetamines his psychoanalyst had prescribed him, that had been keeping him functioning so long through the early stages of dementia. But we didn’t know that then. It never occurred to me that anything was wrong with him other than ordinary life—the thing that was wrong with all of us.
Here, he said. He took a handful of Equal and shoved it in my pocket.