Chapter 30

More than anyone, Linda Coffee had set Roe on its legal way. But twenty years after the case she filed made legal abortion constitutional law, the lawyer was, in the words of her hometown paper, a “historical footnote.” She was not on hand when, in 1993, President Clinton signed five executive orders to safeguard Roe—the great achievement of her life.

That was fine by Coffee. The reporter Joseph Bell had recently tracked her down only to find, he noted, that she was “hostile” to his questions.

Coffee had always preferred to have her work speak for itself. “She hid her brilliance beautifully,” recalled a lawyer named Molly Bartholow, who occasionally opposed Coffee in the Dallas bankruptcy court on Commerce Street. Bartholow had represented creditors in disputes with debtors represented by Coffee. She’d observed just how smart Coffee was. Owing to Roe, she admired her, too. Says Bartholow: “Linda and Sarah Weddington are my heroes.”

It had thus upset Bartholow to hear of Coffee’s indictment on fraud charges. Though she was exonerated, that ordeal had landed Coffee in bed, and, two weeks later, she’d failed again to pay her Texas Bar dues.

Those dues were rising. The annual fees, including membership and a new occupational tax, now topped $400. Coffee had been delinquent twice previously, in 1991 and 1992. Because her second delinquency had passed ninety days, her license was suspended. Worse, she continued to practice, a violation of rule 8.04 a (11) of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct.

The Bar could have disciplined Coffee, but did not do so. (A spokesperson for the Bar declined to comment on her case.) Coffee paid her bills and carried on, back in good standing in the summer of 1993, when she found a note of foreclosure on her front door.

Rebecca Hartt had not known, she says, that her partner had fallen behind on their mortgage. But she might have guessed. In the wake of her public shaming four years prior, Coffee had withdrawn. Her work had sputtered. Having fallen into debt, Coffee needed now to declare bankruptcy, to do for herself what she had done for countless others.

On August 12, Hartt filed for Chapter 13. Coffee then issued a report on what Hartt owed her lender. The court refused to discharge their debt.

The ruling was no surprise. Fifty and forty years old, Coffee and Hartt had little income. That same September, Coffee was again late in paying what she owed the Texas Bar. And her license was again suspended the following summer when she lost her home. “They came in with a moving truck,” says Hartt, “and took out every stick of furniture.”

Hartt would look back on the foreclosure as the turning point of her life. Her childhood had been one of choir practice and homemade strawberry ice cream, her first decade with Coffee marked by dog christenings and Bastille Day celebrations. But the good days were over.

The couple moved downtown, into an apartment on Main Street. Coffee fought insolvency, representing Hartt in suits against their mortgage lender and a collection agency. But the suits changed nothing. Hartt was unemployed. Even after Coffee paid the fees necessary to get her license reinstated in November, she had few clients, and less and less of the restraint and tact needed to speak with them. “I would just be very frank about things,” she acknowledged. “I didn’t want to change that.’ ”

It had never bothered Coffee that bankruptcy law was fickle. Though she sometimes went without pay for six months, work remained her anchor. But her firm had begun to wither after its founding partner Phil Palmer developed lung cancer. Coffee was soon the last of the ten lawyers on staff, and she spent her days alone in her office. Recalls the firm secretary, Peggy Clewis: “She talked to herself a lot.”

Coffee was in good standing less than a year; her license was suspended again in December 1995 for failing to pay those same four hundred-plus dollars. The suspension continued for years, Coffee nonetheless taking on new clients: opposing a bank in 1996, a biotech company in 1997, an employee screening company in 1998, an insurance company in 1999.

Still, the Texas Bar received no complaints about Coffee and imposed no punishments. In early 2000, she was again in good standing. But late that year, her license was again suspended after she failed to pay her fees and to take the required continuing education courses. After a dying Palmer closed his firm in 2001, a delinquent Coffee was left to rely on her mother to pay her bills.

To look at Coffee was to see a fallen star. “She was almost in the fetal position when she walked down the hall,” recalled the lawyer Bartholow, who knew Coffee from court and who happened to be the trustee assigned to her bankruptcy case. “She always had her hand in her face or her hair.” Roe had forgotten Coffee even as it remembered her former co-counsel anew with every anniversary. In 2003, Planned Parenthood of North Texas named Weddington its Humanitarian of the Year.

Weeks later, Coffee lost her mother. Sixty years old, Coffee moved with Hartt into the East Dallas home Mary left behind.

THIRTY YEARS BEFORE, days after Roe became law, Mary Coffee had proudly connected her daughter with the official news service of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Baptist Press had blessed the lawyer’s work.

But there was no longer any room for Coffee in her church. Sixteen million strong, the SBC had come to repudiate not only abortion but homosexuality and gender equality. The church now asserted that “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” Same-sex attraction was “pathological, abnormal, and mostly if not entirely a matter of external influence, learned behavior, acquired taste, and personal choice.” Regarding abortion, the SBC now put the interests of the zygote—“a human being, created in God’s image”—ahead of the mother.

It was a source of some pain to Hartt that her partner did not believe in God. “I have always considered her a virtuous pagan,” says Hartt. Still, Coffee had believed in her church. Rejected by it, she had been left to lean on other supports: her family, the law. But her parents were now dead, and her career was dying. In the spring of 2005, after taking on a new client, a couple in Dallas at odds with a car dealer over the return of a leased Toyota, Coffee lost her license for the last time.

Thirty-five years before, Coffee had stood in a Dallas courthouse and spoken of a lawsuit that concerned nothing less, she said, than “fundamental human freedom.” Roe had gone on to safeguard that freedom for millions of women. Not one of those millions had come to her aid through her years of struggle. Money was a source of growing stress for her and Hartt. More and more, they fought.

Coffee felt that Hartt drank too much. Hartt could also be bossy; the secretary Peggy Clewis recalled a dinner with the couple at their inherited home when Hartt “harassed Linda a lot.” Coffee shrank from conflict and described herself as “slow to anger.” But physical exercise now relieved little more than her insomnia. And Coffee came to see that she could no longer afford to lawyer; “economics,” she says. She came unmoored. In April 2006, the police arrived at her home on Wabash Circle Drive to find that she had “assaulted” Hartt. She would soon assault her partner twice more, punching Hartt in the mouth and hitting her with a purse, its brass buckle cutting the back of her head.

Hartt was bleeding onto her shirt when she crossed the street that July afternoon to seek help from a neighbor. “She was kind of introducing herself and said, very apologetically, ‘I’m a lesbian,’ ” recalls Mary Carter. Hartt told Carter that her partner had struck her and they called the police, who arrested Coffee and noted that the precipitating argument had involved money. Hartt and Coffee, they wrote, had “no food, no electricity, and no phone.” Coffee’s sister, whom she rarely saw, posted her $500 bail.

Years before, as Hartt had stood by Coffee through her trial for fraud, her mother had likened her love for Coffee to the love of Jesus for mankind. But Hartt now prepared to testify against Coffee. She let the charges drop after Coffee agreed to take a course on battering intervention and prevention, and also to submit to a psychiatric evaluation. Coffee had nearly completed her six-month course on domestic violence when, in September 2007, she met with a psychiatrist in Dallas. The doctor flagged “possible underlying psychopathology.” Coffee did not see her again; she had met the terms of dismissal.

Coffee and Hartt and their dogs had been getting by on gifted groceries and providence—an oil painting they found in the attic fetched $850—when, that same summer of 2007, they received a citation for back taxes.

Coffee and her sister owed more than $23,000 on their mother’s home. The sisters paid their bill with a reverse mortgage, says Hartt. But they needed money, and Coffee answered an ad in the Dallas Morning News from a pharmaceutical company that wanted blood—pints and pints of it—to test treatments for a range of medical problems.

Coffee had a fear of needles, was “a hard stick” besides, she says. And donors had to submit to ten or fifteen withdrawals in a day. But the company, Covance, paid between three and six thousand dollars a study. Over the next few years, Coffee, sixty-something and broke, rolled up her sleeves seven or eight times, paying her bills in blood.

Coffee took another job, too, as a surrogate juror; a pair of lawyers were paying forty dollars to help them test out arguments before going to trial. Legal professionals were told not to apply. But Coffee did so and enjoyed the work; seated behind a two-way mirror with a plate of cookies, she assessed damages in a pair of cases, answering questions about a construction worker who had lost an arm, and a patent infringement case involving a computer program. Hartt marveled. “Here is the Roe attorney being a professional juror,” she says. “They don’t know who she is.”

Coffee wanted it that way. There were few things she so disliked, she says, as “braggadocio,” and secrecy had come to feel for her a form of modesty.

Nonetheless, Coffee was proud of Roe. “With very little resources,” she says, “we put together something that’s still standing.” In 2008, she told a reporter from South Dakota who managed to reach her that she was glad a proposed state ban on abortion had failed. Said Coffee: “I think it would have raised some constitutional questions.” It was her lone public comment in years.

Coffee was disinclined to profit from Roe as so many others had. Come 2010—having earned little more from Roe than a few royalty checks from NBC (the last, in 1995, for $86)—she was again broke. She would have to sell her mother’s house, and she turned to a realtor named Scott Jackson.

Jackson was a fifth-generation Dallasite. He and his mother, Glenda, had sold the home of Henry Wade a few blocks over, on Velasco Avenue, where a chaw-speckled wall recalled the DA and his spittoon. Now, a decade later, Jackson set out to sell the cream-brick ranch of the woman who’d bound Wade to Roe. It would be a difficult sell. Coffee and Hartt had no money to run the air conditioning during showings. And they had to sell before their next property tax bill was due. The sale closed in early 2011 with twenty days to spare. Coffee accepted $281,000 from a developer, $88,000 less than she’d asked.

Coffee and Hartt drove east, off to a railroad town in east Texas where they bought a little white house. The town of Mineola had changed little in the sixty years the house had stood. Then, as now, it was dotted with pines and azaleas and Baptist churches. Since 1950, the population had risen by just 20 percent, to 4,500. There was plenty of room in its ten square miles for two more, and Coffee and Hartt furnished their house with a $500 bed from Sears and whatever could be found secondhand.

Coffee had always been frugal; back in 1960, she was seventeen when her fellow exchange students in New Zealand dubbed her “banker.” She and Hartt got by, with Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps; every month, the couple drove off to a food bank in Quitman for $100 of non-refrigerated foodstuffs: rice and pasta and peas and dried cereal and powdered milk and canned fish. They shared the last with their beloved ridgebacks.

New difficulties arose. Hartt was diagnosed with breast cancer, and the women were out walking the dogs when a car struck Coffee and broke her hip. Home in their little house with no heat or air conditioning, the women struggled to care for each other—Coffee uncommunicative and compulsive, chewing toothbrushes till the bristles went flat, Hartt nervous and perhaps even paranoid. Says Hartt: “The sister and Linda were against me.”

Hartt had not let go that six years before, Coffee had hit her; she’d even kept her bloodied shirt. There remained between the women “little love,” says Hartt. Still, she admired her partner, and likened her to Cordelia and Minerva—Coffee both exiled and wise. And for all that the women had suffered, they shared occasional joys, too—a long hike to a picnic on the Sabine River, a feast on Bastille Day, the one day each year when the women ate as once they had, Hartt preparing eggplant and lamb and sorbet.

Home in conservative Mineola, Coffee and Hartt invited no one into their house. And they confided in no one their two great secrets: that Coffee had helped to legalize abortion, and that they were gay. There was reason to keep quiet. Hartt would soon find in her mailbox an absentee ballot sent from the Conservative Republicans of Texas, a piece of political mail that cautioned that a vote for “liberals” was a vote for “abortion on demand” and “teaching homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle.”

EVERY DECADE OR so, Coffee was recognized alongside Weddington for her part in Roe: her face in a mural at Vanderbilt Law School, her name in a Good Housekeeping ranking of world-changing women. And so, as the fortieth anniversary of Roe approached in late 2012, and Coffee turned seventy, it would be best, she thought, if at least one person in Mineola knew of her past in case a camera crew came looking.

Coffee turned to the instructor of an exercise class she took at a nearby church, a former teacher named Christine. Coffee knew that Christine liked to read, and she handed her a book from the library with instruction to look up her name. Christine soon returned the book to Coffee with a question about the fetus that Jane Roe had wished to abort. “She asked me if I would’ve killed it,” recalls Coffee, laughing. “That sounds pretty pro-life to me.”

Coffee need not have bothered. January 2013, the ruby anniversary of Roe, came and went without so much as a phone call.

ANOTHER YEAR HAD PASSED, the thirtieth that Coffee and Hartt had spent together, when, on a February morning in 2014, Hartt stood in her home, a skinny woman with salt-and-pepper hair, mussed and short. She wore nylon pants over flannel, a jacket over a hoodie over a shirt. But her layers and her space heaters were no match for the winter air. It was twenty-three degrees outside and not much warmer in her home—forty degrees in the living room, fifty-six in the hall, sixty in the bedroom off the porch where she and Coffee ate their breakfasts on a small desk. Hartt was cold. She thought of the olive shrub that she’d planted just outside. “Though the fig tree may not blossom,” she said, reciting a passage from Habakkuk that she kept in her wallet, “yet, I will rejoice in the Lord.”

The temperature outside had risen to thirty when, the next morning, Coffee, in black sweats and a zippered green sweatshirt, walked the few blocks to her exercise class at First Baptist Church. She was seventy-one—the age her father had been when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Fearing his fate, she’d undertaken to get in shape and had dropped thirty-five pounds.

At a quarter past eight, Coffee and five other seniors began to lift their heels and bend their knees and circle their arms, a half dozen Texans moving to the light strains of Christian music that emanated from a speaker in the ceiling above: “Praise Him for what He has done.” It was Christine leading the class—the one person in Mineola who knew that among them was a women’s rights pioneer. But Coffee was safe; Roe would not find her here. And after a square dance and a stationary march, Coffee still had energy to burn and began to jog in place and then to run, her gray hair falling over her eyes.

Coffee smiled as she ran. She was happy. At nine o’clock, she and the others retired to a small room where Christine read from the Bible: John, Romans, Psalms. A man named Charles spoke of visiting the sick. A woman named Pam said that they had best remember those who had no heat. Coffee said nothing, and then walked out into the cold.