At seven-thirty sharp, Mark piled into a van with eighteen other Morgan Siler lawyers and began the trip to Mayfield. Looking around the interior, he saw some familiar faces. Harold Fineman, Ryan Grady, Katja. Not Walker. Walker apparently had been correct in his assessment of the situation. “Texas?” he had asked incredulously. “I don’t think so. They won’t use me for discovery. I’ve never done anything like that before.”
“Neither have I,” Mark pointed out, but Walker waved a dismissive hand.
“I’m a third-year,” he said. “I’m too expensive.”
The lawyers clutched the tools of their trade, coffee cups or briefcases, and hunched against the morning chill like paratroopers poised for the drop into the Norman hedgerows. The airport was crowded when they arrived, but the dark-suited phalanx cut purposeful furrows through the waiting passengers, splitting gathered families and interrupting goodbyes. It reminded Mark of something, wolves separating one of their prey from a herd, isolating it, taking it down. He lagged behind, stumbling over an unlaced shoe, feeling awkward and vulnerable. A lawyer with a broken wingtip.
On the flight, Mark found himself next to Harold. He gazed longingly toward the back of the plane, where Katja and Ryan sat. “Have you done any document production before?” Harold asked when they were airborne.
Mark looked out the window, following the Potomac as it wound through the city. Small sails moved on the river, scraps of white against the glassy blue-green. Flying is amazing, he thought, but we take it for
granted. It’s an inconvenience. “How much do you think people would have paid just to get up here a hundred years ago?” he asked.
Wonderful, Harold thought. Another one of those reflective types. Probably a philosophy major or something. We should pay more attention to undergraduate degrees when we’re hiring these people. Law school can only do so much. He’d studied philosophy himself, of course, but he’d overcome it. Those days were past. Harold considered the back of Mark’s head, where the airplane seat had called a defiant cowlick to life. A nice kid, but not enough aggression. Not enough focus. He hadn’t made the transition. Perhaps he couldn’t; perhaps he lacked what it took to immerse himself in the job, to get inside it like a diver’s suit. “Are you listening to me?” Harold demanded.
The plane banked and began its westward progress; Mark glimpsed gentle scalloped waves of coastline, the site of childhood vacations. He thought of the ocean and the beach, sands that advanced and receded, those who fought them and those for whom they fought. He turned back from the window. “What?”
“Forget about it,” Harold said. “I’ll explain what to do when we get there.” He fished a compact disc player from his briefcase.
“Okay,” said Mark. He closed his eyes and tried to nap, but inactivity bred unease. I used to be able to nap. When did that stop? When did I forget how to relax? “What should I do now?”
Harold rifled through silver discs. “You can do some work, if you like,” he said. “For another client. If it’s Hubble, you’ll have to pretend that you did it later. We’re already billing the flight as travel time, and you can’t raise the rates. Of course, billing work to one client while you’re traveling for another is considered bad form. It’s what they used to call double-billing. But I won’t tell if you won’t.” Satisfied with his selection, he closed the player and raised a pair of expensive noise-canceling earphones to his head.
“What are you listening to?” Mark asked.
Harold looked briefly annoyed, then relented. “Wagner,” he said. “The Ring. People need a conceptual framework to organize experience. If you’re a lawyer, you could do worse than pick The Ring. It’s got your themes right there. The lust for gold, the renunciation of love.” He paused. “The dragon.”
“The dragon?”
Harold’s annoyance returned. “If you think you don’t know who the dragon is,” he said, “you’re kidding yourself. You met him your first day on the job.”
Mark looked out the window again. “Should the wing be shaking like that?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Harold. “If you die during litigation you go straight to heaven.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s like battle.” He pointed at the CD player. “Ride of the Valkyries. Hoyotoyo. The bravest men are tapped on the shoulder, called away to live with the gods. Anyway, it’s not going to happen. We’re too important for a plane crash.”
Harold put the headphones on his head and lost himself in the music, letting his thoughts roam free. He and his band of warriors, riding to the rescue on sky-devouring jets, bringing their swords and shields to bear in the affairs of mortals. It worked. The firm as Valhalla; that worked too. The abode of the gods, built from law. Built too on a broken promise, a primal betrayal. Harold knew the history; he had been there. But he loved the firm. It had made him what he was.
Harold had grown up in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, a third-floor walk-up crowded with family. His father was Orthodox, a dressmaker who bought five tickets to baseball games, the empty seats around him warding off the possibility of physical contact with women. Harold had never believed. Perhaps in the mist of childhood, with a child’s superstition. But looking back now he could remember no trace of religious sentiment. It was simply a faculty he lacked.
His father demanded conformity with ritual nonetheless, took him to shul, davened each morning. Act and it will produce belief. Harold wanted none of it, neither the belief nor the acts. Without a god behind it, ritual had no point. He wanted to be free, not to tie himself to traditions for which millions died. This is America, he said. Why reforge the ancient fetters, build the old world in the new?
America ganif, his father said darkly. America the thief of values. Harold went to Yeshiva University high school and summer camps in the Catskills and Poconos; he recited the Sh’ma Yisrael prayer. He studied philosophy at City College and reached his own conclusions. Faith was not the solution, Harold decided. Faith was the problem. Certainty led
to catastrophe, faith to crusades. Faith should be opposed—not with faith, for that was war, but with doubt, the ability to see other perspectives.
When his father died, in the spring of his junior year, Harold felt the first stirrings of liberation. He was under no one’s control now. But soon he realized that command was not the only bond. His younger sisters were still unmarried; with his mother, they had kept the books for his father’s business. With the dress shop in new hands, they’d be paid a salary. The family could live on those earnings; they could live without any earnings, borne up by the tight communal webs of their neighborhood. But he could not leave them to do that.
Harold turned from philosophy to law, enrolling at Columbia. It was a compromise, but not a bad one. Law valued perspective too; the ability to see all sides of an issue was what his professors demanded. Harold excelled, studious and thoughtful. He took a room in Manhattan, amassing student loans, and seldom crossed the river. His mother’s face lit up when she saw him, but to Harold the smile was a demand and, when in his mind he refused it, a rebuke. There was something he must do to deserve it, he was sure, and whatever it was, he declined. When the smile persisted, he felt a debt unpaid and came less often. There were others in the small apartment, his sisters, loud uncles who visited. She was not alone.
The others rebuked him more openly. Harold cut his curls short and polished his diction, rubbing the rhythms of Brooklyn from his voice. His hair was fair and reddish, his eyes a sharp green. “What, you think you can pass?” an uncle demanded. Harold was stung. He wasn’t trying to pass. He wanted no more to be thought of as a Christian than as a Jew; he wanted only to be himself, single and unique. Any community, even two people, bound its members with concerns and traditions, a shared history. But one person could float free, an atom, without ties or allegiances or responsibility, able to take on any role.
There were few jobs available when he graduated. Harold was near the top of his class, but his name was Fineman and his resume still listed Borough Park as his permanent address. Again he struck a compromise. He would work to support the family, but from afar. He joined the litigation department of Schulman Roth in Washington. Litigation suited Harold; it was, he often thought in those days, what he’d been born for. Clients brought their problems to the firm, and Harold contemplated them from every angle, assessing the possible arguments. He advised the
clients, offering a skeptic’s assessment of their claims; when necessary he fought for them with an advocate’s zeal. Doubt and certainty intertwined, mutually reinforcing, mutually constraining.
And most of the time, he won. Harold’s courtroom presentation was impeccable, his demeanor calm, his logic precise. He knew that he started from a disadvantage; Schulman Roth was an outsider’s firm. Judges and juries expected a fast-talking shyster. They were taken aback by this serious young man, and then they were won over. In the courtroom, preconceptions dropped away and Harold was nothing but himself. It was what he’d been seeking all his life. Work had made him free.
It was after Harold won a trial against Fred Cox that Peter Morgan approached. Cox was getting old, on the downward slope of his career, but the win was impressive. And if Cox was on his way out, it was that much more important to stock the next generation with talent. Peter knew potential when he saw it.
Harold found the decision easy. Morgan Stevens was an established firm, with resources that Schulman Roth couldn’t offer and compensation that it couldn’t match. Harold moved in laterally as a partner and sent larger checks to Borough Park. He realized soon that things had changed. On a motion call one day he asked for an extension of time, the supporting arguments carefully marshaled in his mind. The judge granted the request without discussion. After Harold came Nathan Meyer, one of his friends from Schulman Roth, with an identical request that met a fierce interrogation. Nathan had never been as assiduous as Harold, and eventually he was reduced to splutters of indignation. “But you just gave him an extension without any questions.”
The judge frowned down from his perch. “When Morgan, Stevens, Raymond, and Cox seek an extension of time,” he said, “I can be quite sure that they have a good reason.”
Leaving the courtroom, Harold could see the fury on Nathan’s face, and he shrugged apologetically. They were in different worlds now, playing by different rules. Peter Morgan was a valuable resource in those early days, explaining to Harold how this world worked and what his role in it would be. Judges and juries had different preconceptions now, and different means were required to combat them. Once again, Harold changed. He bought his suits off the rack, the pants a few inches short. He strapped a cheap plastic watch over the sleeve of his jacket and let his
curls bloom. He abandoned the hard-won precision of diction; he turned himself into one of the rude uncles he’d promised never to become.
And it worked. He went up against the best that Washington’s established firms had to offer, the prep school products in their Brooks Brothers and Polo, and he crushed them. Juries trusted Harold, knew that he wouldn’t try to pull a fast one. He crossed his ankle over his knee at the counsel table and a white patch of shin winked from the gap between sock and cuff: I have nothing to hide.
Opponents were incredulous. They dropped oblique references to the resources behind him, the teams of associates whose nights of research uncovered the cases he reeled off as though struck by sudden inspiration. The jurors nodded sagely. All that, and he’s keeping it real.
There were other changes too, though these took longer to notice. Morgan Stevens, and more so Morgan Siler, was not in the business of giving advice. The clients wanted certainty; they wanted to hear that they were right. Realism was appropriate in predicting outcomes, for there was always a chance the judge would make a mistake. But a Morgan Siler client was never on the wrong side of the law.
Thus said Peter Morgan. Harold heard and obeyed. He was inside the firm now; the job was his armor, his might, and his protection. For a while he felt he was again a child in Brooklyn, reciting formulas without conviction. But his father had been right about one thing. The assertion of certainty carried certainty in its wake; the acts produced belief.
Harold shifted in his seat, glancing past Mark to the plane’s small window. Litigation at least was less constraining than Orthodoxy. He still had his freedom. But here his thought paused. Freedom to do what, exactly? To listen to forbidden music, to eat what he chose, to work or drive a car on the Sabbath. To drive a Volkswagen or a BMW, even. But these were ordinary things. Not a life’s definition. Not the freedom he’d imagined. He had wanted the chance to choose his own identity, and he had won it, but as he considered his life, it occurred to him that he’d never quite gotten around to making the choice.
Harold switched CDs in his player. He was nearing the conclusion now, shadow falling on the gods. All were dead at the end. That was a relief. Death allowed a fresh start, free from the entanglements of the old order. Harold did not miss God, or his father who had spoken for Him and demanded obedience. He missed his mother, though she had burdened him too, and it was her voice he occasionally heard in what he
thought of as religious moments. Jell-O and tapioca she had made for him. They had not seen each other much those last years, but he had provided; he had taken care of her. Or the firm had; he was too busy to be personally involved with the details when his sisters married and moved out, when her health began to fail. The firm had found her a home, engaged a nurse. But he had loved her, and she had loved him, and wanted only the best for him, and struggled to understand why he did what he did. And through it all, she was proud of him, no matter what his father would have said. She believed. If you do it, it must be right. That trust was what she owed his father’s God, Harold thought. Why should she give it to him, who was only her son? Like love, the faith of others was a terrible thing. It brought with it the demand that it be deserved; it raised questions he would rather not ask.
Her death had been in some ways almost a relief, a release from the need for self-scrutiny. Harold did not like to interrogate himself. Everyone was culpable if you looked deeply enough. Any witness could be discredited; everyone had something to hide. Harold tried to avoid weakness through simplicity. He was an effective lawyer; he had never sought anything else. He had taken on the roles he had to. He was a dutiful lieutenant, leading his forces into battle. Why were they not pleased with him? Why had Peter Morgan rebuked him at the dinner party, assailed his inconsistency, which was no more than faithful service?
Harold frowned fiercely. He had dealt with this question, in his fashion, the night before, with bourbon and music. It was not supposed to return, and the recurrence itself was a worrisome symptom. Harold’s control was weakening; the things he pushed from his mind did not stay gone. He no longer chose what he thought about, and that, he had read, was the very definition of insanity.
Dispassionately, Harold reviewed the evening. The truth was that he had provoked Peter. The question was why. And the answer was Katja, another thought he could not banish. Had he wanted to redeem himself for the Carver fiasco, demonstrate his ability as a litigator? No. He had wanted to convey something to her, to show her something, certainly. But it was not that he was right. It was that she was.
Harold’s inchoate thoughts coalesced into a single proposition. Katja saw something in him, believed in it. Like the beliefs of others, hers was a demand. But he found it was not one he wanted to refuse. He wanted to justify her belief, to make it true. He did not want it proved false, both
for what it would say about him and for what it would do to her. He did not want her to become the kind of person who believed in no one, who found certainty only in roles. That was the threat he had seen from Peter Morgan, that he had risen to resist. Doubt opposing certainty, as it had not for years. But opposing certainty this time in the service of belief. He didn’t want her to lose her faith.
Harold’s frown deepened. He didn’t want her to lose her faith. If that wasn’t a sign of incipient madness, what was? Hurtling through the sky toward Texas, he wondered for the first time where he was going.