IN LUCY MULDER’S DESK, in the drawer where she kept ibuprofen and scrunchies and a homemade turkey call that a United States marshal named Ray had given her, was a plastic canister of film—thirty-six 35-millimeter exposures. The film had been in her possession for a month or so. She’d found it, along with lens tissues and a 1981 Amtrak timetable, in the raincoat that Judge William Dupree, her late employer, kept in his chambers, the coat he sometimes wore on his lunchtime excursions, when he’d forgotten to bring his good one from home. It was this “tattered, dirty-at-the-cuffs” coat that got into his obituary, along with what the writer called a “golf cap.” (The only warm-weather hat Lucy had ever seen the Judge wear, in her fifteen years as his clerk, was a floppy, broad-brimmed Australian bush thing, which his wife had demanded he put on whenever he ventured out into the daylight. He had tender skin, and he’d obeyed.) The coat and hat were details in an anecdote that a lawyer named Bemis (Sunbeam) Purdy passed along to the obituary writer. Purdy said that the Judge had been returning to the federal building from lunch one breezy, rain-spattered afternoon, walking his old man’s thin-legged, tottery walk, when a wino who had just been picked up by the police for disorderly conduct shouted, “Look at him, look at that bum, he probably steals from old ladies, and here you are arresting me.” Lucy suspected Purdy, a dapper Republican who had once been mentioned as a candidate for the district court bench, of a touch of malice in the airing of this story. Though she was also sure he’d claim—she’d heard him do so, at the gathering following the funeral—that the point of the story was that the Judge was a humble man, indistinguishable (at least from a distance) from the lowly and the bereft, the meek and the powerless. Anyway, she thought the Judge would probably have been amused by the story, had he seen it in print. Certainly he would have chuckled at the way Purdy or the reporter had rendered the wino’s speech. As it happened, Lucy had been at her desk that afternoon, half-asleep from reading a motion to dismiss in a due process case, when the Judge returned to his chambers, his bush hat riding uneasily on his small head, the tie strings dangling loose. His face looked as if he’d fallen into a briar patch; he’d recently had a number of tiny skin cancers removed, and the surgery had left scars, red dots. He was frail, the collar of his shirt seemed a full size too big, and he listed to the left, which was the direction his decisions ran (or so some of his critics said). He was eighty-two. He stood before his clerk in his dingy coat and hat, the scent of rain and men’s club food on him, and said, “A man on the street just called me—forgive me—a motherfucker.” He said this word so softly, as if he had hardly enough breath to say it, that Lucy almost missed it. But there it was, like a fly stirring the drowsy air in which she labored on government business.
“He said I looked like the kind of you-know-what who steals from old ladies. But I don’t think he could prove it in a court of law. Do you?” He peered at Lucy through his glasses—thick, fun-house lenses in unstylish black frames, the kind a mathematician might wear—the way he sometimes did with a lawyer who’d left the barn door open (in the legal sense). She looked at his face, creased and scarred and erratically shaven, and remembered for at least the thousandth time how he had kissed her one day two years ago and how she had kissed him back. His face had seemed to come momentarily open then, like a stuck door.
“Which charge?” Lucy asked now, teasing him. “Theft or the other?”
“Both, I suppose. Though the question was rhetorical.” He smiled a partial smile.
“He’d need witnesses,” she said, rhetorically. “Or evidence not of a hearsay nature.” She took a sip from a can of Diet Coke. “And I assume neither could be found.”
“There are some skeletons in my closet,” the Judge said, removing his hat at last, almost hastily, as if to make up for his not having done so earlier. His white hair, once as pure as the proverbial snow, had yellowed a bit. It lay unneatly on his head, the part obliterated. “But none to suggest that I might have lain with my mother, like that Greek fellow, what’s-his name.”
“Oedipus,” Lucy said. There had been times, early in her tenure, when she’d put a literary reference in a draft of an opinion. He’d let it stand, while noting, in his scribble, that the reference might be over the heads of some lawyers he knew, “including yours truly.”
“Him. Yes. How did that old boy die? Do you recall?”
Maybe the Judge, on the way back from lunch at the Breckinridge Club, where he would have eaten a Hot Brown and played half-penny-a-point bridge with men who were known by their nicknames (Hateful, Stork, Prince Albert, Sunbeam), had fallen into thinking about his death, the great empty buzzing lot that lay before him, like the lot from which the old Chestnut Hotel had recently been razed and where perhaps he’d encountered the man who called him that obscenity. Who, at eighty-two, wouldn’t have given thought, at least between meals, to extinction? Or, if you were a Christian believer, as the Judge was, to the sins the soul might drag with it into the next life?
“I’m not sure,” Lucy said. She clearly remembered that Oedipus had blinded himself—with his mother’s brooch?—after he’d figured out all the terrible things he’d done. But of what had finally become of him, she was less certain. It wasn’t her favorite story. It was a bit on the sensational side. “I’m thinking that his daughter, Antigone, took care of him after he became blind and that he died of natural causes, whatever those might have been twenty-five hundred years ago.” She would have gladly changed the subject.
“You might be right,” the Judge said deferentially. Then he shuffled off, hat in hand, toward his desk, where he would take a nap, sitting upright in the enormous green leather chair that was purchased for him in 1972, the year of his appointment. Lucy watched him go, his legs barely moving beneath his raincoat. From behind, it appeared that he’d recently taken a seat in a mud puddle.
FOUR MONTHS LATER, in January of 2001, Lucy drove out to the Judge’s home to see his widow. Lucy had the raincoat with her—uncleaned, in the state it had come back in the day the street person called him a thief and a motherfucker—and some other items from his office: photographs, desktop ornaments (the Everyjudge collection of ceramic and wood-carved owls; paperweights), two neckties, a tie clasp, old railroad timetables, plaques, one of his two robes (the traveling one, which came with a black leather case), a monogrammed satchel he’d never used, pens. All of this, aside from the robe case and coat, had fit into a couple of boxes, and was just about all that was left of his office possessions after the Judge’s sons and his lawyer had gone through them. The lawyer, a square-shouldered, apple-cheeked man of fifty named Clifford Barnhill, who had clerked for the Judge several years before Lucy signed on, had been in search of stray insurance policies, stray stock certificates, any odd piece of intangible property that the estate could lay claim to. Judge Dupree, who had grown up in money and never lacked for it, had been notoriously casual about his finances; things weren’t always where a more orderly person might have put them. In 1997, Lucy had found a dividend check dated 1981 in a volume of the Federal Reporter. His paychecks were known to have sometimes been deposited among the debris in the backseat of his car. Clifford found a check from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, a tax refund of $311, dated 1974, inside a ninety-five-cent paperback called How to Play Slam Contracts.
Crawford Dupree, the Judge’s older son, had spent hours poring over his father’s office possessions. He took boxes of stuff with him, whatever he could fit into his car. What he couldn’t, he had Lucy mail to him in Wisconsin. He took desk diaries and personal correspondence (letters from senators and cranks and people his father had sent to the penitentiary; letters to his children and his siblings and a housepainter who hadn’t finished a job) and superseded wills and photographs and official government memorandums and yellow legal pads with illegible notes about this or that case. Except for a few financial disclosure statements and an appraisal done on his mother’s jewelry in 1990, there wasn’t much that Crawford left behind. The owl knickknacks and paperweights and neckties and plaques didn’t interest him much. Nor did the portrait of Justice John Marshall, peruked and prim. When Lucy asked him if he might like to have one of the robes, Crawford had hesitated. The robe not in the case, the so-called home-court robe, was in the closet, along with the raincoat and a pair of black rubber galoshes Judge Dupree had never worn. Crawford, gray haired, bags under his eyes, a crease between his pale eyebrows where dark thoughts were born, touched the sleeve of the robe tentatively, as if it were a relic with the scent of the deceased still on it. Lucy didn’t say that Crawford’s father had sometimes referred to the robe as his gallows costume. “With a hood and a sharp blade,” he’d said, “I could go into business.”
“I think I’ll pass,” Crawford said finally. “But maybe Morgan would want it.” He didn’t touch the raincoat, and mumbled unintelligibly when Lucy mentioned that the coat was the one that had figured in the obit. It was said that Crawford had become erratic since he’d taken that whack on the head in New York not quite a year ago, in March of 2000. A bi-cyclist had hit him as he was crossing a street. He would check out all of a sudden, in broad daylight, disappear behind a scowl.
When Morgan came down from New York to go through his father’s office things, he tried on both the robe and the raincoat. “I had a dream about this,” he said to Lucy. “I put on my father’s clothes, which were flapping in the wind on a clothesline, and everything fit perfectly. And then my ex-wife appeared and made a remark about what a fool I was.” Morgan had once been a sportswriter, and now Lucy wasn’t sure what he did. But you could see hope (or ambition or sexual energy) pulsing like a nerve afire in the middle of his brow; his long, thick, still-brown hair was swept back off his forehead so that the nerve or whatever it was would be clearly visible. In the robe, which was a bit short in the sleeves, he looked something like his father might have looked at forty-nine, had his father been more handsome and more vain. Morgan had been thinking of writing something about his dad, something along the lines of a memoir, which was one reason he’d come back home so soon after his father’s funeral: he wanted to collect material. (He also seemed to hope to stake a claim to Lucy. He made her a little nervous, with his inquiries about her “situation,” and she’d found an excuse for turning down his invitation to lunch.) It annoyed Morgan that his brother had made himself the repository for their father’s papers. “Maybe I’ll sue his acquisitive little ass,” he’d said, though without vehemence. “Would you be willing to take the case on?” Lucy had said she wouldn’t be a good choice. Morgan had packed up his selection of his father’s possessions. It included a soapstone owl, a guide to New Orleans, a Handbook for Judges, a letter opener, the home-court robe, and an oil painting (a river scene) by his father’s cousin Louis. The raincoat he’d left on its hanger. “Maybe Mom will know what to do with it,” he said.
It was snowing the January morning Lucy drove out to Mrs. Dupree’s house with the courthouse things. Snow wasn’t exactly an oddity there at the extreme upper edge of the South, but many people drove as if each flake were a potential piece of an ice slick. Others, the owners of pickups and SUVs especially, drove as if the snow were a shower of dust motes, confetti, nothing. Lucy, whose car was a runty dinged-up Ford befitting a medium-grade government employee, drove in the slow lane, thinking about the Missouri River town in Nebraska where she’d grown up, where all the lanes were slow and some were dirt. The blacktopped one that went out of town, past the supper club and Cardew’s apple farm and west toward Lincoln, was her favorite not only because it went somewhere but because it had a series of roller-coaster dips that her father, the proprietor of a motel and a movie theater until both failed, always drove with zeal, as if he were trying to separate Lucy and her mother from their stomachs. Lucy loved this, but her mother, who was prone to all sorts of maladies, did not.
Lucy got off the expressway and turned up River Road, a narrow, winding two-lane that followed the southern bank of the Ohio in a fairly rigorous way. It ran from downtown to near the county line. Judge Dupree, whose foot had contained no lead, had almost always taken it, rather than the expressway, to and from work. It was a road made for the Sunday driver, except where it shrank to one-and-a-half lanes in order to cross an ancient stone bridge that passed above Little Blue Creek, one of the river’s tributaries, and then you couldn’t dawdle. The Ohio was on Lucy’s left as she drove east, behind a truck hauling pickles. There was nothing on the river this morning—no barges, no intrepid small craft. It was a blank slate, with snow swirling above it, the way one’s mind swirls before it goes dropping off into sleep. In its winter state, the river reminded her of the Missouri as it slinked past her hometown, like some remote, unsociable, mumbling thing. In the spring, the Missouri, bloated with snowmelt, regularly climbed its banks and flooded milo and bean fields. Once or twice, she recalled, it got as high as the doorstep of her father’s movie theater, which was down in a part of town that some people hoped the Missouri would take with it someday. The Ohio jumped its banks, too, some years. The Judge, who had grown up a half mile from the river, had told her stories about the Flood of ‘37, when for a month the only way off the Dupree property was by foot or rowboat. Of course, she, too, had seen the Ohio flood during her fifteen springs in Kentucky. She was thinking of the years gone by and tomorrow’s appointment to get her hair cut, when the pickle truck turned off, into the Knights of Columbus club parking lot. She almost ran up its back, nearly skidded into the warty green monster dill painted on the rear. She liked pickles, they were a staple of her diet, though she preferred the sweet kind.
With both hands now on the wheel, Lucy drove down the whitening road, past the little club perched above the river where Protestant knights of business played paddle tennis and engorged their arteries with whiskey sours, past the bend in the road where there was a cross memorializing a car-wreck victim, past the road that led up to the Judge’s boyhood home, where his sister still lived with her herd of Great Danes and free-roaming ducks and solitary ancient serving man, and to the now subdivided property where other Duprees and Mudges (the Judge’s mother was a Mudge) had once lived. Between the road and the houses on the bluffs were meadows, fenced with the kind of dark creosoted horse-country fencing that horses could lean their heads over as they watched you shoot by in your tinny automobile, though Lucy had never seen a horse or any other animal along this stretch. What was a meadow in Kentucky without a horse? On a snowy day in January, it was an empty whitening space that made Lucy feel dull and sleepy.
She sipped coffee from a Kentucky Bar Convention travel mug and turned down the heat and switched radio stations from a classical one (soporific Telemann) to a rock outlet that would occasionally slip in an oldie between Limp Bizkit and Dave Matthews. Once on this station she’d heard an Elvis Costello song, which had transported her more swiftly than she might have predicted or wished to 1979, her last year in college, when she was reading lots of Henry James and was involved with her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend in a love triangle (it wasn’t equilateral) in which she served mostly as confessor and go-between, and for her troubles was the recipient of four-hand massages. The boy, a physics major who had a cat named Schrödinger and a black birthmark under his eye that made him look like a pirate, had played Elvis Costello constantly. Now the station played something up-to-date, a male voice snarling behind snarling guitars, a terrible squall of sound. It led her to imagine for a moment being a boy listening to this music in his car, his thumpmobile, or in the privacy of his room, the room he’d had since he was six, the football pennants still up on the wall along with pictures of fighter jets and girls in spandex, saying, as the music punched him all over but especially in the holes in his ears that led through tunnels to his brain, “Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.”
Lucy preferred the older guys. And also some of the dead guys, like Roy Orbison and Marvin Gaye. And all the jazz singers that her father had filled their little house in Nebraska with, who were also all now dead. (One of them, she remembered—was it Ella Fitzgerald, doing some wild upper-register scatting?—had always made Lucy’s dog, Red, scratch at the door to be let out.) Sometimes, when she was out of range of the courthouse, Lucy would put Marvin Gaye or Sarah Vaughan in her tape player and, weather permitting, roll down the windows and sing along. She had an alto that wobbled among the notes enthusiastically. But the tape player in her eight-year-old Ford was broken now. She was at the mercy of the radio.
A few years back, she’d taken a car trip with Judge Dupree to Chicago. They were going to a conference on sentencing. This was two years before he’d kissed her and set in motion their peculiar, almost quaint affair. They’d taken the Judge’s car, a Toyota sedan. He’d driven, a bit shakily, more than once inciting semi drivers to high dudgeon for not ceding a lane quickly enough. After lunch, Lucy had offered to drive. He’d have time to look at that bar journal article about forcible detainer she’d mentioned. It was boring as all getout, but germane to a case that was on his docket. Almost docilely, he’d dropped the clump of keys into her hand.
He nodded off no more than a page into the article. She drove up I-65 under a blue August sky in which not a cloud floated, past acres of corn and beans. She saw signs touting Jesus and herbicides and Dole/Kemp. The Judge twitched in his summer suit, like a sleeping dog dreaming of prey escaping, like a sleeping jurist dreaming of being reversed. Lucy turned on the radio and came upon a station that was playing Elvis Presley, nothing but Elvis Presley. Today, the deejay announced more than once, was the nineteenth anniversary of Presley’s death. “Which if you go to Graceland, your tour guide will describe as the most gentle passing from earth to the next level you might wish for. He played a game of racquetball, you see, and then he sat down and quietly croaked. And if you believe that, I’ll sell you some carrot juice that will increase your IQ by fifty points.” Lucy thought the signal must be coming from a college campus—Purdue was in the neighborhood—unless the source was some airwave thief’s trailer hidden in the cornfields. Anyway, the signal was strong enough that she heard a half dozen songs before the station began to fade. The Judge stirred during “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” When he did, Lucy made a move to turn the radio off, but he said, “It’s not bothering me. You can leave it.”
So they drove past fields of tasseling corn and ditches full of chicory and fences dotted with red-winged blackbirds, who watched them go, and listened together to “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “Suspicious Minds.” Judge Dupree consulted a map, then cast his eyes forward again. He said, “Is this the man who said he was more popular than Jesus?”
“No,” Lucy said. “That was the Beatles—John Lennon. This is Elvis Presley.”
“That’s right,” the Judge said. He was still surfacing from his nap and his voice was husky. “The one who sang that ‘Hound Dog’ song. And was known as Pelvis, if memory serves.”
“That’s right,” Lucy said, stifling a smile. She’d always assumed that his knowledge of popular music stopped at Gershwin or Hoagy Carmichael; he sometimes hummed snatches of one or the other at the office. But then again he had two children, from whom he hadn’t insulated himself.
“I wonder if he took that as a compliment,” Judge Dupree said. “Being identified as a body part.”
“I imagine he got used to it.” She steered around some carrion. This stretch of highway seemed to be full of it.
“In college,” the Judge said, “I was known as Horse because my face had a certain equine quality.” Lucy glanced at her employer. She’d not previously noted horsiness in his face, though it was true that it was narrow and unfleshy and his French nose was on the long side and his eyes, looming behind those lenses like objects underwater, sometimes seemed wary in a horsey way. “It wasn’t a term of affection,” he went on. “It got to me, I’m afraid, coming from well-bred East Coast boys with their fine manners and stickpins under their ties.” Lucy thought the Judge’s nap must have awakened something in him, some long-buried grievance. “I finally hauled off and slugged one boy. His name was Augie Weinglass. He was one of two dozen Jews in a class of five hundred. Augie acted like a character out of a John O’Hara novel, with everything he wore monogrammed. He was the only person I ever struck in my life. I did absolutely no damage to him; I hurt my hand more than I did him. I was a hundred-and-thirty-five-pound weakling.” Lucy turned off the radio; static had overtaken the signal. “There were fifty other boys I could have punched, but I chose to hit Augie. He believed the reason I hit him instead of a Christian hockey player from Andover was that I was an anti-Semite. He was right, though I like to think I’ve reformed.”
Lucy wasn’t quite sure how to take this story. In the twelve years of their association, he hadn’t made her privy to much of his personal history, or, anyway, to that part of it that he couldn’t relate as an anecdote of little consequence, though she’d heard stories (about his dipsomaniacal sister, for instance, and his bachelor artist cousin, Louis) from other sources. Did this confession mark a change in their relationship? As his days dwindled down, as he awakened from his naps, was he going to tell her about his missteps, his secrets, his laments, all that he hid (if indeed he did) beneath that gentle manner? The thought of having to revise her idea of him, of having to sift through all that he might be, scared her a little. She moved over into the passing lane to go around a truck carrying hot dogs and bologna and other meat products. She liked bologna. She’d been known to have bologna and pickle sandwiches for dinner.
The Judge shifted in his seat. He had more story to tell. “I saw Augie thirty years later at a bar convention in New Orleans. He was a civil rights lawyer in New York, but he was wearing one of those cream-colored planter’s suits, almost like he’d been born to it. I said, ‘Augie Weinglass? Is that you?’ And he said, ‘Horse? Well, I’ll be damned.’ He said he’d heard I’d been appointed to the district court and he wished me well. And then he slapped me on the back and said, ‘Watch out for Jewish civil rights lawyers in planter’s suits. They’ll do everything they can to get an edge.’ He turned up in my court some years later, not long before you arrived. He came down from New York with another lawyer to help represent a plaintiff who’d alleged discrimination, a woman who claimed she’d been denied a promotion by a chain of greasy spoons because of her color. Augie won. He would’ve won even if he’d worn his planter’s suit. The facts were in his favor.”
• • •
THE SNOW HAD PICKED UP. Lucy crept past a man and his dog walking by the side of the road. The man was in need of a hat. She turned off the radio. She went by Meehan’s Bar-Be-Cue and Boat Dock and U R Hair and—she stepped on it here—over the narrow stone bridge that seemed to invite people to play chicken. She slowed down again and went past the Little Blue Creek fire station and the Little Blue Creek Baptist Church, a small white clapboard building with red double doors and a steeple that claimed a humble portion of the sky. It was almost like a child’s drawing of a church, Lucy thought. A sign out front said, as it always did, Jesus Is Lord, in bigger letters than those used for the times of the services and the name of the preacher. Behind the sanctuary was a flat-roofed brick building where Sunday school classes met and the preacher had his office. On most Monday evenings for many years—right up until his death, in fact—Judge Dupree, a dyed-in-the-silk Episcopalian, had tutored children in reading and math in that brick building. It was for this sort of thing—as well as for the fact that a number of his major opinions had come down on the side of the weak and the afflicted—that Judge Dupree, a Republican whom Richard Nixon appointed to the bench, was known, in certain circles, as Judge Dugood or Judge Dugoody Two Shoes or Judge Duright If Your Idea of Right Is Left. To this, he’d said, “Well, it’s better than being known as Dubad—or Dumal, if you want to get French about it.” And then he had added, in an interview with the local newspaper of record, which appeared in the midnineties, around the time when he was thinking of retiring permanently (he’d long had senior status, a much reduced docket), “At the risk of offending some of my liberal friends, I admit to loving Jesus. Jesus is my Lord, and He influences my decisions inasmuch as He is the clearest example of love and mercy I’ve ever known.” This remark—which had a rider that the newspaper didn’t quote: “But I rule according to the law”—did get him in hot water, and he himself regretted his “too pious” tone. He also regretted speaking to the reporter, a young man who may have read the Constitution once, over lunch.
A mile beyond the church, Lucy turned right, up a road that, a sign said, was Private and had No Outlet. The road was narrow and had not been repaved, Lucy estimated, since before she became a federal employee. Perhaps the property owners were waiting for the day when the price of asphalt came down.
Lucy drove up a snaky incline, past a couple of driveways that were as long as landing strips, beneath old sycamores with their ghostly underbark. The snow fell thickly now, lining potholes that Lucy bumped in and out of. At a blind bend in the road, there was a sign instructing her to sound her horn, but she didn’t do it. She was thinking, not for the first time that day and probably not for the last, that she would soon be out on the street, without a job. She would receive her government paycheck until April, and then she would have to fend for herself. At forty-two and with her résumé, she was not the most marketable lawyer. Judge Dupree had long ago advised her—half-heartedly, to be sure—to pack up her briefcase and find more exciting work than tending to him in his dotage. Others, including Gene, her former boyfriend, had said she was committing career suicide by spending her prime earning years with a judge who was semiretired and was handling fewer and fewer cases. It was time to put that expensive law degree to work. Lucy hadn’t needed to be told that while it wasn’t unheard of for lawyers to make a career out of clerking, it also wasn’t standard practice to clerk for a judge for more than a couple of years, much less fifteen. It had been whispered that she was hiding from the “real world” in her clerkish sinecure. But what was so wonderful about the real world? Most of the lawyers she knew who were in private practice complained endlessly about their jobs. Anyway, she would have clerked another dozen years for Judge Dupree, had he lived on. She’d loved the way he solicited her opinion. “Lucy,” he would say, “I will be forever grateful for any light you can shed on this motion to dismiss.” She’d loved the drugstore birthday cards he gave her. They all seemed to say, “You’re the Greatest.”
In 1998, for a period of about two months, he had come to see her at her apartment once or twice a week. The first time he came, he brought a jar of chicken soup that Ida, the Duprees’ maid, had cooked. Lucy had been out of the office for several days; she’d caught a bug while visiting Gene in Washington. She’d not expected the Judge and when the doorbell rang, she was in her pajamas, the not-quite-sheer shorty pj’s she’d bought on a lark, that for some reason she wore only when she was swollen-headed and feverish. She’d had the presence of mind to put a jacket on before answering the door, but the Judge, after telling her how much she was missed down at the courthouse, had left quickly, as if startled by the sight of her bare knees. A couple weeks later, after Lucy had returned to work, he turned up again at her apartment. It was a Saturday afternoon, Indian summer. He was wearing a short-sleeved pink shirt, and Lucy noticed how thin his arms were, how far up his forearm he wore his watch. He stood at Lucy’s door and said, “My wife of forty-nine years has threatened to divorce me if I don’t change my ways.” He smiled only a little. She was properly dressed and she invited him in. She’d been repotting plants and watching football and waiting for her mother to call from her gated retirement village in Arizona and report on life with her second husband. (She was only one ahead of Lucy, though Lucy’s first and only had been so brief that it almost didn’t count, in the minds of either woman.) Lucy washed black soil from her hands.
“Who’s winning?” he asked.
“Nebraska,” she said. She’d grown up in a state where football was a religion. Even now, after twenty-five years of living away, she paid some attention.
“Go, Big Red,” the Judge said, who, though unathletic, a hacker at the few sports he’d played (tennis, Ping-Pong), followed sports closely—too closely, in the opinion of his wife, who wished he would get out in the yard and water the trees. Didn’t he know there was a drought going on?
Lucy said, “Mary Louise isn’t really going to divorce you, is she?” She turned off the TV. The game was a slaughter.
“I think she might send me into exile for a while.” He explained that his wife had been on him that morning for failing to organize the recyclables properly and also for neglecting to clean up a mess that the dog, an old West Highland white named Duff, had made in the breakfast room. The Judge had walked right through it and tracked up the kitchen. “I have bungled my sanitation duties, Lucy,” he said, “and now I’ve come looking for sympathy.”
Lucy brought him a Coca-Cola on the rocks and a plate of chocolate chip cookies, things he couldn’t get at home. He came back a week later and again the week after that. He told her stories about his wife, his children, his long-ago youth. She fed him illicit foods. They didn’t talk shop or discuss cases. Work was work, and this—whatever it was—was this. Lucy didn’t tell anybody about the Judge’s visits. She went to and from the courthouse and around town and, once again, to Washington to see Gene, with what felt like a state secret in her briefcase, though the secret was hardly earthshaking. They had conversations, the Judge spoiled his dinner by eating a Napoleon or a Krispy Kreme doughnut (with chocolate sprinkles), they watched football, the Judge gazed at Lucy with unprofessional ardor and Lucy smiled or looked away or asked a question. The Judge’s face was a flower blooming out of season, during some late, possibly fatal warm spell. At the courthouse, he kept this face mostly to himself, though it was clearly a struggle for him to do so. Once he threw caution to the winds and sent her a note through the interoffice mail. It said, “Would you be able to receive a caller on Sunday at four, by which time I hope to have obtained liberty from my keeper?” And once, in what was the climax to his visits, he leaned across the space between them on the cathouse-red sofa that Lucy had paid next to nothing for at a yard sale and kissed her squarely on the mouth. Lucy remembered his puckered, doughnut-sweetened lips traveling toward her slowly, as if the air were water and he were a fish, his eyes shut behind his glasses. She had seen this kiss coming for a long time, she had done nothing specific to discourage it, and she watched it land almost with relief, as if it were something to get beyond. What lay beyond, she hoped, would be a return to normal, in which she would be the trusty, diligent clerk, and he would be a senior judge, a little shabby and badly henpecked but a distinguished servant of the law nonetheless. So it surprised her when she kissed him back, though not hard and only, of course, with her lips. It must have surprised him, too, the way she leaned into him, for while a door to some neglected back room had suddenly opened, revealing light that was like the light at the top of the trees on a fall day, it shut almost as quickly. He stood up in a fluster laden with apology. Then somehow, while stepping away from the sofa, he fell and hit his forehead on the corner of her coffee table. Blood flowed as if from a faucet. Jumbo, Lucy’s cat, came into the room and rubbed against him while he lay on the rug, and Lucy, kneeling, held a damp tea towel to the cut. He apologized for soiling her towel. He said his doctor had put him on a thinner a while ago for his heart, which maybe explained why he was bleeding like a stuck pig. He asked for her forgiveness, and Lucy, slightly irritated by his tone, said, “There’s nothing to forgive, Judge.” She cleaned the cut with Mercurochrome and put on a Band-Aid and walked with him outside to his car. He was quite pale; the bright October sunshine made him seem even paler. He said, “Do you have any advice about how to explain my mishap to Mary Louise? Or should I tell her the truth?” Lucy advised against telling the truth. He nodded in a sort of resigned way and said, “The truth would upset her, wouldn’t it?”
The following Monday, he told whoever asked about the Band-Aid on his forehead that he’d run into the corner of a door in broad daylight. “Even on a weekend,” he said to more than one inquisitor, “justice is blind.” Lucy spent the day reading deeply in the United States tax code; a case in which the chief executive of a shadowy firm was hoping to recover certain sums from the IRS was soon to go to trial. When the case finally did come to trial, the Band-Aid was gone from the Judge’s head. Lucy wrote a draft of an opinion that Judge Dupree praised for its clarity. A year or so later, he went into the hospital to have, as he put it, a piece of plumbing repaired. He came home from the hospital and peed streams of blood and went back into the hospital. A urologist from Bombay fixed him up, and after a period of enforced rest at home, he returned to the courthouse and solicited Lucy’s views and remembered her birthday with a card from Walgreens. Some months later, Gene came down from Washington—he was a lawyer for the Nuclear Regulatory Agency—and told Lucy that he was seeing a man. Lucy went to Spain and slept with an Englishman, the owner of a chocolate factory. The Judge walked to lunch in his shabby raincoat and bush hat and heard a wino call him a motherfucker. In December of 2000, he fell while doing a sanitation job for his wife and landed in the hospital again. Lucy saw him there—a blood clot had been found in his leg and he had pneumonia—and in the course of their conversation about the Christmas party in Judge Norwell’s chambers (Norwell, a fun-loving Democrat, had worn antlers), Judge Dupree brought up the subject of what he called their “extra-legal relationship.” In a solemn voice, in the voice of someone making a deathbed speech, the Judge apologized to Lucy for what had happened between them and asked for her forgiveness and said that an old man’s lust had corrupted him.
Lucy asked, “Was it really only lust?” She was afraid she sounded rude, but she hoped for a clarification.
He looked at her and then he looked past her, beyond her, as if the answer lay there. Or perhaps he hadn’t heard her. There were times during the last few years when he’d missed testimony and such because he’d forgotten to wear his hearing aid or had left it in a coat that had gone to the cleaners. But he was wearing it today—it and his glasses and a hospital gown were all he was wearing. He weighed in the neighborhood of a hundred and twenty pounds now, fifteen less than Lucy, who was four inches shorter. He coughed while looking beyond her, and then Larry, a nurse whose strip of a beard was like a shadow on his long jaw, appeared and said that it was time for an oxygen treatment.
THE SNOW SPUN AROUND the Dupree house, whitening its red brick, filling the plant urns that stood on the porch. Lucy rang the bell, waited, caught a snowflake on her tongue, waited, fingered the holly in the wreath wired to the knocker, shifted the box of office doodads from one hip to the other, then put it down and went back to the car to get the second box. When she returned, Mrs. Dupree was at the door. She was wearing a long maroon sacklike robe—it put Lucy in mind of something a monarch might wander a drafty palace in—and fuzzy, pale blue booties. All that was visible of her were her hands and face. The lines in her face suggested that she’d reached some bitter conclusions about mankind long before this morning. Her nose was small and delicate, sensitive to anything the least malodorous, inclined to flare just before a rage came on. Her mouth was small, too; you had to look closely to see her smile. She was a tiny woman, no more than ninety pounds, counting her robe and slippers and the rings on her fingers, which often ached in cold weather.
“Oh, Lucy,” she said. “It’s you. I’d forgotten you were coming out. Excuse my appearance. I was up and down all last night, and now Ida has called, saying she doesn’t want to get on the bus in this weather. There are a hundred things that need to get done around here. You’d think a big bus could make it through a little flurry, wouldn’t you?”
Lucy did not attempt to correct Mrs. Dupree’s impression that the snow now falling was only a flurry or note that it was a long way for Ida, who was pushing seventy and lived downtown, to come even in good weather. Anyway, the chances of getting a word in edgewise were not good. Talking to Mary Louise Dupree was like being caught in a downpour with no shelter in sight: you withstood it until it stopped.
“And I had an appointment to see Dr. Brinkman today.” Dr. Brinkman was a chiropractor; Mrs. Dupree had sent her husband to him once, on the theory that an adjustment or two might improve his posture. “And I haven’t had my hair done since I don’t know when.” With the tips of her fingers, she touched her hair, which was wispy but still dark. “Mr. Guilfoyle is on a cruise, of all things, and the last time somebody else did me, she nearly burned my roots, so I guess I’ll have to wait until he gets back. Well, come in, dear, before we both catch our deaths.”
Lucy brought in the boxes of the Judge’s office things and set them down next to a chest on which a crèche sat. The baby Jesus, a thumbnail-size figure carved out of the palest wood, lay in a hank of blond hair. (Both Morgan and Crawford had once been fair-haired. Perhaps the manger hay was a remnant of their childhood.) One of the kings and his camel had tipped over. Lucy considered putting them upright, but decided against it. Better to let sleeping magi lie.
“I’m in a little boat on a big sea, Lucy,” Mrs. Dupree said gloomily. Did she mean only that she was lost without a maid? Well, of course not. Her concerns were broader than that. She was grieving for her dead husband, wasn’t she?
Lucy thought “I’m sorry” was not much solace, but it was all she could manage. The sounds of self-pity, at least as uttered by others, made her irritable.
A teakettle was whistling, high and insistent. Mrs. Dupree, who had a titanium ball and stem in her left hip, limped down the hall, leading Lucy past a portrait of a jowly, whiskery ancestor and past another chest on which the Judge’s bush hat rested. She talked as she went. She said she needed to call the estate lawyer about something—she wished she could remember what it was. Clifford was such a slowpoke about doing things, she said. “He’s like hundred-year-old molasses, my dear. Sweet but slow.” In the kitchen, which smelled of burned toast, Mrs. Dupree remembered what she needed to call Clifford about: a safety deposit key she’d found in one of her husband’s sport coats. “I never knew what I’d find in his pockets,” she said, turning off the kettle. “Peanut brittle. Vitamins he’d forgotten to take. His hearing aid—I always told him he should have one for the office and one for home, but he never got around to getting a duplicate.” She poured boiling water into a bowl that contained a flaky, grayish substance—oatmeal, perhaps. “Once I found something from you, Lucy. If I hadn’t known better, I’d’ve thought it was a love letter. It was a card with a picture of a dog on it. I’ve got it somewhere, if you want it back.” She glanced up at Lucy, who had several inches on her.
Lucy was blushing, as much for her failure to remember what she’d written on the card as for Mrs. Dupree’s discovery of it. It must have been a birthday card. “Your husband was a wonderful man, Mrs. Dupree,” Lucy said, her hands jabbing at the bottoms of her coat pockets. “He inspired me. He inspired everybody who knew him.”
Mrs. Dupree stirred her oatmeal or porridge or whatever it was. The loosening skin on her throat, above the ruffed collar of her robe, seemed to vibrate, like a bird’s. Lucy knew all about Mary Louise Dupree’s temper, how she could fly off the handle in a moment.
“Some people think I didn’t love him enough—my sons, to name two. It was work sometimes, but I loved him more than they could know. What could they know, living so far from home?” She said this in between spoonfuls of breakfast, her face turned away from Lucy, as if to spare her husband’s clerk some of the resentment she felt for her critics.
Lucy looked outside, at the snow whirling among the bare trees. A crow came swooping toward the house, then angled off. Lucy told herself that she’d done her duty delivering the last of the Judge’s things, and now she was ready to leave. Then she realized that she’d left the raincoat in the car, along with the traveling robe.
“They”—Mrs. Dupree meant her children—“just flew in and out and never saw what I saw. I had to train him to put his dirty clothes down the chute, for goodness sakes. He was off in his own world most of the time, thinking about cases or sports or Lord knows what else.”
Lucy, who was becoming increasingly warm inside her coat, kept her tongue. She kept her coat on, too; she wasn’t going to stay longer than was polite.
“Can I get you some tea, Lucy?”
Lucy declined. Mrs. Dupree opened a cabinet. There were a couple of boxes of tea among a sea of vitamin pill bottles. On the counter, in the dimness under the cabinets, were more vitamin bottles. Sometimes the Judge would come to the office with a bottle of vitamins—most of the alphabet, he said—his wife had packed for him to take at lunch. When Lucy had cleaned out his desk drawers, she’d found pills scattered about, a few in advanced states of decomposition.
“My sister said she slept with her husband’s pajama top for months after he died,” Mrs. Dupree said, taking up a new thread. “She wept into it every night. And then she remarried. Of course Vic was fairly young when he went. Sixty-one. And Betty is still young herself.” She picked a tea bag out of the box—it was echinacea—and set it on the counter. Then she poured herself a glass of water from a ceramic pitcher gaily painted with jumping fish. “I have this fungus in me that I can’t get rid of,” she said. She drank only distilled water, Lucy knew; the Judge had been permitted to drink spring water, but of what came from the tap, the stuff doctored with who knew what, she had nothing good to say. “She came to the funeral. Flew in and flew out. Did you meet her?”
Lucy didn’t think so. She had kept her distance from the family at the funeral.
The telephone rang. Mrs. Dupree answered on the fourth or fifth ring, after she’d finished her water. She told the caller how she was: “I feel like I’m in a little boat on a big sea, Dorothy.” Lucy left the kitchen. She passed the bedroom, noted the unmade bed with the comforter tossed up like a crested wave, the drawn curtains, the tiny “lady’s” desk in the corner. Nothing of his was visible in the gloom. She gave the jowly ancestor a second look but resisted touching his descendant’s bush hat, which lay in its place like a stranded UFO. In the front hall, she stood before the mirror hung above the chest where the crèche was. She saw that she was a clerkish color—pasty, wintry dull, the complexion, you might say (she said to herself), of a single woman of forty-some years whose footing in both the legal and extra-legal worlds was uncertain. She was anxious and irritable and, though resigned to the fact that she was not by any stretch beautiful or even particularly pretty, capable of making a face at herself. She had a longish jaw and a hard little chin and a narrow nose of the probing sort and she wore glasses that were more owlish than necessary. Her eyebrows were thin and gestural, more like concessions to the idea of eyebrows than the real things. They gave her forehead more prominence than she wanted, though she didn’t attempt to hide her forehead with her hair. Her long hair, which until recently was a lovely chestnut color, she tied back with a scrunchy or occasionally put into a bun. She had a good opinion of her hair, the creeping gray aside, and in a weak moment she might have conceded that her mouth was wide and full enough to qualify as “sensual.” When she was a girl, her mouth—and much of the rest of her, in fact—was an object of derision. A boy once called her “Catfish,” and she had made the mistake of saying back, “A catfish has barbs, you know.” She hadn’t told the Judge much about her past, nothing about her phantom ex-husband. He’d made polite inquiries, saying he hoped she wouldn’t mind his asking, and she had offered up a few things and then changed the subject back to him. She preferred his voice to her own, the elaborate courtesies, the kindly, meandering narratives (full of omissions, if you could put it that way) about his family and his troubled relations, the occasional Southernisms (a “bidnessman” was what his father had been, “supper” was what he called dinner), the general absence of irony. If she tilted her head just so, she could hear him say, “Lucy, I would be forever grateful if you would cast your eyes on this brief.”
Lucy turned away from herself and looked through a leaded-glass window that bordered the door. There, on the porch step, taking on snow the way a statue might, was Duff. Lucy let him in. He sniffed her with his ice-crusted muzzle and then trotted toward the kitchen. Lucy followed, hoping that Mrs. Dupree would be off the phone so she could say goodbye. In the kitchen, Duff shook himself vigorously, speckling things with melted snow. Mrs. Dupree, who had just hung up, instructed Lucy to go down into the basement and get a towel—“an old towel, in the laundry room, please.” Lucy found the laundry room—it was next to the Judge’s home office, a small bookish mess of a room—and a towel that looked older than new, and when she got back upstairs she began to wipe Duff off. Mrs. Dupree said, “Here, dear,” and took the towel. She got down on her knees and wiped between the dog’s toes. Duff submitted to this, while looking up at Lucy, as if in hope of an explanation. Mrs. Dupree scolded herself for leaving Duff outside in the snow, and then she began to talk about how her husband had walked the dog every day, up until the moment he fell down in the kitchen, right over there, by the refrigerator, when she asked him to wipe up some acidophilus he had spilled. She had made him drink acidophilus two times a day, in the belief it would be good for his GI tract. “I could have cleaned it up myself,” she said. She started to cry and rose up from her knees in search of Lucy’s arms. Duff ambled off.
Lucy held Mrs. Dupree for a moment, and then Mrs. Dupree let go and went to get a mug to put her tea bag in. Lucy went out to her car and brought the Judge’s robe in. But she kept the raincoat and all the contents of its pockets.