The Diviners (71 page)

This Sunday is not like those other Sundays. On this Sunday, there has been a summons from the chief justice, the man with the specially tailored robe, to discuss the case before them. The justices have assembled, the justices have stayed late, including those of their number who are of advancing years, and they have spoken to one another by memo and by phone, and finally they have met briefly in conference, where there were a number of heated exchanges concerning the preliminary opinion, per curiam, that the clerks are at present drafting. The tone in the building, not that the distinguished jurist worries about tone, is almost as bad as during
Furman v. Georgia,
wherein every one of the justices wrote, each with a different and in most cases equally specious opinion, on the matter of the penalty of death. Of course, it is not the place of lily-livered citizens of weak temperament to make the law of the land other than what it is and shall ever be, because the law of the land is that a man shall be hanged, or shot, or electrocuted, or injected, no matter whether he or she is old enough to vote. He shall be hanged on earth, and afterward he shall be commended for eternity to a lake of fire.

Here’s the interesting part. Notwithstanding the course of extraordinary events, the distinguished jurist has a long-standing dinner engagement scheduled for this evening and, while pacing the corridors, he is pondering whether or not it would be unseemly to break his dinner engagement. The distinguished jurist is looking at the busts of the justices and is wondering if the justices of the past would have kept a dinner date on a night like this. And it’s not just any guest who comes tonight. It’s his law school chum. How fondly the distinguished jurist feels about his chums from law school. They collected palindromes, they bet informally on outcomes of capital rulings, they rooted for the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, never both. They stayed up long nights, slept badly, pressed their own shirts, never went without neckties. The distinguished jurist had no firm idea, notwithstanding his magna cum laude, that he would ever come to have the opportunity to serve here in a place so august, and as a result he was, in those days, relatively speaking, fancy free. He could spend an afternoon trying to come up with a palindrome like “Star comedy by Democrats.” He could spend an afternoon debating the issues raised in the
Republic
of Plato, wherein he concurred with the idea that poets should be banished from the city limits. They were close, the chums of law school, and this particular chum was his bosom buddy and his especial pal, because this particular chum would sing. What they did when they needed to blow off some steam was find a piano wherever they could on the campus, and there they would sing from the musicals of the period or they would sing light operatic songs, Gilbert and Sullivan, et cetera, and they would find that the singing of these songs choked them with emotion. They were young men who dreamed grandly, and though there was no certainty that they would come this far, they knew they were destined to do great things, and the songs they sang were a recognition of the scale of their dreams, from which dreams they never once deviated.

His friend’s road led into the world of business, where the special chum served first at Debevoise and Plimpton. Specifically, the chum worked on several pro bono cases that the distinguished jurist considered unworthy of such a legal mind, e.g.,
Massiah v. United States.
This early work made the special chum aware of what he really wanted to do, which was entertainment law, and it was in this cause that the special chum relocated to the dangerous land across the mountains, California, after which the distinguished jurist saw far less of him.

For his part, the distinguished jurist was for some years involved in the education of meandering and unfocused law students. While the special chum was trying to establish the D.C. office for Debevoise, making the acquaintance of such memorable persons as could exist in the heavily perfumed air of the Kennedy and Johnson years, the distinguished jurist was languishing instead in Cleveland, and this, as anyone will tell you, is not a place where one makes a long-standing contribution to national jurisprudence. At one point, he attempted to relocate to a more suitable environment, Georgetown, perhaps, or Columbia, but when he visited the campus of Columbia, he found it peopled entirely by communists of dubious hygiene, including one remarkably unpleasant and outrageous young man who had the audacity to take the distinguished jurist to a house of ill repute! He was meant to be going to a faculty soiree of some kind, and instead this appalling young man took him into a building on Upper Broadway populated with scantily clad women of a different color from himself. It was only when he made clear that he was an adherent to the pre- Vatican II tenets of the Roman Church that his kidnapper relented.

And so the distinguished jurist remained for some years in Cleveland. He thundered in the classroom about tort reform, about the necessity of constitutional limits on claimants. He would thunder in the classroom about the so-called right to privacy, which is not a right but a weakness of character, since it exists nowhere in the Constitution of the United States of America, neither in the Bill of Rights, nor elsewhere, and he thundered thus because he did not really wish to be in the classroom. His wish was to be in government, and at last he was given a chance, when again justice was being meted out appropriately by the men and women of a benevolent administration. In this capacity he served until a delusional peanut farmer from Georgia appeared on the horizon. In the following years, first at the University of Chicago and then at the American Enterprise Institute, he was given the chance to evaluate his positions and to refine them such that he came to see that by
not
opposing the usurpation of power by judicial activists, the distinguished jurist was giving material aid and comfort to the forces of evil.

Relief appeared once and for all in the person of a godly man, a man who had come in from the wilderness, a man who had once called himself a unionist but who was now a man of belief, and this God-fearing man plucked the distinguished jurist from a think tank, raising him from nowhere to the Court of Appeals and later to this very temple of jurisprudence, according to a senatorial vote of
99-0
, so that the jurist might write his blistering concurrence in, e.g.,
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services.

It is fateful, after all, that the distinguished jurist was redeemed by a veteran of the entertainment world, a former movie star, because, as noted, this is precisely the direction traveled by his chum from law school. His special chum, who had once been a vigorous outdoorsman and sportsman, and a swashbuckling swordsman with the ladies, packed up and settled in the city of Los Angeles. This vexed the mind of the distinguished jurist, who felt that the place was peopled by drunkards and child molesters, notwithstanding the beauty of some of its flora. Moreover, in the case of the special chum, there were, concurrent with the relocation west, a number of modifications of comportment and habits that did not seem in keeping with the wearing of neckties.

In fact, there was a period during which the distinguished jurist and the special chum didn’t speak at all, and this had in part to do with a rumor that began circulating among classmates about the special chum, namely, that perhaps the special chum had a certain weakness proscribed in the Old Testament and in other enduring scriptures that do not change because of evolving standards of decency. Language is fixed and perfect, and the company of heaven sings when in the presence of perfectly deployed sentences. Even more disappointing were some of his hires, including a person alluded to above, whose name the distinguished jurist cannot bear to mention, who went on to become the heir apparent at the conglomerate of the special chum. How was this possible?

Christmas cards still arrived, and birthday cards still arrived, and this was no small feat on the part of the special chum, as the distinguished jurist has a goodly number of children, after all, and yet the special chum remembered the birthdays of all these children and even a couple of grandchildren. There were telephone calls now and then, and the distinguished jurist did his best to discount the rumors and he paid no attention to the diminishment in the excellence of the written grammar of the special chum, which he believed was owing to the influence of the film world. The special chum had advanced swiftly and decisively in the world of entertainment, until, at first, he was the head of a film studio, and from this aerie the special chum advanced through the ranks of the parent company that owned the film studio, which parent company was in the business of spirits and intoxicants, a business that, in the view of the distinguished jurist, was only marginally more harmful than the film studio itself. And in due course the special chum became the chief executive officer of the company in question, a major Fortune 500 corporation with holdings in beverages and entertainment. The company boasted operations national and multinational, and a myriad of contentious and opinionated stockholders.

The apotheosis of the special chum took place during or contemporaneous with the decision in the case that came to be entitled
Maryland v. Craig,
which case, as many will remember, had to do with the alleged molestation of a certain child. The child testified during trial proceedings via one-way closed-circuit television in a separate room. The Court of Appeals overturned, complaining as to the use of this novel form of cross-examination, et cetera. The distinguished jurist, naturally, finds the idea of child abuse abhorrent, perhaps worthy of the ultimate penalty, and he believes, naturally, that people who have the problem that the special chum is rumored to have, the love that dare not speak its name, are more likely to behave as child molesters behave, and the distinguished jurist, naturally, would no more hold on behalf of a child molester than he would favor a Soviet, and yet, in thinking about the special chum, and in thinking about the Constitution of the United States, the distinguished jurist, during the conference on
Maryland v. Craig,
came to feel that perhaps there are aspects of what he might call
the human
in people who are afflicted with this dread sin, and perhaps
the human
merited, in this particular instance, an opinion that was not entirely alien to the cause of the molester, whose case went down in flames nonetheless, as the distinguished jurist knew that it would.

His perambulations now bring the distinguished jurist into the empty, reverberant cavern of the spiral staircase of the Supreme Court of the United States, a design element that is so splendid that the distinguished jurist often pauses to gaze upon it, and it’s here that he arrives at a decision, Solomonic in its evenhandedness, viz., that he will tell the special chum, Naz Korngold, that if the special chum would like to meet him in chambers, then perhaps the two of them could dine briefly as planned while the jurist’s clerks work on his concurrence. Perhaps in due course he might be able to give the chum a little tour of the premises, including the hall on level one where his own portrait will hang. Perhaps he can bring him here to the spiral staircase. When he returns to his chambers, this offer entire is dictated to the distinguished jurist’s secretary, Mrs. Edith Wilbur, who then places the call while the distinguished jurist watches, standing by the edge of her desk, mouthing the words to make sure that she makes the offer just as he has dictated it. Mrs. Edith Wilbur is schooled in making these telephone calls in such a way as to produce maximum impact with the announcement of the caller, indicating that she is calling from the Supreme Court of the United States. And therefore Mrs. Edith Wilbur gets through immediately to the assistant of the special chum, the executive assistant being known as Georgia the Peach, and Georgia the Peach patches the secretary through to the mobile phone of the special chum, and the secretary makes the offer and she then nods thoughtfully, without making eye contact with the distinguished jurist, whose hovering is not ideal but effective nonetheless. Then Mrs. Edith Wilbur announces, having terminated the connection, that the special chum would indeed be glad to appear at the Graeco-Roman temple of jurisprudence, especially since he has a matter of personal import to discuss.

It’s only after the terms of the meal are settled, and after fending off his one especially sycophantic clerk, that the distinguished jurist remembers the last time he saw the special chum. This was perhaps eight or nine years ago, on the occasion of a shooting expedition in the state of Maryland. On, or about, or during
Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.,
and this he remembers because he recalls explaining to the special chum about the implications for copyright raised by
Feist,
wherein originality triumphed over “industrious collection,” to the detriment of phone book compilers henceforward. He recalls the special chum laughing grimly and asking if the vogue, in his own business, for film “sequels” might be affected, since those films seemed less the products of “authorship” than works that were simply compiled by the “sweat of the brow” from preexisting narratives. The distinguished jurist remembers these things, and he remembers that it was early spring, and that the weather was overcast, with light winds, and that the smell of sulfur and ejected cartridges was wonderful, as ever, and he remembers, naturally, that the special chum was not doing very well in the matter of obliterating the little clay pigeons. The special chum was made increasingly uncomfortable by his abject failure.

Of course, the distinguished jurist was not born into the condition of firearms enthusiast. It’s more that his position on the Second Amendment has made it natural. In the march of life, strange bedfellows do we become. In truth, the distinguished jurist, as a young man, rarely found himself in the company of those who had been reared up with firearms and the sport thereof, and yet as he rose through the ranks of national adjudication, he found himself learning about firearms and connoisseurs of firearms. He found himself appreciating the ritual of cleaning, preparing, shooting, caring for the gun, nailing up the kill, plucking the kill, and here the distinguished jurist will admit that he does take care of the plucking himself, disbelieving that his wife should be burdened with such things. And though the distinguished jurist was not born to carry a gun, like many men of leisure, he is rather good at the sport, and so he was handily trouncing the special chum on the day in question, at least in numbers of clay pigeons dispatched. Even the young man who was accompanying them in the marshes of Maryland, the young man from the local rod and gun club, found himself saying nothing in the tense silence as the special chum shouted “Pull” again, and again the clay pigeon traversed the sky unperturbed.