The Lady of Situations (32 page)

Flying back to New York on Sunday afternoon Natica and Thad had their first serious talk about religion.

"Would you expect your wife to become a Catholic?"

"Only if she were a genuine convert. Of course I'd be very happy if she were that."

"And would you insist that she promise to raise the children in your faith?"

"I'd tell her it would be very painful to me if they weren't. I'd hope she'd always be open to persuasion. But I wouldn't make it a condition, no."

"Would a priest marry you without the promise?"

"I think so. If I assured him I'd do everything I could to convert you."

"Then if I were to marry you, I would in effect have given you my word. For I could never marry you to give you pain."

"I'd take my chances."

"And while we're on the subject of conditions, would you object to your wife's working?"

"Not if she still could be a good mother. If my wife is the girl I'm thinking of, she'd never neglect her children."

They buckled their seatbelts at the landing announcement. "Oh, I don't know. Some people say the girl you have in mind is a pretty tough cooky. I'll bet your ma thinks so, anyway."

"Mother thought you were wonderful!"

"That remark isn't even trying to be a good lie!"

She no longer had to see much of Mr. Haven in the office, but Thad talked about him a good deal. She tried to keep an open mind, but she couldn't allow Thad's attempt to portray his partner as a champion of the Bill of Rights.

"Don't you think there are some liberties that he's too little concerned with? Do you remember that conference on the school brief when he remarked that having fought the bloodiest war in our history for the Negroes was enough to have done for them? For a hundred years, anyway?"

Thad's slightly impatient head-shake might have indicated some awareness of this imperfection in his idol. "Yes, I saw your look when he said that. Of course, he was not serious. You must remember he was raised in a far from reconstructed South. I think it's actually remarkable how well he has overcome those ancient prejudices. You can tell by the bantering way he has of speaking of such topics that he doesn't mean to be taken literally. But of course his words have a considerably less innocent look in print, which is why it's one of my jobs to see they never creep into anything he writes."

Haven used to invite Thad down to his rambling shingle country house in Smithport for what he called a working weekend. He always managed to relieve these with a little golf, excellent meals and plentiful liquor. He was a childless widower and his household was run silently and efficiently by a gaunt, grim butler, Thorne, who shared Thad's protective adoration of his master. On one of these weekends, when Natica was making a rare visit to her parents only a mile away, Thad persuaded her to join him and Haven for dinner, promising her the ordeal would be short, as the two men would have to work in the library afterwards. But when she arrived she saw at once from his puckered brow that the evening was not going to be as planned. Her host, more pink-faced than usual, hardly greeted her. He was silent and morose and drinking what was obviously not the first scotch of the evening.

Thad took her aside and murmured the explanation. Haven had received a call from Washington that afternoon informing him that the Supreme Court on Monday would hand down an unfavorable ruling in one of his due process cases involving a state law restricting the rights of labor unions and that the majority opinion had been written by Hugo Black.

The tirade in which Haven now indulged took the form of a monologue which lasted through the cocktail period and well into dinner. At length he became actually abusive.

"What the hell, I ask you, is the point of wasting one's heart and mind on brilliant arguments to a court that's stacked with a bunch of rubber stamps who owe their robes to the late happy-go-lucky cripple who occupied the White House for such an unconscionable number of terms?"

Thad now at last intervened. "Hugo Black, sir, was hardly Roosevelt's rubber stamp. You mustn't forget that when a man's once on the court he's free of any political pressure. Look at the other Roosevelt and his appointee, Holmes. Didn't Teddy get so angry at one of his decisions that he said he could have made a better man out of a turnip?"

"But Holmes, my dear fellow, had been Chief Justice of Massachusetts. This man Black was a police court judge!"

"A man can learn a lot of law in a police court, sir. I've heard you say so yourself."

"As a
part
of his experience, yes. Not as the whole kit and kaboodle! No, Thaddeus, there's no point trying to mitigate it. It's just another example of the dirty role Lady Luck plays in our lives. I toil for decades and fool myself into thinking I may have made myself a niche in the glorious history of our Constitution only to see the highest honor go to a redneck from my own state!"

Natica was interested to learn of such an ambition from the man who professed to value the uttered word as the sole important joy of life. "Would you like to have been on the court, Mr. Haven?"

He looked at her as though he had just been made aware of her presence. "Young lady," he said solemnly, "it was the great ambition of my life. And do you know what the great irony of my life was? I was offered the court once and turned it down."

"You turned it down!"

He nodded gravely. "I did. I thought I was too young at the time and that the chance would surely come again. And I needed the income from my practice, as I had run up debts in the badly paid years of my public life. So there you are. I actually said no to President Harding." Here he grunted. "And he lost the chance to do the one good deed of his administration."

"The appointment may still come," said Thad consolingly.

"Are you out of your mind? Truman would rather put an illiterate Nigra on the court than a Wall Street lawyer. Besides, I'm too old. Much too old. The accent is all on youth today."

"Well, even if the appointment never comes, you'll have played a greater role as a single advocate before the court than you would have as one of nine judges sitting on it.
That
will be your great part in history, sir, the saving of the Constitution!"

Natica regarded with dismay the earnest countenance of the man she was thinking of marrying. Was it possible that he could be such a toady? And wasn't it worse if he was sincere? Deliberately now she hoisted her pennant of dissent.

"In my opinion, Mr. Haven, Hugo Black will go down in history as one of the court's great justices."

Thad gave a little gasp, but it struck her oddly that it might have been feigned. Could it be that her cool defiance of the old boy amused him? Oh, if
that
were only true!

Haven was shocked into a more temperate reaction. "Do you think so? Thad had told me you were of the liberal persuasion. Though he claims it doesn't affect the quality of your work in representing the saner sort."

"A lawyer should be able to step into any client's shoes, isn't that so, sir?" she demanded.

Thad lumbered heavily to her aid. "May I remind you, sir, that you argued in the Sterne case that the death penalty was a cruel and inhuman punishment and, five years later, in an amicus brief you urged it for a kidnapper."

Haven grunted, not much liking the reminder. "It's true that in trial work there are inconsistencies. At the appellate level you will find more uniformity in my briefs. I wouldn't take a case where I had to argue the constitutionality of a New Deal statute."

Natica's indignation had been heightened by Thad's temporizing effort. "Then I take it, Mr. Haven, you're in favor of continued segregation in the South, entirely aside from the question of states' rights?"

"Entirely. It's the only way for the two races to live together in peace and harmony."

"You mean with one on top and one on the bottom? Why isn't that a revival of slavery?"

Haven hit the table with his fist. "We're not Nazis, damn it all! We treat the Negroes differently for their own good. That's something you Northerners can never understand."

Natica paused to consider her answer to this. She glanced at Thad and wondered if his eyes were pleading for restraint. But his eyes were enigmatic. He might have been watching her with as much curiosity as fear. Was she idiotically risking her future? But then a sudden memory tore like a rocket across the murky sky of the past. She was sitting in Dr. Lockwood's study puffing a cigarette in his infinitely disapproving presence. Yes, yes! These hateful old men had to be resisted at any cost! Any at all!

"You say we Northerners cannot understand, Mr. Haven. Perhaps that's because it's so difficult
to
understand. You say you're not Nazis. But I think I'd rather have been a Jew under Hitler than a Negro in the postbellum South."

"Oh, come now, Natica," Thad protested, now genuinely aroused. "Nothing in the South could compare with the gas chambers!"

"I'm not so sure of that. Let me put these alternatives to you. Which of the following two lives would you prefer?" She paused again to arrange her conditions. "Let me see. All right, I think I have it. The first I offer you is that of a black farmer in the South, say in the early nineteen hundreds. I'll be very fair. I'll give you a kind overseer, a pleasant cottage and a loving family. You'll even be surrounded by children and grandchildren when you die in your eighties. But you'll be illiterate. You will have been forcibly kept in a state of ignorance. And now for my other life. You'll be a Jewish doctor in Berlin, at the height of your career just before Hitler. You will have discovered a cure for some kind of cancer and be a candidate for a Nobel Prize. But you will die with your wife and children at the age of forty in a gas chamber. Which life do you choose?"

Haven, intrigued in spite of himself, breathed a bit heavily. "One is deprived of life, the other of books. Is that the gist of it?"

"That's it. Which is the crueler fate?"

"Obviously, you want me to say the Negro's. But his fate would only be cruel if he were a white man. Your choice is not a fair one."

Haven turned now to Thorne, who was removing the dessert plates, to tell him they would have coffee in the library. "Except I won't have any. I'm tired and I'm going straight to bed. No work tonight! I suggest, Thad, that you take my pretty cross-examiner to some night spot. I'll see you in the morning."

At a roadhouse on the Jericho Turnpike, a half hour later, Natica sipped her whiskey and contemplated her companion's enigmatic expression. He had said nothing in the car about her conduct at dinner, yet he did not seem in the least resentful. It had probably never even crossed his mind that there could ever occur such a thing as his having to choose between her and his partner.

"You're a female Daniel, my dear. You entered the lion's den and emerged unscathed."

"But the lion will never forgive me."

"You think he minds your views that much?"

"I don't think he gives a tinker's damn about my views. What he and I were really fighting about was you. Oh, make no mistake about it. You're the indispensable partner, a kind of surrogate son. And he's damned if he's going to let me get my hot little hands on you!"

Thad reached across the table for one of them. "How is he going to stop you?"

"I'm not sure. You
worship
him so, Thad."

"I don't worship him at all, I admire him. I consider him a great man. Is that so wrong?"

"It might be misguided. He's getting old. And he's scared to death of losing you. Oh, yes, he's scared of that and he's scared of me."

"Because you might take me away from him?"

"And I would, too. If I thought I could."

"But, Natica, what would it profit you?"

"It's more of a question of what it would profit
you.
It might make a man of you."

She liked his not resenting this.

"So you don't think I'm even a man?"

"Perhaps not quite such a one as you could be. My standards are very high. Where you're concerned."

"But can't you admit he's a rather wonderful old boy? Aside, that is, from his constitutional opinions?"

"I'm afraid I can't separate him from them."

"You mean you don't even
like
him?"

"I don't like him at all. I thought I'd made that very clear."

"Then how can you like
me?
"

"Well, that's just it. Do I?"

"I'm glad you smile when you say that. Let's forget poor old Haven. Tell me, dearest. When
will
we get married?"

"Oh, Thad, I don't know. Let's give it a little more time. There are so many things to consider."

"What, that we haven't considered?"

"Well, I'm a two-time loser. And you're so fresh and pure, if that's not an insult. God knows I don't mean it as one."

"I only wish I were purer. I have a past, too."

"Oh, but a man's past. That's nothing. It's not like mine. No, dear, don't argue with me about that. I know all too much about that. And then it seems so odd to me—so rather dreadful, really—that you wouldn't have proposed to me if poor Tommy hadn't gone to the bottom of the ocean. It's as if for the second time I were trying to build my happiness on his defeat."

"In time you may learn to leave those things to God."

"Exactly. That's why I need time." She was shocked by the pain in his eyes. It was rare that he showed pain or even considerable discomfort. It was why it was so hard to determine the depth of his feelings. Yet why in the name of heaven (his heaven anyway) should he want to marry the "likes of her," as his mother would no doubt have expressed it, in the absence of the deepest feeling? "Oh, I suppose you think I wouldn't need time if I really loved you. But that's not true. A woman with my experience learns caution. It's not only that I don't want to play with my own happiness. I don't want to play with yours."

"Can't you let me be the judge of my own happiness?"

"I'm perfectly willing to drive to New York right now and spend the rest of the night in your apartment. Does that shock you? Does it make me seem very brash and forward? It seems to me the least I can offer."