Scott Turow - The Burden of Proof

Ms. Klonsky, as she had just demonstrated with her remark about Sennett, was not really equipped to be discreet. She understood the role, but her large, expansive character was still not comfortably confined by lawyerly proprieties. Like many young attorneys, she was imitating the mentor-Sennett, in this case-rather than making allowances for herself.

Duke's was little more than a lunch counter, a greasy spoon with an open grill under a spattered aluminum hood, and a number of old Formica tables. Klonsky set her files down when they were seated and lifted her face to the frying smells.

"Wonderful," she said.

"That is an overstatement. Reliable will suffice. You have never been?" 'She shook her head.

'The proprietor," said Stern, "is the little dark fellow you see in the kitchen. A Rumanian. He is best known for his sausage, which he makes himself and which he aptly refers to on the menu as 'Ruination." Will you eat?" Stern akeady had the menu in hand.

"I shouldn't," she said. "I've put on twelve pounds already." But she picked up the laminated card nonetheless.

"Your son-in-law got a lawyer, you know. I was a little surprised by your referral."

"Oh, well," said Stern, and smiled fleetly. He, on the other hand, was well practiced in appearing agreeable yet.remaining silent; how John chose his lawyer was not the prosecutor's business. He had been troubled not to have heard something from his son-in-law, but Klonsky's remark made it clear that he had followed Stern's advice and retained Raymond Horgan. There were many people in the legal community puzzled by Stern's affinity with Horgan.

They'd had celebrated battles while Raymond was the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney, culminating in some uncomfortable moments three years ago when Stern had crossexamined Horgan, Who appeared as a prosecution witness at the murder trial of Rusty Sabich, Raymond's former Chief Deputy. But the law, much like politics, made its own strange bedfellows. Horgan's large firm liked to send cases they could not handle due to conflicts to Stern, who could not compete for the other legal work of the big corporate clients, and he n. aturally reciprocated.

"What's really good?" she asked.

"The sausage, if you have the stomach for it. I am not certain it is suited to your present condition."

"I doubt it," she said. "I've just started eating meat again. For the protein."

"A vegetarian?"

"Oh, I've been very careful for years about what I eat. I was once very sick." She looked directly at Stern, the hinge of some tentativeness clear in her eye. "Cancer," she said.

The waitress came then, saving Stern from a response. Ms. Klonsky had a disconcerting directness, a willingness to proceed past the recognized borders with little thought, a trait which made Stern uneasy. She asked for a single scrambled egg, while he ordered an omelette and tWO servings of the sausage. He promised her a bite.

"What was I saying?" she asked. Stern did not answer, but she remembered herself and said simply, "Oh, yes."

"You appear a picture of health now."

"I think I am. I mean, I wouldn't be in this condition-" She lifted a hand. "But so much of it is outlook. You really never forget about it.

You tell yourself you're well. You search for signs that you're not, and when you don't find them, you rejoice and tell yourself that you can go back to believing that you're infinite, the way you did before."

"How old were you?"

She raised her eyes to remember. "Thirty-five, thirty-six just about."

Stern shook his head. That was young, he said, for that sort of thing.

"Well, you know how it is. You get to the hospital feeling why me, how me, and then there are plenty of people in the same condition, and worse." She had asked for tea and interrupted herself to fish the bag in and out of the cup when the waitress brought it. "It didn't seem so unusual there. But I was a very young thirty-six. My life was in chaos. I was in law school, but it was the fourth postgraduate education I'd started. I had no idea what I was doing. My relationship with Charlie was going through its one millionth crisis-" She raised her hands for emphasis, one wrist today bedecked with a mw of bright plastic bracelets, "It just seemed so unbelievable to me that I was being shown the door, when I didn't even feel I'd arrived." :The expression made Stern laugh. "What were your other postgraduate programs?"

"Let's see." She raised her hands to count and again lifted her eyes to the grimy acoustical tiles of Duke's ceiling.

"From college, I went out to California for graduate school,in philosophy, but I wasn't ready for that, so I enrolled in:the Peace Corps-remember that?-and was in the Philippines for two years. When I came back, I started graduate school in English, which is where I met Charlie. I left that because I couldn't imagine actually writing a dissertation. But, of course, I'd finished all the class work before I figured that out. Then I taught for about a year and a half then I went back to the U. as a graduate student in education. Then:I gave up on the educational bureaucracy as hopeless. Naturally, I owed a fortune in student loans at that point. So I began thinking about getting a decent-paying job. Which 'led to law. There were some things in between, but they didn't last long enough to mention."

"I see," said Stern. "It does sound as if you had a hard time getting started."

"Not starting," she said. "That was no problem at all.

Finishing was hard. I always believed that I was not an achievement-oriented person, but when I got sick, I was really unhappy that I didn't have a single thing I could look back to that I'd completed. It was as if I'd.passed through and never even left tracks.

It was pathetic. I was getting radiation. I was lying there with my hair falling out, recovering from surgery, and I had Charlie bringing me volumes of Hart Crane. I actually started writing my dissertation right there. And, naturally, one morning I vomited all over it. That, needless to say, was a low point." She sat back, gripped by her own story. She picked up a dull steel fork off the table and stared at it.

"I'm talking too much," she said.

"You are charming, Sonia," he answered, and immediately felt he had been drawn into her habit of saying more than one should. He rushed on to something more neutral. "So you became a health-food person in the wake of your illness? My daughter, who is a lawyer in New York, comes home with a knapsack full of bags and bottles of such things. I've learned to ask no questions."

"Oh, yes. That's me. Ms. Natural here. We drive around all day on Saturday and shop. Charlie has written poems about it. It really is better for you. But the doctor has been dropping some pretty broad hints about more protein."

"Your husband is a poet?"

"A living, breathing, write-every-day poet. He actually puts it in our tax return: 'Poet." He has another job, naturally. You have to. Charlie likes to say we have the same employer.". She smiled. "He's a postal clerk. He was an instructor in the English Department at the U. for years, but he couldn't hack the politics. And he makes more money this way and gets more time to write. It's an absolutely impossible, impractical life, to which he's completely devoted." She smiled once more, somewhat fitfully this time. Perhaps she felt she was being disloyal. She looked again at the silverware and took a second to praise her husband's verse.

The eggs came then.

"God," said Klonsky, "what is that black lump?"

"Ruination," he said. "What else?" Stern cut a piece and lifted it toward her, but she made a horrible face and raised both hands.

"It makes me queasy just to see it. It looks like something excreted."

Stern dropped his fork to the plate."

"Young woman," he said darkly, "this is my breakfast." She began to laugh then, a fine trilling note full of joy and congratulation. He laughed himself and she got caught up in her own amusement and went on until she had to use her napkin to wipe her eyes. She managed to say,