Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

'How did you end up in this position in the first place? One way or the other, won't somebody say your decision is based on how you feel about this boy or his family?'

I explain the circumstances. I was free to keep the case if I wanted to. The week before the trial, I even took the precaution of describing my predicament to Brendan Tuohey, the Chief Judge. The thought of me in a ticklish situation seemed to spark some brief delight beneath the crafty veneer of his narrow rosy face, but he was reassuring. 'You're the right judge, Sonny,' he told me. 'You know the saying: "If you can't tell the difference between your job and your friends, you don't deserve either." Comes with the robes, you know. Besides, if you don't sit, no one in the Criminal Division will want to. Then the Supreme Court will make me pay the bill to bring in someone awful.' He regaled me with a long story about the extravagant expenses the court incurred when the Supreme Court designated an upstate judge named Farrell Smedley to sit on the fraud trial of Marcelino Bolcarro, the former Mayor's brother. 'Did you know, Sonny, that man never met a lobster he didn't like? I finally asked him, "Don't you ever get a taste for ground beef?" And the poor dumb backwoods s.o.b., he looked at me, I thought he was simply gonna cry. "L'il Abner," they called him behind his back.' Tuohey went off shaking his head.

'But why did you?' Gwen asks.

'What?'

'Want it? The case? It sounds so messy.' 'Nostalgia?'

'You're not nostalgic. I don't know anybody who was happier to grow up. You quake when I mention high school. You barely remembered me.' This, of course, is an exaggeration, but I did lose track of Gwen, like so many others. Then in 1983, I took a routine mammogram. In one of those strange twists, the radiologist at Bethesda who read the film was Gwendolyn. She showed up at my house in person, took my hand, wept when I wept after the biopsy, and promised we would arrive together on the other side of the experience, as we have. Another part of the past I don't much care to remember.

‘I don't know,' I say. 'Do you know anybody our age who doesn't look back at that time without feeling they did something amazing, like going off to the Crusades?' I've often heard recollections of Gwendolyn's experiences in Madison. She performed nude onstage in rock musicals and still relishes the memory.

'You know what it is?' Gwen points a long nail at me, manicured in a persimmon shade. 'It's Zora. You're working something out with Zora.'

'I'm always working something out with Zora. I'm working something out with Zora when I send Nikki to school in the morning.'

She shrugs. I do as well, but Gwendolyn has exerted her customary power to upset me. I bundle her into a taxi, feeling low, feeling again that I'm careening about as the captive of mysterious forces and that I blundered taking this case. Everyone else knows something – about me, or the case, or what will happen with it – which has completely eluded me. Dubinsky had his own sarcastic prediction, the last thing I overheard from the next table. He was talking about Eddgar's role as a legislative advocate of penal reform.

'Eddgar's in those prisons twice a month, looking them over and giving the wardens hell,' Stew said. Then his laughter, sharply nasal, always somehow derisive, pealed forth, loud even on the other side of the partition. He'd amused himself greatly with a thought.

'Now he can go on Sundays, too,' Dubinsky said.

Seth

Jolted by the million marchers who'd gathered on the Mall on November 15 to protest the war, Congress enacted the draft lottery system the next week. Now, instead of years of continuing jeopardy, eligible men would confront only a single night when their fate would be decided. Some would go; some would be free. I recognized the lottery for what it was, an ignoble effort to divide and demobilize the young. But privately I was near jubilation. All but certain to be drafted days before, I now had a chance to escape.

The lottery was conducted on December 2, at 5 p.m. our time. We watched in our apartment. Hobie and Lucy were there. So was Michael. Sonny sat next to me, holding my hand. The local news yielded to Walter Cronkite and a live feed from Washington. It looked like my imagination of a court-martial – a bunch of old men up on a platform. A congressman pulled the first little capsule from the rotating drum. A date, September 14, was read aloud by an elderly colonel and posted on a board behind him. The point of the lottery was to place every day of the year in a random order, which would, in turn, become the sequence in which young men would be called. If you were born on September 14, you'd be drafted first. On the other hand, if Hobie's birthday or mine was pulled above a certain number – 200, we figured, given the many deferments in University Park – we'd be free.

Members of President Nixon's Selective Service Youth Advisory Board grabbed the remaining little bullets from the drum. They were draft-age men with haircuts which revealed their ears, work-within-the-system types whom I despised. One of them drew my birthday, March 12. It was the fifteenth number selected. I would get a draft notice by April at the latest.

'Luck of the Irish,' I said, but the joke was bad and my tone was worse. Somehow I'd gotten to my feet. From behind, Sonny wrapped both arms around my chest, just to hold on. 'I am fucked,' I told her. There was no counter.

The local newscast resumed, with the numbers from DC scrolled along the bottom of the screen. I watched stupefied, trying to envision my future and hating everything in America. In Hartford, two students were on trial for criminal libel for publishing an obscene cartoon of Nixon in the college paper. Mark Rudd and the Weathermen had been indicted in Chicago for the Days of Rage. And the saga of Juanita Rice, currently riveting California, was continuing. The girl was the object of occasional sightings across the state, while her captors issued various communiques demanding five evenings of national TV time. Since it had occurred, the Rice kidnapping had been of irrational concern to my mother. Having heard about my radical acquaintances in the building, she convinced herself they might kidnap me, too. It was, I suppose, some kind of coping mechanism, a danger she could reasonably dismiss – unlike Vietnam.

In the meantime, Hobie sat silently before the TV, watching the numbers roll. Hobie was as intent on avoiding Nam as I was, but he had a different approach. He swore he would show up for his induction physical in a dress. He was going to claim to have had homosexual relations with every prominent black Communist from Patrice Lumumba to Gus Hall. He also sometimes attached his leg to a concrete cinder block and pulley, hoping to aggravate a high-school football injury. Now, once the numbers passed 275, we knew he would not have to go through any of those antics. Inconsolably jealous, I nonetheless roused myself to kiss him on the forehead.

'Luck of the Irish,' Hobie said. He did not hit until after 300. The last one to go was Michael at 342 – and him with a 1-Y. Even though he had grown up mowing and baling, Michael had been exempted from the draft for hay fever and asthma. It did not seem fair, but very little at that moment did.

My mother and father had viewed the lottery with almost pitiably high hopes. They did not find the courage to call until the following afternoon. It was 6:01 p.m. Central Time, the very minute long-distance rates went down. No matter how extreme the circumstances, my father would never violate his personal dogma about money.

When my parents phoned on Sundays, my father and I barely spoke. He made a few correct inquiries regarding my health or the California weather, then passed the phone to my mother, who painfully elaborated a list of questions I knew she had been assembling all week. With a rush of constricted feeling, 1 would visualize the two of them, my mother holding a ball of Kleenex, her fingers touching her mouth, my father close enough to overhear, but with his head in a paper to show he did not have much interest. But this was a moment of confrontation with his renegade son, a challenge from which my father never retreated.