Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

Straight out of the gate, however, the problems began. When Charlotte stood from behind the plaintiff’s table she said, “Good morning, George. I did just want to say, I am so glad it’s you.”

Incredulous, the town attorney rose to object but Cushman stayed him before he could speak. The lawyer for the intervener, Fanning, however, would not be held back.

“May I approach, Your Honor?”

“No, Counselor, you may not. You will be pleased to sit down. Now, Ms. Graves,” he said, “litigants must address this court as either ‘Your Honor’ or ‘the court.’ Is that clear?”

“Of course, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean any offense. Your Honor.”

“All right, then,” he said. “Is there anything you’d like to say in addition to your submissions in this case?”

“Oh, yes, there is. You see, after I sent you the letter I found this book in the library that had what they called model pleadings, and right away I realized that I may have somewhat obscured my central contention. The way I wrote it out, I mean. This business of the thirty years. I understand that. Why we have to quiet the wishes of the dead like that I’m not so sure, but there we are. I’ll leave that for another day. But what I’m saying is slightly different. Would you mind if I read a quote?”

“Go right ahead,” Cushman said, leaning back in his chair.

“This is from a book I came across by a Professor Duckington. He writes, ‘While, in its infinite wisdom, the legislature has seen fit to extinguish the rights of individuals in possession of contingent remainders in real property, presumably in the interest of dusting titles clean of those cobwebs of the common law that were seen as an encumbrance to an efficient and reliable system of sale and purchase, the people’s representatives were sufficiently mindful of their own prerogatives, along with those of churches and charitable corporations , as to exclude themselves and the latter from the consequences of their good judgment.’”

She closed the book, returned it to the table, and smiled proudly.

“Heaven help the man’s students,” Cushman said, “but it sounds accurate enough. The rule applies to individuals. But the distinction’s not relevant in this case.”

“Oh, but it is, George,” she said. “You see, my grandfather — he was a charity.”

“Come again.”

“Willard Graves, before he died, he turned himself into a charity: the Graves Society. We’ve been puttering along ever since. My point is, if you look at the records, he didn’t give the land to Finden. The society did. So you see, the thirty-year rule — it doesn’t apply here. The conditions in the bequest are still good. Which means the land no longer belongs to Finden or to Mr. Fanning. It belongs to our family’s trust. In fact, it has ever since the town sold it. The documents are all here in my file. I believe all I need from the court is the title. And then we’ll be done.”

For the following ten seconds no one in the courtroom uttered a word. In fact, they barely moved. Like guests at a funeral who have just witnessed the lid of the coffin come open and the corpse sit up to greet them with a smile, they stared at Charlotte in awe.

Then the shouting began.

Mikey nearly fell over the front end of the jury box, where he and Doug had been instructed to sit, as he leapt up to yell, “Approach! Approach!” taking on, in panicked violation of courtroom decorum, the voice of the judge himself, whose rejoinder was hardly audible over the fuming objections of the town lawyer, who didn’t even bother addressing himself to the bench, hurling his words directly at Charlotte. By the time Judge Cushman got a hold of his gavel and began slamming it, Wilkie and Sam had scampered into the aisle and begun barking up a racket, causing everyone but an appalled Henry to turn in still greater astonishment to the sight of two drooling hounds bolting toward the front of the courtroom.

“Bailiff!” Cushman cried, standing to pound his gavel. “Bailiff!”

Order wasn’t restored for another ten minutes, as the dogs were dragged snarling from the room and the lawyers, ignoring local rules, jumped onto their cell phones to offices and aides in a desperate effort to fill in the suddenly gaping void in their understanding of a case for which they had barely bothered to prepare. After denying repeated motions for a continuance, Judge Cushman declared a recess and returned to his chambers with Charlotte’s file.

By the time he’d finished examining the documents, he’d been reminded that there were, after all, a few unique pleasures to his occupation. He could of course give the town time to regroup. But they had no good argument for why they deserved such a reprieve. The evidence Charlotte was relying on had been stored in their own basement. And as to the legal argument, she was perfectly correct. The donation of the land had come from a charity. The rule didn’t apply. He needn’t reach the question of whether the town had been willful or merely negligent in its sale. Either way, they lost.

Back on the bench, he listened with serenity to the attorneys’ pleas, objections, and even their threats of appeal and motions for recusal. When at last they had exhausted themselves, he thanked them for their advice, and then, allowing himself just this once a flash of that declamatory rhetoric that as a law student he’d dreamt of dispensing but never quite found an opportunity to employ amidst the grayness of actual litigation, he began, “As the great British prime minister William Gladstone once put it, ‘Justice delayed is justice denied.’” Announcing his finding that the papers presented left no room for doubt about Charlotte’s claim, he continued, “The court is certainly sympathetic to the plight the purchaser now finds himself in, having built a house on land it turns out that he does not own. But the right of reentry is an ancient one, predating our own Constitution. I cannot set it aside merely because it presents an inconvenience. However, now that the subject of ownership has been settled in favor of the Graves Society, my hope is the parties can arrive at a negotiated settlement. With this in mind, I suspend for sixty days the order I hereby enter granting plaintiff’s family trust title in the land.”

Looking down over his glasses at the once-again silenced courtroom, he asked, “Is there anything further in this matter?”

Glenda Holland had decided it was just the thing to stay put in Finden on the Fourth of July and throw a grand party for all their friends and obligations. Jeffrey had canceled their plans for Capri, the Cape house was still under renovation, and Florida was out of the question in such ghastly weather. Besides, the Harrises were staying in town, the Finches, the Mueglers, the dreary board of the Historical Association, to which she had been dragooned into writing checks, and of course her wretched son and his prankster friends, and their parents for that matter, if they wanted to come — who was she, after all, to be embarrassed by her son’s failure to crawl from the tub of even a public school? — in addition to which there was the advantage that as long as Jeffrey invited clients and a few shelves of Union Atlantic’s management, the whole hing-ho could be charged up on the bank’s entertainment account.

It being too late for save the dates, she’d gone straight to invitations, whizzing them out FedEx and doubling up the numbers. The caterer had to be bought out of a wedding contract, the tent people bribed, and the florist threatened with boycott. But by the time the real heat commenced that weekend before the Fourth, her chief suppliers had more or less fallen into line and the phone had begun to ring off the hook.