Sol Stein - Other people

I had left word with Margo, who fended my calls, to take messages except for dire emergencies. When she buzzed me in the middle of Hypocrisy Number Nine, she said, "This isn't a dire emergency, it's your lawyer. Later?"

"No," I said, "I'll take it."

Sometimes as I answer a phone call, I see myself as if I were a camera watching me.

"Hello, hello," I said, as though saying it twice made the announcement more personal.

"Hello yourself," Thomassy's voice said, "I've got good news." I pictured him sitting, then standing.

"Are you sitting or standing?" I asked.

"Running," he said. "Aren't you interested in the good news?"

"Of course."

"One D.A. down, one to go."

"You see," I said, "even members of the legal establishment can be reasonable."

"Don't be so sure. I had him by the short hairs."

"How affectionate."

"It wasn't affection. I had some information I didn't think the D.A. wanted to see circulated further. When can you come see me?"

"Today?"

"Preferably. I want to bring you up to date."

"I should be finished in an hour, but it's pretty late now."

"I'll wait for you."

Thomassy the Impregnable sounded human. He added, "Do you have a dinner date?"

"I was going to eat my parents'."

He laughed. "Why don't you call and tell them you won't be home."

"At all?"

"For dinner, I meant."

"They're at a worrying stage."

"Tell them you're with me."

"After hours? They'll worry more. Especially my father. He thinks all men think as he does about me."

By the time I arrived Thomassy's secretary had gone. The outer door wasn't locked. I went in quietly. The door to his office was open. I coughed to catch his attention. He looked up from his paperwork, came out bearing a smile I couldn't associate with the man I had first met. He plunked himself down on the couch in the reception area.

"Please don't stand," he said, gesturing at one of the armchairs. "You feeling better?"

"Got lost in work today," I said. "Helped."

"Good." Though I was ten feet away, I felt as if he were examining my face with his hands.

"This is a business meeting?" I asked.

"Yes."

"You're going to tell me what happened with the Assistant D.A."

He shifted his eyes from their examination of me.

"Yes," he said.

And so he told me about his meeting with Lefkowitz. He stood up to act out the part about sweeping past Lefkowitz's secretary, taking the young lawyer for a breathless walk. He had me laughing. Thomassy should have been an actor.

On the phone it sounded like blackmail. He's making light of it.

"I have a feeling," I said, "that you don't usually fill in your clients along the way."

"You're damn right."

"Why are you doing it now?"

He hesitated. We both knew why.

"You're pretty proud of the way you overwhelmed the poor kid," I said.

"He's about your age. He ought to be able to take care of himself. You can, can't you?"

"Yes I can. If I were up against a blackmailer like you, I'd call the cops."

Thomassy laughed, then immediately apologized. "I'm sorry," he said, "I keep forgetting how naive most people are about the police."

"And about life?"

"Right."

"Like they think the ends don't Justify the means."

He had picked up a magazine from the table. Now he put it down carefully as if he was restraining himself from slamming it. "All right, Miss Philosophy Major."

"Political science," I said.

"Life is not school. A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets. If a woman has a starving child and steals food, those means justify the ends. I'll bet you're for euthanasia."

"Where warranted."

"Okay, you're justifying killing on grounds that it's merciful. You blink the means to secure the end. Think of yourself in a packed lifeboat at sea, filled to capacity, and there's that extra swimmer coming up, wanting to climb aboard. You know the boat won't hold him, do you smash his hands as he tries to hoist himself aboard? What right do you think you have to decide whether someone else is going to live?"

"Maybe one more wouldn't sink the boat."

"Maybe it would. And you'd find out by taking the guy aboard."

"Yes I would."

"Endangering fifteen people maybe. Maybe drowning them."

"I'm civilized."

"To whom, the fifteen already aboard the boat?"

"What would you do?"

"Save the people in the boat."

"By shoving off the fellow trying to get in?"

"If necessary, yes. A bad means to a good end."

"I suppose it'd be easy for you."

A flash of anger reddened his face. He let it pass, then said, "It's a matter of experience. It gets easier to make realistic decisions. Even tough ones."

"You're saying it's easy for you to use a kid like Lefkowitz to twist the D.A.'s—"

"On your account!" he interrupted.

"— after a lifetime of using courtroom tricks."

"I haven't lived a lifetime," he said.

Thomassy was what, fortyish? How few years ago I used to think of that as an age beyond the divide of us and them, over the hill, old people. We move the borderline of acceptability away from us as the years slip. I haven't lived a lifetime, says the vital man.

He continued in a different voice, the mentor trying to be patient with a slow pupil.

"I bet your best teachers in school taught by tricks. I can give you half a dozen examples from my own…"

"Yes?"

"Tricks. Bad means to good ends."

"Not blackmail."

"You want to be a bishop, says the cardinal, you do as I say. I don't know of any area of life where blackmail doesn't get used. It's just we feel more comfortable being hypocritical about it. Why are you laughing?"

I had to tell him what I'd spent the day doing.

"Well," he said, "nice girl spends day cooking up hypocrisy examples to use hypocritically. Bad boy spends day twisting the D.A.'s arm to prosecute a crime."

"What if I said it offended me to have blackmail used for me?"

"I'd say don't get caught doing anything for the rest of your life and you'll be okay. And drop this case."

The gulf I was getting to know was the one between two lawyers, this man and my father. My father lived by the protections afforded by propriety, forms, the sure knowledge that the right people will continue to pretend. Thomassy was man with the mask off, cutting through the bullshit my father thought of as those things that made people civil. Had the barbarians come? The barbarians have always been here. The Widmers were a permanent minority, dwindling as mobile classes cottoned onto the rules the world was governed by.

"You haven't said a thing in two minutes," said Thomassy.

"I've been thinking."

"That disqualifies you from a lot of occupations."

"You think," I said.

"Yes I do."

"Not enough," I said.

"Some things don't have to be rethought every week. Some people learn from experience."

"I thought you were inviting me to dinner tonight."

"I am."

"The Annapolis?"

"I had in mind a place that makes a very interesting light meal."

"Has it got ambience?"

"You'll see."

He took me to his house.

Dear Father, this is one of those open letters I never send. You recommended him as a lawyer who could shepherd my anger through the courts. Now I'm involved with the shepherd. If you knew, it'd make you angrier than the fact of my rape.

Thomassy's house was on a street with six or seven houses, not too close to each other, each set back a hundred feet from the road, enough space for a lawn with a single specimen tree. In the middle of the block, between two of the houses, there seemed to be a house missing. There was only a gravel driveway going back more than a hundred yards into a wooded area. You had to go most of the way before you saw the small house nestled among the trees. In the middle of civilization, Thomassy had gotten himself a forest home, seclusion in the suburbs, invisible to strangers.