An Imperfect Spy (9 page)

“Well, I might get some more tonic,” Kate said, moving toward the bar.

“Allow me,” Abbott said; he took her glass. “I’ll be right back; don’t move. Just plain tonic?”

“Please,” Kate said. His gallantry allowed her a moment to structure her response, for which she was grateful.

“I’ve been thinking of what you asked,” she said
when he had returned with their glasses refilled. “I don’t think revolutions come gradually, or in measured steps, and we are living in a revolution. There are two possible faculty responses to revolutions: to fight them, and to join them, hoping in the process perhaps to offer not only encouragement, but some restraint and caution. The problem I have found—I speak frankly, and only about literature—is that caution is misplaced, because those in power, those who like the old ways, will not budge until pushed. And once you push, the momentum carries you even further than you had quite foreseen.”

“Yes,” Abbott said, “I’ve noticed that. That’s why I’m against the pushers. I’m ready to stand and defend what we have. After all, it took many years of effort to achieve what we have, in law and literature, and surely it’s worth respect.”

“Except for the fact that it is white men who have achieved it, and told some lies and committed some crimes in the process. Since we now know that, we revolutionaries feel inclined to question everything, perhaps more than we should.”

“You want to throw out the baby with the bathwater?”

“No,” Kate said. “I think we just want to reconsider the baby and change the bathwater. But clichés are hard to build on, don’t you find?”

“Clichés, perhaps. Wisdom, I find, is not hard to build on.” He had returned to his pomposity, and was looking over her shoulder. Kate turned to find Blair approaching with yet another faculty member in tow. “Let me introduce you to Augustus Slade,”
he said to Kate. “Kate Fansler is teaching the law and literature course with me,” Blair told Slade, unnecessarily. More informatively, and sensing her need to distinguish these men one from the other, he said to Kate: “Professor Slade teaches Criminal Law.” Kate greeted Slade with more enthusiasm than she felt; one could have too many conversations with members of this exalted faculty. She wondered, irrelevantly, if Harriet had decided to attend this sad example of a social whirl. Apparently not; wise Harriet.

Kate repressed a sigh. When caught, as she now was, in a reception or cocktail party, Kate thought of Shaw’s response when asked to stand for Parliament: “It would be easier and pleasanter to drown myself,” he had replied. But Professor Slade was, clearly, ready like the others to let her know she had no business here at a law school. What Slade did not realize was that Kate had decided upon him as the one to be questioned about the battered woman syndrome. Reed had told her that a number of women in the prison his clinic would be associated with were there for having killed their battering husbands. Kate wondered how the old guard would react to this new twist of the law, though she thought she could guess.

“And how do you like the company of lawyers?” Slade asked. “Or are you, because of your lawyer husband, quite used to having us around?”

“I’m not used to it,” Kate said, “and I welcome the opportunity to talk about law instead of literature.
Would you mind if I asked you some lawyerly questions? Blair did say you teach Criminal Law.”

“Like your husband. Surely you can’t have any questions you couldn’t ask him?”

That was a facer. “Well,” Kate said, adopting a simpering manner that always worked with just-met professors and other self-satisfied and powerful males, “I don’t like to bother him with questions when he comes home after a hard day’s work. One wants to show an interest, don’t you know, but one doesn’t want to hammer away.”

“Very good thinking,” Slade said. “I wish you could pass your wisdom on to my wife. She seems to think I can explain every legal twist and turn the newspapers pepper us with. What was it you wanted to ask in these professional surroundings?”

“Well,” Kate simpered on, “being a woman, I’m naturally interested in the new laws affecting women. The old laws don’t seem to have taken women into account.” She hoped this would get him onto the battered woman syndrome, but if not, she would have to get more specific.

It appeared, however, that she had pushed the right button. “These changes in the law are preposterous nine tenths of the time,” he declared. “Giving women total rights over their bodies is bad enough, with no consideration for the fetus, but when you distort the law to let a woman murder her husband and let her off by rules that don’t apply to men, you have got yourself in real danger. Real danger.”

“Surely that can’t happen,” Kate said, widening her eyes and crossing several fingers and toes.

“It can and does, my dear. Practically every day. It might have happened to my oldest friend, Fred Osborne, but the only comforting aspect to his horrible death is the fact that his wife was sent to the prison on Staten Island before this battered-woman nonsense took hold, and I trust she will rot there. Betty Osborne should have been put to death, in my opinion, but despite what you say, the law is easier on women.”

Kate forswore pointing out that New York State did not have the death penalty except for killing policemen. “I can’t believe that the wife of a friend of yours actually killed her husband,” she said.

“Killed him in cold blood when he was asleep. Just as though he were an animal. Like a gang execution, really, that’s what it was. Horrible.”

“Why was she mad at him?” Kate asked.

“No reason; no reason on earth. She was just crazy, a mad, ungrateful, unbalanced woman.”

“Did he beat her? Isn’t that why it’s called the battered woman syndrome?”

“Of course he didn’t beat her; he was a member of this faculty, not a working-class thug. She claimed he beat her, of course, but I can tell you the worst he did was drink a bit much, and maybe he knocked her around once or twice when he was under the influence, but I’m sure she wasn’t battered. She had a nice home and two children; she was a liar and a nut, if you ask me. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Slade left
with no pretense of courtesy; he was opting out of the discussion.

Kate stood for a moment, reflecting on his remarks, isolated in this room of babbling voices, sharply aware of not belonging, of being, in fact, a spy in an enemy camp. She had barely begun to reflect on this strange experience when a glass was tapped, and a tall, trim, handsome man demanded attention. “Welcome,” he said, when the room grew quiet, “welcome to our traditional gathering. At least once each semester we join, all of us who teach in this fine institution, in one room to remind ourselves who we are and what our mission is: to pass on the law as our forefathers conceived it, to the young who will defend it after we are gone. The need for defense of that noble law grows greater each year. I lift my glass in tribute to those who honor what time and experience have proven true to our country’s destiny.”

Kate found Blair at her side. “Who on earth …?” she whispered.

“The dean, our leader,” Blair whispered back. “You should have met him when you were hired, but he was busy fund-raising. Frankly, I rather pushed you through before his return. He doesn’t believe in law and literature, or in law and anything else whatsoever, including justice.” The dean droned on praising his law school for “maintaining standards too easily abandoned by institutions considered more elite, who had sold out to the demands of those marginal to our great culture, who had no hand in writing our laws or defending them against
their enemies. I drink to the wise makers of our Constitution.”

“Does he consider the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution?” Kate asked.

“I doubt it,” Blair said. “He would certainly not be in favor of them, were they up for a vote today. He thinks the Second Amendment guarantees his and every American’s right to carry an unlicensed handgun.”

“My god, Blair, what have we got into, me and Reed? How did you ever decide to join this mob in the first place?”

“I wanted to be in New York, a city I love. Of course, as you realize, I had no idea what I was getting into. So, instead of leaving, I decided to bore from within. Hence you and Reed.”

The dean was concluding his remarks to enthusiastic applause. All raised their glasses to drink to their fine school. Kate thought there was a distinct danger that she might be ill; she and Blair made their way out of the room and, eventually, out of the building. Kate took large breaths of air.

“And to think I might have drunk with them,” she said. “I’m particular about whom I drink with, and it doesn’t include this amazing faculty. Slade actually told me that one of his noble colleagues was shot by his wife when he was sleeping. Is that true? Slade said she shot her husband like a gang executioner.”

“Gangs execute in the back of the head; she shot him in the chest,” Blair said. “A few times. And yes, of course I know about it and it is true. He does
seem to have been a monster, but as far as the faculty here is concerned, he was the innocent victim of a woman’s wrath.”

“I begin to think I know nothing about crime,” Kate said. “And she didn’t try to hide the gun or pretend there had been a burglary, nothing like that?”

“Nothing like that. She called for help. They found her still holding the gun. She never denied killing him; he died before the medics could get there.”

“Did you know her at all?” Kate asked.

“No. I’m afraid I rather avoided my colleagues after hours; certainly I didn’t know their wives. Nellie Rosenbusch knew her, though. Said she often had bruises, and cried all the time. Nellie told me she never guessed Betty would have the nerve; she certainly didn’t have the nerve to leave. There were children, of course.”

Kate sighed. Reed, coming up to them at that moment, suggested to Kate that they proceed uptown. Like her, he seemed eager to place some distance between the party scene and himself. “Will you come with us?” he asked Blair.

But Blair felt he should return to the party. “I am on the faculty,” he said. “I can’t flit in and out like you two. See you in class anyway,” he told Kate. She and Reed set out toward the subway.

“Shall we walk to the next stop?” he asked.

“I’m always ready to walk,” Kate said. “Tell me more about your prospective battered-women clients who killed their husbands. No,” she said, stopping
in her tracks. “I think I’ll go back and have a word with Harriet, who is supposedly to be found in the secretarial room, or whatever they call it. I want to get my impressions clear about the members of this creepy faculty before I forget which is which. Do you mind going on alone?”

“I will always mind going on alone,” Reed said, “but I can handle it for a few hours.”

After some exploration and the opening of a number of wrong doors, Kate found Harriet seated in a large room at the first desk she encountered upon entering. Behind her were other desks occupied by young women, sitting before computers; what Kate took to be copying machines were grouped together at the very back, as though for protection.

“You look surprised,” Harriet said by way of a greeting.

“I am. Mere professors of literature do not get this kind of service. There are two sad and overworked women for the whole department. I type my own letters, simultaneously acquiring nobility for myself and accuracy for my letters.”

“Lawyers are rich and catered to,” Harriet said. “Blair Whitson told me that one of the things that used to infuriate Nellie Rosenbusch was that if she came in here to get something copied, any male professor in the room would assume she was a secretary and ask her to ‘take care of this’ for him.”

“I can’t help feeling, fresh as I am from the reception
downstairs, that there ought to be one redeeming character in this place.”

“One honest man, as the angel said before destroying Sodom. Or was it Gomorrah? We have Blair; that’s miracle enough.”

They were interrupted by a man, apparently liberated from the reception, asking for a clean copy of this and eighteen copies of that. Kate stood by while Harriet dealt with him.

“You seem good at this,” Kate said.

“Of course I’m good at it; anyone with a modicum of intelligence and the patience of Griselda would be. We take all the hassle out of these men’s lives; it’s brought me to a new principle of leadership. No rich men should be leaders because they do not experience hassle, which is the major lot of most lives. Is there anything I can do for
you
, by the way, besides chatter on? Do you want something typed for your seminar?”

“What I want is some inside dope, bluntly put,” Kate said. “Can you take a tea break or something?”

“Actually, we’re just about done here.” And Kate looked up to see the women turning off their computers and retrieving their purses from desk drawers. “Make it a scotch break, and I’m with you.”

“Sold,” Kate said. “Your place or mine?”

“Yours. You have better scotch. Also, as someone said of George Smiley, ‘There has always been that certain kind of guilt about passing on his whereabouts—I still don’t know why.’ ”

They arrived at Kate’s house, where she was
amused to see Harriet greet the doorman as an old acquaintance. Reed had left a note saying he had gone over to his office to get his mail.

“The truth is,” Kate said when they were seated, scotch in hand and the bottle on the table, “I wanted to find out if you’d picked up a good bit of gossip while reigning over the secretarial room.”

“But of course. To quote yet another of le Carré’s characters, not dear George Smiley: ‘Men are no good at it. Only women are capable of such passionate espousal of the destiny of others.’ ”

“It doesn’t sound altogether a compliment,” Kate said.

“It’s still true. And what man is there who wouldn’t talk to you with a little encouragement, or even with none? That being established, what sort of gossip were you after?”

“Professor Slade told me at the reception that one of the law professors there had been shot by his wife; she’s in prison on Staten Island, where Reed’s clinic will have its clients. I thought if you knew anything about it, he might be persuaded to look into the matter further. If she really was a battered wife, that is.”