Authors: Allen Drury
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Genre Fiction, #Political, #Contemporary Fiction
“Sue-Ann and I were at Henry Randall’s last night for dinner,” Justice Pomeroy said, naming the shrewd legal mind who was senior Senator from Virginia and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “and the guessing there seemed to center around Taylor Barbour. For what it’s worth.”
Rupert Hemmelsford, who had been chairman of Judiciary himself before his appointment to the Court, blinked his eyebrows and assumed the disapproving look he got when contemplating the highly intelligent, highly effective, much-publicized forty-six-year-old Secretary of Labor. “Henry’s a good weathervane,” he said, “but I’m not so sure I can work very well with Tay Barbour. I don’t anticipate he’ll have any trouble with Senate confirmation, though. I’d guess two days of hearings and confirmation by about seventy to twenty-six, wouldn’t you, Wally?”
“Higher than that,” Justice Flyte said with a calculation harking back to his own Senate days. “More like eighty to seventeen, I hear. Tay has some problems, but I don’t think they lie with the Senate.”
“Things are running down with that marriage,” Justice Wallenberg observed with characteristic bluntness. “It could affect his work as a Justice. It’s not unheard of, in Court history.”
“He’ll subordinate it to the Court,” Mary-Hannah suggested. “He won’t let anything disturb his work here.”
“You like him,” Rupert Hemmelsford said, his tone almost an accusation. She nodded briskly.
“Very much, Rupe. Shouldn’t I?”
Justice Hemmelsford sniffed. “You liberals always stick together.”
“And you conservatives don’t?” she inquired. “Anyway, you know this institution, Rupe. Today’s liberal is tomorrow’s conservative is next day’s liberal is next day’s conservative—you know how it goes.”
“That’s one of the great things about us, isn’t it?” Hughie Demsted agreed with a grin. “Nobody can tie us down, not even our own past records. Once we come on this bench there’s not a soul on earth can control us or be absolutely sure what we’re going to do. That’s one of our great strengths—infinitely better to have us sitting up here a bunch of unpredictable independent mavericks than it would be if we were just a gang of puppets for some transient in the White House. Right?”
“He
wouldn’t like to be referred to like that,” Rupe Hemmelsford said with a chuckle. “Like all of ’em, he’s got the idea he’s eternal. Whereas in reality”—he gave his sly grin—“we are. But you’re right, of course. It keeps him wonderin’ and hoppin’.”
“Which is all to the good for the country,” Hughie Demsted said triumphantly, settling back to take a sip of his coffee. “If not, Ray, the law.”
“The law has got to be consistent if it’s to mean anything,” Justice Ullstein insisted with his quiet stubbornness that often achieved more than another man’s flamboyant dramatics.
“We’re the law,” Moss Pomeroy said with his usual irreverent grin, “and we’re not consistent, half the time. So how can the law be?”
“It’s got to be,” Ray Ullstein said doggedly. “Or at least we’ve got to try to make it so. We’ve got to subordinate our personal feelings and problems, as we were saying about Tay Barbour earlier, to the needs of this Court.”
“Well,” Justice McIntosh said with some dryness, “we’re important, all right, but I don’t know that we’re
all
that keeps the country from drifting. There’s a whole complex of things—tradition, old habit, respect for and devotion to the Constitution, a basic respect for law and order among the great majority of our countrymen—”
“Who are about, as Dunc says, to take the law into their own hands and raise counter-hell with everything,” Wally Flyte remarked dryly.
“Listen!” Justice McIntosh said, as sternly as though she were still dean of the Stanford Law School, which she had been for five years before her appointment to the Court. “Don’t lecture me on the situation in this country! I know what it is. I also know that not an hour ago we voted five to three to deny certiorari to
Evans
v.
Minnesota,
a very pertinent case, and it wasn’t
my
vote that kept us from considering it. The Chief asked us to face up to it. Well, we just didn’t. What is it going to take?” she demanded with a concluding burst of indignation. “Will one of
us,
or somebody near us, have to be slaughtered or mutilated or something, before we come to grips with it?”
“Well, now, May,” Dunc Elphinstone said soothingly, figuring it was time, as Rupert Hemmelsford often put it behind his back, “to spread on a little of the old snake oil,” “I don’t think we need to get personal about things. It’s bad enough, as we all know. I’m hopeful,” he added with a slight asperity that indicated he, too, was becoming impatient, “that in the next couple of weeks we’ll find a case we can all agree on, grant it certiorari and
get to it.
We can’t fiddle around much longer.”
“I’m ready,” Justice Wallenberg said, returning his gaze with a calm and unimpressed air. “But it’s got to be a good case, not one we have to stretch for. Maybe South Carolina”—he turned and bowed sarcastically to Moss Pomeroy—“will provide us with something. It’s already given us the Court dude.”
“Clem, God damn it,” Justice Pomeroy said, “will you stop sniping at me? I’m sick of it! Sick of it! Just because I have thirty years on you—or is it a hundred?—and a beautiful wife and lots of money and smashing good looks”—he began both to exaggerate and soften his tone and his usual charming grin began to break through—“and you’re just a sour, wizened, nasty old sourpuss who’s a liberal-conservative or a conservative-liberal or some kind of all-purpose Push me-Pull you for the Court—anyway,” he concluded cheerfully as they all, even Clem, started to laugh—“what the hell are we talking about? The whole thing is too serious to fight over in chambers. Why don’t you all come down to South Carolina and be my guests, and we can relax and forget it for a day?”
“What’s the occasion?” Justice Wallenberg inquired in a still slightly prickly, but mollified, tone.
“They’re dedicating the Pomeroy Station atomic energy plant,” Moss said, “and you know why I’m involved. It’s out west in the Blue Ridge on what was the original Pomeroy Grant in 1693, although we haven’t owned the property for at least a hundred years, I guess. But because my name’s still on it, and because I was governor when they started to build it, they want me there. I’d like to invite you all, if you’d like to come.”
“Against atomic energy,” Clem Wallenberg said shortly. “Wouldn’t be caught dead.”
“Scratch one,” Justice Pomeroy said with unfrayed cheer. “I’m just as relieved as you are, Clem. Any more cop-outs?”
The Chief hunched forward and clasped his hands under his chin with a thoughtful air.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, looking up and down the table, “we’ve already had some cases on the atomic issue, as you know, and inevitably we’re going to have more. I really think it might be better if we all passed. With all thanks and respect to you, Moss. Does that make sense?”
There were unanimous nods and sounds of agreement.
“Now let me offer a counterproposition. Birdie and I would like to have everyone to dinner a week from next Friday. Just to wind up the session, as it were. And to officially greet Tay and Mary Barbour, assuming he’s nominated and confirmed by then, as our two distinguished ex-Senators predict.”
“That’s the night of my trip to South Carolina,” Moss said, “but the ceremony is at noon and Sue-Ann and I will be coming right back. The President’s giving us a plane.”
“Oh, I say,” Justice Wallenberg remarked. “How jolly.”
“Yes, isn’t it,” Moss agreed with a grin. “You see what you’re missing, Clem.”
“So, then,” the Chief said, “a week from this coming Friday, eight p.m., in the dining room here, black tie—”
“God, must we?” Hughie Demsted groaned.
“You look divine, Hughie,” Justice McIntosh said, “and you know it, so stop objecting. Men always look divine in black tie. Why do they always balk?”
“With spouses, of course,” The Elph went on. “Or,” he added, bowing to Mary-Hannah, “boyfriend, as the case may be.”
She hooted.
“Darling,” she said, “I am fifty-eight years old, in the sere and yellow leaf, and the last time I was unfurled was—” She stopped, blushed and started to laugh, as did they all.
“When, May?” Moss Pomeroy demanded eagerly. “Oh, do tell us about it! When? When?”
But she had collapsed in laughter and so their luncheon ended on a merry note as the Chief said with mock sternness, “And now, back to those damned certioraris. We’ll be lucky if we get out of here by six p.m.”
“I’m afraid so,” Wally Flyte said, heading for the door. As he reached it there was a knock and it was opened from the other side so quickly that it almost hit him in the nose. A clerk thrust a piece of wire-service copy into his hand with an apologetic murmur and fled. Wally glanced at it hastily and spun around, holding it high.
“It’s Tay,” he confirmed. “By a landslide.”
…
…
***
Chapter 2
The landslide, while inevitable, did not happen for a week, but there was never any doubt that Taylor Barbour would have no trouble with the Senate. In the interim he was the focus of immense and immediate media interest.
“And so when did you first decide you wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice?” his bright young interviewer asked when
The Washingtonian
magazine sent her to the Labor Department late on the afternoon of his nomination to do an in-depth cover story on “Our New Man on The Court.”
He smiled in his pleasant, noncommittal fashion and for a moment looked far away into some private distance.
“I don’t know that I ever really
wanted
to be,” he said, “or ever made it a specific goal of mine. But I suppose if one is a lawyer and by good fortune and the grace of Presidents has been permitted to reach high place in government, it is an idea that occurs.”
“That’s very diplomatic, Mr. Secretary,” she said with a smile that he found he quite liked, “but of course you know I don’t believe you for a minute. I think you’ve been eating your heart out for this job most of your life. I think you are inwardly doing a rain dance for glee.”
“Whoopee,” he said mildly. “What did you say your name is?”
“Catherine Corning,” she said. “Isn’t that awful? They call me Cathy Corny on the magazine because I’m always doing these sob-sister stories on the more glorious monuments of our government such as Secretaries of Labor, former Solicitors General who get appointed to the Court, and people like that. They say I have a Touch.”
“No doubt,” he said. “Well, I hope you’ll give me the same sweet treatment you’ve given all the rest.”
“Have you read any of my stuff?”
“Occasionally.”
“Then you know I bite. Beware!”
“You bet I will,” he assured her solemnly. Then he smiled, more broadly and in a more relaxed fashion this time. “As a matter of fact, to level with you, I have wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice ever since I first decided I wanted to be a lawyer. And that was about thirty years ago, now. Roughly the time you were in diapers.”
“Not quite,” she said. “Not—quite. Tell me the story of your climb to the Court. Our public wants to know.”
“Then we can’t disappoint them,” he agreed, and obliged; much more fully and candidly, he realized later, than he had ever related it for any other interviewer in a career that had in large part been spent in the public arena.
It had begun sometime around age sixteen after a childhood and youth spent on the family ranch in California’s fertile and lovely Salinas Valley, inland and south from San Francisco. His parents had assumed, and so had he for quite a long time, that he would grow up, go to college, probably at the University of California’s agricultural school at Davis, and then come home to work with his father and eventually assume management of the property. It comprised some four thousand acres, acquired originally by his grandfather starting in 1894, and had provided the family with a more than comfortable living ever since. They raised truck crops, as did most of the valley: lettuce, tomatoes, beets, turnips, the like. The ranch’s prosperity ebbed and flowed with the seasons and the weather, sometimes good years, sometimes bad, but overall far more of the former.
“It’s a good living,” his father said comfortably, and no one could deny it. The temptation for Tay to take the easy way and stick with it was very great, strengthened by sentimental ties, the fact that he was the eldest of two sons and a daughter and was locked into the family assumption that, naturally, he would take over the ranch. What else did Barbours do?
It therefore required some major event to pull him away. It had occurred quite by accident in high school when a civics teacher with some imagination had decided to form the class into a student replica of the federal government and take a mock piece of legislation through its various stages up to and including legal challenge and final decision by the Supreme Court.
He often reflected that if Miss Tillson had not had this inspiration, he would probably be a pillar of the Salinas Valley to this very day, president of Rotary, adviser to the Future Farmers, battler with Cesar Chavez, staunch believer in all the things his father had believed in without question or quarrel.
Instead Miss Tillson had said, “Tay, you’re going to be the Chief Justice,” and a life’s direction had changed in a moment.
(She was in her seventies now, in a retirement hotel near Monterey. She had called him twenty minutes ago and with the persistence and determination he remembered had worked her way through the Labor Department switchboard to his office. “Tay?” she inquired without other introduction. “Do you remember Civics I and our ‘Supreme Court’ days together?” “Yes, Erma,” he said, “bless your heart, I do.” “Well, you haven’t made Chief Justice,” she said; “yet. But now you’ve got a foot in the door, you’ll get there.” “One step at a time,” he said. She chuckled, a fading but still gallant sound. “Do us proud, now!” she admonished. “Don’t let Civics I down!” “How could I?” he asked. “After all, you’re the one who got me into all this.” Which had pleased her very much, of course; and truly enough, she had.)
He was a thoughtful and conscientious boy, and in preparation for his role he did considerable research on the Court. He found the two weeks during which the class carried its legislation through mock House, mock Senate and mock Court not only fun, but exciting. Some glimpse of something came to him, growing stronger every day they played their educational game. It became very serious for him before it was over, and when, as “Chief Justice,” he presented all his arguments with force and clarity and then declared solemnly, “Accordingly the ruling of the Supreme Court of California is reversed,” the class burst into spontaneous applause.
Afterward they had to prepare a theme on their experience in “government.” Miss Tillson gave him a straight A. “Some critics,” his paper concluded, “find it hard to analyze exactly why the Supreme Court is as powerful in our system as it is. They say it has ‘lifted itself by its own bootstraps’ to acquire this power. One critic even says that the Court ‘rests firmly on the cushion of its own self-esteem.’ But it has been many, many years since anyone has successfully challenged its power. It is a special place.”
And so it is, he thought now as he sorted out his memories for “Cathy Corny,” whose quick intelligence and deliberately disrespectful challenges intrigued him into a greater unburdening than he had intended. Their interview easily lengthened past the hour she had requested.
“You sound as though you were quite a little prig before you got this sudden flash of light about the Court,” she suggested with a smile she knew would be provoking. “A real little Goody Gumdrops of an obedient son and heir.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he objected, but much more mildly than he might have with someone else. “I was just a good boy. That meant something, when I was growing up in the Salinas Valley.”
And so it had. Aside from normal childhood deviltry, such as the time they took their three horses and decided to run away to Carmel over on the coast at ages ten, eight and six, he and his sister Anne and brother Carl were good and reliable kids whose parents felt that they would all settle surely and without difficulty into the pleasant pattern of ranch and valley life. Fortunately Carl and his wife, Dorothy Sterling, and Anne and her husband, Johnny Gonzales, all had, so the ranch today was still in the family, still flourishing and still a homestead for all the Barbours. His own wife Mary didn’t like it much, being the city-girl daughter of a Philadelphia banker, but for him there was still no tranquility like that he felt when he stood in the furrows of a newly plowed field and watched the gentle purple light of California evening touch the hills along the valley.
“I’m Antaeus,” he had said recently in one of his increasing arguments with Mary about that and many other things. “I get a lot of strength out of touching foot to my own ground.” She had snorted derisively but it was true. True enough so that the last time he had said he was going to the ranch and she snapped, “Go without me, then!” he had.
No, not a Goody Gumdrops as a kid, just a good and generally well-behaved little boy, who had grown up rapidly into a physically strong, mentally sharp, steady, thoughtful and trustworthy youth. Erma Tillson was not the only elder who thought he had much promise and tried to steer him toward its fulfillment. She happened to be the one who got through.
She did not realize this until the end of his senior year, when he came to her one day and said he wanted advice. Not very many students did this with her, because though she was a good teacher and imaginative in her approach, she was painfully shy and inclined to run from any intimate contacts. Also, many of the valley sons and daughters, though of good stock, salt of the earth and all the other things complacent rancher-parents said of them, were not touched with any special genius or interest in life beyond the prospects of the next crop and what could be accomplished on side roads in the back seats of cars after school dances. Tay Barbour’s interests, as healthily lively in these areas as any of his contemporaries’, also had room for a great deal more. She had thought this might be the case when he had proved so dedicated to his role as “Chief Justice,” but she had not been sure: it might have been just a passing fancy that would soon subside into the general level of valley living. She found out now with thrilling certainty that this was not so.
“Yes?” she said, sounding as always more quick and impatient than she was—not meaning to, but cursed. (It was not until many years later, when he came home after being named Solicitor General and accidentally met her on the street, that she had finally begun to relax with him. By then he was at last old enough to start calling her “Erma,” and after that they became real friends. But the ease of years was not yet)
“Miss Tillson—” he began earnestly, blushed, and stopped.
“Yes, Tay?” she said, resisting her impulse to flee, forcing herself to be steady, authoritative and grown up. “Can I do something to help?”
“Well—yes, I think so,” he said. He paused and then plunged doggedly on. “Do you remember in civics class when you had us play government?”
“Of course. You were the Chief Justice.”
He nodded, hesitated a moment, looking awkwardly at his feet, the room, out the window, anywhere but at her.
“Miss Tillson,” he blurted out, “would you say I was crazy if I said—” And stopped again, overcome.
“I won’t say you’re crazy, whatever you say,” she promised, for she realized something very important must be in the wind. “So go right ahead. What is it?”
“If I said I wanted to be a lawyer,” he said, almost angrily.
“Why, now,” she said with growing excitement “Not at all! Why would anybody say you’re crazy?”
“Well,” he said, struggling but determined, “the—the ranch, and—and all. My sister Anne and brother Carl say I’m crazy. They say it’s crazy for any Barbour to leave the ranch. They say none of us ever has. They say I’ve got to stay here and run it, just as my—my father—wants me to.”
“Has he ever said that?” she demanded.
He looked miserable.
“It’s just understood.”
“But not by you.”
“No,” he said, forlornly. “Not by me. I love the ranch, you know that. But I don’t want to stay on the ranch. Carl wants to. Anne wants to. So why can’t I go away and be a lawyer, if I want to? I’d still come home to see them and help out. I’d still be part of it!”
“Of course you would,” she said soothingly. “How could anybody, particularly your brother and sister, doubt that?”
“It’s—it’s my dad I’m worried about,” he said, miserable still. “He’ll raise hell.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said with far more confidence than she felt. Frank Barbour loomed a large, rough, red-faced presence in her mind, glimpsed occasionally at school functions, awesome and omnipotent in his role as chairman of the school board, which he had been for all of the seven years she had been teaching there. “I think he’ll understand. After all, he does have Anne and Carl. Why don’t you go and talk to him about it?”
“That’s easier said than done,” Tay said with a wan smile. “You don’t know how determined my dad is.”
“I know how determined his son is,” she said stoutly. “He ought to be proud of you!”
“He’ll be prouder if I take over the ranch someday,” Tay said in a desolate tone. “There’s no doubt about that.”
“Well, then,” she said, dreading the answer, telling herself desperately, I do not want to talk to Mr. Barbour, “what do you think I can do about it?”
But Tay surprised her.
“I just wanted to know,” he said, suddenly looking her straight in the eye with an anguished appeal, “if
you
think I’m crazy.”
She was relieved and pleased in about equal measure.
“I most certainly do
not!”
she exclaimed. “I think you have the mind for it, and the character, and I think it’s wonderful you want to do something like that. Just wonderful! And if I had anything to do with it by assigning you in our little play, then I shall be proud of it for the rest of my life! And proud of
you!
So there!”
“Well,” he said, relaxing for the first time and giving her the shy, easygoing grin that was one of his most attractive characteristics, “if
you
feel that way and
I
feel that way, then maybe I’m not so far out, after all.… But,” he said, reverting again to gloom, “that doesn’t make it easier with my dad.”
“Well!” she said, and took a deep breath. “What about your mother?”
He looked a little less glum, but still with the world on his shoulders.
“She’s a Taylor, you know, from over in the San Joaquin Valley. They’re ranch people, too. She’ll probably feel the same way.”
“Maybe not,” she said thoughtfully. She took a deep breath. “I tell you what. Suppose I try to find a way to talk to your mother alone about it. Sometimes when we girls—we ladies—put our heads together; we can get the men to agree to a lot of things they didn’t think they would. How would that be? Would you mind?”