One L (19 page)

“He's angry,” she said to me, “very angry. I went to apologize to him, but he could barely speak. A lot of people he has contact with are going to see that. It's a real embarrassment for him. And he was
very
unhappy about that letter being printed. He said it was a breach of confidence. He said he's holding everyone who signed it responsible.”

“Great,” I said.

Lindsey shrugged gently.

“He'll cool off,” she told me.

“And Wade was the one?” I asked.

Lindsey looked around to see who was listening, before she answered.

“Everybody's talked to him, but he doesn't even understand what he did wrong. He's so innocent.”

Innocent, I thought. Christ. I went to my seat and stewed. I could pay no attention to Zechman that morning. Were it not for the use of the letter, I'd have felt Perini had made his own bed. But he was right—there had been a breach there. He'd been bad-mouthed through an inappropriate source. I felt guilty and increasingly depressed. Now and then, my mind wandered to Peter and my spirits declined further.

In the interim between Torts and Procedure, the study group met again to discuss the exam. I still couldn't concentrate. When we returned to Langdell, the addition of nervousness about the test left me feeling disoriented. Nicky passed around the blue books. I shook my head sadly as I considered mine. I clearly remembered the day a few years before when I'd finished my graduate course work in English and had exulted in having written my last exam. Nicky recited the question: “Discuss the case of
Pennoyer
v.
Neff
.” The answer would require a brief essay on some of the prominent ideas in the subject of jurisdiction, which we'd studied for the first two months. It did not seem all that hard.

But when I opened my blue book, some kind of emotional sluice opened in me as well. Everything accumulating the past few weeks arrived as a grand swell of pain and dread and confusion. How,
how
, I thought, with a quick and stricken wonder, could I have returned to this low point of having to
prove
myself? Suddenly all I could feel was the kind of miserable dishonor and failure which had followed on everything I had done the past few weeks, and I was sure, desperately certain, that it would happen again right now. I
knew
it. I could not shake that certainty of failure from my mind. And so within a few minutes that prophecy had fulfilled itself.

Three quarters of the way through the brief exam period I tore up what I'd scribbled and tried to get down something coherent. There was no way to make up the lost ground. When Nicky called time I knew I had failed—literally, absolutely flunked. I'd done it, and now the gathered shame and grief were overpowering. Much of my pain was in seeing the kind of downward spiral I seemed to be on, these worsening screw-ups, this deepening hurt and fright. I knew I had to do something about it.

As soon as class was over, I went to the basement of Pound, where the Law School Health Center is located. There is a psychiatrist housed there, as handy as a fire extinguisher on the wall in case of emergencies.

I was trying gaily to hold my act together when I arrived.

“How loud,” I asked, gesturing toward the psychiatrist's door, “do you have to moan, to get in to see her?”

Pretty loudly, it turned out. The nurse asked quietly if I was suicidal. No, of course not, I answered, just aching. There were plenty of people around HLS in that category. I would have to wait until after Thanksgiving to see the doctor. I glumly accepted my appointment and went home.

Over the weekend I remained in agony and disarray. I had never before failed an exam. That it would have no bearing on my grade did not matter. I had been confirmed in my suspicion that I was a ludicrous, miserable, unworthy failure. The disgrace turned inside me like a fierce, fiery wheel. The world as I saw it was peopled only by those whom I'd disappointed and hurt: Mann, Perini, Blaustein, Peter, my friends, my parents, my wife. And all of those feelings only worsened when on Monday I walked back into school, the scene of the crime. I went up to Harkness to have a cup of cocoa—my nerves were too shot for coffee. I was bad off. I took out my notebook and wrote the passage which appears at the front of this book.

Somehow I dragged myself through the next week and a half. I didn't feel much better, but I felt no worse. There were no further crises.

On Monday, Perini became reconciled with the section again. He was slightly bitter this time. He made a comment about the kinds of things one reads in the newspaper. Then he called on Mooney. He was no gentler, nor any harder, on him than on his predecessors. It seemed an effective way to put the whole business to an end.

Section 100's meeting went forward. Only thirty people showed up, though, and the group promptly dissolved. Kyle, I was told, had written a letter of apology to Perini.

At the end of the week, Nicky gave us another test. This one was a short multiple-choice exam to be worked on at home. I was more comfortable in my own study and I tried to do the test carefully.

When Thanksgiving arrived, I was desperately grateful for the rest. Sleep alone seemed to go a long way toward healing me. Marsha, a dear friend from California, was visiting. We had Thanksgiving with her, then she and Annette went down to Connecticut to spend time there with Marsha's family.

I stayed in Arlington alone. I had to study. Despite all the resolutions earlier in the term, the study group was now busy assembling an outline of Mann's Criminal class in preparation for the exam. His casebook was new and none of the commercial guides was yet available. And the course had been so disorganized that we had all been forced to agree that a collective effort was required to put it together. I knew that with only three weeks left in the semester, I'd better get my share done now.

Over the weekend, I worked at the outline listlessly. I spent most of my time walking through the empty apartment, trying to figure out exactly what had happened to me the past month. I recognized many of the things I've repeated here about the demands of the student life and of Harvard Law School. I saw that yet another cost of HLS's size is the depletion of trust, the fact that there are too many people there to maintain the kind of close bonds that could forestall some of the rumor mongering and mass paranoia that had lately been driving me nuts.

And I'd seen some more of “my enemy,” that funny, indefinite collection of shadowy and unnerving recognitions about myself and what was around me to which I more and more willingly gave that name. The latest sighting had come in the oral argument and in Nicky's test, where wisely or unwisely I had tried to slow down in a stampede. Now I had to admit that I did not have the strength yet to stand up on my own. Looking forward to exams in January, I saw that I should more or less abandon hope of maintaining any perspective. Health, in that circumstance, might well be in excusing myself for giving in.

It was that kind of charity toward myself that characterized the weekend. I decided that by and large I was a sound creature. By Monday, I felt well enough collected to cancel my appointment with the psychiatrist. I'd been a little whacked out, I decided, but that was as much a reflection of the experience as of any personal crisis. I began to read in the extensive psychological literature about law school and was reassured to learn that my bad spell was hardly unique. “I have never seen more manifest anxieties in a group of persons under ‘normal' circumstances than is visible in first-year law students,” one psychiatrist had written. As the year went on, I learned that there were many 1Ls who felt they'd tilted a little, many of them in more severe and more painful ways than I had. I know of at least one suicide attempt in my class, and there were more people than I can count who confided that they'd been driven through the door of the psychiatrist's office for the first time in their lives by the experience of being a Harvard 1L. The fact that the psychiatrist is down there at all is indicative of something.

No doubt, some of us who've had our hard times during the first year of law school are carrying around a lot of delicate psychological china that's bound to be damaged somewhat with any abnormal shaking and strain. But I resist, in general, the suggestion that the many HLS students who sink into prolonged bouts of panic, anxiety, and despair should bear all the blame on their own.

Late in the year, I heard Nicky Morris address a crowd of students on the topic of legal education at Harvard. He said something worth repeating:

“I keep running into Harvard Law School graduates, people of all ages, who tell me that ‘court held no fear' for them. A lot of them are men who fought in World War II or Korea or Vietnam, and most say that even having had those experiences, they never felt as scared or oppressed as they did when they were law students at Harvard; and that afterwards, by comparison, their anxiety about going into a courtroom for the first time was nothing.

“Well, I'm glad if we can prepare our students so that they feel self-confident about performing their professional tasks. But it doesn't fill me with pride to be part of an institution that has provided so many people with the worst times of their lives. I don't think that's an affirmative thing to say about this law school. I think there has to be something wrong with a place like that.”

Nicky nodded his head as he looked at us all.

“Something,” he repeated.

Exams (First Act)

12/4/75 (Friday)

For the first time in a month, I felt some peace and pleasure this week at HLS. A moment ago I was laughing at myself. Thinking over the day, I felt simultaneously elated, depressed, and confused. I knew I could only have been at law school.

Today Nicky Morris returned the two tests he gave us. He had the blue books spread out on the broad podium when we entered and people were instantly clustered wildly in front. Then, immediately the comparing of grades took place, remarkably rapid and willing.

As I've long recognized, I potted the discuss-the-case essay. Nicky invented an especially generous curve, nothing like the stingy thing which will be used for exams next month, and I had a C—far better than I expected. But there were only twenty grades below B in the section and Nicky said bluntly that those of us who had low marks should be “concerned.” My dismay was lessened by my previous suffering over that test and the fact that I received one of the highest grades in the section on the multiple choice exam. When I spoke with Morris later in his office, he told me not to worry about the essay, and I've decided to take him at his word.

For most everybody, though, the tests set the mood of the day. Superachievers in an era of grade inflation, many people (Stephen among them) were despondent about Bs—especially on the essay, which Nicky obviously gave greater weight. Hearing of my C seemed to make none of them any brighter. The majority, I guess, just walked away convinced that I am a dummy.

The students with As—Aubrey was one—tried to be self-effacing but could not fully conceal their delight. Kyle was particularly pleased, and with good reason. Nicky had written a long note on his exam saying it was the finest he'd read.

To observe the powerful hold the grades and tests exerted on all of us was a little disturbing. I can't help wondering what kind of month it'll be between now and January 9, when we have our first exam.

 

Final exams play on a law student's world like some weirdly orbiting moon. They are always in sight; but while they're at a distance, they serve merely to create the tensions which swell daily like tides—to read, to keep pace, to understand. As exams draw close, however, in December and May, their gravitational force starts to shake the whole place to pieces.

When we came back after Thanksgiving, I could sense the exam mood taking hold. Many of the upperclassmen, the people who'd been through exams before, seemed to have returned from the holiday with a pale, grim look. When they greeted each other in the hallways, most made jokes about how much better they'd feel in a month and a half. To a 1 L, that was not a good sign.

I was also struck by the appearance of the red books. Each year, late in the fall, the law school publishes the text of the previous year's finals. A professor's former tests are considered by students a good index to the topics in a course which the teacher deems most important and to the approach to legal problems to which he or she is most receptive. Students in all years pore over past exams, sometimes to an extent unrecognized by the faculty. This year, one professor repeated a test he'd used three or four years earlier and had to award a classful of As and A-pluses.

The tests are published in two bound volumes, 1L and upper-year courses separate, their covers a shade of red so vibrant that the books themselves look a little alarming. They are left in boxes in the tunnels from which almost all were grabbed off within a day. What was most significant to me about the books was that they were published at all. That the law school would go to that trouble and expense indicated how seriously everybody, teachers and administrators, took exams; it was an official stamp, confirming their gravity.

So the results of Nicky Morris's tests only served to accentuate a tension which was already becoming pronounced. We were all stopping each other now at lunch, in the hallways, to ask questions about cases and concepts we'd covered at the beginning of the term. And the study groups were growing more active. Some people preferred to work alone, either because they did not want to rely on others, or simply because they felt they learned better independently. But by now, most of the members of the section had found their way into groups, almost all of which were meeting a number of times every week to swap information and outlines and to work out past tests.

My group was especially earnest, in large part a result of the efforts of Stephen, who was growing more nervous daily in the face of exams. A year or so before he'd started law school, Stephen had been divorced. He was still upset about his marriage. He talked often about his wife, in tones alternately wistful and bitter. He lived by himself now in a small apartment in Watertown and I think that law school was one of the first things he'd found that took his mind off his loneliness. Increasingly, he had become involved in school, always full of law school gossip, his susceptibility to the law school's demands growing, the more so because he had an obvious gift for the law.

Gradually, Stephen had emerged as one of the persons, like Hochschild and Stern and Cauley, although far better liked, who could be counted on always to say something penetrating. The others had a talent for paring away at an idea, peeling it down like an onion until there was nothing left; but Stephen was an intellectual builder, somebody who could take a bare notion and turn it into something fuller—a concept, a policy. He did that often in Torts, commenting on what Zechman had said. “This notion of externalized risks. That applies to railroads, truckers, many industries. It shows that we've been granting a tacit subsidy to all of those concerns.” Zechman would tell Stephen he'd made a powerful point, and Aubrey and Terry and I would meet after class, shaking our heads at Stephen's fluency and intelligence. “He's so damn smart,” Aubrey often said, “he's so damn smart.” We admired him sincerely.

Despite all of that manifest talent, Stephen was no less frightened than any of us at the prospect of the tests. I suppose he's a nervous person by disposition. One afternoon late in November he asked the study group to gather so we could discuss our plans for exam preparation.

“We're all doing well,” he said as he looked around the table. “We're really on top of this stuff compared to everybody else in the section. We're in much better shape.”

We all murmured denials, and I suspect that Stephen's opinion too was actually the opposite. Like a lot of people, he was apt to say the precise reverse of what he felt about those subjects which made him most uncomfortable. He would, for example, often tell me how much he hated law and law school, even as he poured himself into it. In this instance, there was no point in arguing, for Stephen immediately held up a hand.

“We're doing well,” he said, “but we can do better.” At that point, Stephen set out his plan for the Criminal Law outline. It would require us to boil down class notes and case briefs, to describe and reference the relevant portions of the Model Penal Code, and then to integrate all of that information. It would be a long, laborious effort and we all briefly resisted, but Stephen's logic seemed inevitable when we considered the disorganization of the course. Reluctantly, we each pledged responsibility for a different portion of the semester's work and agreed to have certain segments of the outline complete by various deadlines. We also promised to meet each day in the weeks after Thanksgiving to discuss what we'd outlined thus far.

The initial review sessions were fruitful. We worked together until six or so, probing at each other, trying to clarify, then we'd often sit and gossip for another half an hour, usually about who was going to make Law Review. As exams neared, Law Review somehow seemed to dominate our conversations. Regularly we'd exchange speculations about who the top candidates were—Hochschild, Sandy Stern. After Nicky's exam, Stephen decided that Kyle was a shoo-in. Often we would tell Stephen that he too was a hot prospect, but he would hear none of it. We were sitting in one of the Pound lounges early one evening at the end of a study group session, draped in various poses on the butcher-block furniture, when someone accused me of being a possibility.

I shook my head and said I did not have that kind of mind.

“And I'll tell you something else,” I said. “I wouldn't take it.”

Terry didn't believe me. He had been making good use of the time he was not in class and lately had been spending hours in the library reading law review articles on whatever he found interesting. In the process, he'd become quite enthusiastic about legal scholarship. He was even talking about teaching law when he finished school and we'd all been told a number of times that Review membership was an invaluable aid to an academic career. But Terry did not like to think that he alone had succumbed to the Law Review mystique.

“You mean you wouldn't even
try
it? I mean, come on, I would
try
it. I admit that.”

“I still don't see it,” I said. “Fifty hours a week extra. Buried in the library? What do I need that for?” I asked Stephen if he'd do it.

“Never,” he said. “It's crazy.”

“Hey, man,” Terry cut in. “But you'd like to
make it
, right, even if you were gonna turn it down. Right? Admit it. It'd be nice to do that good.”

“I'm not sure,” I answered. “I hope it won't break my heart if I don't do well.” I had been concentrating on developing that kind of attitude since I'd emerged from my depression in November. I'd realized how much I had taken the achievement ethic to heart—I had been so hard on my mistakes and middling performances. A sincere effort was all I owed myself. “I mean, I think that's kind of an ugly desire to feel that you have to do better than everyone else.”

Aubrey came in then. “Why is it ugly?” he asked. “There's nothing wrong with that. That's what makes the world go round. Frankly, I'd
love
to be on the Review. It opens every door. I'll jump if I have the chance.”

Terry nodded. I said again that I wouldn't want to do it. Stephen did too. But I knew I was being a little disingenuous. There was another side to my feelings. I had no desire to do the Review work. And I had resolved to be satisfied with less. But there had been moments when I envisioned my best efforts as somehow being good enough that I would have the opportunity to turn the Review down. I still had no conclusive idea on how far I could reach with the law, and like many first-year students I had heard about the Review so often that it had finally been digested as the emblem of a success which was otherwise hard to define. I liked to think of that kind of status and prestige accruing to me. And God knows, I, like most of my classmates, had worked hard enough to feel that I deserved some extraordinary reward.

The next day I was talking with Terry in the library and the Review came up again, as it so often did now. Terry's a hard man to resist, especially when he thinks he's hit on the truth, and today I had to give in.

“Admit it, right. You'd like to make it, at least.”

“All right,” I said, “I admit it. In some ways, I'd sort of like to make it.”

Terry laughed and socked me in the arm.

“Right,” he said.

“Right,” I agreed. But I felt I'd done something precarious, something quite dangerous, the minute the words were out of my mouth.

 

As we entered the last week of the term, right before Christmas, most of the students at the law school seemed to abandon any effort to maintain a brave front in the face of exams. The evidence of great apprehension was widespread. Whenever I visited the library, there were long lines before each of the Xerox machines, as people waited to copy earlier editions of the red books or Law Review articles which were said to offer particularly trenchant digests of the material in various courses. Everybody around the school seemed to be fretting aloud that they would never catch up in their classwork in time to make a thorough review. Karen Sondergard was now crying four or five times a day. And the students who lived in the on-campus dorms reported that people were running up and down the hallways, shouting questions to each other at all hours, night and day.

For me, the anxieties showed in a spending spree on hornbooks, outlines, and prepared briefs. The purchase of study aids by all students was proceeding so briskly that one person had set up a sales counter outside the dining hall; I was a particularly willing customer. By the last week, I knew I had gathered more aids than I could possibly examine between then and the second week of January, but I could not resist my insecurities. Both the Torts and Criminal exams would be “open book,” meaning that we could consult any printed source during the test. I was convinced that if I skipped the purchase of any one item it would prove to be crucial. With Stephen, I made a number of trips to a Harvard Square bookstore where legal study aids were stocked in shelf-high abundance, and on each occasion I bought something else. My own doubts and Stephen's rationales would persuade me each time.