At the Clerks’ Reunion
“Roberta” by Molly Phalan
The judge had never attended the annual reunion of his clerks. He was always invited, but nobody expected him to come. The clerks knew, as the judge knew, that the reunion offered a chance for commiseration among clerks, and that the judge’s presence would make commiseration impossible. And like a man who lets his wife creep off with a neighbor on a preordained night, the judge allowed the clerks to have their fun. He let them tell their tales, tales that cast themselves as underdog heroes, banding together against his tyranny. He let them tell jokes about his shirt stains and his petty grudges. He let them mimic his exhausted growl of a voice. He let them warn the new clerks about his temper and prejudices. His absence let them do these things.
Some said the judge footed the bill for the reunions out of his own pocket, but no one really knew, except maybe the organizer, a clerk from 1999, and no one was inclined to ask whether they could chip in for the considerable expense of renting out a bar for the night. The clerks came directly from their jobs, which meant they wore suits; the one attendee in casual wear came from a spin class, and attempted to hide her inappropriate attire by leaving her coat fully buttoned. Current clerks were among the last to arrive, and when they did they struck the sorts of tentative poses common to those who know no one at a party. They came late because they worked late. They always worked late, but they worked even later than usual on this particular night because the judge hadn’t been in the office, and had preemptively, in an effort to assure his workforce there would be no slacking off when he was away, assigned them an exhausting array of tasks. A current clerk mentioned this in conversation with a former clerk. The former clerk found the judge’s absence from the office unusual. The judge never took days off. Was he growing soft in old age? The current clerk assured her conversation partner that the judge showed no signs of softening. Earlier that week, she’d edited over ninety drafts of an opinion the judge eventually discarded in favor of starting over. Around draft twenty, she received, with a thump on her desk, a stack of grammar books with a note from the judge attached. Please master English grammar by Monday, read the note. There was also a Spanish translation of the request.
It was during the second or third round of drinks, when stories were taking on a light coat of exaggeration, that the judge, as though summoned by the repetition of his name, appeared. He was dressed in a tan raincoat and carried a leather briefcase, given to him many years ago by his wife, now his ex-. The judge’s embossed initials were difficult to discern for all the cracks and scratches in the leather. The judge gave no notice to the reactions he inspired, the nudged shoulders and raised eyebrows. With bumps and light touches, he negotiated through the crowded room. One clerk, class of 2007, whom the judge had once chewed out for taking a sick day when his grandmother died, made eye contact with his former employer, not out of any intention, just because he was too stunned to look away, and to this the judge responded with a nod of no particular warmth, as if to say, yes, it’s me, your eyes do not deceive you.
The judge came to a stop when he reached the bar. He asked the bartender for the remote control that was attached to an old television set by a velcro strip. The judge turned on the television and scrolled through the channels until he reached a news station. He then set the remote on the bar, took a seat, and watched. Behind him, one by one, the clerks went silent as they too turned their eyes to the screen, and to the judge, and to the screen again.
The breaking story concerned the death, by heart attack, of a Supreme Court justice. Under images of the old, jowly justice, a ticker scrolled examples of his influence on American law, politics, and social mores. The screen split to return to the news anchors, and they began to discuss the buzz around prospects for a new appointee to replace the deceased (pure speculation on the part of the news anchors; the President had not yet weighed in on the subject). A photograph appeared on the screen beside the anchors. In the photograph, the judge verged on a grin, but the unformed quality of this expression could suggest to a stranger that his teeth were slightly small or even clipped, though they were neither. His eyes were turned directly to the camera. He wore the wire frames with smoked lenses that, up until a few years ago, when he lost them (and found, to his dismay, that the frames had been discontinued), had been inseparable from his face. Some clerks claimed he’d never lost these glasses at all, rather that they’d been stolen by a clerk in an act of revenge. There are many versions of this story, just as there are many justifications available to the clerk who stole the judge’s glasses, but since the story is no more credulous than a rumor it compels no further mention.
After the appearance of his face on the screen, the judge raised the remote control and summarily turned off the set. He then performed a maneuver uncommon to distinguished personages, to older men generally: he set his strong hands on the bar’s edge, leaned forward, and, with a hop and a turn, deposited himself atop the bar, on his rump. He kicked his feet to test the air below him. The audience of clerks tried on reticence for a change. Few of them were used to reticence. And though it would be natural for a drinker, as some of them were, to take a swift gulp of their drink in the pause, no one gulped. A clerk from 2010 would later describe this moment to his wife: it was as though a system of wheels and gears, iron and impossibly heavy, had suddenly appeared in all its turning madness overhead.
“So,” the judge began, “it looks like you hitched your wagon to the right horse. You all did something to get me here, and it occurs to me to thank you, so, thank you. Admittedly I did not come here to thank you. I came because I am aware that a certain type of conversation occurs at these reunions. It’s a conversation about me. For a long time I’ve been more than content to let this conversation go on without my interference. Not anymore.
“I am a difficult person to work for. I keep long hours and I expect my clerks to work even longer. I’ve never been particularly good at holding back my contempt for people I find contemptible.” Here the judge paused to search out the most contemptible faces in the crowd. “But, you all knew what you were getting into. You knew about the bargain. I teach you everything I know about the law, you hold back the tears when I do something you don’t like,” the judge paddled his hands between the conditions. “That’s the deal. Oh! And, as a bonus, you get to come back and tell war stories at these gatherings.”
The judge then appeared to have forgotten a detail. He turned behind him, to the bartender, and the bartender found himself upgraded from observer to active participant in the show as the judge asked him, in a clear voice, to pull a Guinness.
“The war stories have recently gained a kind of power over me. The impulse may strike you to bring news of my conduct to the attention of a wider audience, most likely out of a sense that the world needs to know. It’s a perfectly natural impulse to have – misguided, but natural. When I’m bothered about something, I often want to shout about it. But in this case, the world does not need to know what bothers you about me.” The judge reached behind him for his Guinness. “I need to know what bothers you about me. That’s why I’m here. If you want to put me on trial, this is your chance.”
No clerk wished to make the first indictment in what would surely be a long chain, and so a mood of anticipation settled over the crowd. If no one came forward, what would happen? Would the judge leave? While the clerks considered such questions, the judge took even breaths and let his eyes rest unfocused over the crowd.
The man who broke the silence had, since his clerkship, become a judge, an important one, and perhaps because of this considered himself the ideal man to proceed. “I’d like to ask why,” said the clerk-turned-judge, “You required me to work on the Sabbath. I recall we discussed this on my first day. You asked me whether I’d be willing to set aside religion for the duration of my clerkship, and I agreed, albeit reluctantly. But then, there were several instances when it seemed as though there wasn’t serious casework to be done on Saturday, and you had me stay in the office just to prove, it seemed, some point. I always wondered what that point was.”
“Excellent question, Sam,” said the judge. “If I allowed you to observe the Sabbath once, I’d have had to allow you every Saturday, and that would have been problematic. You might have considered yourself privileged above the other clerks, simply because you could exempt yourself from work on a certain day and for a certain ‘good’ reason. I couldn’t have this. One clerk has no privilege above another, not in my office. I believe I presented the same argument to Ms. Belfort with regards to her pregnancy… Hello, Melissa.” The judge waved hello to the clerk and mother named Melissa Belfort.
Another clerk broke in. “If, as you say,” began this clerk, Ms. Gordon, class of 2006, who spoke with a tremble of indignation in her voice, “no clerk had privilege above another, then why was it necessary to build walls around my desk, and only my desk?”
“Ms. Gordon, your voice – and I hear it hasn’t changed much – I found your voice distracting. I disliked your voice even more than the fact that you felt entitled to chat constantly in the office. Your cubicle walls I put up – at my own expense – as a measure to reduce distraction for myself, for you, and for the other clerks. And it worked! You did exceptional work on Mills v. McGovern that year, and I maintain that the elimination of chatter was a major factor in this success.”
“What don’t you like about my voice?” asked Ms. Gordon.
“It shakes when you’re agitated, and when it’s in neutral it’s a little too loud and a little too clear. It sounds false to me, more like you’re playing the part of an attorney than actually being one. It would appear that you, now, are one, so, congratulations on that.”
Ms. Gordon excused herself to the restroom; one of her colleagues soon followed to see if she was alright. The two women missed the next inquisition. It came from a clerk named Mosely. The judge remembered Mosely well, because Mosely had once made a grave mistake in the case of LaPierre v. NYPD. The case dated from the bygone days before the judge’s ascent to the appellate circuit, which bears mentioning only to say that it was an old case and a relatively low-stakes affair when considering the judge’s pedigree. But no grudge ever lessened its grip just because someone called it a low-stakes affair or because someone assumed the years would take care of it.
On a Tuesday in March, two uniformed police officers arrived at Gale LaPierre’s electronics store in Harlem with a warrant to search the premises for stolen goods. Mr. LaPierre made an immediate dash into the back alley, where the police followed and cornered him. Much to the officers’ surprise, Mr. LaPierre told them he’d make a full confession if they took him downtown. They hastily did. Once at the station, though, Mr. LaPierre began to drag things out. First he wanted a lawyer, then he got cold feet about the whole confession idea. And so, due to what seemed to be indecision, Mr. LaPierre remained in custody for the night. Meanwhile, at Mr. LaPierre’s electronics store, a full-scale looting was in progress. In their haste to arrest Mr. LaPierre, the police had failed to lock the shop’s door. The looters walked in and took whatever they wished. Since the allegedly stolen goods were no longer sitting on the shelves of Mr. LaPierre’s shop, and now resided in the apartments of Mr. LaPierre’s neighbors, the police had no evidence against Mr. LaPierre, and their case collapsed. But this was not the end of the matter. Mr. LaPierre sued the NYPD, seeking damages for the property he lost while his store was unlocked, due to police negligence. The judge was called to rule in the suit. Mr. LaPierre’s attorney obtained video footage from the looting episode, and Mr. LaPierre was allowed to recite from the witness stand the make and model of all the speakers, phones, televisions, and even record players the looters carried away. The NYPD’s attorneys, for their part, claimed that Mr. LaPierre’s night in jail was a canny strategy to encourage looting, but they had little proof of this and were unable to apprehend a single looter.
The clerk Mosely’s mistake in this case was one of withheld information. Mosely had visited Mr. LaPierre’s electronics store several times. The clerk and Mr. LaPierre lived in the same neighborhood and were acquainted. Mr. LaPierre had fixed a stereo receiver belonging to Mosely, charging a reasonable fee for his services, and this transaction had endeared Mr. LaPierre to Mosely because Mosely abhorred the sight of fixable things sitting out on sidewalks in the rain. Had Mosely told the judge that he knew Mr. LaPierre, it would have forced the judge to recuse himself from Mr. LaPierre’s case – something the judge, who saw LaPierre v. NYPD as a piddling dispute, unlikely to boost his reputation, actually wanted very much. But Mosely didn’t tell the judge about his connection with Mr. LaPierre until the very end of the trial; indeed, Mosely wouldn’t have said anything about it had Mr. LaPierre not winked at Mosely in the courthouse hallway, and had the judge not seen the wink. At the last possible moment, the judge recused himself, and a mistrial was granted. Though finished with the case, the judge was not finished with Mosely. And it was the judge’s displeasure and contempt that Mosely recounted on the night of the clerks’ reunion.
“You berated me for what seemed like an hour,” Mosely said. “I recall you took a break to make coffee in the middle of it. And before you let me go, you suggested that I review a case called Grutter v. Bollinger. Does everyone here remember Grutter from law school?” Mosely asked the room. There were murmurs. Mosely turned back to the judge.
“Well, I didn’t, at least not all that well. I thought Grutter must be somehow relevant to LaPierre. Instead, when I reviewed Grutter, I found a piece of affirmative action legislation totally unrelated to the legal matter at hand. Given the color of my skin, your insinuation was clear. So now, I have to ask, did you make all your black clerks review Grutter, or was it just me?”
“Just you,” said the judge. “And I’ll tell you why. First, let me say, I find it mystifying that you can stand here today and not admit that you sought to give LaPierre an advantage, and that you wanted to give him that advantage because he’s black and because you like him and because you think he should be served a different standard of justice. Worse than that, you knew what you were doing was wrong and tried to hide it. This is the kind of conduct that only comes from someone who feels the world owes them something. When I asked you to take a look at Grutter, I assumed you would know it by heart. I was at least expecting you to share a personal opinion on it. I was sorely mistaken. You never brought Grutter up with me again – I didn’t know until today whether you ever read it! Now you may find it demeaning to learn that I was testing you, but there you have it, I was testing you. I wanted to know what you thought of the legal circumstances that put you through college, law school, and, finally, put you in my employ, put you in a role for which you were underqualified. To be fully qualified to work for me, one must recognize their own biases and have at least a passing interest in figuring out what they mean. You didn’t know anything about your biases when you worked for me, Mr. Mosely. Have you figured anything out since then?”
“Fuck you,” said Mosely, and headed for the door.
“Mr. Mosely has left the building!” the judge announced. “Which reminds me, leaving was an option for all of you. There were some who left me, sure. Not you. You stuck it out, because you knew the work we did was damn well worth it. Or, you knew about the rewards. Pedigree. I don’t pretend that’s not important. But either way, you stuck it out. And I’d thank you for it, but I think any more gratitude would be an insult to your integrity. You don’t need to be thanked. It was your call. I think you all made the right call. Look at where you are. Look at your beautiful suits.”
“Judge,” said a clerk named Krzyzacy. “We had issues over my name when I was a clerk. I recall you had a difficult time pronouncing it.”
“Your name is Krzyzacy,” the judge pronounced the name perfectly. “Is that correct?”
“That’s impressive,” said Krzyzacy. “I have to admit, I was testing you.”
“Well, alright,” said the judge. “What’s fair is fair.”
“I’m impressed you remembered my name,” said Krzyzacy.
“I remember all of your names,” said the judge.
Some of the clerks couldn’t help but scoff. There had been hundreds of clerks over the years. The judge could tell he was being challenged, so he said, alright, let’s try it. He then proceeded to point at the various clerks and announce their first and last names. Given the judge’s prodigious memory for case law, this feat of recollection perhaps shouldn’t have surprised the clerks, but it did. The naming went on at a swift clip, and each former clerk, as they were named, was in a sense called forward to a higher rung of existence. Their fear of the man who named them abated for a moment with the thrill. And yet the judge did not name everyone in the room. He skipped over one man. The man was an unremarkable looking individual with glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. The clerk beside the unnamed man spoke up: “Did you forget this guy’s name?”
“That guy never clerked for me,” the judge said.
The clerks around the unnamed man turned toward him, and the unnamed man held up a stiff expression against their peering. “If you never clerked for the judge,” someone asked the unnamed man, “then why are you here?”
The judge seemed just as interested.
“I’m a reporter,” said the unnamed man.
The judge embarked on a sigh. It frightened him that he could not resist sighing, but once the sigh began, he duly finished it. In an effort to collect himself, he pushed a pair of phantom glasses up his nose.
“What is your name?” asked the judge.
“Bill Selwyn,” said the reporter.
“Okay, Bill Selwyn. As far as I can work out, you came here under false pretenses, and never gained consent from me to use anything I’ve said for publication. I’d urge you to consider the legal ramifications of writing a word about what you’ve seen and heard tonight. I can assure you that, should the matter end up in court, I’d have a very good lawyer on my side.” At this some of the clerks let out uneasy laughter. The judge hopped down from the bar and approached Bill Selwyn. “Are you going to have a drink? It’s on my dime.”
“I’m alright,” said Bill Selwyn.
“Is this something you do in your line of work? Crash parties?” said the judge.
“I was invited to this party,” said Bill Selwyn.
The judge took a step back from the reporter.
“Who invited you?” said the judge.
“I can’t say,” Bill Selwyn replied.
“Did anyone here invite Bill Selwyn to our party?” the judge raised his voice. “Anyone?”
Bill Selwyn looked to the exit, then back at the judge. “I’ll leave if that’s what you want,” he said. The judge ignored him.
“I’d like to invite the Judas among us to let me know just what I did to warrant this kind of betrayal. Anyone?” The clerks shifted on their feet. Their discomfort came mainly from hearing a tremble in the judge’s voice; in the past, even when berating them, he’d always seemed in control. “I’d like to invite anyone who does NOT feel it was worth their time to clerk for me… to leave. Was it worth it to put up with me for what I taught you? If the answer is no, leave. If you need more time to think, you may as well leave, too. Go on, anyone who wants to leave, leave. There will surely be a lot of you.”
Of the seventy or so clerks present, only four gathered their things and made their way to the door. Among them was the clerk who felt underdressed; she left for this reason. All the clerks who’d stepped up to air grievances with the judge stayed. Indeed Mosely, who’d stormed off before, had not gone far; he was smoking a cigarette outside the bar and weighing the prospect of a return.
While the judge watched the room he forced down a bitter sip of beer. If the number of loyalists impressed him, he did not show it; he scowled, instead, at the exit, and marked for himself the names of those who had abandoned him. He then turned to Bill Selwyn. “You can go after them now,” said the judge. “If there’s a story here, they’re the ones who will tell it. I can tell you their names.”
***
Bill Selwyn left, but not to chase down the clerks. He felt dirty and shameful and in need of the drink he hadn’t had at the bar. He’d been through this experience before, with people he’d interviewed: the discomfort of intimacy he hadn’t earned. He didn’t care that the judge had been rude to him. He understood it. To some extent, he felt he deserved it. He should have guessed the clerks would be loyal, reverent even, he would use that word later, reverent. The Venezuelan girl he talked to, the current clerk, she had the judge’s grammar books in her bag. Here was a place where more research could have helped. He could have learned earlier about the reverence, and about the judge’s reliance upon it. He could have asked his sources.
He regretted also his lie. It had been one of those automatic lies, the likes of which he’d told many times over the course of his career, lies that no one could really disprove. No clerk had invited Bill Selwyn to the reunion.
He went home and got to work on a draft. He was too tired to tell whether it was any good, and the next morning his editor hacked it apart. There was too much speculation about what the judge felt and what he cared about, said the editor. It detracted from the overall point, that this man’s biases were myriad, his hypocrisy astonishing. He was unfit to serve the Supreme Court.
While rewriting the article, Bill Selwyn periodically called the judge for comment. If he reached the judge, he’d lead off with an apology, he thought. But the judge wasn’t answering his personal cellphone, and no one was answering the phone in his office.
Bill Selwyn continued to write until all that remained of the original draft was a quotation: “We loved him for choosing us. We loved ourselves even more for being chosen.”
***
In the weeks since the clerks’ reunion, the judge had let his mail pile up. He’d thrown it all on the couch in his study, a chesterfield whose button pits held on to the crumbs of pretzels. His vacuum was never strong enough to suck out all the crumbs. There was no shortage of cards from fellow judges, who assured him that what had happened to him was a shame. One of the cards used the phrase “a victim of the modern age,” which was a phrase the judge knew he’d heard in a movie somewhere; another card used the word “pilloried.” A few of the store-bought cards were actually intended to be condolence cards, and the judge found this apt, because the clerks’ reunion had felt somewhat like a funeral. His funeral. People came together, reminisced, got drunk, and went home. He’d been to plenty of funerals like that, funerals whose agenda was not mourning so much as discussing the life of the person who was no longer there. In this way, the clerks’ reunion lived up to the judge’s expectations. He had expectations, because he’d imagined the event many times; on the nights when his clerks reconvened, he would sit down on the chesterfield couch in his study, pour himself a scotch, and allow himself to daydream (no clerk would have called the judge a daydreamer, but they didn’t know everything, and indeed it pleased the judge to carry on a secret life of daydreaming known to no one). His vision of the event had always been somewhat vague, idealized, too, but he knew that the clerks would reminisce and that there would be an unmistakable sense of ritual to the proceedings. Sometimes he imagined them gathered around a fire, a campfire, yes, on a night just cold enough to let them all appreciate the warmth…
After half a dozen condolence cards, the judge began to skim. He threw out catalogs, credit card offers, and letters from institutions hitting him up for money. In the course of his sorting he eventually came upon a small padded envelope with no return address. Inside this envelope he found a pair of glasses. He knew the glasses had once belonged to him; the lenses were too scratched to be new. Only briefly did he consider which of his clerks had stolen them. There were many clerks with motive, and the glasses had gone missing so many years ago. He returned the glasses to their rightful place on his face and watched the edges of the objects in the room before him bleed away. He looked down at his hands. Ten fingers, he could say that with confidence, even if he couldn’t tell one finger from another.
His glasses were giving him a headache, but he forged on with his letters, hoping the next one would say something new. You deserve this. Our nation deserves you. May you reign Supreme until your very last breath. It wasn’t hard to imagine a letter that said something like that. He could hear the clerk’s voice, and even see him, writing the letter in the last lighted office of an empty floor, while custodial staff bore down on their vacuums. And so, by rendering some inconvenient words unreadable, the judge solved the problem of letters that said sorry when they should have said congratulations. The problem of walking remained. He reached his bedroom by feeling his way along the hallway walls, where picture frames rattled under his fingers, and only once in darkness did he remove the glasses from his face.
Benjamin Henry DeVries is a writer of fiction. His short stories have been published online. He is currently working on a fishing vessel off the coast of New Hampshire. He would love to hear from you about his work. Or whatever's on your mind. benjaminhenrydevries.com