Middle Age (59 page)

Now Marina was vanished from his life. Now Robin was vanished from his life.

The red-haired woman, he’d had to let go. He couldn’t stalk her, for Christ’s sake.
Yes, I could
.
But I will not
. The daughter, how could he let go?

She was his daughter, his only child. Though she’d banished Deardeaddad. Though she was, as Lee Ann was saying with grim satisfaction, “dead serious.”

After the unfortunate visit with Robin in Maryland, it seemed that Roger and Robin were as estranged as Roger and Lee Ann had been years before. The e-mail message was a shocker, yet not a surprise. Roger had tried to please the girl yet she hadn’t been pleased. He had tried to demonstrate his love for her yet she hadn’t wanted his love. Now she’d announced to her mother that she wouldn’t be returning to the Ryecroft School for the second semester, the very school grounds were “tainted”

for her since Daddy’s visit. She was insisting upon transferring to a smaller school in Brunswick, Maine.
Maine!
“What’s this, the fourth school in three years, or the fifth? And all to put distance between herself and her father.” Roger tried to speak calmly, as if to a client. With clients, you were always calm. Lee Ann agreed yes, it was disruptive but “maybe
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for the best.” Roger was baffled by his ex-wife’s acquiescence. Lee Ann was a woman of good, stubborn sense: he’d expected her to refuse to give in to another of their daughter’s whimsical demands. But Lee Ann was saying thoughtfully, “Better for Robin to make this break with you, Roger, than to love you too much.” “Love me too much!” Roger laughed incredulously. “Robin hates my guts. She hates my profession. She hates my cock, and my soul.” Lee Ann said primly, “Don’t talk dirty, Roger.

That’s one of your less endearing traits. Robin has said you do it to ‘assert masculine authority’—it’s an act of ‘sexual terrorism.’ ” “
Robin
says? That bullshit sounds like one of her teachers.” “Roger, good-bye. I’m hanging up.” But Roger slammed the receiver down first. He couldn’t bear it, this was madness.

The personal life! He wanted no more of it. He would immerse himself in the impersonality of work, and it would be work that would save him.

Yet staring at the flashing numerals of a digital clock.
Is this all there is,
finally? A mad rushing forward. Seconds, hours. Days
.
Years
.
Through a lighted
tunnel for a while, and then
—
oblivion
.

Only the other day he’d had another birthday. He was forty-eight years old! No one loved him! Self-pity convulsed him like a belly of squirming eels. Didn’t know if he was sick with despair, or with rage. Or shame.

He’d wanted to ask Lee Ann, almost he’d wanted to beg Lee Ann, what had he done to so offend their daughter?

Or was it something Roger Cavanagh
was?

Nothing you do is a matter of life and death
.
You defend white
-
collar criminals, what’s to be proud of?



O    : not to allude to any personal weakness, and never to his predicament as a divorced, scorned father, in the company of anyone at Abercrombie, Cavanagh, Kruller & Hook. His reputation in the firm was: efficient, informed, methodical, and unsentimental as a guillotine. Roger was a skilled litigator who made money for his clients, and for himself.

What’s a litigator but a money-making machine.

What’s to be proud of?
Robin had sneered, crinkling her nose against a bad odor.

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J C O

Hell, Roger wasn’t proud. Pride is a young man’s prerogative. But Roger was functioning, and would function.

Above all he’d learned never to speak of personal matters to his Salthill friends. The men (with whom he played tennis, squash, sometimes golf ) shrank from such revelations as one might shrink from a carrier of plague.

The women were eager to invite him to dinner (especially during the week, when their husbands were in the city) and suck what remained of his life’s blood from him in the name of delicious shuddering
empathy
.

And there was Abigail Des Pres. The woman infuriated him, he refused to think of her.

Yet, working with new associates whom he knew slightly (Roger had recently become involved with a local branch of the National Project to Free the Innocent), Roger sometimes spoke impulsively, unguardedly. “My fifteen-year-old daughter has cast me out of her life like an old shoe.”

“And why not? Your daughter has the right.”

This was a young woman named Naomi Volpe speaking. A paralegal assigned to assist Roger in the Elroy Jackson, Jr., case.

“She has the right? My
daughter?
” Roger was incensed.

Naomi Volpe said, “To herself she isn’t ‘your’ daughter. Believe me. To herself, she’s
herself
.”

Exactly, Roger thought. That was the trouble.

It was the first time that Roger Cavanagh and Naomi Volpe were alone together, outside the Project’s offices in lower Manhattan. They were driving in Roger’s car to Hunterdon County, New Jersey to meet with Elroy Jackson’s public defender for his disastrous 8 trial. It was an overcast day in late October not long after the shock of the
Deardeaddad
e-message. Roger, driving, was stung by the young female paralegal’s tone.

He wasn’t accustomed to subordinates, especially females, confronting him so bluntly; but there was Naomi Volpe fixing her ferret-eyes upon him, as if Roger Cavanagh and his reputation as a litigator didn’t much impress her. She said, “A man sees his daughter as a possession, an appendage, but the daughter has a totally different perspective. And remember: a fifteen-year-old today knows more than an eighteen-year-old did just ten years ago. American kids grow up fast.” Naomi spoke with maddening certainty. No possibility she might be wrong. This was one of the woman’s telephone voices that Roger had overheard since joining the staff as a volunteer and it made him itch to grab hold of the nape of Volpe’s neck and give her a good hard shake. Instead he said:
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“It isn’t just Robin’s only fifteen. She’s a very immature fifteen.”

“How so?” Volpe’s response was immediate.

“She—has a cruel streak. She fantasizes, and—”

“You think only adolescents are cruel, Mr. C.?”

Mr
.
C.!
Was this mockery, or an awkward form of deference? Or was it playful, even seductive? With Naomi Volpe—who’d asked Roger please to call her simply “Volpe”—you couldn’t know.

“Of course not. But there’s a particular sort of unthinking adolescent cruelty, that seems not to be connected with a sense of reality, and responsibility.” Roger was thinking of Robin’s teasing accusation that Adam Berendt had “touched” her. “Touched” her! The whimsicality of it. The treachery.
Just a hypothesis, Dad
.
See?
But Roger hadn’t seen. In Robin’s wish to harm him she’d have sacrificed Adam Berendt whom, Roger believed, she’d truly loved. He said, “It’s painful to concede that maybe your own offspring isn’t—fair-minded. Isn’t ‘nice.’ ”

“And you yourself
are?
”

A born lawyer, this Volpe. Except she wasn’t. She was only a paralegal.

Practically, Roger was thinking, a menial. Yet she had the lawyer’s instinct for relentless confrontation, interrogation. A fired-up lawyer is like a buzz saw: get too close to the spinning blade, you’ll be shredded. But Roger Cavanagh was accustomed to being the buzz saw, not its victim.

Roger said, deflecting the question, “Robin has demonized me, in her imagination, and I have no idea why.”

Volpe was lighting a cigarette, exhaling smoke out her window. She laughed. “No, Mr. C. Probably you wouldn’t.”

Roger said, annoyed, “You’ve had experience with daughters?”

“Have I! I was a daughter myself for sixteen years.”

“ ‘Was’? Are your parents dead?”

“Dead to me.”

Roger shivered.

This paralegal Volpe was a sledgehammer of a female, though hardly more than five feet tall and one of the newer staff members at the Project.

She was claimed to be “very experienced” in assisting with death penalty cases; she’d worked in Texas, the heart of U.S. executions. She lived in Jersey City and commuted to East th Street, Manhattan. She wore mostly black clothes, sexy gay-boy attire: long-sleeved shirts tucked into trousers that outlined her round, hard little buttocks, black leather lace-up boots.

A black leather coat. You could stare at her (as, half-consciously, Roger

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J C O

had done) and not know if Volpe was attractive or plain. Or if she believed herself attractive, or plain. Her mouth was so small as to appear invisible except when she smiled broadly, showing a flash of ferret-teeth. Her gravelly laughter was the obverse of infectious: a jeering sound to put you on the alert.
Is she laughing at me?
Roger half admired Volpe’s wiry little-boy-body with its unexpected, somehow perverse breasts like rocks shoved up inside her tight clothes. And her hair! It was a sleek dark brown, shaved up the back of her head yet spiky on the sides and top, moussed, or oiled, to give the feisty little woman a look, surely unintended, of a cartoon character who has stuck a toe into an electric outlet. Her skin looked smudged as if with a dirty eraser. Her eyes too looked smudged. Both ears glittered with studs and rings and there was a silver ring in her left nostril that gave her an aboriginal ferocity. She was much younger than Roger Cavanagh yet seemed to him not-young; there was nothing girlish about her, and certainly nothing charming. Even in repose her forehead was lined; her eyebrows were dark, heavy, quizzical. When Roger was first introduced to her she’d said, “Mr. Cavanagh of Salthill-on-Hudson. An honor.” Roger hadn’t wanted to think the paralegal was being ironic.

On this drive into New Jersey, they were becoming acquainted. Volpe confided in Roger that she’d been admitted to several top law schools and had started at NYU but dropped out, too much bullshit, torts, motions, briefs, judges’ rulings and precedents, nobody gave a damn about justice, no attention paid to the ethical life. But now she wished she’d gotten her degree, you had to be a lawyer to have some effect upon this “shitty consumer society” where everything was for sale, especially justice. Roger guessed that Volpe hadn’t done well in law school. She was smart, obviously, but had little patience. She was restless, and annoying. She’d lit up a cigarette without asking Roger’s permission. (It was his car. This was his mission, primarily. And he was trying to cut back on his own smoking, which was becoming excessive.) Volpe’s aggressive in-your-face style would rub law professors the wrong way, especially in a female. Among the congenial staff of Abercrombie, Cavanagh, Kruller & Hook there was no one remotely like Volpe. Even in Manhattan, among seasoned lawyers, individuals who’d been involved with various liberal organizations like the ACLU, Volpe stood out. She strode through the drafty high-ceilinged rooms of the Project’s headquarters on the third, walk-up floor of an old brownstone tenement with the swagger of a jockey, her boy-buttocks cupped in snug trousers of some odd fabric that rustled and whispered
My
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ass
.
My ass
.
Hey
,
see? My ass
. Roger had heard rumors of Volpe’s “intense, polymorphous sexuality” and even a rumor, he’d since discounted, that Volpe had had a baby, and given it up for adoption to a wealthy couple. He disliked her on principle. Though she was a very capable assistant so far.

They were too much alike temperamentally, to get along for a protracted period. Roger knew! He knew the type. Volpe claimed to be from the Midwest but her accent sounded like Brooklyn to him. She spoke rapidly and impatiently and gave the impression of believeing herself superior to anyone around her, which pissed Roger (
he
was the superior party, usually) but also intrigued him. Roger had had occasion to overhear Volpe speaking on a phone, in a voice heavy with sarcasm, to individuals (like Elroy Jackson’s ex-attorney) who should have been treated with professional courtesy, if only in the interests of manipulating them. (A first-rate lawyer is a first-rate manipulator, or he’s nothing.) Since joining the Project staff, coming into the office two or three times a week in the late afternoon and early evening, Roger had been fascinated to hear this spiky female chew out assistant district attorneys and defense lawyers and even clients, social workers, law professors. He’d overheard her speak in rapidfire Spanish.

She’d been critical of one of the Project interns, a slow-moving cow-eyed Barnard girl whom other staff members treated with strained patience.

On this drive Volpe managed to boast to Roger that she’d lived and worked in places as disparate as Arizona, Florida, Alaska, and Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as Texas, and Capetown, South Africa, where for a year she’d taught remedial English to black African adults—“The most exhausting and rewarding year of my life.” (So why had she left Capetown, Roger inquired, and Volpe admitted she’d had to leave, she’d been mugged and “pretty badly beaten though at least not raped” by some drug-crazed black youths and couldn’t take the pressure of continuing with her work.) She’d been a social worker’s assistant in the Bronx. She’d been a paralegal in a Legal Aid office, also in the Bronx. She’d “repudiated” her Caucasian middle-class Indiana background by the age of sixteen. She was furious at what the “system” had done to Elroy Jackson, Jr., among others whom the National Project to Free the Innocent had taken up and she sincerely believed that there was in the United States an “unspoken but calculated apartheid” and that the emergence of selected African-Americans in sports, show business, the arts, and even the law was but a part of the conspiracy. “See, Elroy Jackson, Jr., is the basic unit.