No Defense (37 page)

“Great gifts that change the future of an
institution stem from a boundless selflessness,” the Dean began.
“At best, those of us who are recipients of this beneficence can
stand back in awe and gratitude. Today, through this substantial
endowment in recognition of the upcoming Carsonville, Alabama
Bicentennial, I am honored to officially announce that,” he paused
for a silent drum roll, “a Chair, to be known as the Sam Bailey,
Jr. Scholar in Clinical Law, will not only honor our law school but
will support the critical missions of independent scholarship and
teaching excellence.”

The Dean continued: “The terms of this
generous gift from Sam Bailey, Jr. are few. The recipient, who will
receive tenure, must have been born in the great State of Alabama,
and he or she must be an authority in the field of Clinical Law. We
foresee with this endowment that our Clinic, already nationally
recognized in just the two short years since its establishment,
will become a leader in this burgeoning field. Sam’s own law school
Clinic experience up north at – what’s the name of that place
again?” The Dean opened his palms, shrugged and smiled, attempting
to make a joke about the insecurity “second tier” law schools like
ASU wore like an albatross. “Sam’s Clinic experience changed his
view of legal education.”

The faculty tittered with nervous laughter.
Sam Bailey had attended Yale Law School, number one for the
umpteenth year in a row in the all-important
U.S. News and World
Report’s
yearly law school ranking. He’d spent a small fortune
on his hometown school, ASU, trying his best to push it into the
top fifty; the much desired “first tier.” Not only did he endow the
Clinical Chair, but Sam also had contributed a huge chunk of money
for the law school building itself, as well as the funds used to
hire Marilee and start the Clinic two years ago.

“The Trustees and I, with the assistance of
the Rank and Tenure Committee, under the able leadership of Dean
Scanlon, have chosen the recipient for the Chair, and I am proud to
introduce the new Bailey Professor of Clinical Law,” the Dean
continued.

“Please congratulate and welcome our new
Bailey Chair in Clinical Law.” The Dean’s voice rose forcefully as
he readied the crowd for the big announcement.

Marilee leaned forward slightly, inhaled,
and tried to put on a grateful but humble face as she stood up.

“Dwight Hurley!”

Dede’s hand shot out, grabbed her sister’s
arm, and pulled her back into her seat as heat spread rapidly up
Marilee’s neck and across her face, leaving apple-sized hives,
clear evidence of her dismay.

As faculty members sitting in front of her
whipped their heads around, Marilee averted her eyes from the
pitying looks and nervous giggles and prayed that most of the
faculty had missed her presumptuous ascent, and her humiliating
descent.

As the Dean gestured to the side entrance
doors, they swung open, as if under some spell, and there he was.
Dwight Hurley. Marilee felt as though everyone else in the packed
auditorium had disappeared, and that she and Dwight were in a slow
moving dream, a nightmare. She bit the inside of her cheek hard but
didn’t wake up.

Dwight walked with the loose, cocky swagger
of politicians and men who played college basketball. His black
hair was stylishly messy and long, hanging just over his collar,
and his full lips. Above a prominent nose, his dark blue eyes
exuded a calm confidence.

Marilee looked down at her trembling hands,
then stuck them under her thighs.

“What the hell is going on?” Dede
whispered.

“I wish I knew.” Marilee could barely form
the words with her bogus
I’m-so-happy-for-Dwight-and-I-don’t-care-that-I-didn’t-get-it smile
and a growing lump in her throat. If she could get through the rest
of this event without weeping, she decided, this entire ceremony
had to be considered a brilliant success.

Dwight shook the Dean’s hand, then stood
back a little to the side with his hands clasped behind his back,
as though at attention, while the Dean detailed his credentials:
Vanderbilt University (to Marilee’s Duke), Chicago Law (to her
Emory), Sixth Circuit clerkship (to her Eleventh), the Public
Defender’s office (to her law firm stint), and, just last year, the
Criminal Clinic at Redmont Law School in Cincinnati, where he’d
established an Innocence Project and personally participated in
several high profile criminal trials, in particular the
groundbreaking
State of Illinois vs. Edmunds
. “Lucky for
us,” Dean Dody explained, “Dwight was only co-teaching one class at
Redmont this fall, so he was able to leave on a moment’s notice to
join us.

“Finally,” the Dean concluded, “because
faculty scholarship is essential for the law school’s continued
success, you all can understand just how thrilled I am to pass on
this bit of very good news: Dwight has almost finished the first
Clinical Law textbook and it will be published soon.”

A book? Marilee stifled a gasp. She hadn’t
even finished an article and Dwight, who had taught Clinical law a
year less than she had, had completed a book! In the world of
academia, professors didn’t write textbooks alone in their attics,
penning one page after the next, coming out with a masterpiece
after years of isolated toiling. No! They circulated ideas and
parts of papers; they e-mailed and conferenced; they collaborated
and argued. How could he possibly have written a book on Clinical
Law, the first textbook ever, without her hearing about it?

Dwight shook the Dean’s hand again as the
faculty clapped its approval.

Was she mad? Jealous? Worried about her
future? Yes, yes, yes. Adding insult to her injured ego
,
the
Dean and the trustees had awarded the Chair to the charter member
of the men-who-broke-Marilee’s-heart club. Dwight Hurley was
Marilee’s first love, and, since their breakup ten years ago, she’d
taken great pains to avoid him during his rare visits home.
Unfortunately, because the ASU Legal Aid Clinic was a law firm in
which the students practiced law pursuant to Student Practice Rules
(think
Legally Blonde
but not so well dressed) she would be
stuck working and teaching with him almost every single day.

Marilee wanted to disappear, and though she
was too big to scooch under her chair, she wasn’t too large to walk
away. She stood slowly, hoping no one would notice, and turned
toward the exit at the back of the room, only twenty steps away.
Perhaps, she thought, she had a legitimate reason for her sudden
departure – labor, or a doctor’s appointment, or a scheduled court
appearance to name a few. She could think of any number of clever
excuses, but before she’d lumbered up three steps, Dede was next to
her, her mouth close to Marilee’s ear.

“Marilee, turn around,” she whispered
insistently. “You have to say something to him. You can’t
leave!”

If Dede, who never bowed to convention,
thought she had to stay, clearly there was no other option. In the
moot courtroom surrounded by her colleagues, Marilee had to admit
that she wasn’t free to act mad or jealous or worried. She needed
to appear to be a reasonable, responsible grown-up, even though she
felt like a rejected, neglected child, and welcome Dwight to what
until that moment – although officially named the ASU Legal Aid
Clinic – had simply been referred to as “Marilee’s Clinic.”

Faculty members surged toward Dwight to wish
him their best and congratulate him on the prestigious award and a
job well done. As he shook hands, he looked around, searching for
someone. Marilee wondered if his wife Lana was there, and surveyed
the room for a petite, gorgeous brunette.

When she didn’t see Lana, she turned toward
her sister and mustered a small smile. “Okay, okay, I’ll go
congratulate him.” She swallowed hard but the lump remained. What
if she choked? That at least would get her out of there.

Dede nodded her encouragement, her light
gray-green eyes full of concern.

Marilee started down the steps toward
Dwight, but by the time she reached the last step at least twenty
professors had surrounded him. Because she preferred to shake his
hand without half the faculty watching so closely, she hung back
and looked around the room. Dwight’s mother, Ruth Hurley, stood a
few feet away looking pleased in a tight-lipped sort of way.

Marilee approached her, figuring that if she
couldn’t get to Dwight, his mother was an acceptable stand-in.
“Mrs. Hurley. It’s been a long time. I wanted to offer my
congratulations to you and Dwight.” Marilee extended her hand.

Ruth recoiled slightly at the sight of
Marilee but offered her limp hand. Hopefully she wasn’t reliving in
her mind, as Marilee was, one of the last times the two had seen
each other, when she and Dwight were high school seniors. Dwight
and Marilee had broken up – something they did every few months
during their six-year, high-drama romance – and a week later had
made up. They were on the basement couch, their clothes strewn
across the floor, ready to consummate the reconciliation, when Ruth
walked in on them.

“I’ll actually be working with Dwight in the
Clinic,” Marilee said. “You must be very proud of him.”

“I am, thank you,” she replied primly.

“So, when did Dwight get back?”
And
where’s Lana
, Marilee wondered.

“Just yesterday. Oh, if you’ll excuse me.”
She walked toward the Dean, even though he was busy talking with a
pack of reporters.

When the Dean looked up to greet Ruth, his
eyes met Marilee’s and he cringed. She tried to read in his face
the truth about why she hadn’t been chosen for the Chair he’d
promised her, but before she had a chance to publicly demand an
explanation – something that surely would have made her
embarrassing situation even worse, he turned away.

The one person she always tried to avoid –
Sue Scanlon – touched her forearm, then tapped it with two red
nails, as if she were sending Morse code via Marilee’s body. “Oh,
Marilee.” She shook her head, her layered blonde hair rising and
falling with each shake. Sue’s expertly applied eyeliner, eye
shadow, and mascara, and the plunging neckline of her silk blouse
made Marilee feel like a homely, matronly, pregnant hick.

“What a terrible blow to you,” Sue gushed,
feigning concern for Marilee although she clearly was enjoying
every minute of her colleague’s pain.

“Oh, far from it! You know I wanted more
faculty support in the Clinic, Sue, given how many students we have
to turn away every semester. This fall we had twenty-one
disappointed third years.” Marilee faux-smiled. “Now we can add
another full section.”

“We’re not expanding the Clinic! I thought I
made that clear to you when I told you we wouldn’t support your
little proposal for Clinic work at the detention center. But good
for you, what a brave way to look at being passed over for the
Chair, Marilee. Keep it up. You’ll need that kind of spunk once
you’re home with two little ones.” She looked at Marilee’s bulging
belly and grimaced. “Thank goodness Dwight’s here now, taking care
of things. We’re just so thrilled he accepted our offer.”

Marilee was in dire need of moral support.
She scanned the room for her sister, but Dede’s back was to her as
she talked with Dean Larkin. Dede stood like the dancer she was,
her feet in third position, her hips slightly thrust forward, her
right hand on her hip. Marilee would have to cross the entire room
and talk to one professor after another about Dwight and the Chair
just to get her attention, so she tried to imagine what Dede would
say to Sue, what perfect zinger of a response. But she was too
upset to think, much less to channel Dede’s biting tongue.

Enough was enough. Marilee had been cordial
as long as she could. She had to leave the moot courtroom before
the tears pressing against her eyes caused her head to explode,
right there, all over Sue and the moot courtroom bench.

Marilee hadn’t used the stairs to her
fourth-floor office in months due to the extra weight she carried,
but they were her only hope for dodging the other faculty members
and nursing her wounds in private
.
As she dragged herself up
the first flight of stairs, she let her frustration,
disappointment, and anger loose with a few minutes of
full-throttled crying. The event that was supposed to mark the end
of the year from hell had just made her life exponentially worse.
Wasn’t there some limit on how many terrible things could happen to
a person in one year?

When she reached the second-floor landing,
she heard someone above her breathing loudly and shallowly. Marilee
gulped back her tears and walked slowly up the next few steps,
peering upward, ready to run back down and escape out the
second-floor door if necessary. But she had no reason to worry.
Standing on the third-floor landing was Larry Lee Hallowell, his
body pressed flat against the wall, as though he wanted to render
himself invisible. How long he’d been there was anyone’s guess.

Mr. Hallowell, a Clinic client in his late
thirties, never took the elevators due to panic attacks coupled
with mild obsessive-compulsive disorder. Climbing the stairs
sometimes took him close to an hour, depending on how many people
interrupted his progress, as Marilee just had.

Marilee wiped her face as she approached him
and thought about trying to explain her tears, but didn’t think it
appropriate or necessarily helpful. “Mr. Hallowell,” she said,
careful to resist the natural impulse to shake his hand. “How are
you today?”

He wiped his hands nervously on his T-shirt,
then looked down at his feet, the top of his buzz cut pointing at
her. “Fine,” he mumbled. At least, that’s what it sounded like he
said.

“I’m sure your student lawyers are looking
forward to seeing you.” Of course, she didn’t know whether Lance
and Paula, his student lawyers, would still be waiting for him by
the time he reached the Clinic offices. His appointment could have
been hours ago, or he might have dropped by without an appointment,
as some of the Clinic clients did.