Decision (6 page)

“That isn’t fair,” Tay said, quietly and more maturely now, fortified by the knowledge that his father knew it wasn’t fair. “I’m not giving up the battle, and I’ll never be far away. You
know
that Carl and Anne both want to stay on the ranch, and when they get married, Carl will get a lot of help from Anne’s husband—”

“Johnny Gonzales!” his father said in a strangled tone. “At sixteen, she thinks she wants to marry Johnny Gonzales!
That—
”

“Yes,”
Tay said, without giving an inch. “And that’s great too. He’s a great guy and Carl and I want him in the family as much as she does. Things are changing, Dad. We need new blood in the family. And he loves the ranch as much as you and I do. After all, he’s grown up here almost as much as we have.”

“That’s the trouble,” his father growled. “If I’d only known what was going to happen—”

“You still would have hired Martin, because he’s the best foreman in the valley. And you still would have got his son along with him. And Anne would still have done what she’s going to do. So why make it tough for everybody?”

“Isn’t nature enough?” his father asked in a half-wry, half-bitter tone. “Do I have to fight my own kids too?”

Tay dared to laugh, knowing he had the upper hand now.

“Not at all, Dad. Just give in to ’em. It’ll be a lot easier.”

“Are you afraid of me now?” his father asked and again there was a long moment, and again a decisive answer.

“Not anymore,” Tay said quietly. “Not ever anymore, I think. But now I think we can begin to love you more than we ever have, too. So that’s something.”

“Yes,” his father said, blowing his nose abruptly again. “That’s for damned sure
something.
So how do you plan to go about this law bug of yours?”

“Well, first,” he said, “I was thinking Stanford for undergraduate work. And then I think maybe Harvard, if I can get in.”

“You want to go
east?”
his father demanded in the disbelieving tone of any loyal Californian who knows they have everything, and better, right there. “Why
east?”

“Because that’s where the big opportunities and the big money are,” Tay said crisply, in a toughly practical tone his father had never heard before, though his mother had, in the past twenty-four hours when they had talked about it at length. “And that’s where the chance to help people really is. Maybe eventually I can even go to Washington and do something to help serve the country and help make our whole society better. I’d like to do that.”

“That’s that damned Erma Tillson again!”

“It is
not!”
Tay said flatly. “That’s my idea.”

“You might even want to be a politician,” his father said in a tone that unfortunately was not only Californian but virtually unanimous from coast to coast.

“I might even want to be,” Tay agreed in the same crisp tone. “So don’t be too shocked if it happens someday… Anyway, I have a long way to go. Are you going to wish me well on the journey?”

And now it was his time to run and look his father squarely in the face, though he could hardly see it in the now swiftly gathering dusk. But he could sense a smile, and presently the big hand closed firmly over his.

“I guess I’d better make it easy and give in,” Frank Barbour said with a chuckle that cost him more than Tay would ever know. “Since that’s what my kids want me to do.”

Five minutes later they came back to the house laughing and joking together, arm in arm. Helen Barbour gave her son a big wink and a grin and kissed them both heartily.

“There!”
she said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it!”

“Hard as hell,” her husband said. “But I think we both survived.”

“Yes,” Tay said happily. “I think we did. I think I’ll go call Miss Tillson. She’ll be pleased to know.”

“So your mother had to play second fiddle even then,” Cathy remarked. “Didn’t she deserve something for—”

“Listen!” he said, suddenly genuinely annoyed. “Will you stop this phony women’s chip-on-the-shoulder business? Who says I didn’t? And who says there was ever any problem? Do you know that scarcely ten minutes before you came in I called the ranch and told my mother about this appointment—even before I told my wife? Do you know that she and my dad are flying back for my swearing-in? Do you know—but of course you don’t. You’re just jumping to conclusions, like all the media. It’s so damned stupid.”

“Am
I
damned stupid?” she demanded; and added quickly, “Why didn’t you call your wife first? Is something wrong there?”

“Oh, for—!” he exclaimed with a frustrated laugh. “Okay, you tell me. Go on and make up your own story. I’m obviously wasting your time. I know it will make much better reading than the truth.”

“You’re very defensive about your wife,” she remarked thoughtfully, making a note and staring at him unblinkingly. “I wonder why that is?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shifting to mockery for a moment. “Maybe it’s because we have the worst possible marriage there ever was and I’m planning to divorce her as soon as—”

“Are you?” she inquired with the same quick earnestness that appeared to be genuine, though he seriously doubted it. It was just a reporter’s trick, they all had them.

“No, I am not,” he said, deciding two could play at that game, turning completely calm and reasonable. “Mary and I have a close and satisfying marriage that has lasted for twenty years now, and which we aren’t about to dissolve. Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s the way it is.”

“Tell me about it,” she said; and after studying her for a moment, he smiled.

“All right, if you’ll treat it sensibly, I will. I met her in my last year at Harvard Law.”

The school years, divided between Stanford and Harvard, passed very profitably and pleasantly for him. He applied himself with diligence to his pre-law course at Stanford; enjoyed the many extracurricular activities he found available; was a star of the basketball team, as he had been in high school; speaker of the student senate in his senior year; had his share of conquests on the back roads west of campus; and generally enjoyed the life of a healthy, vigorous, studious, reliable and outwardly gregarious young male. “Tay is so
well balanced,”
one of his fraternity brothers who was not, particularly, remarked sarcastically as they neared graduation; and so he was.

When he was accepted at Harvard Law School and prepared to leave for the east at the end of his fourth Stanford summer back on the ranch, he took with him a thorough preparation, many good memories and a few good friends who would stay with him over the years. He did not take a wife, nor did he take the unbalancing of emotion and of views that were to warp and twist so many of the college generation that came soon after.

He completed his undergraduate years, he often reflected, just in time to escape the effects of the Vietnam war. Unlike Earle Holgren, now staring vacantly at nothing in his carefully modest cabin in the woods, who came to Harvard a few years later, Tay was not a self-conscious child of rebellion self-consciously rebelling. A character infinitely steadier than Earle’s would not have permitted it, even had the timing been right. Fortunately for him it was not. The maintenance of a level head and an undeviating advance toward established goals did not become a personal battle to survive the chaos of a generation but simply an extension of an already well-ordered progression.

At Harvard his love affair with the law, which had begun rather lightly in Erma Tillson’s Civics I and had grown steadily more serious at Stanford, became a final commitment. By now it absorbed him to the point where it almost seemed that there had never been any other major interest. The ranch was still a part of him—he was drawn into its affairs on many occasions by the family corporation Frank Barbour had set up, he still went back for vacations, pulled on jeans, work shirt and battered old hat, and drove tractors and trucks and plows and harrows with his father, Carl, Martin and Johnny Gonzales and the rest. He still loved it. But always his mind was at work on the problems of the law, his thoughts, never idle, were concentrated on examinations yet to come. His heart was at Harvard and, more specifically, in the law.

Aware of this—as who could not be?—Frank Barbour told Helen many times that he felt he had done the right thing to take the time to find out what the boy really wanted and encourage him to do it. She always agreed gravely that it had been one of the best ideas he had ever had.

At law school, also, Tay made several good friends whose paths crossed his repeatedly over the years as they all rose steadily in the profession. One of the first, the one who meant the most and always would, was a young Southerner of substantial wealth, political purpose and considerable personal charm who came into his life one day at the library with an amiable grin, reentered it when Tay came to Washington and now was about to become not only friend but colleague and fellow Justice. Stanley Mossiter Pomeroy was six months younger than he, a little less serious, a little more relaxed, but equally ambitious and dedicated to the law.

Their eyes had met across a study table, held, been followed after a moment by smiles.

“Hi,” the other had said, holding out a friendly hand. “I’m Stan Pomeroy, except I like to be called Moss because my middle name is Mossiter and it’s different. My best friends call me Moss. I expect you’ll want to do the same?”

And he gave an engaging grin that Tay could not help but respond to.

“I expect I will,” he said, “if you want me to.”

“I think I do,” Moss said. “You look like a good guy to me. Do you need any help on anything?”

“I’m making it okay.”

“So’m I, but on the whole I think a team does better.”

“Probably,” Tay agreed. “We can spread the headaches around.”

“And boy!” Moss said. “Does this place give ’em to you!”

A team they had become, studying together, researching together, writing together, serving as practice audience for each other’s oral presentations, giving each other critiques of substance and style, fortifying one another in all the rigors of the paper chase. And, cautiously at first on Tay’s part, but then with increasing acceptance and ease, they became a social team as well, meeting a steadily increasing number of girls from Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, going on double dates to Boston and New York, skiing in Canada, picnicking on the Cape, breaking away from the grind whenever they could.

Moss, as he explained matter-of-factly, was probably going to marry a girl down home in Charlotte, South Carolina, named Sue-Ann Lacey but, “In the meantime, I do not intend to let any virgins grow under my feet. I’ve got a better place for ’em.” In pursuit of this he ranged far and wide through New England’s educational institutions for the warm-blooded young and did not do at all badly in achieving his announced intention: even though, as he confessed to Tay from time to time, he really did love Sue-Ann and he only wished the damned law school would come to an end as fast as possible so he could marry her and have her save him from all this worthless carryin’-on.

For Tay, too, it was essentially worthless. He could not deny he enjoyed it, even if much more circumspectly and on a much more modest scale. But it soon lost its savor and before long he was beginning to look seriously for someone he could genuinely love and who could genuinely help him in his career.

He related none of this to Cathy Corning, though she did her best to pry it out of him. To hear him tell it this afternoon, he and Moss were virgin, hardworking, no-nonsense students who stayed glued to their law books until Moss went home to Sue-Ann and he found Mary Stranahan at Smith.

“That must have been boring,” Cathy observed dryly.

“Dreadfully,” he agreed cheerfully. “But it made us such good students that we both seem to have wound up on the Supreme Court. Don’t knock it.”

“Never,” she said, making a note. “I thought I was to get the truth.”

“Within reasonable limits.” He smiled. “I set the limits. And I define what’s reasonable.”

“You’ll make a good Justice,” she said with a sudden answering smile. “You sound like one already. You’re an arrogant bunch of birds, you know that?”

“I’m sure we don’t mean to be,” he said. “I’m sure we’re not. It just seems that way, sometimes.”

“Like now,” she agreed. “Get on with the fairy tale.”

“Well,” he said,
“then
I met Mary Stranahan.”

“And lived happily ever after.”

“Perfectly,” he said, although he knew, and by now she was absolutely certain, that this was not the case.

Yet for quite a while—more than half their years together, in fact—it had been. He had met Mary at a dance at Smith—one of his other classmates had a younger sister there and invited him to go along as a blind date. The whole thing was very conventional and clichéd—“No surprises,” as he had put it once not long ago, and with a sudden bitter twist to her mouth she had echoed, “No surprises.
That’s
for sure.” But he could not honestly see that this was his fault. “It takes two to tango,” he had snapped back, more sharply than he had intended; and then they were off again into one of those upward-spiraling exchanges that more and more often ended in angry silence, until now the angry silence was virtually unbroken save for the ordinary civilities of getting through the day.

How this had happened he was not exactly sure, because at first and for a long time thereafter things seemed to go very well. The original blind date escalated into more, and then soon into weekend trips to Mary’s Main Line home outside Philadelphia. There he met her bank-president father and her fashionable party-giving mother and was gradually accepted as worthy despite his rural background—“A
farmer,
my dear, from
California.
But a good boy, and really rather sweet.” Engagement and marriage soon seemed inevitable and came about on his graduation from law school.

If anything, he thought with a wry smile for Mrs. Stranahan which he kept to himself, Mary had more trouble passing inspection with his family than he did with hers. Frank Barbour was strongly opposed at first and did a lot of dark talking about “upper-crust arrogance” and “watered-down Eastern bloodlines.” Helen, more tolerant and ready to accept whatever would make Tay happy, expressed mild reservations about Mary’s “somewhat superior manner.” But eventually they came around, as they had about the law, and when the day arrived they were in Philadelphia to do their part as smoothly and pleasantly as he could possibly have wished. The day ended in amicable harmony for the parents and ecstatic happiness for the bride and groom. Everything seemed set for the rest of their lives.