One L (18 page)

“I'd like to comment on the argument,” Quinley said soberly before he let us go. He was a gentle, patient teacher and he mentioned no names, but it was obvious how angered he'd been by Willie's performance and mine. Some of the counsel, he said, didn't seem to care what they were saying. Some of the counsel had been too argumentative to listen to questions. Some of the counsel had slumped, had gestured too much, hadn't bothered to button their sports coats, had looked almost insolent.

Outside in the lobby, we had a piece of a coffee cake which Jody had baked. We all talked about how nice it was to be done with the work of Legal Methods. All that was left of the course now was the mock trial of the Katz suit, which we were not required to attend.

I congratulated Jim and Jody again; then Annette and I went home. I had two quick drinks, unusual for me, and waited for the alcohol to work. Now and then, as I sat bleakly in the kitchen, Annette would pat me on the shoulder and say in a hoarse, ironical voice that she still loved me. I did not laugh much.

I see now that during that period last fall, I was learning all about disgrace. I was suffering a broad variety of shames and embarrassments—over failure, at feeling a child, over losing control. Kyle, at one point, said that much of the section's anger with Perini earlier that day arose from a shamed sense of having continually submitted to things we did not admire.

In looking back at all those shamed feelings, I see much of the pain as crazy and exaggerated and unnecessary. But I think even now I would feel a little of what hit me after that argument. I had finally realized that there had been a worthwhile job to do and that I had done it badly. I had mocked what I should have cared about, and in the process I had strained a friendship, even embarrassed my wife a bit. I felt like the bottom of somebody's shoe. And there was no way out. No professors to blame, no institutions. This time I'd been the entire source of my own humiliation and there was nothing to do but drink, and wait until I could forget it.

 

On Thursday, the movement to rebuke Perini began to divide. In the half hour between Torts and Civil Procedure, Kyle read the letter he and Wade and Lindsey had written overnight, and it was apparent at once that much of the support for the protest had dissolved. Only sixty or seventy persons stayed to listen and many of them quibbled with the letter's language.

In twenty-four hours, tempers had cooled. Many people were ready now to heed what Ned Cauley had said—that a single misstep by a great teacher should be forgiven—or to honor Mooney's request that he be allowed to deal with the matter himself. In addition, a number of people had become frightened. Rumors—probably baseless ones—were now circulating that Perini had instructed his student research assistants to make it clear that he would retaliate for any gestures on our parts which he found embarrassing. Once more people feared that their grades would suffer, or that Perini would somehow take out his anger in class in the long period between now and June.

Many of the Guild members who continued to favor the letter spoke out angrily. They disparaged their classmates' courage and moral sense. There were a few hot-tempered speeches, a little name-calling. Finally, Kyle cut off the argument by saying that those who wanted to sign the letter could do so. He was the first, writing his name on the sheet with a dramatic flourish.

Watching, again from the back, I was not sure what to do. Gina came up to me.

“Are you going to sign?” she asked. She looked troubled.

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know.” I was in the grip of more of that painful confusion. Perini
was
a great teacher, I thought, and God only knew, I had learned for myself the previous afternoon the value of being prepared. I could see why Perini had impressed its importance on his students.

But still, it seemed to me that he had been rude and unfair, that he had been cruel. In considering excuses and counterweights I thought I might be doing what Nader had described the other night: hesitating where months ago common sense would have made things clear. Something ugly had happened the day before and there was nothing wrong in trying to make certain that it did not happen again. I just wanted to speak my mind. I dismissed the rumors of retaliation. If they proved to be true, that would in itself justify protest.

I walked to the front and read the letter once. It was really a moderate document. It praised Perini's teaching; it acknowledged the value of preparing for class. Its only critical note was struck in one carefully worded paragraph, in which the hope was expressed that in the event of a similar occurrence Perini's response would be more restrained. I put my name on it.

In the end, there were only 29 of us, in a section of 140, who signed the letter. Aubrey and Terry did. Stephen and Gina did not. I understood everybody's point of view. I still feel I did the thing which was right for me.

The signing of the letter was hardly the end of what was quickly becoming known to everyone as “the Incident.” Organized rebellion by a first-year section was virtually unheard of at Harvard Law School, and word of the letter had passed quickly. By Monday Kyle had led a number of the Guild members in formation of an organization called Section 100, whose purpose was to spread the protest throughout the first year class. They had decided to direct to all 1Ls a mimeographed statement in which they would describe their dissatisfactions with their entire experience at HLS and ask those who felt as they did to join in a mass meeting where some collective action could be planned.

Kyle had urged me to become part of Section 100. I looked in on one or two of their meetings but I was reluctant to get caught up in something in which Kyle was so prominent a force. There was a wonderful, attractive energy to Kyle, and he was highly intelligent; but I knew the kind of unyielding seriousness with which he regarded himself. All his class notes, for example, were inscribed in leather-bound notebooks purchased at the Law Coop for four bucks apiece. No one ever dared to kid him about his ostentation: There was little doubt that he considered his remarks on the law well worth preservation. In study group, he liked to have silence while he more or less lectured on the topic at hand. Early in the year he had admitted that he hoped to become a law professor, and I suspected that he saw himself right here, on the faculty at HLS. It was a high ambition. He would need to make straight As, Law Review, and a deep impression on his teachers, but Kyle had already left behind a string of achievements. He had been
summa cum laude
at Harvard, and in his junior year he had established some kind of college-wide note-taking service which was still operating. The service, as I heard it, had made Kyle a campus celebrity and also a great deal of money. On rainy days, he arrived at school in a taxi. Now that Kyle had emerged as an activist, I was not sure where that combination of self-seriousness and raw ambition would lead. I admired him for taking a stand, but I preferred to move aside.

Perini, for his part, seemed to be trying to put the whole thing behind us. When we faced him on Monday for the first time since the Incident, the class was more tense than we'd been since the opening day. There was a lot of nervous gossip and I stole a glance at Mooney, who wore his usual implacable expression but who looked pale. The room fell silent as soon as Perini appeared.

“I was out of town over the weekend,” Perini said as he'd set his books on the podium, “and I have to admit that I nearly came to class unprepared.”

It was as close as the man could come to an apology. The members of the section laughed and applauded. A great swell of relief passed back through the room. My classmates were delighted to be on good terms again with their stern Uncle Rudolph and class proceeded as normal, Perini commanding the room with wit and show and verbal force. He left Mooney alone.

Kyle and the Guild members, however, were not mollified. They felt Perini owed the section a genuine apology, and they also had complaints that went beyond any one episode. On Thursday, Section 100's statement to the first-year class appeared in our mailboxes in the basement of Langdell.

“What is happening to us at Harvard Law School?” the statement demanded in its opening line. It mentioned no professors by name, but it contained complaints about the irrelevance of our Criminal Law class, the intimidation we all felt in Contracts, the model of the lawyer's role taught in Legal Methods. I was told that a paragraph indirectly criticizing Nicky Morris's condescension had been omitted on a close vote. The statement asked all who felt similar reservations about what had gone on in their sections to join for a meeting the following Wednesday.

 

On the same day that Section 100's statement appeared, a new alarm spread through Section 2. But it had nothing to do with “Incidents” or protest. Nicky Morris had announced that the following morning he was going to give us an exam.

“It will not count,” Nicky said, with his hands raised to hush the tumult which followed his announcement. “It will have nothing to do with your final grade. I
will
mark these tests, but I just want to give you some experience in taking exams and I'd like to check on how much of what I've been saying has been getting across. You can take the test anonymously or you can just skip it. It's your choice. I'd advise you to take it. But, please, don't study for it longer than an hour or two.”

Aside from the purposes he mentioned, I think Nicky also wanted to provide us with some of the feedback and reassurance which we'd needed for weeks. But coming when it did, his announcement fed into the mood of stress and competition created by the Methods arguments. Nicky had said it would be a real exam question, given under authentic conditions, and for that reason most people figured the test and its results would be an indubitable indication of future standing. Many in the section lapsed at once back into the kind of panic which had prevailed for the past weeks.

Stephen grabbed me immediately after class. He was obviously in a heat.

“We'll meet, right? The group? Talk about Procedure?”

Here we were again, back at the familiar emotional crossing between panic or withdrawal. Terry had already chosen the latter course. He sat behind me in Procedure and when I had asked him if he'd take the test, he shook his head.

“No way,” he said. “I'm not working myself up for nothing. Man, I don't put my bucks down when they're just joggin' around the track. I'm not taking any tests when I'm not
all
prepared.”

I was looking for some more moderate response. I told Stephen I wanted to write the exam but that I saw no need for a study group cram session. I reminded him that Morris had said only an hour's preparation would be needed.

“Don't be naive,” Stephen told me. “Everybody's crawling the walls already. They'll study all night. We've got to get together just to have a chance.”

Aubrey, even Kyle busy with Section 100, agreed. So the four of us met late that afternoon. I was not happy to be there and after an hour I left. I studied my Procedure notes briefly at home, then put them away. Moderation, I told myself. Moderation. I was still collected when I arrived at school on Friday morning. Near my locker, a group of men and women from my section were quizzing each other on Procedure. It was obvious, that as Stephen had predicted, they'd studied hard. They were glib about cases I couldn't even recall. I tried to ignore them and hustled away.

In Langdell, in my mail slot, I found a copy of our motion brief. It was the one Peter Geocaris had been given at the argument to read and comment on. I hadn't spoken with Peter about the argument. He'd had to leave for a class as soon as we finished, and I'd avoided him since. But to the brief Peter had appended a long personal note.

“Your brief was not as bad as your argument,” Peter wrote, “but I would be lying if I told you to be proud of either of them. I have seen worse briefs and heard worse arguments, but I know what you are capable of. Frankly, I expected a lot more.”

The note was blunt and I was not prepared to deal again with the way I'd felt last week. My first reaction was anger. I threw the brief on the floor. I think I may have kicked it. All that snotty excellence crap, I thought. Then I counseled myself: Whose fault, really? Who are you angry at? I recovered the brief, removed Peter's note, and left the paper for Willie. Suddenly dreary again, I headed back to the hallway, where I ran into Stephen.

“Have you heard?” he asked me.

“Heard what?”

“You won't believe it.” He took me with him to his locker and removed a copy of one of the morning papers. He opened it to an inside page. There was a small, single-column article. The headline read “Harvard Law Students Protest” and in four or five inches of type the Incident and the birth of Section 100 were described. Perini's name was mentioned a number of times, but the only direct criticism of him was contained in the article's conclusion—a verbatim quote of the one critical paragraph from the letter which Perini had been sent by the twenty-nine of us from the class. I was mortified.

“Why would they
print
that?” I asked Stephen. “Where'd they get the letter?”

“Maybe they think we're going to sit in,” Stephen said. He explained that a man in the section lived with a woman who was a reporter. She'd seen Section 100's statement and had followed things from there. According to rumor, she'd called Wade Strunk, who had provided her with all the information, including the quote from the letter we had sent Perini. That was the part which bothered me. I had signed that letter and I felt responsible for what happened with it. I'd thought it was a private matter. I never intended the letter to become an element in any sort of public humiliation for Perini.

Stephen knew no more and I headed for the Torts classroom, where there would be fresher information. I got hold of Lindsey Steiner, the woman who'd asked everyone to stay after class the day of the Incident. I'd been told she'd seen Perini this morning.