What He's Poised to Do

I got acquainted with it at once, and then spent the rest of that long summer wishing I had not done so with such swiftness. The room had no windows. It was lit by massive fluorescents. Three of its walls were lined from ceiling to floor with beige filing drawers, while the fourth contained, in addition to the door, a map that showed the countries of those continental cabinets: which of them were inhabited by past judgments, which by pending arguments, which civil litigation and which criminal. There was exactly one piece of art in the room, a picture of two fish jumping from a stream side by side, tails fully fanned.

After my first morning there, I emerged to find Mortenson smiling and chatting with a secretary. “Go get yourself some lunch and then alphabetize and file the pile by the door,” he told me. That took care of the afternoon and the next day. The hours piled up and I filed them away, too. On the morning of the third day, a knock sounded at the door and Schiff appeared. He stood in the doorway until I invited him in, then took a seat dolorously and asked me how I was enjoying the file room. When I murmured something about getting an education, he cleared his throat to take me off it. “The files are history, but what’s history? Merely markers of time that can’t be recovered.” This was, I would come to learn, his dominant mode, a grave melancholy that he intended as philosophy but was in fact autobiography. “Well, this is what Mortenson wants you to do, so you should work,” he said, “and I should go.”

But he did not go; he stayed with one hand hovering just above the folders and began to instruct me, slowly but with unmistakable purpose, in the law. That first day’s lesson was the Jeffers case, which concerned a client who had sued his employer for unlawful dismissal. Schiff was not capable of fine movements, but his broad strokes had all the necessary detail in them: he explained the man’s position, the employer’s stance, the statute at that time, the dominant interpretation of that statute, the precedent that allowed him to locate an opening. Through it all, it was clear that the law had once meant everything to him, and now meant nothing. He was bereft but not poor; only a rich man could have lost so much. Finally, after we had toured the whole of the case, he stirred heavily. “After lunch, come by my office. I have some work for you that makes more sense than this. I’ll leave it on the table by the window.”

His office was in the corner. As in the matter of the firm’s name, Mortenson had asserted his stature by concession, giving up the largest space on the floor to his partner. Schiff kept the place sparse. He had no pictures with which to clutter the desk or credenza, and no newspapers or magazines. The place was not empty but filled with what was missing. The assignment for me—a list of appointments I was supposed to schedule—was on the table, squared between two staplers.

When I finished, it was late. Nearly everyone had left for the day. From Schiff’s window I could see the spire of the university lecture hall where my father held forth on Lewis Douglas and the Bonus Bill. There was, just beneath the window, a small triangular park, trees springing up from each corner, a small pond in the dead center—no more than a pool, really, for bicycles and baby carriages to circle—and spans of grass in which children tossed a ball. The afternoon light played out, and by degrees my reflection appeared on the window glass. It was unfamiliar to me, and in the midst of so much newness that unfamiliarity was a haven. I had a clear sense of becoming something I had not been before.

Schiff visited me in the file room only once that week, and once the week after that. Each time he lectured in that understated, overdetermined manner of his, and each time he departed with some word or another about work he had for me in his office. As we went, I came to forget the specifics of the cases he presented and to remember only the aphorisms with which he summed up each case. At the conclusion of a long case concerning workplace injury, he represented the judgment to me with this moral: life is a bell with a crack in it, and yet its tone when struck is the nearest to perfection any man will ever know.