Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin [14]
Gradually, our grumbling turned into longer talks over coffee in the student lounge or during walks around Washington Square Park. We began to study together in the hour before class, preparing for the inevitable—the day Zigman would call on us. I dreaded my turn, knowing that it would be a bloody massacre, but secretly couldn't wait for Dexter to be called on. Zigman preyed on the weak and flustered, and Dex was neither. I was sure that he wouldn't go down without a fight.
I remember it well. Zigman stood behind his podium, examining his seating chart, a schematic with our faces cut from the first-year look book, practically salivating as he picked his prey. He peered over his small, round glasses (the kind that should be called spectacles) in our general direction, and said, "Mr. Thaler."
He pronounced Dex's name wrong, making it rhyme with "taller."
"It's 'Thaa-ler,' " Dex said, unflinching.
I inhaled sharply; nobody corrected Zigman. Dex was really going to get it now.
"Well, pardon me, Mr. Thaaa-ler," Zigman said, with an insincere little bow. "Palsgraf versus Long Island Railroad Company."
Dex sat calmly with his book closed while the rest of the class nervously flipped to the case we had been assigned to read the night before.
The case involved a railroad accident. While rushing to board a train, a railroad employee knocked a package of dynamite out of a passenger's hand, causing injury to another passenger, Mrs. Palsgraf. Justice Car-dozo, writing for the majority, held that Mrs. Palsgraf was not a "foreseeable plaintiff" and, as such, could not recover from the railroad company. Perhaps the railroad employees should have foreseen harm to the package holder, the Court explained, but not harm to Mrs. Palsgraf.
"Should the plaintiff have been allowed recovery?" Zigman asked Dex.
Dex said nothing. For a brief second I panicked that he had frozen, like others before him. Say no, I thought, sending him fierce brain waves. Go with the majority holding. But when I looked at his expression, and the way his arms were folded across his chest, I could tell that he was only taking his time, in marked contrast to the way most first-year students blurted out quick, nervous, untenable answers as if reaction time could compensate for understanding.
"In my opinion?" Dex asked.
"I am addressing you, Mr. Thaler. So, yes, I am asking for your opinion."
"I would have to say yes, the plaintiff should have been allowed recovery. I agree with Justice Andrew's dissent."
"Ohhhh, really?" Zigman's voice was high and nasal.
"Yes. Really."
I was surprised by his answer, as he had told me just before class that he didn't realize crack cocaine had been around in 1928, but Justice Andrews surely must have been smoking it when he wrote his dissent. I was even more surprised by Dexter's brazen "really" tagged onto the end of his answer, as though to taunt Zigman.
Zigman's scrawny chest swelled visibly. "So you think that the guard should have foreseen that the innocuous package measuring fifteen inches in length, covered with a newspaper, contained explosives and would cause injury to the plaintiff?"
"It was certainly a possibility."
"Should he have foreseen that the package could cause injury to anybody in the world?" Zigman asked, with mounting sarcasm.
"I didn't say 'anybody in the world.' I said 'the plaintiff.' Mrs. Pals-graf, in my opinion, was in the danger zone."
Zigman approached our row with ramrod posture and tossed his Wall Street Journal onto Dex's closed textbook.
"Care to return my newspaper?"
"I'd prefer not to," Dex said.
The shock