Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [8]
That was another difference from the old days: back then I could count on knowing all my colleagues well. Many of them had lived in free rooms that the co-op provided to offset the low salaries a poverty law firm offered. All employees were welcome to attend the frequent potlucks, parties, and poker games. Today everyone was adequately compensated, and the few who remained in communal living quarters—Ted, Pam, Larry, Jack, and Rae—paid fair-market rent. A number of the newer associates and employees led personal lives that were strictly segregated from their work lives, and while the potlucks, parties, and poker games continued, they catered to an ever-diminishing core contingent.
Rae said, “Mike and Gloria seem like good people, but I can’t warm up to either of them. I get the feeling that anything not strictly relating to work is off limits, and you’ve got to admit that neither of them has a sense of humor.”
“They’re crusaders, Rae. People with missions often don’t see much to laugh at.”
“Well, if I couldn’t laugh at stuff, I’d go totally insane. Even this thing with Willie has its funny side, if you think about it.”
I agreed—both about the thing with Willie and the need for laughter. If I lost my ability to laugh at life’s snares and pitfalls—to say nothing of my own foibles and pomposities— I’d end up in the bin within weeks.
Ted stuck his head through the doorway. “They’re ready for you, Shar.”
“Thanks.” I got up and followed him, smoothing my long red sweater over my jeans and feeling ridiculously like a little kid being called to the principal’s office.
As I slid open the parlor door, Ted whispered, “Noli nothis permittere te terere.”
I glanced back at him. “What?”
“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
They were all there, seated in various attitudes and degrees of repose. Hank was sprawled on the piano bench, leaning back, elbows propped on the keyboard cover. Pam, always more comfortable on the floor, had her back to the ash-clogged fireplace. Larry slouched in the overstuffed armchair, his feet propped on its hassock. He had a big pottery bowl in his lap and was fishing walnuts from a sack and shelling them into it. Mike anchored one end of the maroon sofa, Gloria the other.
I shut the door and looked around for a place to sit. The only one was between Mike and Gloria, but being hemmed in by the two partners I was least comfortable with would put me at a psychological disadvantage. Finally I went over and plopped down next to Hank, poking him in the ribs to make him move over.
“Sorry I was late,” I said. “I got hung up on a case I’m working,”
Hank held his ground, poked me back, then sighed and relinquished the center of the bench. Larry tossed me a walnut. Pam smiled and said, “Better late than never.”
Pam loves to utter aphorisms in a manner that makes them sound like arcane bits of Asian wisdom. I said, “That’s deep, Pam. Maybe you should get Ted to translate it into Latin.”
She made a face at me. I glanced at Gloria and Mike; neither looked amused. Gloria’s eyes were impatient, Mike’s somewhat annoyed.
Well, no wonder, I thought, recalling the conversation Rae and I had just had. To them the law and its trappings— even All Souls’s shamelessly casual partners’ meetings—were a serious matter.
Both Gloria and Mike had struggled to achieve what Hank, Pam, and Larry took for granted. While I knew only the outlines of Mike’s earlier years and nothing at all of Gloria’s, I was certain neither had enjoyed the slightest privilege or luxury. In contrast, Hank had been raised in an affluent Peninsula suburb and hadn’t worked a day until he graduated from law school. Pam’s childhood had been spent on a Lanai pineapple plantation; private schools, both there and on the mainland, had prepared her for law school at the University of Chicago, where the worst hardship she’d endured was snow. And Larry—he’d been a rabble-rouser all his life, bummed around Europe for a couple of years after college, then skated