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QUITTING THE BAR, TWICE : What the law taught me about faith
Commonweal, May 19, 2000 by Heather King
"I'm asking you if you have any physical complaints," the attorney snarled. "Insomnia, stomach pain, backaches? Have you seen a doctor? Have you started taking any prescription medicines since your husband died?"
"I don't think you understand," Mrs. Prietto said softly, leaning in toward his tense, sweaty face. "When my husband died, it was like I had been sitting in a bright room and someone, without any warning, snapped the lights off. And they were never going to come on again."
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In the world of litigation almost everything you do or say or hear is calculated, but this was so real you could smell it: real sorrow, real grief, real love forever lost. You could have heard a pin drop; the interrogating lawyer even stopped snapping his gum. Simple, sincere, soft-spoken, Mrs. Prietto had managed to bring eight attorneys to their knees, had rendered us, finally, mute. In the silence, a phrase floated up from nowhere to the forefront of my mind: "But many who are first shall be last, and the last first." That was when I saw that Mrs. Prietto didn't need me. In some strange, reverse way, she had already won.
Just before I left my job, I apologized to Eric. It seemed to me that if blame were to be apportioned it would be along the lines of 99 percent his and 1 percent mine, but I had to admit that if he had been the world's biggest blowhard, backstabbing jackass, I had not always been a model of sisterly love. I thought for days about what I was going to say, reworking thousands of scenarios, saying to myself, "Okay, if he says this, I'm going to say that," and "If he refuses to talk to me, I'll just...."
In the end, I walked into his office, forced myself to meet his eyes, and said, "I know I haven't always been easy to get along with. I'm sorry for the times I was rude or uncommunicative." It just about killed me. I could scarcely believe, after the hideous wrongs he had perpetrated on me, that the words were coming from my mouth. But they were and, at that moment, they were as genuine as I could make them. True to form, he took it entirely as his due, puffing and preening in his usual way, and made not even the merest apology himself.
But when I walked back out his door, something had changed: some granite ledge inside me had been dynamited to smithereens. For three years, I had let him hold me in bondage and I wasn't in bondage anymore. It was like an exorcism: the most cataclysmic grant of inner freedom (apart from having been relieved of the compulsion to drink) that I have ever experienced.
I still support myself with occasional legal research and writing. There's something about law libraries that attracts misfits: grubby types with smudged-up notebooks. One unkempt guy with a yellowing beard sits all day at the library where I work, with his head bowed over a book whose pages he never turns. Another man with filthy clothes and wild hair spends hours filling legal pads with unintelligible squiggles. If only they turn enough tissue-thin pages, they must think, write down enough section and chapter and volume numbers, stare long enough at some fiendishly unintelligible index, some day they will finally stumble across it: the Rule Book, the code of behavior, how to be accepted and a part of the world instead of cast aside and lonely.
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