"You let him do it," Brackman said. "You walked right into it."
"You should have stopped him. You're my attorney."
"You were your own attorney at that point."
"I was getting angry."
"Yes. So you attempted to argue your own case. That was a brilliant move, Arthur, absolutely brilliant."
"Someone had to argue it. You certainly weren't."
"Thank you, Arthur."
"Don't get petulant, Sidney. Petulance is unbecoming on a middle-aged man."
"Yes, and ingratitude is unbecoming on a man of any age."
"If we win this case…"
"If we win this case, I'll be amply rewarded, yes. If we win it. In the meantime, it's cost me a considerable amount of time and money, and I would appreciate your letting me handle it from now on."
"I didn't think McIntyre was being fair. He can't—"
"He can do whatever he wants in his own courtroom."
"But he has to be fair."
"No, he only has to be judicious."
"I still think he was rushing us," Arthur said, and raised his hand to signal an empty cab.
"Let it go by," Brackman said. "I want to talk to you."
"I have to get to the theater."
"The theater can wait. Let it go by."
Arthur waved the taxi away and turned wearily to Brackman. "What is it?" he asked.
"Arthur, do you want to lose this case?"
"You know I don't."
"You can lose it if you're not careful."
"I thought you said…"
"Yes, that we had an airtight case. But believe me, Arthur, you can lose it. And one sure way of losing it is to antagonize the man who'll be making the decision. That's one sure way of slitting your own throat."
"I'm sorry."
"Tomorrow's going to be a rough day, Arthur. Willow—"
"I said I was sorry."
"Willow is not on our side, you know, and he'll do everything he can to rattle you and confuse you and make you lose your temper. I want your promise that under no circumstances will you again address the judge personally, not to ask him any questions, not to offer any explanations, not for any conceivable reason. I don't even want you to look at him, Arthur, I want your promise on that."
"I promise," Arthur said. "I have to get to the theater."
"Can you be here at nine-thirty tomorrow?"
"I guess so. Why?"
"There are a few matters I want to discuss when you're not in such a hurry."
"All right, I'll be here."
"Nine-thirty," Brackman said. "There's another empty one, grab him."
"Can I drop you off?"
"No, I'm going east."
The taxicab pulled to the curb. Arthur opened the door, and then said, "Judicious is fair."
"Look it up," Brackman said, and Arthur climbed in and closed the door behind him. "The Helen Hayes Theatre," he said to the cabbie, "Forty-sixth and Broadway."
It had turned into a bleak, forbidding day, the sun all but gone, dank heavy clouds hanging low in the sky and threatening snow. Through the taxi windows, he could see pedestrians rushing past on the sidewalks, hurrying to cross the streets, their heads ducked, their hands clutching coat collars. Behind them and beyond them, the store windows beckoned warmly with holiday tinsel and mistletoe, colored lights and ornaments, wreaths and sprigs of holly. This was only the twelfth of December, with Christmas still almost two weeks away, but the stores have begun preparing for the season long before Thanksgiving, and the city wore a festive look that unified it now as it did each year. He could remember the long walks to the library from his home on 217th Street, the store windows decorated as they were here but with a shabby Bronx look. They had moved to the Bronx when he was twelve years old, the decentralization, was beginning, the second generation was starting its exodus to what then passed for the suburbs. The trip to Grandpa's house each Sunday would be longer and more difficult to make, discouraging frequency, trickling away at last to family gatherings only on holidays or occasional Sundays, disappearing entirely when his grandfather died. The street they moved into was another ghetto, smaller, cleaner, with a rustic country look (or so it seemed after Harlem) trees planted in small rectangular plots of earth dug out of the sidewalk, mostly two-family brick houses, Olinville Junior High School across the street, its fence stretching halfway up the block from Barnes Avenue, they used to play handball in the schoolyard. He tried out for the handball team when he entered high school, but did not make it. He was a good student, though, his marks always up in the eighties and nineties, and an omnivorous reader. He would go to the library on 229th Street and Lowerre Place maybe two or three times a week, even before it got to be a gathering place for the high school crowd.
There was a feeling of prosperity to the new apartment (he recognized now that it was hardly less shabby than the four rooms they'd had in Harlem) with its new furniture and its new linoleum, the three-piece maple set his mother bought for him, with the dresser that had a hidden dropleaf desk full of cubbyholes, and the pink curtains in Julie's room. She was nine at the time, and had already begun to hang all kinds of crazy signs on her door, genius at work and BEWARE VICIOUS DOG, he got such a kick out of her, she was really a great kid. His father had become a "regular" by then, and was working out of the Williamsbridge Post Office on Gun Hill Road. He would set the alarm for four-thirty every morning, waking up the whole damn house, and clamoring for his breakfast, a real ginzo with ginzo ideas about the woman's place and so on. He could have let Mama sleep, instead of making such a big deal about breakfast, racing around the apartment in his long Johns. "There he goes," Julie would yell, "they're off and running at Jamaica," and Arthur would lie in his bed under the quilt Aunt Louise had made for him, and quietly snicker, he sure was a nut, that old man of his.
There was, too, the same feeling of belonging in this new ghetto, though now there weren't aunts and uncles to meet on the street or to drop in on during the afternoon. But there were Italians all up and down he block, half of them barely able to speak English, and there was a funny kind of intimacy, a feeling of safety, an instant understanding that was not present out there in the White Protestant world, though at the time he was not aware such a world even existed. He knew only that he felt comfortable on his own block, with people who were easily recognizable, like the business with all the women named Anna, for example. His mother's name was Anna, but there were also four other women named Anna on the block. So instead of using their last names, which is what any decent New Canaan lady would have done, instead of referring to them as Anna Constantine or Anna Ruggiero or Anna Di Nobili, the women had a shorthand all their own, Naples-inspired he was sure, instant ginzo communication. His mother was Anna the Postman, and the other women were respectively Anna the Plumber, and Anna the Butcher, and Anna the Bricklayer, and also Anna From Wall Street, he smiled even now, thinking of it. But he was comfortable then, comfortable in his growing body, and comfortable in his new home, where in the silence of his bedroom (unless Julie was practicing her flute in her own room next door) he would take the little maple lamp from the dresser top, the lamp shaped like a candlestick with a little shade on it, and he would put the lamp on the floor and play with his soldiers in the circle of light it cast. The dining room table had been sold before they left Harlem, they now had a three-piece living room suite and a big floor radio that looked like a juke box, but there were worlds to discover on his bedroom floor and he searched them out with his faithful Magua and his intrepid Shorty, his imagination looser now, fed by the books he withdrew from the library each week.