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Volume 27, Number 1 (2003) reprinted by permission of Legal Studies Forum © 2003 Lowell B. Komie THE ESTATE OF MACHIAVELLI LOWELL B. KOMIE* In a way, I felt sorry for my colleague standing inside the warm corridor. I’ve lost a lot of cases in my forty-seven years as a lawyer. I usually also avoid the lawyers who beat me. I see one of them quite often on the street, white haired, fat faced, pretentious. We nod curtly as we pass each other. Another who beat me badly, I see often coming out of the Loop synagogue on Clark Street under the jumble of Hebrew letters sculpted into a metal bow on the facade. He doesn’t remember me. Still, I avoid eye contact with him. Memory is a magic thing. We have an eyepiece on the front door of our room here. We’re on the ground floor. I look into the peephole each morning before breakfast and I see long tunnels of sunlight, crystal whorls of daylight. I suppose we live each day suspended between memory and reality. Now that I’m 74, I think often of elderly lawyers. Some alive and still practicing, others dead and frozen in my memory. Can I admit to myself that 74 is elderly? I should. I think my hair has turned white. I don’t really know because I keep covering it with creme to darken it, but I do really know. It is white. My wife and I were in Stockholm two years ago and we met a lawyer who was 84, ten years older than I am now. He was still practicing and had been retained by our friends from Chicago to represent the wife in an estate dispute in Stockholm against her brothers. He’d prevailed and forced the brothers to back off and pay their sister her fair share of the parents’ estate. He was a feisty, tough lawyer, white haired, thin and physically still very quick. He lived in a 4th floor atelier with no elevator, bounding up the ancient, winding stone stairs that led to his apartment ahead of all of us. We had dined together in a basement restaurant, formerly a dungeon, where he said the assassin of King Gustav III had been imprisoned before he was taken out to the square and executed. The assassination became the plot of Verdi’s Opera “A Masked Ball.” After dinner, we followed him up the winding stone stairs to his apartment and he showed us his collection of drawings and engravings of Gustav III. He was an expert on the assassination. He’d fought against the Germans as a young military cadet in Norway and had fled to Sweden and remained there. His wife was a former French ballerina and was away visiting their daughter who was teaching ballet in Paris. “She (the daughter) was fabrique on that couch,” he told us, pointing to a low living room couch. His white nylon shirt had been freshly washed out in a sink and was hanging from the rafters in the living room. He was going to the office in the morning. He said he practiced without a computer and did his own typing on an old IBM. He was now involved in litigation with his landlord, the church next door. The church was trying to sell his building to a developer. He was suing to prevent the sale and have the building declared an historic property, He was a man of tremendous energy, a kind of demonic energy. I kept his card and carry it in my wallet. “Gustav Adolphus Carlson–Jur. Kand. (Notaire), Stockholm, Sweden.” I think a kind of adversarial demonic energy infuses a lot of older lawyers. It’s the juice that keeps us going. Maybe that’s the cause of my ebb and flow of spitefulness against the lawyer I meet each day in the doorframe. When I was in my 40s, I had a partner in his 70s who used to sit behind a large desk in his immaculate white shirt and suspenders in a huge office. On the wall behind him were two drawings of Oriental Fighting Masks. He was framed by the two drawings, white haired, red faced, always angry. He was a good desk lawyer though, very precise and tedious and an annoying litigator. When he had a stroke he wouldn’t admit that his speech had been paralyzed and when he came back to the office he insisted on still receiving clients. That refusal, to admit he was disabled, ended his career. The same kind of anger fueled another lawyer I knew. He was the senior partner of what is now one of the largest firms in the city. At the end of his career, he became obsessed with the colors of the fabrics of the furniture in the firm reception room. He was particularly infuriated by a red chair. He didn’t think a red chair was proper in the conservative reception room of a law firm. He would scream at his partners to get rid of the red chair. Finally, they forced him to retire. Another man, who I used to fish with in the Florida Keys, stayed on in the office too long. The last time I saw him, he’d walked into a lamp-post in front of his office building and was sitting dazed on the sidewalk with his glasses broken. I extended my hand and offered to help him up but he refused and turned away from me. I should have learned something from them. I think I have. I hope I have and I’ll know when to leave. I’d like to make it to fifty years in practice, three more years, but not by fulminating at chairs or walking into lampposts. I was in Israel several years ago and I met two lawyers there, an uncle and nephew. I was sitting on a bench in Haifa with the uncle. He was a stranger to me, a man in his 80s. We were both waiting at the bus stop and he had difficulty taking off his cardigan. It was hot in the sun-light. So I reached over and helped him. He thanked me and we began to talk. I told him that my wife had recently died and I was a lawyer from Chicago. This was before I remarried. He told me he was a lawyer from Manchester, England. He was visiting his nephew in Haifa for the Bar Mitzvah of the nephew’s son. The nephew was a lawyer in Haifa and the older man was waiting for him at the bus stop. He said he really didn’t practice much in Manchester. He’d lost his wife several years ago and was living alone. He got to the office at 10 mostly to help a younger lawyer with his probate cases. “I get in at 10 a.m. and occasionally take widows out for lunch. I wait for my clients to die so I can probate their estates and at night I eat out of tins.” It was a sad litany. I wondered if it would happen to me. The nephew finally did show, a man in his late 40s with a boyish face and brown hair, short, squarely built. He had an English accent and was a graduate of the University of Johannesburg. The uncle was thin and quite frail. The nephew was carrying a parcel in a brown bag and his briefcase. He wore a short sleeved, open throated white shirt. “I’m sorry uncle, I had a court case in Nazareth and then I went bathing. I have my bathing costume in here,” he patted the brown parcel. Later, the two of them invited me to the nephew’s office. It was just down the street behind a vine-covered wall, in an older two-story building with trellises of bougainvillea. It looked more like a residence but there were several offices up the stairs. The nephew showed me around. He had a kitchen, some soft chairs, a couch, and a stereo. He made us tea and took a few phone calls, speaking in rapid Hebrew. He said he had a 2nd office in downtown Haifa. This office was obviously a hideaway. The uncle told me in a whisper that the nephew had recently left his wife and was involved with another woman. A lot of lawyers have secret places. I remember Julius Hoffman, a Federal district judge in Chicago. He was a very exasperating and difficult man, short and bald like an angry little bird. You’d wait at the counsel’s table for him to appear, waiting before an empty bench. Suddenly, he’d pop up in front of you like a jack in the box from some secret place, maybe a hidden chamber behind the bench. I suppose we all have our hiding places. I seldom go to Court anymore. I have an office practice and I’ve stopped litigating. Just after we came back from Arizona, I had a hearing in the Probate court, approval of a Current Account of a Bank representing a disabled World War II veteran as Guardian of his Estate. I am the attorney for the Bank and I have been for many years. So far, the veteran, who is 78 and lives in Italy, in Rome, has outlived his wife and most members of his family. His mental condition is poor. Occasionally, someone from the American Embassy visits him and checks up on him and files a report. He spends most of his days sitting with his friends watching them play billiards. But even he has a hideaway, a small summer home in Anzio, which is now again a beach resort outside of Rome. It’s my job to have the Current Account of the Bank approved and occasionally file a Petition for special needs of the ward. I took a taxi to Court for the hearing. It was too cold to walk and my legs hurt. I had mislaid my Attorney’s I.D. card. so I had to go through security at the Daley Center. The security system is similar to those they have at airports. I emptied out all the keys and change in my pockets and my two pens and glasses. In the elevator there was absolute silence, litigants and lawyers, crammed up against each other. I could smell tobacco and alcohol mixed with body odor and essences of morning cologne and hair spray. I noticed that several of the lawyers had suntans. Even though we were jammed into the elevator and had to jockey around each other to let people out, the people were courteous. In the Courtroom, instead of a rude clerk, there was a very cheerful, polite clerk with ruddy cheeks and an earring on his ear. He had a display of tiny, green, soft leprechauns on his desk. He was an Irishman who spoke with a lovely accent, a gentleman. There was a woman lawyer in front of me as I waited to hand him my file. She had a very tired, sad, pale face and seemed weary and defeated. All her spirit and animation were gone. The Judge took the bench exactly at 10. She was very courteous and pleasant. Then the first case was called. The Clerk called out, “The Estate of Machiavelli.” I waited for laughter. I didn’t think it would come. I was wrong. The laughter began as a tittering. Then a crescendo of real laughter came. We were all Machiavellian, writing our treatises for our respective Princes. We were all servants in this courtroom. But the cosmetics of Chicago style justice had improved. The clerks were more charming. The Judges, younger, intelligent and polite. On the wall though, still the slogan, IN GOD WE TRUST. The pale, sad faced woman lawyer rose to answer the call for The Estate of Machiavelli. As she approached the Bench, her purse strap hooked over the corner of the Counsel’s table and she was caught and held back. The Judge waited and smiled patiently. Finally, a woman lawyer reached over and gently released the purse strap from the edge of the table. After my hearing, I stood in the corridor outside the courtroom. There was a retarded boy sitting on a bench with his mother and a social worker and the boy kept questioning them in a flat, atonal voice. He had a fresh, young face, a handsome boy about 12, dressed for his court appearance in black trousers and a white shirt and tie. “Why are we here? “Where are we?” “Why?” “What are we doing?” he kept asking. I stopped at another courtroom and looked through the door window. I’d spent many hours in this courtroom. The same Judge was on the bench, his hair a little whiter. The room was packed with lawyers. A tough, fair Judge. I have great respect for him. As I was watching, a lawyer pushed the door open, almost into my head but I pulled back just in time. I still have my moves. I can still head feint away from a punch. The next morning I was back in the doorframe waiting for my bus. It was Spring in Chicago, but it was still so cold. I haven’t seen my doorframe friend since I’ve been back from vacation. I wonder what’s happened to him? Maybe he’s like one of those comic strip characters that transmogrify into an electric shock figure as they walk through a doorframe and then either disappear or reconstitute themselves. He’d disappeared. I thought of trying the door handle and waiting for the bus in the warm corridor, but I realized that without him there’d be no one to watch for the bus. I’ve changed now to a Springtime costume of my tan raincoat buttoned at the throat and a baseball cap. I was the only one waiting for the bus and when it finally came, the bus driver passed me up but saw me at the last moment and braked. He opened the door and waited for me in the middle of the street. –“Hey man, I almost didn’t see you hiding in there. You can’t hide in there and expect me to see you.” * Lowell B. Komie is a lawyer and a writer in Chicago. He has practiced law for forty-seven years. Komie's short fiction was featured in a special issue of the Legal Studies Forum which appeared in 2001. [See the Tarlton E-Texts index for links to those stories.] "The Estate of Machiavelli" first appeared in the Chicago Bar Record in September, 2002. |
