Commonwealth (14 page)

The name rang its small bell in the back of Bert's mind. Dick Spencer from the DA's office who had once been a cop; in fact, Dick Spencer who had invited him to come along to the christening party at Fix's house. Franny's christening party.

“Where's he going?” Bert asked. He seemed to remember Spencer had gone to UCLA.

“Southwestern College of Law,” Franny said, impressed with herself for having committed it to memory.

“Dear God,” Bert said.

“Well,” Beverly said, brushing a strand of yellow hair out of her eyes. “I say good for him.”

“Sure,” Bert said. “It's going to be tough though, trying to go to law school every night after work. I don't know when he'll have time to study.”

Franny looked at him, her own yellow hair long and slightly stringy. She hadn't bothered to brush it this morning in her rush to get down to the presents. “Didn't you go to law school?”

“Sure I did,” Bert said. “I went to the University of Virginia. But I didn't do it at night. I went the regular way.”

“So that wasn't hard,” Franny said. She felt proud of her father, who would be doing two things at once. The nuns had led her to believe that God gave preference to people who did things the hard way.

“It was hard enough,” Bert said and took a sip of coffee.

Caroline came back downstairs and stalked through the living room on her way to the kitchen to get a snack, a second piece of Christmas coffee cake which she felt would aid in her studying.

“So your father's going to law school,” Beverly said to her, smiling. “That's great.”

Caroline stopped dead, as if her mother had shot her in the neck with a blowdart tipped in neurotoxins. The expression on her face blossomed into something between horror and rage. They could all see the mistake had been made and that there would be no undoing it. “You
told
them?” Caroline said, turning the full force of herself onto Franny.

“I didn't  . . .” Franny's voice started small and then trailed into nothing. She meant to say she didn't know she wasn't supposed to tell, or she didn't know it was a secret, but the words just dried up in her mouth.

“Did you think Dad
wanted
them to know? Did you wonder why he didn't just call and ask to talk to them?” Caroline took two fast steps to Franny and struck her sister's bony shoulder with an open hand, the blow knocking the younger girl sideways out of the chair. It hurt, both the arm that was hit and the arm that she fell on. Franny couldn't help but think that Caroline must have really been mad at her, madder than usual even. Caroline almost never hit her in front of people.

“Jesus, Caroline,” Bert said, putting down his cup. “Stop it. Beverly, don't let her hit Franny like that.”

Christmas is particularly hard.
All four of them were thinking some variation of that same sentence. Beverly leaned imperceptibly away. Nobody liked to see Franny hurt, but the truth was that Beverly was afraid of her older daughter and she didn't step in unless there was blood.

“Don't tell me anything,” Caroline said to Bert, spitting just the tiniest bit in her fury. “Tell your snitch.” Franny was crying now. The red imprint of her sister's hand would be a purple bruise by the time she went to bed. Caroline turned around and pounded up the stairs, every step a blow. She would be forced to study without her piece of cake.

Once Fix started law school, his conversations with the girls revolved around torts. “Mrs. Palsgraf was in the East New York Long Island Rail Road Station standing next to a scale,” he said conversationally, like he was telling them a story about his neighbor. He was only saying it to Caroline because Franny had put the phone down and gone back to reading
Kristin Lavransdatter
. During the “Law School Summers,” as they would later be remembered, Caroline and Fix sat together at the kitchen table, Fix explaining the cases. He said it helped him, that if he could explain a case to the
girls then he would have learned the law that was embedded in it. “People will tell you that law school is about learning to think, but it's not. It's about learning to memorize.” He held up his hand and counted off on his fingers, “Negligence, wrongful death, invasion of privacy, libel, noncriminal trespass . . .” Caroline took notes. Franny read. Franny credited her father's time in law school for her reading
David Copperfield
and
Great Expectations
, all of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and, eventually,
The World According to Garp.

There had always been a particular bond between Caroline and Fix, only now that they had the ten exceptions to the Dead Man's Rule to discuss they were closer. Caroline and Fix agreed there was nothing as boring as property law, with five times the details and little intuitive reasoning to help them. There was nothing to do but plow through the cases with endless repetition and clever mnemonics. What's an offer? What's an acceptance? What's a contract? What creates a third-party beneficiary? Property law required vigilant attention.

“It's a good thing there're going to be two lawyers in the family,” Fix said to Franny over dinner, meaning Caroline and himself. “Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.”

“They're free,” Franny said. “I check them out of the library.”

“Well, thank God for libraries,” Caroline said.

Astonishing how much condescension could be packed into the words
Thank God for libraries
. Fix laughed, and then caught himself. Franny didn't think he meant to laugh.

Fix had favored Caroline even before he started law school. It was because she was older, because they'd had more time to get to know one another before the divorce. It was because Caroline's hatred for Bert burned like a clean white flame, and because she went out of her way to make their mother's life miserable and then
report the whole thing back to her father. Fix would tell her to ease up, while at the same time enjoying the meticulous detail of her reportage. He would have liked to have had the chance to make Beverly's life miserable too. Caroline looked like Fix—the brown hair, the skin that tanned to gold the minute they hit the beach. Franny was too much like their mother, too delicate and fair and uncoordinated. Too pretty while at the same time never as pretty. When their father took the girls to the alley behind the grocery store at six o'clock in the morning with their racquets and fresh cans of tennis balls, Caroline would have as many as twenty-seven consecutive hits without missing.
Thwack, thwack, thwack
, into the blank wall that was the back of the A&P, her long arms intuitively graceful in their swing. Franny's personal best was three consecutive hits, and that had only happened once. But the real difference between Caroline and Franny was that Caroline cared. She cared about the law and tennis and her grades in classes she didn't even like. She cared what their father said about their mother, what he said about everything. Franny just wanted to go back to the car and read Agatha Christie. Most of the time they let her go.

After their father had finished the second day of the California State Bar Exam, he called the girls in Virginia to tell them how crazy people were. They came into the test lugging their own desk chairs, their lucky study lamps. One guy was so superstitious he came with a friend and together they dragged in the guy's desk. Crazy! The test was long and hard, like running all the way from MacArthur Park to the police academy in summer, but that's why you practice, so that when the time comes to perform you'll be ready. Fix had been ready, and the test was behind him now. He was done.

Franny told Bert. She went into his study and shut the door before she told him, and even then she kept her voice down. “Dad took the bar.”

Franny and Bert got along, even when Bert and Beverly no longer got along, even though Caroline and Bert had never gotten along. Bert looked up from the stack of file folders in front of him. “Did he pass?”

“He just took the test,” she said. “But I'm sure he passed.” Four years of doing nothing but working and studying and going to school, sacrificing vacations and what money he had—he had passed. There was no other possible outcome.

Bert shook his head. “California's tough. A lot of people have to take the bar a couple of times before they pass.”

“Did you take it a couple of times?”

Bert, who was quick to be brash with everyone else, was kinder to Franny. He looked at her there, her very straight shoulders, and gave his head a shake as if he were sorry about it, then he went back to his work.

Fix didn't pass the bar.

Marjorie was the one who called and told the girls. “Nobody passes the first time. I know plenty of lawyers and they all say forget it. Your dad is just going to have to take it again. The second time you know what you're up against. The second time it all makes sense.”

“Will it be the same test the second time?” Caroline wanted to know. Caroline was crying and she was trying to be quiet about it, keeping her hand over the receiver.

“I don't think so,” Marjorie said with hesitation. “I think the test is always different.”

“So what did he do?” Franny said from the extension, knowing that it was up to her to carry the conversation now. “What happened when he found out?” Fix had asked Franny and Caroline to pray for him on the day of the test, and they had. They had asked the nuns at Sacred Heart to pray for him too, and still he hadn't passed.

“We went to my mom's and she made your dad a nice dinner.”

“Oh, that's good,” Franny said, because Marjorie had a mother who could make anybody feel better about anything.

“She made him a gin and tonic and fixed a meatloaf. She told him it was a shame that he didn't pass the test but at least he'd get to take it over. She said most of the tests you take in life you only get one shot at. I think that made him feel better.”

For the second test Fix made index cards. He knew a guy who had done that the second time and that guy had passed. Fix showed the cards to the girls that summer. He kept them lined up in a shoebox, divided by topic. There were more than a thousand cards. Caroline quizzed him even when the car was going through the car wash, except she wasn't quizzing him. She was telling him the answers, holding the card flat against her chest. “The doctrine under which a person in possession of land owned by someone else may acquire a valid title to it, so long as certain common law requirements are met, and the adverse possessor—”

Franny stood at the long set of windows and followed the car as it passed down through the slapping clothes that dangled from the ceiling (continuous), through the soap suds (hostile), the rinse (open and notorious), the spray wax (actual). She let the car wash fill her, every part of her, but still it was not enough to bear away the four elements of adverse possession.

As brilliant as the index cards were they didn't work, even though the second time he took the test he brought his own desk lamp. Marjorie's mother made him dinner again and told him he was going to have to take the bar a third time, nothing to be ashamed of, plenty of people had, and so Fix sat for the test the third time, and when he didn't pass it then, he stopped. No one talked about law school anymore, except insofar as it applied to Caroline and Franny.

By the time Caroline took the LSAT her senior year at Loyola, her Kaplan guide was held together by duct tape, highlighted in three colors, and bristling with Post-it notes. Test takers are a superstitious breed, so while she was careful to read updated versions in her study groups, the copy she read in bed in her dorm room before going to sleep was the one her father had given her that Christmas in Virginia. Fix's and Bert's mutual theory that a consistent practice over so many years would result in a perfect score had not been correct. A perfect score on the LSAT is 180. Caroline Keating came in at 177. She didn't know where she had lost those three points but she never forgave herself for them.

* * *

Almost two weeks after Franny had so miraculously deduced that Leo Posen's room number was 821, and had gotten him to that room and gotten herself out of the hotel without anyone's being the wiser, she got a phone call at the bar. Ten minutes past six and every table was full, every barstool taken. People stacked up behind the people in the chairs, drinks in hand, laughing and talking too loudly while hoping that a seat would open up. One of the other waitresses, the girl named Kelly who had the ex-husband and the child, put her hand on the small of Franny's back and nearly touched her lipsticked lips to Franny's ear while whispering to her. Everything these people did was intimate, even the delivery of messages. “Phone call,” she said, her voice slipping beneath the din.

Franny had never gotten a phone call at the bar. Kelly got them all the time, from her ex-husband and her babysitter and her mother, who sometimes watched the baby. The child was never able to make it through the entire shift without facing some unsolvable need. Franny did a quick scan in her mind of all the people
who might be dead, then realized there was no guessing. The room was so loud—competing voices, the eternal clink of glasses, Luther Vandross on the goddamn tape which meant that Bing Crosby was coming next. Heinrich held the phone straight out to his side as if it were some nasty bit of carrion scraped up off the road, while continuing his conversation with a customer. He kept his chin down slightly, his shorthand for disapproval. He didn't need to say it. She put a hand over one ear as if that could actually block out the noise.

“It's Leo Posen,” the voice said.

“Really?” she said. It's not what she would have said had she taken a moment to think about it. She had reread
First City
since escorting him to his bed and that had kept him very present in her mind. Franny doubted he would have remembered any aspect of that evening, and even if he had, it would never have occurred to her that she would hear from him again. Thinking that Leo Posen might call her required a level of self-aggrandizement that Franny Keating did not possess.