Chapter 7

The group began working in earnest. They went over the old exams, they did their own outlines, they argued and debated. And each kept her own study schedule in addition. Mairin enlarged her normal study schedule to include nights. Sometimes she didn’t get more than an hour in before tiredness and tension made it impossible to study.

"I’m drinking more bourbon than I should," she said to Linda. "I drink it to ease the tension, but then I fall asleep."

"Well, you don’t strike me as a basic lush," said Linda, "but if you’re concerned about it, maybe you ought to knock it off."

"And stick to the ceiling like a helium balloon?" asked Mairin. "I’ve never thought I needed tranquilizers, but I’m ready for them."

"You’ll make it," said Linda.

Mairin wasn’t so sure. The weeks were gone, and exams were upon her. Criminal law was first. It was okay, kind of a rehash of torts, except that the penalties were criminal. Civil procedure. It was a dumb test, just like the course, but there was a logic to civil procedure. It could make sense if it was approached correctly, and Mairin felt that she’d done a reasonably good job.

Then came the coup. The contracts exam was the last and the hardest. Everyone was edgy beyond reason. Mairin had decided to forego the bourbon that last week in favor of keeping awake. However, she was incredibly tense. She felt like the helium balloon she’d joked about with Linda. She could picture herself rising into the sky and disappearing completely. When she sat down to take the contracts exam, she felt that she should tie herself to the chair.

She read the questions. She felt the same bewilderment she’d felt when she looked at the practice exam. There seemed to be no connection between the cases she’d been reading and the questions in front of her. Then, slowly, she thought of some principles that might apply to the situations in the questions. She began to write. Three times she left the room for a drink of water. She wished she could run from the building. When she was finished, she went straight home. There were a few knots of students doing post-mortems, but Mairin had no desire to stop.

She walked into the apartment, dropped her books on the couch. She went to the kitchen and poured a hefty glass of bourbon. She was sitting at the breakfast table looking through the mail when the phone rang. It was Evan.

"Where did you go? I looked all over for you."

"Here. I came here."

"What did you think of it?"

"I don’t know. It was like the practice exam, but even so, it just seemed like something from another world."

"How do you think you did?"

"I’m sure I don’t know."

"What did you put for the third question?"

"I thought that was a third-party beneficiary."

"No, there was no means of enforcement."

Mairin felt her stomach tighten. He was right. "Evan, I don’t want to talk about this test. I just want to go to bed."

"Don’t worry about it, Mair." You’ll do okay."

"Goodnight Evan. I’ll talk to you later." She hung up and went right to bed. About three she woke up. She was wide awake. I blew the third question, she thought. She got out of bed and leafed through her outline. She was beginning to feel sick. Even more than that, she could feel the beginnings of a gigantic depression. Oh no, she thought, not that. It’s been over a year. I can’t stand that again. She made herself get back into bed, but she couldn’t sleep. She used an old trick from college days. She took four aspirins, and the result was sleep.

She felt like hell the next day, both physically and emotionally. She sat in her office, trying to bury herself in paperwork rather than returning phone calls. Carol was the only one who was brave enough to ask her about the exam, and Mairin’s response was so depressed that Carol put out the word to leave her alone.

Mairin’s one wish was to be alone, to cry. The tears kept gathering weight. I’m not a crier, she thought, I never have been. I swear a lot, but none of the words are adequate right now. She lived through the day, the tears still gathering weight. She lasted until five, drove home, bolted up the stairs and into the apartment. She threw herself onto the bed, and the tears came. I failed, she thought. I really failed. I studied all year, and I didn’t understand a thing. I wanted so much to be a lawyer. I wanted the challenge, but I wasn’t good enough for it. I’m stuck. I’ll have to stay where I am in life. She cried. She talked her thoughts out loud. Finally she fell asleep.

When she woke up, the tension was gone. But as she lay there, memory came back. She could feel the depression as though it were a physical weight. I need music, she thought. She got up from the bed, realized that she still had her work clothes on, put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She put on one of her favorite blues records and curled up on the couch. The electric guitar soared, the words expressed her feelings. The phone rang. It rang four or five times before Mairin realized what the intrusion was.

It was Karen. "God, Mairin, I feel so awful. I’m sure I failed. You just can’t fail nine hours of contracts and keep going. I don’t know what to do."

"You too?" Mairin was incredulous. A little of the weight shifted.

"You mean you feel bad too?"

"I have just finished crying my face off. I went through four years of a really tough undergraduate school, and I never cried once. It took a contracts final to make me do that."

"Oh, Mair. I feel better already."

"Come over. We’ll have a drink and curse contracts."

"Okay, for a little while. But I’ve got to do a wash so I have something to wear to the office tomorrow. Life stopped while exams were on."

"I know what you mean."

Mairin’s life had stopped in some ways, too. She and Karen talked very late. She went to work the next day feeling a little better, feeling that she could deal with clients again. I’ll have to be doing this the rest of my life, she thought, I’d better get on with it. When she got home that evening she began to work at all the daily chores she’d pushed aside over the last few weeks. She swept, cleaned, washed dishes, opened mail, paid bills. Each night that week she made some shopping trip she’d put off. Groceries. A new slip. Some drinking glasses to replace a few that had been broken.

She still felt the depression, but she was dealing with it. I’m lucky I have a job, she thought. I hate like hell to have failed, it’s embarassing, but I guess I’ll have to live with it. Bea talked with her at coffee one morning.

"Oh, Mairin, nobody ever thinks they passed law school finals. It’s always horrible. Come have dinner with us Sunday. Harry will tell you."

Sunday Mairin and Harry sat out on the balcony of the Warncke’s gorgeous apartment. She could see the lake glistening in the sun.

"So you’re worried about your exams." It was a statement.

"Yes." Mairin sat for a moment. "I did okay in criminal and civil procedure, but contracts...and that’s nine hours."

"Ever since the exam you’ve been seeing points you missed."

Mairin looked at Harry, surprised.

"Sure. You always do. Everybody does. You’re supposed to miss things, honey. The profs pick impossible questions. They just want to see if you can keep your head above water.’

"I’m going down for the thrid time." Mairin was melancholy.

"I doubt it," said Harry. "Anyway, it will be awhile before you know for sure."

"Yes. Look how long it took to get the practice exams back. It’ll be six weeks or so, I guess. Maybe if I work on my head I won’t care by then."

Harry laughed. "Come on, Mairin, you’ll make it. You’re a bright girl."

"That isn’t enough. I just don’t understand contracts. I thought we’d be reading pieces of paper with whereases and heretofores and parties of the first, second, third, fourth parts. But we’re talking about A told B he’d paint B’s house if the sun came out on a certain day. B doesn’t paint the house. What does A do? Can A do anything? I don’t get it."

"Contracts is really a course in human behavior, Mairin. There are certain ways that people behave. Sure, at the corporate level, there are written pieces of paper--sometimes--but even there one guy calls up another and says, ‘Hey, we can’t make this delivery on time. We’ll be a week late, but we’ll throw in some extra widgets.’ And the second guy says ‘Alright.’ Then a third guy says, It’s not all right. We’re going to sue for breach of contract.’ And the first guy says, ’We didn’t breach the contract. We had an oral modification.’ Contracts goes by the way people operate. You classify their behavior into the different categories that recur regularly, and you study the principles that govern those categories."

"Why didn’t Hanson ever put it that way?"

"There’s a game to law school. Never put anything simply."

"The Socratic method. I hate it. It’s stupid."

Harry was surprised at the anger in Mairin’s voice. He looked at her closely.

"I doubt that the Socratic method ever worked. But if it did, if, then it wasn’t somebody like Hanson that made it work. We just read through the cases. Sometimes one made sense after the other, sometimes it didn’t. And the casebook was no damned help at all."

"You’re the type of student that would like Corbin’s hornbook on contracts."

"Sure, if I had an extra hundred hours a week. How many volumes is Corbin? I had to settle for Gilbert’s outlines. Hey, they put me through law school"

Harry laughed. "They put a lot of people through law school. We had ‘em in my day, too, under another name."

"You know," Mairin looked thoughtful, "I must say that sometimes I’ve been surprised by the fairness of law. Like that contracts doctrine of promissory estoppel. That if one person promises another that he’ll do something--just a promise, nothing enforceable--and the second person, believing him, goes ahead with something that puts him in a bad position unless the promise is kept, that then the first person can be made to make good on the promise."

"You didn’t think law was fair?"

"No, I guess I didn’t. I thought law was a hard bargain."

"And you’re surprised that law is fair sometimes?"

"Yes," Mairin laughed. "I have the nagging feeling that I don’t really understand what law is. My father or uncle or cousin aren’t lawyers. I didn’t grow up with it. I never thought of law as something I might do, that a woman might do."

"And here you are, doing it."

"But not understanding it. Maybe I’m too much in awe of law, of authority, maybe. If someone says,’you can’t do that,’ I believe him. Others say, ‘Oh yeah?’ and they show that certain laws don’t mean what they seem to mean."

"There’s lots of maneuvering in law. And rarely is it cut and dried. Sometimes a statute can be stricken by the courts because it’s too vague."

Mairin sighed.

"Tired?"

"Oh," she said, "I could sleep for a week. I feel kind of funny, too, headachy and chilled. And yet I know it’s warm out here."

"Maybe you’ve got a sort of flu."

"If it were winter, that would be it for sure."

"You can get sick in the summer too, honey. Hey, Bea," Harry called into the house. "Bring the thermometer out here."

"Come on," said Mairin. "I’m okay."

Bea came out. "I broke the thermometer and never got another one. Who’s the patient?"

"Mairin."

Bea put her hand on Mairin’s forehead. "You might have a little temp. Come in and take some aspirin. Dinner’s almost ready."

The dinner conversation went right back to law.

"Do you hear many contracts cases?"

"A fair number."

"And lawyers really make arguments about impossibility of performance and promissory estoppel?"

"All the time. Mairin, this summer come down to court. I’ll let you know when a good case is on. Could you get off work for a few hours?"

"Do you have any vacation time coming?" asked Bea.

"Yes," said Mairin. "I used a few days of it around exam time, but I have most if it left. I was planning to use most of it to visit a college friend during August. She lives in New Mexico. I figured I’d have one big blast before I had to settle down to the fall schedule."

"Well, take an extra day or two for court, Mair," Harry reiterated. "I’ll let you know when something good’s on the docket."

"Okay."

They sat after dinner in the living room. "This is so comfortable," said Mairin. "Why do any of us deliberately choose something as uncomfortable as going to law school? All winter I’ve deprived myself of the pleasure of sitting around after dinner." She yawned. "Or sleeping, excuse me Maybe I’d better leave early. I’ve got a lot of sleep to catch up on."

"Go ahead, honey," said Bea. "You need the sleep."

When Mairin woke up the next morning, her head really hurt. For sure I have a temperature, she said to herself. I feel so warm. She had a thermometer, and she popped it into her mouth. 102 degrees. I guess I am sick, she thought and called the agency to say that she wouldn’t be in. She lay on her bed, listening to records, or she curled up on the couch watching TV. If my lungs didn’t hurt when I breathed, it would be fun being sick, she thought. I never get to see the soaps, I never have a day to drift. She slept a lot, off and on. She cooked a few TV dinners, one for lunch and one for supper. But she wasn’t really hungry. Everytime she stopped taking aspirin, the fever came back. She ended up staying home all week.

Friday afternoon the buzzer rang. Puzzled, Mairin went to the intercom. It was Bea.

"I wanted to see how you are." she announced as she walked into the apartment.

"Awful," said Mairin. "This cold or whatever is really the worst I’ve had in a long, long time."

"Have you called your doctor?"

"I don’t even have a doctor."

"Good heavens, child." Bea went to the phone, had a very cheerful conversation and returned. "Get dressed. I’m taking you to my doctor. He lives in our building, and his office is right around the corner."

"Oh come on, Bea, I’m okay."

"Get out of that bathrobe" said Bea, sounding like the strict parent of a ten-year old.

That evening Mairin stayed with the Warnckes. Dave Kelner had pronounced her rundown and infected with walking pneumonia in addition. He had prescribed antibiotics, tonics, and plenty of sleep. Instead of driving Mairin back to her apartment, Bea took her straight to the Warnckes. "What are you doing?" asked Mairin.

"You’re going to stay with us for the weekend."

"But my things!"

"I’ll go back later and pick them up for you," said Bea, "when I go to have all these prescriptions filled. Right now you’re going to bed."

Mairin was truly too sick to argue. She fell asleep in the bedroom that the Warnckes saved for company or Bea’s sewing. Bea went to the drugstore, picked up the prescriptions and stopped at Mairin’s apartment. It was so like Mairin, she thought. The sunroom had become a study area, neat and tidy, books all organized. The living room suited Mairin--modern furniture and prints, everything in good taste. The kitchen was a disaster. Disarray. The bedroom wasn’t bad, but it was cluttered. Bea sorted out a few things Mairin would need.

Mairin slept virtually all weekend. Sunday evening she sat in a bathrobe in the living room. "You’ve been fantastic, Bea."

"You’ve been a pretty good patient."

"Not really," said Mairin, remembering her grousing about certain medications.

"Mairin," said Bea, "why don’t you come here to live for the rest of the time you’re in law school?" She noted Mairin’s bewilderment. Harry and I talked it over last night. We miss having someone around, and you’ve said yourself how hard it is to handle the apartment -- not just keeping it up, but financially too."

Mairin had had to promise Bea installment payments on the cost of the prescriptions. "It’s been a lot tighter than I thought," she said. "When Diana left, I figured I’d give it a try because I loved it so much. Plus I felt that if I weren’t sharing the apartment I could plan my study schedule for any hours I wanted."

"You could do that here, too," said Bea. "Sure, I know it’s tighter, but I think it would work. So does Harry."

"Maybe we could give it a try for the summer," said Mairin slowly. "I know a few people I could sublet to. But I’d want to pay you the rent that used to be my half."

"It's not necessary," said Bea, "but I understand."