Page 108 - A Little Life: A Novel
P. 108

interspersed  with  frequent  pauses,  as  if  his  clerks  were  not  lawyers  but
                scriveners, and should be writing down his words. But no one did, not even
                Kerrigan, who was a true believer and the most conservative of the three of

                them.
                   After  the  judge  left,  he  would  grin  across  the  room  at  Thomas,  who
                would  raise  his  eyes  upward  in  a  gesture  of  helplessness  and  apology.
                Thomas was a conservative, too, but “a thinking conservative,” he’d remind
                him,  “and  the  fact  that  I  even  have  to  make  that  distinction  is  fucking
                depressing.”
                   He  and  Thomas  had  started  clerking  for  the  judge  the  same  year,  and

                when he had been approached by the judge’s informal search committee—
                really, his Business Associations professor, with whom the judge was old
                friends—the spring of his second year of law school, it had been Harold
                who had encouraged him to apply. Sullivan was known among his fellow
                circuit  court  judges  for  always  hiring  one  clerk  whose  political  views
                diverged  from  his  own,  the  more  wildly,  the  better.  (His  last  liberal  law

                clerk  had  gone  on  to  work  for  a  Hawaiian  rights  sovereignty  group  that
                advocated for the islands’ secession from the United States, a career move
                that had sent the judge into a fit of apoplectic self-satisfaction.)
                   “Sullivan hates me,” Harold had told him then, sounding pleased. “He’ll
                hire you just to spite me.” He smiled, savoring the thought. “And because
                you’re the most brilliant student I’ve ever had,” he added.
                   The compliment made him look at the ground: Harold’s praise tended to

                be conveyed to him by others, and was rarely handed to him directly. “I’m
                not  sure  I’m  liberal  enough  for  him,”  he’d  replied.  Certainly  he  wasn’t
                liberal enough for Harold; it was one of the things—his opinions; the way
                he read the law; how he applied it to life—that they argued about.
                   Harold snorted. “Trust me,” he said. “You are.”
                   But when he went to Washington for his interview the following year,

                Sullivan  had  talked  about  the  law—and  political  philosophy—with  much
                less vigor and specificity than he had anticipated. “I hear that you sing,”
                Sullivan  said  instead  after  an  hour  of  conversation  about  what  he  had
                studied (the judge had attended the same law school), and his position as
                the articles editor on the law review (the same position the judge himself
                had held), and his thoughts on recent cases.
                   “I do,” he replied, wondering how  the judge had learned that. Singing

                was his comfort, but he rarely did it in front of others. Had he been singing
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