Final Option

tuition. I sent the certificate to my dad. The bastard had it framed. There it is, right over there, next to the picture of him playing golf with Bob Hope.”
    “And then what happened?”
    “Nothing. I went back to school. Halfway through the second semester checks started coming from my dad again. He and Mom came to see me one weekend, and we all acted like nothing had happened.”
    “It was good of you to forgive him,” I remarked, thinking of the perpetually strained state of my relationship with my mother.
    “By then I’d met Jane. She really helped me get a sense of perspective when it came to my father. Dad had such a big personality, he always made me feel like I lived at the periphery of his life. Jane helped me see that I could just accept him for what he was and move on.”
    “You are lucky to have found her.”
    “I know. Dad could never understand what I saw in her. Did you know that Jane’s a resident pianist with the Chicago Symphony?”
    “I knew she looked familiar,” I exclaimed. “I’ve heard her play. Last November. She played a Beethoven piano concerto—she was startlingly good. You know how some pianists get out there and just want to dazzle you with their technique? Her performance was so different. It was as if she was possessed by the music. She was wonderful.”
    Barton beamed, obviously proud of his wife’s accomplishments.
    “I’d think your dad would have loved to have a famous daughter-in-law,” I added.
    “He didn’t see it that way. Dad thought a woman’s job was to be expensively attractive, like my mother and my sister Krissy. He couldn’t understand a woman who wasn’t a trophy.”
    “Does your mother like Jane?”
    “I don’t think Mother dislikes Jane. It’s just that she doesn’t understand anyone who’s not just like her. She’s gotten used to Jane, but I think she’d have been much happier if I’d married the daughter of one of her friends.”
    The door to Bart Hexter’s office opened, and the redheaded woman in the lavender suit walked in, surprised to find the office occupied.
    “Oh, I—I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
    “Did you need something?” asked Barton Jr.
    “Just some account files,” she replied, backing out the door. “I’ll come back later.”
    “Who was that?” I asked, once she’d gone.
    “That was Loretta Resch. She’s in charge of the clearing operation. If you believe my sister Margot’s stories, she was once my father’s mistress.”
     

CHAPTER 7
     
    Flanking the twin mahogany doors of Callahan Ross are two enormous pillars of polished marble, incongruous on the forty-second floor of a downtown office building. According to legend, they were purchased from a failing bank by Ewald Callahan, the firm’s founding partner, who hoped to create an aura of power and respectability for his fledgling practice. Now, of course, the respectability and power flow like wine. With more than 200 lawyers in Chicago and offices in New York, Washington, D.C., L.A., Atlanta, London, Paris, and Brussels, the work of Callahan attorneys is woven inextricably into the fabric of world commerce.
    In the churchlike dimness of the reception room hangs a list of the partners, drawn out like a family tree and framed in gold. My name is the most recent addition. In February of this year I became the youngest Partner in the august history of the firm.
    In moments of unexpressed yearning I had hoped that Partnership would bring with it a sense of accomplishment and belonging. Instead I was delivered an insider’s knowledge of how the firm is really run, freedom from the dominion of the abusive partner with whom I’d worked most closely as an associate, and, of course, a bigger paycheck. From the attorneys who joined the firm before me, the ones I leap-frogged to partnership, I receive a mixture of deference and bile. Jealousy, it is said, like a bad cough, cannot be hid. By my partners I am greeted with a mixture of cordiality and suspicion. Callahan has only four female partners including myself, and I’ve heard a fair amount of tut-tutting over I both my age and gender.
    But there is no denying that with rank come privileges. My new office is a small wonder of space, with a window facing west from which, if you stand on the bookcase, you can see the river. I even have a famous neighbor—Howard Ackerman. Howard is a legendary I cuss of a litigator—a viper in wire frames and a bow