Mistress of Justice

contained.
    Junie’s eyes were closed, her patent-leather shoes swaying in time to the music. My God, she was growing up. Fifteen. It gave him a pang of sorrow. At times he had flashes—poses she struck, the way the light might catch herface—of her as a woman in her twenties. He knew that she, abandoned in adolescence, carried the seeds of adulthood within her more fertilely than other children.
    And he often felt she was growing up far too fast for him.
    He handed the dictated tape to the typist, who left.
    “So,” he said to the girl, “are we going to do some shopping?”
    “I guess.”
    That
question she heard perfectly, Dudley observed. “Well, let’s go.”
    She shrugged and hopped off the chair, tugging at her dress in irritation, which meant she wanted to be wearing jeans and a T-shirt—clothes that she loved and that he hated.
    They were at the elevator when a woman’s voice asked, “Ralph, excuse me, you have a minute?”
    He recognized the young woman from around the firm but couldn’t recall a name. It stung him slightly that she had the effrontery to call him by his first name but because he was a gentlemen he did nothing other than smile and nod. “Yes, you’re …”
    “Taylor Lockwood.”
    “Sure, of course. This is my granddaughter, Junie. Junie, say hello to Miss Lockwood. She’s a lawyer here.”
    “Paralegal, actually.” Taylor smiled and said to the girl pleasantly, “You look like Alice.”
    “Huh?”
    “Alice in Wonderland
. It’s one of my favorite books.”
    The girl shrugged and returned to the oblivion of her music.
    Dudley wondered what this woman wanted. Had he given her some work? An assignment?
    “I’d like to ask you something.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You went to Yale Law School, didn’t you?”
    “That’s right, I did.”
    “I’m thinking of applying there.”
    Dudley felt a bit of alarm. He hadn’t quite graduated, despite what he’d told the firm, and so couldn’t exactly send a letter of recommendation for her.
    But she added, “My application and letters and everything’re in. I just want to know a little about the school. I’m trying to decide between there and Harvard and NYU.”
    Relieved, Dudley said, “Oh, I went there before you were born. I don’t think anything I’d have to tell you would be much help.”
    “Well, somebody here said you helped them decide to go to law school, that you were very helpful. I was sort of hoping you could spare a half hour or so.”
    Dudley felt the pleasure he always did at even minor adulation like this. “Tonight?”
    She said, “I was thinking tomorrow night maybe. After work? I could take you out to dinner.”
    A woman taking a man out to dinner? Dudley was nearly offended.
    The paralegal added, “Unless you have plans.”
    He did, of course—plans he
wouldn’t
miss. But that was at 10 P.M . He said, “I’m busy later in the evening. But how would seven be?” A charming smile. “I’ll take you to my club.”
    Junie of the selective hearing said, “Like, Poppie, you told me they didn’t let women in there.”
    Dudley said to her, “That’s only as members, honey.” To Taylor he said, “Come by tomorrow at six, we’ll take a cab uptown.…” Then, calculating the taxi fare, he added, “No, actually a subway would be better. That time of day, traffic is terrible.”

     
    “Now he’s going after the clients.”
    Donald Burdick knotted the silk tie carefully with his long fingers. He liked the feel of good cloth, the way it yielded yet was tough. Tonight, though, the smooth texture gave him little pleasure.
    “First he rams through the accelerated vote and now I hear he’s targeting the clients.”
    “The clients,” Vera Burdick repeated, nodding. “We should’ve thought of that.” She sat at her dressing table in the bedroom of their Park Avenue co-op, rubbing prescription retin-A cream on her neck. She wore a red and black silk dress, which revealed pale freckled skin along the unzipped V in the back. She was leaning forward studiously, watching the cream disappear.
    A resolute woman, in her early sixties, she’d battled age by making tactical concessions. She gave up tanning fifteen years ago and carefully gained a little weight, refusing to join in the dieting obsession of many of her friends, who were now knobby scarecrows. She let her hair go white but she kept it shiny with Italian conditioner and wore it pulled back in the same style as her granddaughter.