Mistress of Justice

good mood she believed she resembled a young Mary Pickford. On not-so-good days she felt like a thirty-year-old little girl, standing pigeon-toed, impatiently waiting for the arrival of maturity, decisiveness, authority. She thought she looked her best in imperfect reflections, like storefronts painted black.
    Or Wall Street law firm windows.
    She turned away and walked back to her cubicle. It was now close to nine and the firm was coming awake, growing busier—catching up with her; this was usually the case; Taylor Lockwood was often one of the first employees toarrive. Other paralegals were making their way to their desks. Shouts of greetings—and warnings of impending crises—were crisscrossing the paralegal pen, war stories of subway snarls and traffic jams were exchanged. She sat down in her chair and thought about how abruptly the course of life can change, and at someone else’s whim.
    Mr. Reece said you’re not supposed to mention this to anyone. He said that was very important. Not to anyone
.
    Then I won’t
.
    Taylor glanced at her finger and went to find a Band-Aid for the paper cut.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    On a warm morning in April of 1887, a balding, thirty-two-year-old sideburned lawyer named Frederick Phyle Hubbard walked into a small office on lower Broadway, slipped his silk hat and Prince Albert coat onto a hook and said wryly to his partner, “Good morning, Mr. White. Have you secured any clients yet?”
    The life of a law firm began.
    Both Hubbard and George C. T. White had graduated from Columbia Law School and had promptly come under the acutely probing eye of Walter Carter, Esquire, the senior partner at Carter, Hughes & Cravath. Carter hired them without pay for a year then turned them into professionals at the end of their probation by paying them the going salary of twenty dollars a month.
    Six years later, the two men—as ambitious as Carter had pegged them to be—borrowed three thousand dollars from White’s father, hired one law clerk and a male secretary and opened their own firm.
    Though they dreamed of offices in the state-of-the-art Equitable Building at 120 Broadway they settled for less.Rent in the old building they chose near Trinity Church was sixty-four dollars a month, which bought the partners two dark rooms. Still, their quarters had central heat (though they kept the office’s two fireplaces going throughout most of January and February) and an elevator that one operated by pulling a thick rope running through the middle of the car with pieces of tapestry carpeting Hubbard’s wife had cut and stitched; the felt pads provided by the building management were, Hubbard felt, inelegant, and he feared they might “impress clients adversely.”
    Over lunch at Delmonico’s on Fifth Avenue, where Hubbard and White sunk much of their first profits feeding existing and would-be clients, they would brag about the firm’s new letterpress, which used a damp cloth to make copies of firm correspondence. The firm had a typewriter but the lawyers wrote most of their correspondence in ink with steel pens. Hubbard and White both insisted that their secretary fill the firm’s ink-blotting shakers with Lake Champlain black sand. The men had looked at, though rejected, a telephone—it would have cost ten dollars a month (besides, there was no one to call but court clerks and a few government officials).
    In school both men had dreamed of becoming great trial lawyers and during their clerking days at Carter, Hughes they’d spent many hours in courtrooms watching famous litigators cajole, charm and terrorize juries and witnesses alike. But in their own practice economics could not be ignored and the lucrative field of corporate law became the mainstay of their young practice. They billed at fifty-two cents an hour though they added arbitrary and generous bonuses for certain assignments.
    Those were the days before income tax, before the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, before the SEC; corporations rode like Assyrians over the landscape of American free enterprise and Messrs. Hubbard and White were their warlords. As their clients became exceedingly wealthy so did they. A third senior partner, Colonel Benjamin Willis, joined the firm in 1920. He died severalyears later of pneumonia related to a World War One mustard gassing but he left as a legacy to the firm one railroad, two banks and several major utilities as clients. Hubbard and White also inherited the matter of what