Right to Die

prosper on the baby boomers’ abject horror of graduating college and having nowhere to spend their parents’ remaining money. Even though both New England and Suffolk offered long-established evening divisions, Mass Bay felt it also could cash in on full-time employees who wanted part-time law study. After getting back from Vietnam , I was one.
    Given that my stipend under the G.I. Bill would cover most of the tuition, a career counselor at Empire allowed as how it wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to do one year of law school. I chose Mass Bay because I hadn’t been what you’d call a scholar during my undergraduate days at Holy Cross. Also, I did about as well on standardized tests like the LSAT as Ray Charles would shooting skeet. The only standardized number Mass Bay cared about was 98.6, and the school was located within blocks of Empire’s office tower. At the end of the year my grades were a little better than average, but I knew the law and I would not enjoy each other over the course of a lifetime. So I simply didn’t register the following fall.
    Mass Bay ’s first and only building was a converted armory, the facade of pink granite and turrets still impressive. The security desk was just inside the entrance, only a few students sitting on plastic chairs in a linoleum lobby.
    “Help you?” said the guard, a pensioner with a green uniform shirt, khaki pants, and no tie or badge.
    The clock on the wall told me I was ten minutes late. “I’m here to see Inés Roja.”
    The guard moved something around in his mouth. “Good luck to you.” He pushed a button on an old-fashioned switchboard and said into the receiver, “Inés, you expecting somebody?... Didn’t say...” He looked up at me. “Yeah, yeah, that’s him.... Right.”
    Hanging up, he pointed to the elevator at the back of the lobby. The only elevator. “Take that to three and turn left. Can’t miss it.”
    “Thanks. Kind of quiet, isn’t it?”
    “Kids are out for Christmas already, you can believe it. We’re in special session now.” He spoke the phrase the way a prison guard would say “rehabilitation therapy.” When the elevator doors opened on three, Inés Roja didn’t give me a chance to turn left.
    Pulling back the cuffed sleeve of a copper-colored suit, she checked her watch. “The professor teaches at eleven. I will take you to the classroom. After that you and she can return to the office to talk.”
    “Wait a minute. I’m going to sit through a whole class hour before I talk with her?”
    “It will not be as long as an hour. It is the initial meeting of special session, so it will be short. The professor wants you to see her in the classroom. Please?”
    Roja got on the elevator with me, and we rode down to the second floor. She indicated a door marked 205. The room I’d sat in for my first-year courses.
    “Please, go in and make yourself comfortable.”
    From what I remembered about 205, that would be quite a trick.

= 5 =

    “Take your seats, please.”
    Shuffling mixed with comments and laughter as thirty or so students arranged themselves in the classroom that could hold seventy-five. Unlike my day, the ratio of women to men was now almost fifty-fifty.
    The room itself hadn’t changed, though. Floor flat rather than pitched, tiled rather than carpeted. Fixed, narrow tables in straight lines. Fixed, narrow benches as well, the backs too low and at right angles to seats too shallow. It was as though an extraterrestrial designer had been told the function of the room without being shown the human bodies that would occupy it for hours at a time.
    A slightly raised stage was centered at the front of the room, a blackboard on the wall behind Maisy Andrus. She looked at her notes on the podium, then looked at us and said, “Welcome to the special session course, Ethics and Society.”
    Andrus came down off the stage and began moving around the room, a trial attorney opening to the jury. She was even more imposing at floor level. Nearly six feet tall in one-inch heels, she had auburn hair swept up from her ears and back behind her neck, sprigs of gray here and there. The face was boxy but attractive, Germanic or Scandinavian in cast.
    Andrus wore a yellow sweater dress gathered loosely by a teal sash at the waist, the hem riding a bit above her knees. She spoke about the required text, office hours, and other housekeeping details of the course. Her manner reminded me of a black Special Forces captain in basic