February 4, 2011

Dear Cyndy,

Here's the update on the legal front. Yesterday afternoon, after returning from the status hearing in Suffolk Superior Court, I made the following notes:

"I must debrief myself before the events of this long tiring day vanish in amnesia. I slept lightly and awoke early, rehearsing over and over again what I might tell the judge at the hearing. By six a.m. I was up.  I wrote an early morning letter. Then I dawdled reading the NY Times on the Internet. At nine-thirty I started to pack ny briefcase with a few legal records and my Loeb Library edition of the Odyssey.  Since I have no waterproof dress shoes, I covered those I wear daily with rubber boots; these I would remove prior to the hearing, once I was in the courthouse, Not to be forgotten: my keys, my wallet, my MBTA senior citizen's pass, my cell phone, gloves, and hat.  By ten o'clock I had it all assembled and was on my way. The sidewalk was choked with snow, and five foot high ridges of snow - like models of an alpine landscape, lined the narrowed street. It was awash with slush. I had started to walk up on the left side of School Street facing traffic, when Mr. Traniello, a neighbor whose dog has for years favored our front lawn as his favorite "rest area" without protest from me, pulled up in his dilapidated 20 year old Buick stationwagon and insisted on driving me to the bus stop. I was early, the bus was late, but after twenty minutes of waiting in chilly breezes on the ice-capped sidewalk, we made connections.  No sooner had the bus started to careen down Concord Avenue than I noticed that I had forgotten to decorate my shirt with a necktie, that article of dress which distinguishes the two hundred dollar an hour lawyer in the courtroom from the evildoer about to be led off to jail. It occurred to me, that since I was early, before continuing my trip with the subway, I should take time in Harvard Square to celebrate my day in court by stopping at the Coop to buy a necktie.  That boutique, however, is not what it used to be. The hall in which 64 years ago, men's clothing was offered for sale has been converted into a large bookstore, labyrinth of sections and divisions and of course books and books too numerous to count. After keeping me waiting for five minutes, a saleslady put down the telephone and answered my inquiry. No, neckties were no longer sold by the Coop. I thanked her politely and wandered out onto Massachusetts Avenue and into the slush. A good time, I thought, after so many years, to make the rounds of Harvard Square.  Albiani's, the dirty-spoon restaurant which sustained me in graduate school, I knew had long since disappeared, - but not from my memory of feasting there for lunch day after day, on spaghetti, tomato sauce, a hard roll, and a glass of water, all for thirty five cents, eschewing the luxury of meatballs which would have added a nickel to the price.  I turned into Church Street looking for a haberdashery with neckties, and finally espied a promising establishment at the corner of Brattle Street. Yes, said the very youthful salesman, they did sell neckties; I looked and found them less than attractive, but decisive was the price of $25, which happened to exceed my mental necktie budget by all of ten dollars.  I nodded appreciatively as I rejected the offer, ashamed once again that my stinginess had cast some small shadow, however fleeting, over the expectations of one of my fellow human beings. At that late juncture, it was already 11 o'clock, it dawned on me that although lawyers wear neckties in court, plumbers don't, and a tieless appearance would hardly jeopardize and perhaps enhance the chances of being accepted as a plumber of sorts, however irregular. Since the hearing was set for 2 p.m. and the subway ride to Government Center would take half an hour at most, and with so much memory waiting to be refreshed, I decided this was the occasion for an anniversary visit to the Yard.  At the corner of Boylston I nodded to the ghost of the Wursthaus, long since replaced by a more modern and much less colorful establishment, a restaurant which I myself had never frequented, but where I had located the encounters of Doehring and Murphy, two protagonists of my novel Die Andere. A few hundred feet to the east, the Bank where Dorothea, die Andere herself, had worked and from which she had been abducted into the caverns of the adjacent subway station von dem Ophthalmoluegner, as Murphy had called him.  Across the curve which Massachusetts Avenue, die Staatsallee in the novel, describes at this point, the long since dismantled subway exit from which Joachim Magus of "Die Freunde" emerged on his arrival, trying to find "das Eulenhaus." I myself entered the Yard through the same gate through which I had lugged my heavy black suitcase sixty-five years earlier, walked past the window of the first floor bedroom, Matthews Hall 3, where I had spent my first 2 semesters at Harvard. Walked under the bare elms past Weld and University Halls, and stood next to Memorial Church looking first at the grand but appallingly humorless facade of Widener, then to Richardson's dungeon-like Sever Hall, where I failed my mid-term calculus exam. I walked back under the west side of Widener, but could no longer identify the window of Professor Vietor's study where I prepared the newspaper extracts for his Nietzsche book of which his final illness prevented him from even making a beginning. Then out through the Wigglesworth arcade to Massachusetts Avenue, where the aspect of the J. August haberdashery, - which Klemens says dates to the days of Teddy Roosevelt - reminded me of the necktie I had been too cheap to buy.  Maybe another attempt was in order.  The store was packed with Chinese and Japanese students, as if Harvard had been transported to the Far East.  However, the only ties sold by J. August were emblazoned with Veritas shields, such as I've never worn. Too old now. The salesman directed me to a men's clothing store around the corner on Holyoke Street, in whose window was arranged a display of many tasteful and attractive ties.  An elderly salesman was ready to help me. I enquired about the price.  From sixty three he said to a hundred thirty five. I smiled gently and said, I take it the quotation is in dollars rather than cents.  That's correct, he said, and returned my smile.

It was time to go to the courthouse. There was no wait for the subway or the green line. I arrived on the 9th floor two hours early and sat down on a very hard and uncomfortable bench. I read only one page in the Odyssey.  Then I began to day-dream. I slept intermittently, repeatedly tried to enter the courtroom where I might be officially awakened if I feel asleep.  If I dozed off in the lobby outside, I might well miss the hearing.  However the courtroom was kept locked until precisely 2 p.m.

As I walked in, a smallish slender, very well dressed man of youthful middle age addressed me and introduced himself as George Pucci, Nantucket's new lawyer.  A few days after the Appeals Court denied the Nantucket authorities the right to destroy my plumbing, they switched lawyers.  I suppose it was out of spite, that Kimberly Saillant, the lawyer now dismissed from the case, hadn't given Mr Pucci my motion or memorandum.  He had only a hazy notion of what the case was about. To make friends with him and help him get started, I gave my copies of the documents I had recently filed. There was no time for conversation.  A court officer had barely intoned "All rise", when the judge walked in. I'm not much of a ladies' man, but I found her to be a very attractive woman, and furtively wished I might have been forty years younger to have had a chance to flirt with her, who seemed too polite, too intelligent, to have too much good sense and good taste to find it necessary to advertise her women's liberation status.  There was not much business. I suspect a number of cases had been postponed because of the snow. Ours was the third and last.  Contrary to protocol, which provides that the appellant lead, and with but a perfunctory excuse to me, the Judge asked first to hear from Mr. Pucci, for the defense.  In fact, it turned out that she didn't want to hear from me at all.  That circumstance, far from offending, pleased me. I surmised, correctly or otherwise, that my memorandum had given her all the information she wanted and that my motion, filed three days previously, had made its point; she recognized its validity, but pressed for compromise in an attempt to to avoid the hard decision.  With Mr. Pucci she was very stern. When he explained that the Nantucket authorities did not want my case to become a precendent, the Judge said: "Setting precedents is not an acceptabler function in my court. Tell that to the Nantucket authorities."  The judge - I don't yet know her name - wanted a compromise by next week.  Mr. Pucci asked for 30 days, and she agreed. Another hearing is scheduled for March 3, at 2 p.m.  

After I came home I telephoned Mr Gordon, the only plumber willing to help me, to whom I had given a key and a check for a thousand dollars, whose application for a plumbing permit had been refused. I thought I should apprise him of the latest turn of events. He was obviously pleased to hear from me. He was less taciturn than before. The purpose of my call, I explained, was to put him on notice that Mr. Pucci thought he could teach manners to his client, Mr. Ciarmataro, and force him to issue the plumbing permit and to inspect the plumbing, and that he, Mr. Gordon, might be called upon to host the inspection, that Mr. Ciarmataro, the inspector might then pressure him to change his evaluation of my plumbing. I was concerned that Mr. Ciarmataro might punish him if he continued to endorse what I had done. I urged Mr.  Gordon to look out for his own interests and to abandon me, if he deemed it best for himself. It turned out, luckily for me, Mr.  Gordon considered his interests to coincide with my own. He was not afraid of Mr. Ciarmataro. He considered himself a better plumber than the inspector and would stand up to him.  Mr. Gordon confided to me that he had visited the house before we arrived, looked through the windows and seen that the studs were bare.  He also admitted that he had spoken twice with Mr. Ciarmataro, once before the inspection and again on the following day when his request for the plumbing permit had been denied. Mr. Ciamartaro was chagrined that contrary to his expectations, my plumbing was substantial and code compliant and did not need to be razed.  Mr. Gordon stated even more forcefully than in our earlier conversation, that he believed my plumbing to be more code compliant than customary on Nantucket and should be approved.  He most emphatically said that any attempt to pressure him to find fault with the plumbing would only make him more insistent on its quality.  I had the impression that my rebellion against the bureaucracy is a template according to which he is prepared to express his own frustrations, and that he is finally finding release for years if not decades of harrassment by officialdom. I was much heartened, he's the plumber I need."

If you didn't want to know this much then it's your fault that you've read to this point. Stay well and give my best to Ned. If it's a choice between being a plumber or a lawyer, choose being a lawyer.  It's a better life, by far.

Jochen