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Volume 25, Number 1 & 2 (2001) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum INVESTITURE LOWELL B. KOMIE Today would be a harsh day. An 87-year-old woman client was dying, and she controlled a $5 million estate that she was going to leave in trust to an order of nuns in Chicago. He had prepared her will. He was named as trustee. The sole beneficiary of the trust was the order of nuns. He would meet with the Sister Superior and two priests at St. Joseph’s Hospital at noon. If the will was signed, it would provide the order with more than $300,000 a year and an income of $3,000 a month in fees for him as trustee. He had worked to get himself this appointment all his life. Now, at 68, at the end of his career, the income from the trust would be his pension, together with Social Security and his small savings. It would enable him to retire and leave Chicago for a retirement apartment he had rented in Arizona. His wife died six years ago and their two children now lived at opposite ends of the country. Today would be one of the most important days of his life, and in order to face it, he would camouflage his usual fear and uncertainty with the cosmetics of powerful men. He would close this. Just this one more deal and he could quit. It wasn’t really a “deal,” he told himself. No, of course not. It was a will signing. But it had a peculiar quirk: his client, who had contributed to the order of nuns all her life and had for several years lived as a lay person in the convent with the sisters, insisted, as a condition of her final gift, that she be admitted to the order as a nun. She would then close her eyes and die in peace. Those were her final instructions to him a week ago, and since then she’d grown weaker each day. She was ravaged by cancer and she wanted to die. She’d never told him of these conditions when he’d drawn the will two years ago, but as she was dying, suddenly she wanted to be admitted to the sisterhood. He hadn’t said anything about it to the priest or the Sister Superior at the convent. He’d put off opening the subject. He thought he’d talk to them at the hospital today. If she didn’t sign the will, though, and exercise her power of appointment, the entire estate would pass under the original trust to collateral relatives and he would not be appointed trustee. He picked out his white shirt carefully, not a frayed collar today. Most of his shirts had tiny threads fraying at the collars and cuffs. He wore his best suit, a black suit, black would be proper for the priests, and for the nuns, and for the ritual of the will. He was still a good practicing Catholic. He selected a navy blue tie with silver moons and asteroids. He’d shined his shoes carefully the night before. He brushed his hat. It was a gray, soft hat from Marshall Field’s, with a small splayed red feather. He looked at himself in the hall mirror—light blue eyes, a thin face, a few red splotches on his cheeks from years of drinking. He’d quit the year before his wife died and joined AA. He had the thin Riordan lips of his father, and the watery, tired, blue eyes of a failed, sad man. But today, in the black suit and gray hat, wearing the secret new lotions, he looked confident. He decided to cut the feather off his hat band. It was too showy and he snipped it off with his manicure scissors. Charles Riordan lived surrounded by his books on Irish history and literature in a modest, one-bedroom apartment on Grace Street, on the North Side of Chicago. This morning, as he dressed, he carefully brushed dust off his shoulders and then put on his monogrammed, white silk scarf and black overcoat. He did look like he belonged, like a responsible probate lawyer, a counsel that could be trusted, an old friend of the client and the parish. At least he wasn’t wearing that foolish red feather in his hat. Lately he noticed some of the lawyers his age were wearing hats downtown that signified their secret longings. Sherlock Holmes caps, captains’ yachting caps, even cowboy hats. He wasn’t that senescent, not yet; just the solace of the new cosmetics would be enough. He’d wear his real hat in Arizona, the beret of a poet, an artist’s beret. The client, Beatrice Taylor, had been sent to him by an old friend, a parish priest from St. Benedict’s on Irving Park. Riordan was introduced to Beatrice Taylor 40 years ago. She was then already a selfish woman, living on a trust fund from her father, and she never married. It was an irrevocable trust administered by a bank as trustee, and she was given income only during her lifetime, with a general power to appoint the principal. She’d become dissatisfied with the bank and hated the trust officers who fought with her over her income. She trusted him and she wanted him to replace the bank as trustee, as her final gesture of contempt for the bank. After his death, her niece, who had received a legacy, would act as trustee. She’d dangled the power of appointment in front of him and the order of nuns all her life, never quite getting around to exercising it. At her direction he’d drawn the will establishing the trust two years ago, but she had always put off signing it, and it had sat in her file. As she grew older, he began to see her face as that of a pouting, dyspeptic, ceramic queen, an ancient, evil queen of angels, her face caked with the patinas of age and selfishness. A week ago, when he last saw her in the hospital, she pursed her dry lips. “How are you Beatrice?” he’d asked, reaching to touch her fingers. “Sister Beatrice Taylor, Charles,” she whispered, her eyes glistening behind the tiny spectacles as she gasped for breath. “Sister Beatrice Taylor, Charles,” she whispered, and clung to his wrist with her bony hand. Then she told him about her desire to be admitted to the order as a nun as a condition of her gift. This morning after his coffee and roll at Wertheim’s at Irving and Lincoln he walked slowly to mass at St. Benedict’s. He remembered seeing the older Richard Daley coming from mass at St. Peter’s on Madison Street, and now, as he touched the holy water to his fingers and face, he wondered about the former mayor. Mayor Daley had nodded to him once. “Hello, Counsel,” he’d said. How did Daley know he was a lawyer? Maybe the brief case? Or the frazzled look? Maybe he remembered him from the old neighborhood. He never knew Daley but he also grew up in Bridgeport. He knelt in one of the pews at St. Benedict’s and closed his eyes. Was Daley really flying around in heaven with feathered wings, a florid-faced angel? Were all the dead judges and lawyers from Bridgeport, some of whom he had known as a child, flying around with Daley? What a strange band of angels they all would make. And would he be joining them soon? Would he soon be flying with them? Wasn’t some angel with huge feathered wings waiting for him? He thought of the mosaic of the two Greek mythological flyers at the 120 North LaSalle Street Building across from the County Building, the mosaic of two Greek men in white shorts, flying on huge feathered wings. They looked like lawyers who’d lost their clothes and wallets in the Daley Center. Who were they? He knew they were supposed to be Icarus and Daedalus, Daedalus the father and Icarus the son. Icarus flew so close to the sun that the wax on his wings melted. That had happened to a lot of lawyers in this town. He opened his eyes and stared at the faces of the ceramic angels surrounding the altar. One of them did look like his client, a fat-faced ancient queen cupid, a selfish pout, lips puckered and eyes vacant. Sister Beatrice. He tried to shake all this out of his head, He didn’t want this kind of confusion, the hierarchy of floating angels waiting for him. He wanted certainty, the arms of Christ around him, and repose. He was afraid and uncertain of death. He closed his eyes and said a prayer and calmed down. He took the El down to his office on Monroe Street. He rented a small office in a six-office suite. The receptionist, a woman in her 20s, Theresa, waved to him as he walked in, and then she shook her head. There were no messages. She was talking on the phone to one of her friends. “I was like so bored, I go ‘I want to dance. I want to like do something, not just sit here,’ and he goes ‘Drink your beer.’ So I go ‘Shut up,’ and he like freaks out and throws his beer at me. It missed me. Like just a little on my hair. I was so pissed.” He closed his door. Her voice became just a murmur. He wished he could invent a machine, a CAT Scanner, where people could stick their heads in and with one jolt, “go” and “like” would permanently be removed from their vocabulary. Half the country’s work force under 30 would suddenly become mute. Theresa was nice to him, though. She put his mail aside for him every day and was always cheerful—with her spiked hair and bright clothes. She was really the only cheerful person in the office. There were five lawyers in the suite, all men, and three of them had a small insurance defense firm. One younger man helped them answer their court call in a space-for-services arrangement. Riordan had the fifth office and one office was vacant. CHARLES J. RIORDAN was lettered on the frosted window of the heavy, old-fashioned, varnished door. The men in the suite weren’t friends, but they all got along and his rent was low, $350. He did his own typing behind the closed door. He didn’t have a word processor, but he had an old IBM Electric and hunted and pecked on envelopes and a few letters. The word processing service on the fifth floor did his wills. That’s what his practice had dwindled down to now, almost all small probate matters. He was good at drafting wills, and the complicated trust he’d drawn for Beatrice Taylor pleased him because of its good draftsmanship. He’d worked very hard on it and had taken it to a friend who specialized in estate planning, who polished it for him. He liked drafting wills and contracts. He used to be able to try injury cases before a jury, but he no longer wanted to go to court and gradually the cases had disappeared. The good injury cases were chased and anyway, he didn’t have the stomach at 68 for trial work. He liked probate. It was clean work and the fees were enough so that he could still net $25,000 a year after taxes, even with his dwindling practice. At least he hadn’t been indicted. How many lawyers and judges had been convicted in the Greylord investigations? Sixty-nine? Seventy? Almost the same number as his age. Had he ever bribed a judge? No. That was his one major accomplishment—a lawyer for 45 years and he’d never bribed a judge. Maybe he would get a plaque from the Bar Association. When he left his office he locked his telephone. It had a device that locked it from being used, and he always locked it. Then he locked his office door. He walked out on Clark Street and suddenly he thought of Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s character in Ulysses. Why Bloom? Because he’d been thinking of the two Greek flyers, because he, Riordan, was really ineffectual like the two flyers, like Bloom, even this morning, covered with the secret cosmetics, but he couldn’t be ineffectual, not today. He had to perform just this one day, dear God. As he walked to the bus stop he continued thinking of Bloom and Joyce. Joyce had met his wife, Nora, at Finn’s Hotel in Dublin. The worn name of Finn’s Hotel was still slightly visible on the wall of Trinity College. He’d seen photos of it. The hotel was built into the wall. Nora worked there as a chambermaid in 1904 when Joyce met her. If he’d close this trust (it wasn’t a deal), he would go to Dublin to see the walls of Trinity and sit in St. Stephen’s Green and wander the book stalls along the banks of the Liffey. He’d go to the Abbey Theatre. He had promised himself Dublin, first Dublin and then Arizona. Joyce had created Stephen Dedalus. Was he named after the Greek Daedalus? Of course he was. He nodded his head unconsciously and smiled as he showed his senior’s pass to the conductor. He would catch the 157 bus on Washington to Michigan, and the 151 to Diversey to the hospital. He sat down heavily and stared out at the Picasso on the Daley Center Plaza. At Michigan Avenue he waited for a northbound bus. It was cold early in November, and he was chilled. He could hear the sound of his own heart beating in the chambers of his ears, even over the sound of traffic. That had been happening to him lately, the sound of his own heart swelling in the chambers of his ears. The bus came and he found a seat beside an older woman, being careful not to touch or brush her as he sat down. If he wasn’t thinking about death, he thought about money. He thought of the two envelopes he’d gotten earlier this week enclosing checks, one check for a real estate closing for $500, and the other for a will and powers of attorney, $350. He summoned up the two envelopes containing the checks. One envelope had a stamp with a heart inscription, the other a blue stamp with a gold medallion honoring our dead in the Iraq war. The two return-address labels also bore red hearts. He remembered the pastel color of each check, a desert scene on one check. What was on the other? A ship, an eagle adrift in a canyon? The mnemonics of counting his money soothed him. His fees this month were only $1,000. It was an awful month. Last month was $2,200, next month would perhaps be over $4,000. Again, “if.” “If” he could close a small estate, “if” he could get it approved by the bullying judge. It was always “if,” but this counting of fees due him usually brought him some repose, but they were dwindling. Every month the total was smaller. As they moved out over the Michigan Avenue bridge past the shops of Michigan Avenue, he closed his eyes and catalogued his savings accounts. Bell Federal ($5,000); Talman ($7,000); Citicorp ($8,000); First Chicago ($5,000). Twenty-five thousand dollars. Some lawyers had millions stashed away. The dark-suited, gaunt-faced corporate lawyers on LaSalle Street heading for their suburban trains, groups of partners, walking together in deferential order. Some of them had more than a million stashed in a secret place. What did he have in his secret place? A box at Lincoln Federal with his wife’s rings, a photograph of his mother and father, his army discharge certificate, a swimming medal from high school, a lock of both children’s hair. Thinking of money didn’t calm him this morning, it only upset him. The pinstriped lawyers of Kenilworth and Winnetka with their calfskin brief cases . . . they were like sepulchral figures mocking him. He wouldn’t let them upset him this morning. Who was the angel waiting for him? Was it his wife? Was she in the secret place waiting with her dark wings folded, her hand reaching out to him? Could she help him anoint Sister Beatrice? They passed the Water Tower and he saw a Tribune on the seat across from him, and opened it to read. When he arrived at St. Joseph’s he walked into the lobby and then into the gift shop, where he was waited on by a young nun. She wore a light blue habit and a white plastic name badge. Sister Regina. “How may I help you, sir?” “I want to buy a card for someone who’s very ill.” “I’ll show you some cards.” The young nun had high-colored cheeks, and natural beauty, the natural beauty of her innocence and clarity. He looked down and saw a pile of tiny silver religious medals. “I don’t think I want a card. I’ll take one of these medals. How much are they?” “One dollar, sir. Our Lady of Czestochowa.” He opened his wallet and handed her a dollar, and she dropped the medal into a small plastic bag with some brochures advertising the shop’s products. He looked at her clear eyes, and he seemed to be looking down a blue tunnel into her repose. As she handed him the bag, their hands touched. “Excuse me,” he said. “God bless you, sir,” she answered, smiling at him. “Thank you, Sister. God bless you, too.” He took the elevator to the seventh floor. He got off and went over to the nurses’ station and asked for Beatrice Taylor. One of the supervising nurses at the station turned to him. “I don’t think Beatrice is going to last the afternoon. If you want to see her, you’d better go in now.” She was a tough, direct woman and she was pulling charts. “I’m going there now. You can come with me. Are you a family member?” “No, I’m her lawyer.” “Do you have papers for her to sign? Do you need witnesses?” She held a stack of clipboards in her hands. “I have a will for her to sign, if she’s still able to sign.” “As far as I’m concerned, counselor, they’re all able to sign.” He hesitated and turned to the younger nurse at the desk. “Have there been two priests and a nun here to see Beatrice Taylor?” “No,” she answered, “no one’s asked for her.” The senior nurse had gone down the hall. He followed her. He never liked hospitals, the sterile odors, the hiss of oxygen, and the smell of death, brief glimpses of patients in the rooms, mouths agape. The nurse had called him “counsel,” just like Mayor Daley. She pointed to a room and preceded him inside. He could see that Beatrice had grown much weaker. She didn’t open her eyes as the nurse leaned over the bed. There was a bottle of fluid dripping into her wrist through a tube and another tube out from the bed to a bottle filling with her urine. There was no light in the room. The nurse turned a lamp on over her face, and he saw how mottled and bruised her skin seemed, all color drained from it. “Beatrice,” the nurse bent over and called to her in her ear. “Beatrice, wake up, wake up, Beatrice.” There was no reaction. “Beatrice, there’s someone here to see you.” Her eyes fluttered for a moment, and the nurse touched her temples with water from a glass at the bedside. “Beatrice, your lawyer is here. What’s your name, counsel?” “Riordan. Charles Riordan.” He could feel his heart starting to flutter in his ears. “Beatrice, Mr. Riordan is here to see you. I’m going to sit you up. Get up, Beatrice.” “Sleep.” “No, you’re not sleeping. Get up. You’re not asleep.” She propped pillows behind her and gently pulled her up. “You have to sign some papers, Beatrice. She’s up now, counsel. Keep talking to her. I’ll get another witness.” “Can she sign?” “She can if you sign for her. They do it all the time.” The nurse snapped her fingers in front of Beatrice’s face three times quickly and then nodded to him and left the room. He leaned over to her and for a moment he felt a great wave of solicitude for her. “Beatrice, it’s Charles Riordan. Do you understand me?” The eyes stared at him. “Do you know me, Beatrice? Can you sign your name? I have your will.” He took the tiny silver medal the nun had given him and put it in her left hand and closed her hand around it. “Can you sign this, Beatrice?” “Charles?” “Yes, it’s me.” “I’m so tired.” “Will you sign this will?” He put the pen in her right hand and guided her fingers into a signature. The touch of her hand was like the touch of death and in this final ceremony he might be accused of fraud. He knew that, but it had to be done, this investiture. He had to do it for her and for himself. The nurses came back into the room. “Did she sign it?” “Yes.” “Go back to sleep now, Beatrice.” The nurse turned the light off. “Go to sleep.” She put her down gently. The two women in the starched uniforms witnessed the will and handed it back to him. “Thank you,” he told them. He then turned back to the bed and touched Beatrice Taylor’s forehead and hair with his fingers. Had he really set her free? Had he hinged her with feathered wings to fly to the sun? If so, she had also set him free. He would never have to go back to the eviction courts or to the divorce courts or close neighborhood real estate deals to make a living. He would have his trustee’s fees for the rest of his life. When he returned to the waiting room he asked again if the parish priests and the Sister Superior from the convent had come. They hadn’t, and he decided not to wait for them. He would phone them and tell them she’d signed the will. When he left the hospital the outside air hit his face, but as he walked away to the bus he still sensed the touch of her skin and her dry hair on his fingertips, and the odor of her death was in his nostrils. “Investiture,” first published in 6 (7) CBA Record 18 (July/August 1992) and collected in The Lawyer’s Chambers and Other Stories, pp. 19-29. Lowell B. Komie © [1994] |
