The Pen

At eleven o'clock on Thursday night, in the study of a tall narrow house on Alder Court, Thomas Hargrove sat in a leather chair with two sheets of paper on his knee, and read them for the second time.

His wife had gone to bed at ten. He could hear, faintly, through the floor above, the creak of the old pipes and the slow tick of the clock on the landing. There was a lamp beside him with a green glass shade, and a glass of water, and a saucer on the arm of the chair in which, for eleven years, he had put nothing at all. The pen was in his right hand. It tapped the saucer's edge, lightly, with the dry small sound of a woodpecker in a far-off wood, and he did not notice.

The pages were headed PELHAM: Summary and Recommendation. They were typed in a plain font, single-spaced, with a margin that had been set exactly, and there was not a footnote on either side. On the first page, in four short paragraphs, was what had happened. On the second, in three, was what the firm ought to do. The language was bare. The sentences were short. At the foot of the second page, in one line, was the sentence for which he had been looking for six weeks, and which he had known, in the abstract, was somewhere in a hundred and eleven pages of the earlier draft, buried in a footnote on page ninety-four.

The notice was defective in service, not in content; we should move on that ground alone.

He read the sentence again. He put the pages down on his knee, and took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers.

It's good, he thought. It's very good.

He was not surprised. That was the thing that troubled him. He had known since the second week that the boy could do it. It had been plain in the way he took a file apart, with a kind of eager ruthlessness, all the pins out in a row on the table. The mind was there. It was a clean, hard, patient mind, of a kind that Hargrove had met perhaps four times in his career, and it was lodged in the body of a young man who could not be in a room for five minutes without making everyone in it want to leave.

…

He had taught two associates well in his life, and one of them had been a disaster.

His name was Peter Lasky, and he had come to the firm in 1996 with a degree from a school that Hargrove had not heard of, a pair of scuffed shoes, and the gift. That was all one could call it. He read faster than other people. He saw the hinge of a case at once. At twenty-six he had written a brief for a commercial matter that the senior partner, a dry old man named Crane, had read through twice in silence and put in his drawer, without a word, and Hargrove, who was then thirty-five, and an ambitious fool himself, had gone out that evening and bought the boy a drink.

He had praised him. He had praised him extravagantly, over the course of two years, in the elevator and the corridor and the restaurant, in front of the others. He had told him that he was the best he had seen. He had given him more work than he could do, and more credit than he had earned, and by the end of the second year the young man walked into rooms with his chin raised and his voice a little too loud, and spoke first.

It was the spring of 1999. A motion in federal court, a judge named Auberon with a reputation for dryness, and a client who had been waiting two years for the ruling. Hargrove had briefed Lasky for a week. He had told him: you will sit at the end of the table, and you will say nothing.

Auberon had stopped halfway through the argument, to ask a question of the other side. It was a fair question. It was the sort of question that a judge asks as he thinks aloud, and expects no one to answer. And Peter Lasky had said, in a clear ringing voice from the end of the table, "If I may, Your Honor, counsel is mistaken."

He had been right. That was the horror of it. He had been exactly right. And the judge had looked at him for a very long moment over his glasses, with an expression that Hargrove would remember all his life, and had said, in a mild voice, "Mr. Hargrove, perhaps you will remind your associate where he is," and the motion, which they had been going to win, was denied, and the client lost.

Lasky resigned in June. Hargrove did not stop him. He had gone to sell insurance in Ohio, and then, for a time, nothing was heard of him, and then, in 2004, a card came from his sister in the mail, with a black border, that said that Peter had died.

Hargrove did not know how. He had never asked. He had kept the card for a while in the drawer where he kept the things he did not look at, and then, one day, it was gone.

…

He put the pages on the table.

He knew what he saw when he looked at Asher Cole. He did not like it, and he had told no one. He saw the chin. He saw the thin, eager, defiant jaw, thrust a little forward, and the hand shot up before the question was finished. He saw the pleasure that the boy took in being right, the bright wet pleasure, like a child in a puddle. And he saw, beneath it, in the eyes, in the flicker that crossed them when the room did not laugh, a hunger so naked that it made him look away.

I killed one already, he thought.

It was an absurd thought. He thrust it away at once. Lasky had been a grown man, with a life of his own, and had made his own choices, and Hargrove had been, at most, a fool. But the thought came back, as it always did, in the dark, in the leather chair. He had given the boy too much, too soon. He had praised a thing that had not yet learned to be quiet. And the world had done the rest.

So I'll do the opposite, he had decided, the first week. I'll give him nothing, until he can carry it.

It was a cruel thought. He knew it was cruel. But he had watched the boy in the meeting that morning, with his phone face down on the table where Hargrove had made him put it, and his jaw set, and his color high, and he had thought, he'll break before he'll bend. And a man who will break before he bends is a man who must be handled with the minimum of praise, in the hope that some day he will learn that he can survive without it.

He had said Fine.

It was the highest word that he had. He had said it, standing in the aisle, with the pages in his hand, and watched the boy's face go through four expressions in two seconds: astonishment, delight, suspicion, and a tight hard pleasure that he tried to hide. He had seen him carry it back to his desk like a man carrying a hot dish.

…

He got up.

The house was quiet. He went to the window, and stood with his hands behind his back looking out at the court, where a single lamp burned over the gate and the maples stood bare and black against the sky. There was a light snow beginning to fall. It drifted past the glass in slow flakes, without hurry, and lay on the sill.

He thought of the phone.

It had been on the table in the conference room, in the second week of the month, face down on the polished wood, in front of a young man with a flushed jaw. Hargrove had made him put it there. He had meant it as a minor humiliation, a way of making a point. And as he turned to resume the schedule, the boy had reached out to adjust it, and the little screen had flickered, and for a half second, before the glass went dark, he had seen what was on it.

White letters on black. A long column of them. At the top of the page, small and round, a pale face with two narrow eyes.

He had not thought much of it. He had been a lawyer for thirty-five years, and had seen the screens of the young: games, chats, pictures of dogs. But there was something in the arrangement of it, in the color, in the plain white type, that had stayed. It had come back to him once or twice while he waited for the elevator. It had come back, tonight, as he read the second page.

It was just a website, he told himself.

It was a mask.

It was a game. The boy plays games. They all do.

He knew perfectly well what a conscientious man would do. A conscientious man would ask. He would put his hand on the boy's shoulder, in the corridor, and say, Cole, may I have a word, and he would say it gently, over coffee, in the voice of an older person with nothing to gain. He would say, I saw something on your phone, and I wondered whether you were all right. And the boy would look at him with his chin up, and his eyes narrowing, and say, I don't know what you mean, sir.

He would say it, and he would hate the older man for the question.

Hargrove watched the snow.

It isn't my place, he thought. It was the sentence that had kept him comfortable for thirty-five years. It had got him through two divorces among his partners and a stroke in the next office and the black-bordered card. It was a good sentence. It was only that it had never once, in all that time, been the whole truth.

…

When the clock on the landing struck midnight he went back to the chair and took up the pages once more.

He read the last line. He read it a fifth time. Then he picked up the pen and, in the margin at the top, in a small upright hand that he used for nothing but the most important comments, wrote three words.

Very good work.

He looked at them.

He crossed them out, with a single clean line, and wrote underneath, Fine, and sat looking at that, and at the pen in his hand, and the saucer on the arm of the chair where a cigarette had once burned, and at the little brass clock on the desk that had been his father's.

He would not say it. He knew he would not. He would give the boy the Pelham binders. He would give him the collating and the tabs. He would wait. In a year or two, in the way that such things happen, there would be a day when the boy was quiet in a room because he had decided to be, and not because he had been told. And on that day he would say it, aloud, in the corridor, in front of the others. This is very good work.

He looked at the dark window.

It did not occur to him that a man may wait too long for a thing. It had occurred to him once, in the spring of 1999, and he had put it away.

He switched off the lamp. The pen, in his hand, tapped once on the arm of the chair, softly, and was still.