It didn’t bother him half as much as it used to. The fact was that he was part of a system. He knew that now. A small piece of skin on a large elaborate creature. A cog that turned a set of wheels. Perhaps it just was a process of growing older. You leave the change to the generations that come behind you. But then the generation that comes behind you gets blown asunder in Vietnamese cafés, and you go on, you must go on, because even if they’re gone they still can be remembered.
He was not the maverick Jew that he had once set out to be; still Soderberg refused to surrender. It was a point of honor, of truth, of survival.
When he first got called, back in the summer of ′67, he thought that he’d take the job and be a paragon of virtue. He wouldn’t just survive, but flourish. He packed up his job and took a fifty-five percent pay cut. He didn’t need the money. He and Claire had already set a good deal aside, their accounts were healthy, the inheritance strong, and Joshua was squared away at PARC. Even if the idea of being a judge came as a complete surprise, he loved it. He had spent some early years in the U.S. Attorney’s office, sure, and he had put his time in, had served on a tax commission, built himself a track record, buttered up the right people. He had taken a few difficult cases in his time, had argued well, had struck a balance. He’d written an editorial for The New York Times questioning the legal parameters of the draft dodgers and the psychological effects conscription had on the country. He had weighed the moral and constitutional aspects and came out firmly on the side of the war. At parties on Park Avenue he had met Mayor Lindsay, but only glancingly, and so when the appointment was suggested, he thought it was a ruse. He put the phone down. Laughed it off. It rang again. You want me to do what? There was talk of eventual promotion, first as acting judge of the Supreme Court of New York, and then, who knows — from there anything was still possible. A lot of the promotions had stalled when the city started to go bankrupt, but he didn’t mind, he would surf it out. He was a man who believed in the absolute of the law. He would be able to weigh and dissect and ponder and make a change, give something back to the city where he’d been born. He always felt that he had skirted the city’s edges and now he would take a pay cut and be at its core. The law was fundamental to how it was imparted and to what degree it could contain the excesses of human folly. He believed in the notion that even when laws were written down they ought not to remain unaltered. The law was work. It was there to be sifted. He was interested not just in the meaning of what could be, but also what ought to be. He would be at the coal face. One of the important miners of the morality of the city. The Honorable Solomon Soderberg.
Even the name rang right. Perhaps he had been used as judicial fodder, a balancing of the books, but he didn’t mind too much; the good would outweigh the bad. He’d be rabbinical, wise, caring. Besides, every lawyer had a judge inside him.
He had walked in, his very first day, with his heart on fire. Through the front entrance. He wanted to savor it. He’d bought a brand-new suit from a swanky tailor on Madison Avenue. A Gucci tie. Tassels on his shoes. He approached the building in a great swell of anticipation. Etched outside the wide gold-colored doors were the words THE PEOPLE ARE THE FOUNDATION OF POWER. He stood a moment and breathed it all in. Inside, in the lobby, there was a blur of movement. Pimps and reporters and ambulance chasers. Men in purple platform shoes. Women dragging their children behind them. Bums sleeping in the window alcoves. He could feel his heart sink with each step. It seemed for just a moment that the building could still have the aura — the high ceilings, the old wooden balustrades, the marble floor — but the more he walked around the more his spirit sank. The courtrooms were even worse than he remembered. He shuffled around, dazed and disheartened. The corridor walls were graffitied. Men sat smoking in the back of the courtrooms. Deals were going down in the bathrooms. Prosecutors had holes in their suits. Crooked cops roamed about, looking for kickbacks. Kids were doing complicated handshakes. Fathers sat with smacked-out daughters. Mothers wept over their long-haired sons. On the courtroom doors, the fancy red leather pouching was slit. Attorneys went by with battered attaché cases. He ghosted past them all, took the elevator upstairs, then pulled up a chair at his new desk. There was a piece of dried chewing gum underneath the desk drawer.
Still and all, he said to himself, still and all, he would soon have it all sorted out. He could handle it. He could turn things around.
He announced his intentions in chambers one afternoon, at a retirement party for Kemmerer. A snicker went around the room. So sayeth Solomon, said one sad sack. Slice the baby, boys. Great hilarity and the tinkling of glasses. The other judges told him he’d get used to it eventually, that he’d see the light and it’d still be in a tunnel. The greatest part of the law was the wisdom of toleration. One had to accept the fools. It came with the territory. Every now and then the blinkers had to be lowered. He had to learn to lose. That was the price of success. Try it, they said. Buck the
system, Soderberg, and you’ll be eating pizza in the Bronx. Be careful. Play the game. Stick with us. And if he thought Manhattan was bad, he should go up to where the real fires were raging, to American Hanoi itself, at the end of the 4 train, where the very worst of the city played itself out every day.
He refused to believe them for many months, but slowly it dawned on him that they were correct — he was caught, he was just a part of the system, and the word was appropriate, a part of the Parts.
So many of the charges were just whisked away. The kids pleaded out, or he gave them time served, just so he could clear the backlog. He had his quota sheet to fill. He had to answer to the supervisors upstairs. The felonies got knocked down to misdemeanors. It was another form of demolition. You had to swing the wrecking ball. He was being judged on how he judged: the less work he gave to his colleagues upstairs, the happier they were. Ninety percent of the cases — even serious misbehavior — had to be disposed of. He wanted the promised promotion, yes, but even that couldn’t stifle the feeling that he had taken whatever idealism he once had and stuffed it inside a cheap black robe, and now, when he went searching, he couldn’t even find it inside the darkest slits.
He arrived at 100 Centre Street five days a week, put on his robe, wore his shiniest shoes, pulled his socks up around his ankles, and prevailed when he could. It was, he knew, about choosing his fights. He could have easily had a dozen pitched battles a day, more if he wanted. He could’ve taken on the whole system. He could have given the graffiti writers fines of a thousand dollars so that they’d never be able to pay it. Or he could’ve sentenced the firework kids on Mott Street to six months. He could’ve sent the drug addicts down for a full year. Chained them with a heavy bail. But it would all rebound, he knew. They would refuse to plead. And he would get the book slung at him for clogging up the courts. The shoplifters, the shoeshine boys, the hotel sneaks, the three-card-monte kids, they were all entitled eventually to say, Not guilty, Your Honor. And then the city would choke. The gutters would fill up. The slime would spill over. The sidewalks would fill. And he’d be blamed.
At the worst of times he thought, I’m a maintenance guy, I’m a gatekeeper, I’m a two-bit security man. He watched the parade come in and out of his courtroom, whichever Part he was in that day, and he wondered how the city had become such a disgusting thing on his watch. How it lifted babies by the hair, and how it raped seventy-year-old women, and how it set fires to couches where lovers slept, and how it pocketed candy bars, and how it shattered ribcages, and how it allowed its war protesters to spit in the faces of cops, and how the union men ran roughshod over their bosses, and how the Mafia took a hold of the boardwalks, and how fathers used daughters as ashtrays, and how bar fights spun out of control, and how perfectly good businessmen ended up urinating in front of the Woolworth Building, and how guns were drawn in the pizza joints, and how whole families got blown away, and how paramedics ended up with crushed skulls, and how addicts shot heroin into their tongues, and how shysters ran scams and old ladies lost their savings, and how shopkeepers gave back the wrong change, and how the mayor wheezed and wheedled and lied while the city burned down to the ground, got itself ready for its own little funeral of ashes, crime, crime, crime.