Schiff and Mortenson, the two principals at the firm, had trained together, and each was convinced of the other’s skill. In fact, the name of the practice was itself a testament both to that conviction and those skills. Schiff, the younger of the two, had suggested that Mortenson’s name should come first, in keeping with alphabetical order and the superior experience of the older man. Mortenson parried Schiff’s proposal by arguing on behalf of euphony and meter, the way the name would be spoken by men when they spoke it. He was giving up his dominance, but he was justifying his decision with reasons of wisdom, and in this he further demonstrated his preeminence. For the most part, this was the way the talents were assigned: protocol to one man, strategy to the other. They knew that they were held in balance by one another, and that this balance was what kept them from tipping toward either collision or drift.
Schiff’s parents were German immigrants, and he had kept on in that same spirit. He had skin that was pink like a baby’s and arms that at first seemed short but were in fact only thick. The features of his face were mostly absent, pushed down into the pudding of his flesh. He had the appearance of something not just fat but fattened. His girth made dressing an ordeal for him, which was probably why he insisted on automating the process: each day, he wore a light-blue shirt beneath a dark-blue coat, and brown pants above black shoes. The only bit of improvisation he permitted himself was his tie: one day a solid yellow, one day green, one day red, all rendered in the fullest and most deeply satisfying shades. He was older than his years, older than all of ours. “We have tagged a specimen of Tristissimus hominum,” Mortenson liked to say of his partner, with comically formal pronunciation.
Mortenson was another kind of species: easier to tag, harder to be made to understand that he had been tagged. He was not as fat as Schiff; he was not fat at all, except if you watched him for a while and began to understand that he thought that he deserved everything around him. All his features were on the sharp side of strong, from nose to ears to chin. There was only one part of his anatomy that had no point: his head was a perfect bald dome, as round as if it had been scooped out from something. He was a decade Schiff’s senior but quicker, healthier in body and mind alike, the kind of eternally young middle-aged man who would sometimes leave the office in the afternoon to swim laps for an hour in his health club’s pool. He had held on to youth with the same effortful ease that characterized nearly everything he did. His enthusiasms — for cars, for women, for the law, though not all of it — were too present in him, and Schiff was always bringing him back to the moment by placing a heavy finger upon some line or other of testimony or statute. “I can’t be bored for you,” Mortenson would say to Schiff, his eyes twinkling, but he could be, and was, excitedly. He had given himself fully to the law as practice, to the artifice of it that men like Schiff insisted was merely a protective cover for a dense moral core, and he held an ever deeper belief that the core, far from pure, might itself be broken open and inspected for even more precious traces of artifice.
At home, as at work, Mortenson was Schiff’s counter. He was married, to a second wife only slightly more than half his age, but he was not very serious about the matter. He liked to take the secretaries out for lunch and to treat them to drinks after work. The secretaries never lasted very long in his employ, though I noticed that they didn’t seem to leave angry. It was another one of his many talents. When secretaries left, I would sometimes get a call in the evening and orders to open the office in the morning. That’s the door I was looking at in my rearview mirror as I drove away from the office. The door was closed, but it had opened a memory. When I got to the edge of the parking lot, I thought I was far enough away that it was safe to relax, because I was safe from that memory. I was wrong on only one point, which is enough.
I ARRIVED AT WORK one rainy June morning, fresh from my first year of college, bearing a note of introduction from my father, who had attended college with Mortenson and was now a professor of political history at the local university. He was a principled man, my father, though his first principle was to seek validation.
“Gregory Tipton, junior,” Mortenson said, though I went by Jim and always had. He read my father’s note, which I had not been permitted to see, with a hard light in his eyes that softened to something more hospitable by the time he reached its end. Then he came to his feet, motioned for me to follow, and took me to the file room. “Get acquainted with the place,” he said, and left me there.
I got acquainted with it at once, and then spent the rest of that long summer wishing I had not done so with such swiftness. The room had no windows. It was lit by massive fluorescents. Three of its walls were lined from ceiling to floor with beige filing drawers, while the fourth contained, in addition to the door, a map that showed the countries of those continental cabinets: which of them were inhabited by past judgments, which by pending arguments, which civil litigation and which criminal. There was exactly one piece of art in the room, a picture of two fish jumping from a stream side by side, tails fully fanned.
After my first morning there, I emerged to find Mortenson smiling and chatting with a secretary. “Go get yourself some lunch and then alphabetize and file the pile by the door,” he told me. That took care of the afternoon and the next day. The hours piled up and I filed them away, too. On the morning of the third day, a knock sounded at the door and Schiff appeared. He stood in the doorway until I invited him in, then took a seat dolorously and asked me how I was enjoying the file room. When I murmured something about getting an education, he cleared his throat to take me off it. “The files are history, but what’s history? Merely markers of time that can’t be recovered.” This was, I would come to learn, his dominant mode, a grave melancholy that he intended as philosophy but was in fact autobiography. “Well, this is what Mortenson wants you to do, so you should work,” he said, “and I should go.”