New York Lawyer
November 30, 2007

The light changes on Labor Day. Suddenly, the breezes were back and the black flies were gone. The artists who first came to summer here were the ones who knew about the light, but even I, who’d been hopeless at paint-by-number, could see the sharpening of blue and the greater precision of the cloud banks. The haze of a hot summer was finished. The kids were gone too. Now, it was just the retired, the unemployed and the unloved, like myself.

There were just two other women there, probably in their sixties. They stood, in tatty old skirted suits, at the edge of the sandy point where the bay dropped off the spit of land. One of them put on her rubber cap and took a dive. The other, who didn’t look at all beachy, folded her arms and shivered. Her legs looked like a map of the Pan-American Highway—pale not white, more clear than translucent, with thin blue lines coursing from the thighs to her ankles. I had a few veins myself, but mostly they were just larger vessels on the backs of my thighs obscured by my freckles.

I could hear her telling her friend, whose head and shoulders were bobbing up and down, that she was surprised she even put on a bathing suit. Apparently, going in the water was going to be too much.

I lifted myself up from the beach chair and looked out across the bay to Gerard Point. There too, only a few older retirees or maybe they were artists or writers, sat in sand chairs across the inlet. Rocky stood up and shook his body, like a shimmy dancer, spraying sand in all directions. “Hey you, stop it.” Of course, the damage was done and all I could do was wipe off the excess.

He walked down to the water, but didn’t just jump in like he would have on a hot day. He waited. I knew I was going in without even feeling the water. This was always my reaction when I saw someone deny themselves the pleasure of the bay because of a little chill. I didn’t ever want to be like that so I held my nose and slipped in to the water.

Just as my head emerged, Rocky was paddling toward me like a little steam engine, breathing out his nose to a rhythmic beat. I continued to swim out and he followed me. He limited my swimming range since I knew his determination to herd me might outstrip his terrier instinct and let him think he was a Portuguese water dog. If he tired, I could count on his taking a rest on the shore and barking at me till I obeyed and came out of the water.

The water was cool, but the sun was still very warm and so any qualms I had about temperature were dissolved in the freshness of the salty bay water. The quietude of nesting terns intermittently taking off and setting down on the uninhabited greenery of the bay point provided a contrast with the gnawing ache in my gut. As soon as Rocky got to me he turned around and paddled back to shore, and since I didn’t move, as soon as he reached shore, he turned to paddle back out.

I had no great urge to get out or to swim. I felt lazy which was always the way I felt when I had a lot to figure out. My husband, Dennis, wanted a divorce that I didn’t want. Within a day of his saying to me “I can’t do this anymore,” I decided if that’s what he wanted then I wasn’t going back to the law practice in the city. If I had to get divorced, I shouldn’t be forced to continue working at something I had lost all patience with years ago. But, other than that everything was fine so long as I could continue to ignore the ache and push away the budding anxiety. For now, I was very good at not paying attention to it— like a mother who has learned to ignore a whining child. I would pay later, but the day was too sweet, and everything at Louse Point so not fitting with the internal turmoil, that I felt it was only right to ignore it all. After all, the whirling dervishes would continue to shout at me that I had to get a job or maybe I should just go to Europe or Dennis would change his mind, I’d make him change his mind. I was too old for this and, by the way, what was I going to do? Thank God, it was lunch time so I simply had to attend to finding a meal and everything else could wait—indefinitely.

Why not treat myself to East Hampton Point? After all didn’t that fit in with this beautiful day? I maneuvered the Jeep down the gravel driveway expecting to find a valet parker, when I remembered that valet parking in the Hamptons was like the color white--not after Labor Day. The lot was huge, and on a summer evening, before sunset, it was filled with Mercedes, Hummers and Land Rovers.

Now, there were only six cars in the lot. I pulled up to a green Jaguar near the white picket gate that opened on to the outdoor walkway so you didn’t have to walk through the restaurant to get out to the deck on the marina. When I had dropped the Rockster off at the house, I put on a lemon yellow linen summer skirt that picked up the yellow in the paisley swirl of my one-piece suit. I had the large sunglasses and the gold sandals so I didn’t think they would throw me out. I have to admit, I know it’s silly but I do like fashion and I was still a semi-slave to style even at 54.

All the white tables were set with blue napkins and silverware as if they were still expecting a crowd. A pretty server in khaki shorts and a navy polo shirt stood reading a gossip magazine while waiting for someone’s Mojito to come out from the bar. There was one other lone woman sitting close to the water. The table next to her was empty and so I headed in her direction. She had on one of those ridiculously large straw sun hats that only look good on the young or, at least, those without a second chin. I noticed the large sunglasses, but they looked a little kooky, and were not particularly the type which were in style. I couldn’t see the title of the book she was reading, so I looked at her sandals, which turned out to be canvas wedges. Definitely, an older woman’s choice. I decided to sit facing towards her so I could look at the water. I put up the umbrella to get some shade in order to try and avoid my luck ‘o the Irish propensity for skin cancer.

No sooner did I raise it, the woman looked up at me and spoke.

“Oh, you’re smart to do that. I almost never sit in the sun without an umbrella, but the breeze off the bay is so cool that I really needed the sun on my shoulders for a little warmth.”

I hesitated a moment. “Right, it is a bit cooler here.” I lowered the umbrella. “I could use all the sunshine I can get today.” The minute I said it I groaned inwardly, knowing I was inviting her to question me. Luckily, she didn’t take the bait, but continued with the pleasantries.

“It’s a lovely day isn’t it? This has been the most extraordinary summer.”

This time I stuck to the banal although I couldn’t help adding a bit of pointedness to my response. “Yes, it’s been a most unusual summer.” I guess my aura was pretty much shot through with dismay. I hadn’t been able to hit the pain, since I was still in shock. Why, I thought to myself, did I feel the need to get into a conversation with this woman?

She reached forward to offer her hand. “I’m Julie Demarest.” I stood up to lean forward to shake her hand, and I expected to grasp her hand and really shake it firmly, but she remained seated and barely touched my mine, before refolding both her hands and placing them primly back in her lap.

“Ann McEvoy, nice to meet you.” I sat down and immediately took the menu and glanced at it hoping to cut off the interaction since I wasn’t sure I really wanted to get into a conversation with this woman.

Julie Demarest was still looking at me. “I would highly recommend the crab cakes. They really do them right here and they’re freshly made.”

“I think I’m going to just go for the burger. I have a yen for one.” Now, desperately trying to keep myself to the innocuous.

“Well, I can’t blame you but women our age have to watch our fat intake so that’s why I rarely eat hamburgers anymore, but I will enjoy the aroma of yours.”

I was relieved I wasn’t going to get a lecture. She was just reminding herself of something I already well knew. Getting older was not necessarily getting better. That rule only applied if you gave up everything you liked because it created free radicals, which caused aging, which in turn created system wide degeneration that could lead to all sorts of nasty things like Alzheimer’s or worse droopy boobs. The one problem I didn’t have.

“I’m in the mood to treat myself and I don’t feel like abstaining or particularly making wise choices at the moment.”

Again, I just couldn’t keep the edge of impending doom completely out of my voice, and this time, she proffered information and a sympathetic tone.

“I know how you feel, my husband Arthur died two years ago and when it first happened I couldn’t eat at all and then after the first year all I could do was eat. I just dropped the extra weight so I’d like to keep it off.”

Somehow, during this brief conversation I realized she probably wasn’t older than

me and maybe even a little younger. I think I got that impression because she dressed like an older woman from the 1950’s. But not in the way the fashion designers co-opted period designs every season as if they were new, more like she’d had these clothes for a long time. It wasn’t just her look, she had an old fashioned way about her. I told her how sorry I was about her loss and then decided that instead of the oblique hints, maybe just stating the facts would place the stamp of reality on them—something I’d been trying to avoid. I briefed her on my own tale of woe.

“I’m glad to hear there’s weight loss after loss. I just separated from my husband and I’ve been just giving myself whatever I feel like having in the food department. It’s not a solution, but I guess it’s the only thing I’m really enjoying at the moment. It’s good to know you get better.” Then, in my own inimitable style, I handed the bat back to Julie. “ Do you think you’d like to marry again?”

Julie hesitated, “No I don’t believe I will. You see my husband was one of a kind. He adored me and I him. Arthur was much older—91 when he died, but he was still working and always a very virile man. We married when he was 76 and I was thirty-five.

It took my mind a second to grasp the concept of being married to a 91 year old man. “Oh, well that’s a substantial age difference but, what matters is the relationship and it sounds like you had a great marriage”

Julie then told me how even though Arthur was 89 when he got ill, she felt he had a number of good years left which were stolen by a doctor who’d given her husband steroids without monitoring his blood sugar. He wound up with kidney failure and on dialysis for two years before he croaked. Dialysis consumes a good part of your energy and life since it’s usually done three times per week at a center where you’re hooked up for three hours so the machine can clean out your blood of toxins which your kidneys can’t do any longer. You have to have a shunt put in your arm so they can get access to a major vessel. The shunts clog and get infected from time to time so it makes most people pretty miserable.

I commiserated. “That’s awful. I used to be a nurse so I’m familiar with dialysis. It’s terrible having to be hooked up to a machine for hours at a time three days a week. It must have really changed your whole lives.” Julie looked very sad.

“It truly was the end of our married lives. I became a caretaker—constantly shuttling Arthur back and forth between doctors and dialysis facilities. He was hospitalized several times for infections and it just changed his whole personality. But I loved him so much and I was so grateful for meeting him that I could never begrudge him a moment of my care. We continued to go to the house in Spring Lake, but he became too weak to do anything except have me push him in his wheelchair on the boardwalk.”

I know it sounds awful, but I couldn’t help remembering something my mother said a couple of years after my father died when she was in her early sixties. “I don’t care how lonely I get. I don’t think I could marry some old coot. Look what happened to Aunt Vera. She remarried that Tony who was in his late seventies down in Florida. She thought she was so lucky because he used to be some kind of wheeler-dealer, but he had a stroke a month after the wedding. I would watch her push him in his wheelchair around the pool and all I could think was that if it were me, I think I’d push him in. Who needs it?” Perhaps, mom was a little crass, but after all she was talking privately with her only daughter and she knew she didn’t have to sugar coat it. My mother did get lonely, but she also relished her freedom and she enjoyed her friends.

Julie was babbling on about the last days of Arthur in such a way that I thought she really still hadn’t gotten over it.

“At the very end, I was bathing him and changing his diapers. I wanted to get help, but Arthur wouldn’t hear of it. He was such a proud man.”

Oh Shit, I thought. Old Arthur was no dope. He knew what was down the road and he wasn’t having any stranger take care of him. At least, for now, though, I admired her. She didn’t seem to have regretted or resented what happened. Plus, she had to have some inkling when she married him and he was 76 and she was 35. “It’s amazing to me that you were able to do it by yourself and it really was an act of love. You made his last years the best they could be.” And I meant it. I’d cleaned enough bottoms when I worked in the nursing home during college to know it had to be love or you had to be paid. Mind you, I was very good at and I always made sure I didn’t let patients feel bad about it. Most of them were just too out of it to care, but for those who did it was important to let them have their dignity.

Without a trace of irony, she said, “That means something coming from a professional nurse.”

I had to set her straight. “I haven’t practiced nursing since I went to law school. I’m actually a medical malpractice attorney now.”

Her head, which had been hanging a little, jerked up “No, you’re kidding. I can’t believe this — it must be synchronicity or my planets are aligned. I have a case against Dr. Amendola, who was Arthur’s internist. Another lawyer has had the case for two years now, but he doesn’t want to continue and he sent me a notice from the court saying I have a month to find a new lawyer.”

I already figured I knew why the lawyer was getting rid of the case. Despite the way Julie had explained what happened, medical malpractice cases were never that simple so I knew I wasn’t getting the whole story. If the liability against the doctor wasn’t good, trying a case dealing with two years of “pain and suffering” for a 91 year old, probably the only damages available in this case, would not be worth a lot. Not only is the law a “jealous mistress” she can be stingy if you weren’t a young wage earner with a dependent wife and children.

“Why is he rejecting the case now?,” I asked with a hint of skepticism.

She started to sob a little, but quickly regained her composure. “He says he can’t find an expert and without one the judge is going to throw the case out.”

Just then, the young waitress came over to take my order. Julie was dabbing at her eyes with an old fashioned lacy hanky, the kind I hadn’t seen since I had one placed in my breast pocket in my Catholic school uniform for first grade. I ordered the burger with the fries, not salad. Right now, life owed me those fries without adding them to my hips. Julie looked at me like a puppy from a pet store.

“Do you think you could help me?”

I heard myself say sure I’d be happy to look at the case, but I couldn’t make any promises until I’d completely reviewed it and I knew I had an expert. But, Julie was off to the races. While I ate my lunch, she filled me in on more of the details. She had a house on Lilly Pond Lane which meant Arthur had left her set up for life. He was still working when this happened, but he hadn’t taken a salary from his company in years because he made so much money off his investments.

“You understand, Julie, the only damages here is his pain and suffering for two years.”

“It’s not about the money for me. Arthur took care of me physically, emotionally and financially. He was still playing tennis and golf. We traveled all the time. The love of my life is gone and even though I’m only 53, I know there will never be another Arthur. I’ve been spoiled.”

I’d already begun imagining her sitting before a jury telling them about her sex life with Arthur, but I managed to focus back in. “There is no loss of support here because you’re doing just as well as you were before. You can’t recover for grief or even for loss of companionship after he’s dead. You can get damages for loss of a spouse’s services but it sounds like you two had enough money to pay for those things while he was alive and you still do after his death. So, that leaves his pain and suffering for two years and you have the loss of his companionship and consortium for two years.” Consortium is the legal way of saying you’re not getting laid anymore and it’s the doctor’s fault.

“I know” she said without missing a beat. “The lawyer explained that to me at the beginning.”

“How many years were you together?”

Without asking, Julie moved herself to my table and leaned in towards me and really lowered her voice. “I met Arthur when his first wife was dying of cancer about 17 years ago. He hired me to give her watercolor instruction in their home in Sands Point. When Sondra became bedridden, he asked me to continue so that she could work on small pieces from an over the bed table and then, to just discuss art with her an hour a day. For the last three weeks of her life, she slept most of the time since she was on such heavy medication and I would spend the time talking to Arthur on their patio overlooking the Long Island Sound. I know this sounds terrible, but we became lovers in the last weeks before she died. We waited for a year after her death, before we let anyone know of our relationship, but we married a year and a day after the first anniversary. “

“Look Julie, I’m a lawyer, not a judge and since you’re at least a potential client anything you say to me is confidential,” I said, sensing her embarrassment at this revelation and the probable need to keep this info under the table in case there were adult children from the prior marriage. “Did Arthur have any children?” I had to ask.

“Yes, two sons, but they were already in their forties and involved with their own families and careers. Both of them have lived abroad for periods and so they only really got together once or twice a year and it was easy to keep it a secret from them. I guess as Arthur got older he realized that he had influenced his sons by his own extended absences from home when they were children. His first wife, Loretta, never complained and I suppose that by the time she became ill before her death they had been so emotionally distant for years that Arthur was hungry for a relationship in his life. Oh, I know it sounds terrible. But both of us filled such great gaps in each others lives and we made each other happy – despite whatever mistakes we made in not honoring his marriage to Loretta.”

This certainly wasn’t the first time I’d heard a story like this. Especially in cases involving death, someone was always coming out of the woodwork—a husband dies and a mistress shows up with a child. Somehow, the husband never got around to telling the wife, or she never finds out and, like everyone, he doesn’t think he’s going to kick the bucket and he dies of a heart attack at the office. Death had a way of evening the score for all the players whether they were known or unknown. “Do his sons know that you started a lawsuit?”

“Yes, they have signed off on everything. They were well taken care of during and after Arthur and Loretta’s deaths so they have no ax to grind with me. I mean they’re very nice men with lovely families, but I think they were relieved that I came into the picture so that they never had to be concerned that they weren’t available to help. Arthur so regretted not ensuring they were all closer during his life and it was his one true regret.”

Sure, I thought, Arthur got to be the bigwig his whole life while the wife stayed in the four bedroom colonial tending the home fires and then, when he was ready to have closeness, she gets sick and he finds someone on the door step waiting to plug up the hole. “Jesus, how do they do it?” I thought. I couldn’t help but envy Arthur’s skill at living his life on his own terms and then, just before, the tire blows, he remembers to get a replacement. Genius.

I finished my burger and we exchanged numbers. Julie promised to have the file transferred from the other attorney.

“If you don’t mind Julie, I’d like to know who the attorney is and question him as to why he’s just getting around to telling you there is no expert so close to the trial.”

“You won’t change your mind, will you?”

“Look, I really can’t make any decision without analyzing the case fully, but since I’m out of my husband’s law practice for the time being and I’m not working, this is the most likely time for me to try a case.”

“The lawyer is Patrick Kavanaugh. His office is in downtown Manhattan.”

Julie opened her bag which was a Nantucket straw bucket with a handle—another favorite of the “ladies who lunch set.” I could already see, she was the kind of woman who wore prim little suits and pumps and wouldn’t be caught dead without pantyhose.

“Here’s his card with his number. Why don’t you give me a day to get in touch with him before you call.”

I knew Patrick. He was one of the few plaintiffs’ malpractice lawyers who worked on his own. For 15 years he’d been a defense malpractice lawyer till he saw the light, left his old firm and went on his own. I knew he’d started his career as a prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. We actually tried a case together a few years ago. He got out of the action early because his client really had no liability. Since he didn’t have much to lose we got pretty friendly during jury selection and had a couple of lunches. I hadn’t seen him since then. He was good looking guy though and as far as I knew he’d never been married which probably meant that he was a serial killer in his off time or gay, but we’d spent a pleasant few days together.

I got up from my seat. “Sure, no problem. Just make sure he’s going to ship me the file out here.” I gave her my card with the handwritten East Hampton address.

She tentatively offered me the fish hand shake again and we said goodbye.

I reached the gravel lot and all I could hear was the crunching underneath my sandals. For a minute, I was at peace. I didn’t know where my life was going, but if I decided to take this case, at least I’d know what I was doing for October.