A Father’s Tale: Gene’s Son

A very long time ago, when I was a timid associate in my first law firm, I was given a random task: a son of a long-term client, let’s call him Gene Cline, (as this is “Commemorating Obscure Pittsburgh Pirates Week”, well, in THIS blog it is) needed help.

Gene even came to the office to talk about it. “He’s going to turn out just fine, my boy,” he said. Gene clenched both fists and raised them above his head. “He’s going to be great! He just needs to get his feet on the ground. So help him out with whatever this is, OK?” I nodded but was dubious. It was the one of the few times in my life when I saw something clearly then when I learned so much more about it in the future: how fathers feel about their kids. I had none of my own then, of course. “I’m not kidding,” Gene concluded, raising his fists again and shaking them. “That boy is going to be just great!”

It was the sort of project you give a baby associate: Gene’s son, let’s call him Johnny, though Tommy would work as well, any diminutive of a real name, had gotten into some undefined trouble, and allegedly there was a lawsuit filed against him. There was supposed to be a hearing on Monday. He or his lawyer would need to be there.

So in the North Carolina heat, I trudged to the courthouse. This was the olden days, when nothing was electronic; you could go see what the coming week held per the announcements on a bulletin board. There was no Anybody vs. Cline on anything. I could, I suppose, have gone in to ask the clerk of court, but whenever I asked the clerk anything, she would ask, “Are you a lawyer? Are you a LOCAL lawyer?” as if to search for some reason why I had no idea what I was doing.

Having scoured the calendars for any pending hearing or motion or anything in vain, I returned to the office.

I was about to call Johnny when Morris Large charged into my office. “I hear you’ve been assigned something for Gene Cline?”

“Yeah , something about his son.”

Large, tall, a graduate of the Naval Academy, cut me off with his slicing hand. “Gene Cline hasn’t paid a bill in years. Don’t do any more work for him. Not on this.”

“Ok,” I said. “Well, Winston gave the work to me.” As you’ll recall from the post of January 24, Winston was a name partner and immovable. He never took any answer at all that he didn’t want. I hoped that Large would see this and go away. Though, in truth, if his objection were a way out of dealing with this case, it would be fine with me.

“I’ll talk to Winston,” Large proclaimed, and left.

I waited about twenty minutes. If it had been twenty years later, I’d have shopped on the Internet or written an email to a friend. Someone was rumored to have kept a current copy of Sports Illustrated in his desk, but I was too frightened. Years later, at AIG, when I had nothing to do, I played a prehistoric golf video game, set at Pebble Beach. That 17th hole is a monster, all right.

Then I went down to Winston’s office. “Did you talk to Morris?” I asked.

Winston smiled, a little crinkle of his mouth and eyes, his acknowledgement that I was worried about the conflict and had a right to be. Some days, Winston was downright human. “Go ahead and do the work,” he said. “I’ll worry about getting paid.”

I nodded and went back to my office. How do law firms get any work done at all? I called Johnny: “I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything going on in the courthouse that involves you.”

“What’s going on?” he asked, not quite on the point.

“Well, without anything on the calendars, there may not be anything going on. I know you don’t want to pay me to sit around the courthouse at calendar call.” There was nothing I less wanted to do; I wanted to be a corporate lawyer, not a litigator anyway, a not very fine point that my firm never really grasped. “But you can go over on Monday morning, look at the calendars posted on the bulletin boards, and see if anything has risen.” Like the body of Christ and even less likely.

“I ain’t studyin' on goin' over to hang around no courthouse,” he slurred.

I blinked. “Well, I don’t know how else you’re going to obtain any information about your case, if there is one. Unless you do want to pay me to go to calendar call.”

He laughed, slow and sounding depressed. “No, I ain’t paying you to do nothing.”

I didn’t like the implication. “Well, it’s up to you then,” I said. I wanted to say, It sounds like nothing is actually going on, but I didn’t want that uninformed piece of non-advice to arise again and bite me so said nothing.

“OK, that’s fine,” he said, “Thanks. Bye.”

“Goodbye,” I said, and couldn’t resist adding, “please let me know if you need any more help.”

More? What was I thinking?

We hung up, and I thought back to Gene’s enthusiastic endorsement of a kid who wasn’t studying on this or that. It was, frankly, an idiom I’d never heard before and have never heard again. Gene spoke in only slightly accented standard English; how did he come up with this kid?

I never heard from Johnny or Gene or Winston or Morris or anyone else about this incident. If there’d been a case filed against him and I’d missed it, I’m sure I would have heard about it and not in a good way. I didn’t have much time billed, either, so Morris couldn’t have been too upset when Gene didn’t pay.

The incident has come back to me as Kate was graduating high school, and any number of fathers at Bainbridge High have confronted the successes or failures of their daughters. Yes, Johnny Cline was older, in his early twenties, but his maturity level wasn’t up to that of a Bainbridge High senior girl.

There’s a fellow who pushed his daughter relentlessly to pitch softball; I’m pretty sure he had figured that she would end up, like the daughter of a friend, at Dartmouth, playing softball. He schemed quite a bit; at one point, when she was on a travel team, he claimed he would leverage her pitching ability to get her more playing time in the infield. This girl is not an athlete; when Kate threw from shortstop to this girl at first, Kate let up a little for fear the girl would drop it.

Her father is utterly deluded. Through her own hard work and good spirits, she became a minimally competent pitcher. Still, she quit high school softball and didn’t even play her junior year. What must he be thinking now? She’s going to a middling midwestern school, certainly no Dartmouth.

There’s also a fellow, a patent lawyer, who can’t be stupid but like most patent lawyers has no social skills. He pushed his talented daughter relentlessly to pitch softball, and she was overwhelming at some point. But then she began to run down: I wonder if it was the pushing?

Kate’s team beat her like a stepchild in a championship game, and she looked exhausted.

But she still pitched in high school till one of them decided that she wasn’t getting to play shortstop enough and she quit. She concentrated on basketball, where she was, from an early age, a relentless shooter. And she managed to get a scholarship to a marginally Division I school, a western state with a direction in it, North, South, East or West. All that pushing, all that work, so a scholarship at a nothing school? She had to be smart, too, given her parents, but she was no academic standout because she was always at the gym.

What does HE think, now that his daughter has sacrificed it all for Northwestern Wyoming State (I’m disguising the school, but that’s not far off.) And a minimal academic experience?

It’s unfair to compare Johnny, apparently a near-juvenile delinquent, with two young women who had been born with all possible privileges. I wonder how a father feels when his kid hasn’t done what he planned for her when he has pushed her so hard? I really don’t know. How did Gene feel, once it was clear to him that Johnny wasn’t going anywhere? They’re different stories, but in the end, it’s a life lesson for all dads everywhere.

I don’t know how the other three fathers in this piece felt when things went so differently from as planned. I never saw Gene Cline again, and the other two fathers are, to put it mildly, not my best friends. The other three men had vaguely successful careers, as far as I know (though Gene Cline didn’t pay his legal bills.) Of all people, I should have been the one tempted to live my disappointing life anew through Kate, whom one coach called the best softball player on the island. But something about Kate warned me off of that early: she was always going to do what she was going to do. Isn’t that the best outcome anyway?

For fans of North Carolina courthouses, here's the one in Guilford County, NC. Soviet style, isn't it.