October 15, 2019: The Dilemma of the Decent Man

Wow, it's been nearly a month since I posted. My bad. Physical and other pain have been absorbing. I'll try to be more diligent.

My first law firm took a retreat every year to the estate of one of the firm’s founders. The firm was in Greensboro, NC, but the estate was up in the low hills of western Virginia. Let’s call the adjoining town Millville, a literary allusion that no one will get because it appears only in my unpublished “Taylor stories” which will probably exalt my posthumous reputation when they are finally discovered.

Anyway, the trip was referred to only as “Millville,” like, we’re going to Millville this weekend. There was a particularly sycophantic associate who raved about how cool it was to go to Millville, but it turned out that she hadn’t been yet; memory fails but I don’t think we went every year.

The best part was the food. One year there was an enormous party of probably locals and a long table of food, including smoked goose, which I’d never had before and haven’t since. One of the other older partners (the one who, if you’ve been reading, represented tobacco companies and put his head down on his desk when he discovered a mistake I made) sidled up to me and said, “You don’t get this kind of money practicing law. It’s that tobacco factory of theirs.” I didn’t know whether that was a warning to get the hell out.

Then there were the evening activities. There was a poker game, in which the sausage-frying partner eagerly participated and to which the oldest woman, an Of Counsel, strenuously objected. The women probably sat out on the lawn and drank wine or whisky and traded stories. Many of the men, as you have been anticipating, watched porn.

In those days (1986 or so), one could rent porn V-H tapes in the back room of even a very rural video store on the way to Millville. The men gathered in some darkened room and watched, though it was hard to see, production values being what they were then, at least in videos rented from rural Virginia video stores.

One fellow there was a curious addition. Michael Major was the senior corporate lawyer, and presumably my boss as I wanted to do corporate law. However, the firm wanted to turn me into a trial lawyer as (1) the firm didn’t have much corporate work and (2) everyone else wanted a shot at it too.

Major was admired first because he was rumored to be the firm’s big earner, at only $281,000 in today’s dollars. I wonder if the litigators made more, but they all did insurance defense, so that’s unlikely. He was married and had a couple of kids; one, Franklin, stood in his office door one day and reported on whatever he was doing as a student at UNC, and Michael’s satisfied and relaxed smile said how much he loved his kid. He had a contractor install a central heating and cooling system, but his walls were pure plaster (imagine!) and the work would take much longer and be a lot more expensive than the estimate. Michael told the guy to split the overage with him; he by rights ought to have some skin in this game. His secretary told me that a few years before, he had made a mistake and cost a client a lot of money and fell into a deep depression: after so many years in practice. that sort of thing shouldn’t happen. Major was a good guy.

He was revered for his southern gentleman demeanor, his evident erudition, his wry and quiet sense of humor and also because every day, precisely at 5:30, notwithstanding the partner who wandered the halls at that hour checking to see who was still there, he essentially vaporized, went invisible. He wrote concisely, always in a very clear cursive. You’d pass his office and he’d be leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk, still wearing his jacket, and staring into the middle distance while he spoke into a dictaphone. He was kind of magical and scary, and he never seemed part of the group. A lot of the partners were ex-military, and he wasn’t, so maybe that was a point of distinction.

Back to Millville: We’re in this dark room, a confusing and shadowy tape playing, and silence was general. (No one, to my knowledge, was jacking off.) Major came in and watched for a minute and then said genially, “He’s really giving it to her.”

No one here believes that he was actually enjoying the tape. Why did he say that? His tone was as if someone had stopped by his office to offer an apple. Why say anything? Was he trying to fit in? Trying to document his presence? It makes no sense, from what I know of him. He was always genial, cordial, but always a little quiet and quite a bit apart. Why document his presence at this ritual?

On my second and last visit to Millville, knowing what was going on, I made up an excuse to leave early on Sunday. As luck would have it, Major wanted to go back early too. I offered him a ride, with trepidation; what were we going to talk about? I needn’t have worried.

Major rattled on for the hour and forty-five minutes on every topic possible having nothing to do with the practice of law. Interesting, considering I wasn’t exactly the most-favored flavor of associate at the moment, that he didn’t take the occasion to say, Hey, George, you know, things aren’t going so well, but maybe if you….As I recall, one of his topics was ceramic blocks that could be used to store electricity on lines until it was needed, instead of letting the electricity dissipate itself on the lines. I wonder if any of that was true. I hope not. It would make him more interesting. As it is, I suspect he wanted to control the conversation so that we didn’t actually have to have one.

When I resigned to go in-house with a software company in nearby Research Triangle Park, I went around to all of the partners to tell them. The reception varied. The ex-Marine just nodded tensely at me and went back to his work. The tobacco guy said, “Is this irrevocable?” When I went to Major’s office, I gave him the news, finishing with, “I’m really glad I had the opportunity to work with you,” which I believed.

He never stopped his easy mild smile, but swung his feet off his desk, stood, and said, “Oh, the pleasure’s been all mine, listen,” and then walked past me out of his office without shaking my hand.

A year or two later, after I was well-ensconced in my new job, I was invited to a party at a young partner’s house for a goodbye party for a young partner who was moving to Florida. (He had been seen heartily kissing his secretary in a parking lot, so, yeah, his wife probably suggested that he join his brother’s firm 600 miles safely farther south.) Michael Major was there, as well, along with most of the firm’s other lawyers. He didn’t acknowledge me. The partners without sticks up their asses were kind to me. They had probably wanted to leave the firm themselves and envied me.

Years passed. Nancy and I worked another year in Greensboro, then moved to Delaware for nine years, then to Seattle. I started a business, The Practical Legal Writer, which should have made a lot of money—I was giving writing workshops and working with younger individuals—but I’m incompetent at self-promotion, and also the 2008 crisis killed budgets and no one would pay for me anymore. But during that period, to publicize my business, I wrote a column for the King County Bar Bulletin. At one point, I described Major, with his feet up on his desk and dictating, as a nod to the past in an article on proofreading.

It occurred to me to send it to Major. By then, the firm had merged with someone else, but a number of partners remained; he forwarded my email with my article to a bunch of them. I heard from only one, of course. But Major’s email back was extremely cordial, as though hearing from an old friend. It was close to touching. But I’ll never forget how he left his desk and walked around me when I told him that I was resigning, and how he pretended not to notice me at the party. And, as I have noticed with Southerners, they don't make the first move. A Yankee has to approach them and take the initiative.

In later years, I heard that Major’s wife divorced him. Why? I can’t imagine it was because he was watching porn or spending too much time at the office. Of course, there’s no guessing what goes on between couples.

But what to make of Major? I don’t know. He wasn’t particularly open with me, but I suspect he was a little cold with everyone. One final memory: we drove in a van to Chapel Hill one night for a recruiting night at the law school. I had too much to drink and, in a furious moment, told him that southerners like him didn’t get people whose name wasn’t Smith or Jones. I somehow wasn’t fired the next morning. I’ll never get Major.