Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,120

chance for promotion, to go upstairs to the Supreme Court, but it hadn’t come his way yet. In the end so much of it was just mundanity. A bureaucratic babysitting.

At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he’d been sure that one day he’d be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you’d make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and you make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can. You go home to your good wife and you calm her nerves. You sit down and compliment the cutlery. You thank your lucky stars for her inheritance. You smoke a fine cigar and you hope for an occasional roll in the silk sheets. You buy her a nice piece of jewelry at DeNatale’s and you kiss her in the elevator because she still looks beautiful, and well preserved, despite the years rolling by, she really does. You kiss her good-bye and you go downtown every day and you soon figure out that your grief isn’t half the grief that everyone else has. You mourn your dead son and you wake up in the middle of the night with your wife weeping beside you and you go to the kitchen, where you make yourself a cheese sandwich and you think, Well, at least it’s a cheese sandwich on Park Avenue, it could be worse, you could have ended up far worse: your reward, a sigh of relief.

The lawyers knew the truth. The court clerks too. And the other judges, of course. Centre Street was a shithouse. They actually called it that: the shithouse. If they met one another at official functions. How was the shithouse today, Earl? I left my briefcase in the shithouse. They had even made it into a verb: Are you shithousing it tomorrow, Thomas? He hated admitting it even to himself, but it was the truth. He thought of himself as being on a ladder, a well-dressed man on a ladder, a man of privilege and style and learning, in a dark robe, in the house of justice, using his bare hands to pull the rotting leaves and the twigs from the shithouse gutters.

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