Free A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr Page A

famous?” she asked in a droll voice.
    He said he was a lawyer. He’d just settled the Copley Plaza Hotel fire case for $2.5 million. “The biggest wrongful death settlement in Massachusetts history!” he exclaimed. His picture had been in the Boston Herald . Hadn’t she seen it?
    “What kind of lawyer are you?” she asked.
    “I represent people who’ve been injured.”
    “Oh. An ambulance chaser.”
    “No,” he said firmly. “I represent victims.”
    “You probably sue doctors,” she said. “You wouldn’t fit into my life. My mother and my father and my brother are all doctors.”
    He asked her what she was doing that weekend.
    “I’m going to the Cape,” she said.
    “Really? I’m going there, too.”
    “Are you driving?” she asked.
    “No, I’m taking the plane.”
    “Don’t you have a car?”
    “Yes,” he said. “I just bought a Porsche.”
    He was so unabashedly egotistical that she had to laugh. He was tall, six feet three inches, with a lean, narrow face and a prominent Semitic nose. He wore a thick but neatly trimmed mustache, perhaps to fill out his face. His suit was expensive—handmade, she could tell at a glance. But the tailoring could not hide the fact that he was as gangly as a boy. Even the collar of his hand-tailored shirt did not quite fit around a neck as spindly as his. The most attractive thing about him, she thought, were his brown eyes, which seemed warm and gentle. When she commented on his eyes some days later, he laughed and told her his father used to tease him by calling him Spaniel Eyes. That night, he did Irish and Italian accents for her and told jokes until finally, despite herself, she was laughing.
    “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked him.
    No, he said, shaking his head, he didn’t. She could tell by the smile just creasing his lips that he thought he was finally getting somewhere with her.
    “Are you married?” she asked.
    He said he wasn’t.
    She shrugged. “What’s so great about you, then?”
    When Teresa’s friend Alma arrived, he danced with both of them. He was not, she had to admit, a very good dancer, too loose-limbed for grace, but he was enthusiastic and not self-conscious.
    They spent most of that weekend together, in Boston. He lived on the top floor of an old and elegant nineteenth-century building on Beacon Hill. From his balcony he had a sweeping view of the Charles River and the Esplanade. He had more suits than any man she’d ever met, but she soon learned that he really knew very little about clothes. “He buys labels,” she explained, after several years with him. “He’s the type to buy Baccarat china because it’s Baccarat. He doesn’t have the self-assurance to believe it’ll look good if it doesn’t have a label.” She began educating him about clothes. She bought him ties as gifts. After he won a big case wearing her ties, he became superstitious and would never appear in front of a jury without one she had selected.
    He would take Teresa and her two best friends out on the town and entertain them the entire evening, laughing and dancing with each in turn. She thought he was astute about people. He could tell if she or one of her friends was having a problem of some kind. He’d ask about it and listen carefully to the answer. She became friends with the people who worked in his office, especially with his secretary, Kathy Boyer, who had worked for him since he started practicing law. When he won or settled a case, everyone in the office got a big bonus. He’d take the entire staff out for drinks and dinner whenever someone had a birthday. Sometimes he’d invite them all out for no reason at all. He always picked up the tab. When he prepared an opening or closing argument for a trial, he insisted that everyone in the office, even the receptionist and the filing clerks, listen and offer their opinions. During an actual trial, the entire office staff would come to the courthouse and sit in the gallery to watch him