An Imperfect Spy by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online Page A

to be possible. But isn’t reading a case—how long is a case?—and a novel all at once rather a monumental assignment?”
    “That’s what we need to work out. I was hoping you would turn out to be an authority on shorter works of fiction. Or even chapters, if one can suggest so unliterary a practice.”
    “Give me a minute,” Kate said. “I’ve no doubt we can work it out, but could we look for a moment at the larger picture? The law school, I mean, into which we are going to shoehorn this fascinating course.”
    “Of course. Shall I start at the beginning, anyway, the place where I come in?”
    “The beginning is often a good place to start,” Kate said solemnly. “I somehow get the impression that the Schuyler Law School is not exactly the cat’s pajamas, but no one has told me why, apart from the fact that it isn’t Harvard or Yale. Fact and frankness will be welcome.”
    “Fair enough. I’m really delighted that Reed is going to do a clinic for us. You’re more luck than I had dared to hope for, or to imagine that the guardian angels of women’s rights and minority culture might grant.”
    “Let’s get to the angels later,” Kate said. “Let’s start with where you come in. Although,” she felt constrained to add, not believing in angels, but not wanting to offend any should they somehow hover, “Reed’s doing the clinic certainly does seem to have taken a certain amount of intervention on your part,and if the angels helped, so much the better. Proceed, please.”
    “Let’s begin with the faculty,” he said. “All male, and all certain that what they don’t know and believe isn’t worth knowing. I hardly have to describe them, except that they are beginning to smell the danger of new ideas and are rallying the troops. Or, as they say where I used to live, the wind is rising.”
    “Well, I gather it’s not a law school anyone thinks of as prestigious,” Kate said between mouthfuls. “Is this the same dynamic as in terrible schools in English novels; the worse the school, the crueler the teachers?”
    “You may be right; I did spend two days with
Nicholas Nickleby
when it was on Broadway. But law schools are a little different. Unprestigious, Schuyler Law may be, but most of the faculty got their degrees at Harvard Law or Yale Law or Chicago Law and have been floating on that fact ever since. Maybe they published a casebook; they haven’t published anything else. They don’t really
think
, in my opinion, but they insist on all the old ways that have served so many years and ought to go on serving in a sane—that is, white—male world. Almost half the students are women, of course, and many of the students are minorities, but that’s all the more reason to imbue them with the law as it should be practiced.”
    “Have there been many rambles from the women and minorities?” Kate asked as her main course was served. “Are the masses stirring?”
    “But little. These students are not your pampered darlings from Harvard and Yale, princes of all they survey. They’ve made it this far by the skin of their teeth, and they aren’t inclined to interfere with their eventual law degree and job. One can hardly blame them. That’s why I think the faculty needs to take a stand. Which was what Nellie Rosenbusch and I did.”
    “Nellie Rosenbusch?” Kate asked.
    “The woman faculty member who was killed by a truck. Harriet and I are very suspicious.”
    “Oh, yes, of course,” Kate said. “I don’t think I ever heard her name.”
    “Nellie was a thorn in the faculty’s side. She was even beginning to get some of the women students behind her. They—the outraged faculty—used everything they could against her, they didn’t miss a trick, from sexual harassment to the silent treatment that I understand is what they do at West Point.”
    “But she did have tenure?”
    “Yes, she did, I should have mentioned that. She got tenure the year I did, and she got it because of me. We let