Bearing Witness by Michael A. Kahn Read Free Book Online Page A

of a corporate downsizing that permanently eliminates your client’s position. Moreover, Beckman Engineering Co. was a particularly unappealing target, especially in front of a St. Louis jury. It was not merely that Beckman was headquartered here, employed more than two thousand local citizens, and spent millions of dollars a year burnishing its public image, as personified by its revered chairman, Conrad Beckman. No, what made Beckman Engineering especially unappealing was its reputation as a tenacious litigant. It tended to respond to a lawsuit with wrath, indignation, and an abundance of litigators. All of which meant that this was not a company to sue unless you had a deep-pocket client and a large support staff. I had neither back when I met with Ruth, and things sure hadn’t changed in the year since then.
    So why had I taken her case?
    It was a good question.
    As I sat at my desk rapping a pencil against a legal pad, I could hear Ruth Alpert’s voice in the outer office. She had arrived a few minutes early for our one-thirty meeting and was out there now boring poor Jacki with one of her interminable Lauren stories. Lauren was Ruth’s niece, and she played a minor character on Gold Fillings , a moronic sitcom about a Beverly Hills dental practice that seemed the nightmare offspring of an unholy coupling between ER and Married With Children . One of the first rules of survival with Ruth was learning how to interrupt her latest Lauren story before she got rolling. Jacki had yet to master that skill.
    So why had I taken Ruth’s case?
    Partly because of my mother. Ruth was her friend and Ruth had been wronged. What else could I possibly need to know? My mother’s powers of persuasion and guilt are wondrous to behold and virtually impossible to resist. Trust me.
    Another reason, of course, had been the injustice of it all. Here was a woman—a widow, no less—cut adrift at age sixty-three after more than two decades of loyal service. BECKMAN ENGINEERING ANNOUNCES ADDITIONAL LAYOFFS, read the headline. INDUSTRY ANALYSTS APPLAUD LEANER PROFILE. In an era of perpetual corporate “rightsizing,” the familiar headlines could dull you to the individual victims and their pain. Ruth’s had been one of 150 JOBS TO BE TRIMMED IN THIRD ROUND OF CUTS and her anguish was palpable. Here was a woman who took great pride in her secretarial skills, who bragged during our first meeting that she had graduated as the top secretarial student in her class at Soldan High, who could type seventy-five words per minute (“eighty-five on a computer, Rachel, but that’s easier”), who knew several computer programs, including WordPerfect, Lotus, and DisplayWrite (“that’s capital D, capital W, no space”), who had taken only seven sick days in two decades and just two personal days (one to bury her husband, one to sit shiva ). On the Friday before I saw her, she had applied for unemployment compensation—“As God is my witness, Rachel, the most humiliating experience of my life.”
    But injustice and a mother’s guilt trip will get you only so far. The deciding factor had been Uncle Harry. On that chilly morning a year ago when Ruth and I first met, we’d both started our day reciting kaddish. For me, it had been two weeks before the first anniversary of my father’s death. He had no son to say kaddish for him, so that first year I’d gone to the synagogue every Saturday morning to recite the prayer for the dead. For Ruth, it was the fifty-fourth anniversary of the harrowing night her beloved uncle Harry had been seized outside his little jewelry store while locking up. Later that night, his bullet-ridden corpse was dumped from a moving car onto the pavement in front of a police station. His wife died in a nursing home in 1964. His only sibling—Ruth’s mother—died in 1973. His two sons died within six months of each other in 1979—one from