Once Fix started law school, his conversations with the girls revolved around torts. “Mrs. Palsgraf was in the East New York Long Island Rail Road Station standing next to a scale,” he said conversationally, like he was telling them a story about his neighbor. He was only saying it to Caroline because Franny had put the phone down and gone back to reading Kristin Lavransdatter. During the “Law School Summers,” as they would later be remembered, Caroline and Fix sat together at the kitchen table, Fix explaining the cases. He said it helped him, that if he could explain a case to the girls then he would have learned the law that was embedded in it. “People will tell you that law school is about learning to think, but it’s not. It’s about learning to memorize.” He held up his hand and counted off on his fingers, “Negligence, wrongful death, invasion of privacy, libel, noncriminal trespass . . .” Caroline took notes. Franny read. Franny credited her father’s time in law school for her reading David Copperfield and Great Expectations, all of Jane Austen, the Bront? sisters, and, eventually, The World According to Garp.
There had always been a particular bond between Caroline and Fix, only now that they had the ten exceptions to the Dead Man’s Rule to discuss they were closer. Caroline and Fix agreed there was nothing as boring as property law, with five times the details and little intuitive reasoning to help them. There was nothing to do but plow through the cases with endless repetition and clever mnemonics. What’s an offer? What’s an acceptance? What’s a contract? What creates a third-party beneficiary? Property law required vigilant attention.
“It’s a good thing there’re going to be two lawyers in the family,” Fix said to Franny over dinner, meaning Caroline and himself. “Somebody’s going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.”
“They’re free,” Franny said. “I check them out of the library.”
“Well, thank God for libraries,” Caroline said.
Astonishing how much condescension could be packed into the words Thank God for libraries. Fix laughed, and then caught himself. Franny didn’t think he meant to laugh.
Fix had favored Caroline even before he started law school. It was because she was older, because they’d had more time to get to know one another before the divorce. It was because Caroline’s hatred for Bert burned like a clean white flame, and because she went out of her way to make their mother’s life miserable and then report the whole thing back to her father. Fix would tell her to ease up, while at the same time enjoying the meticulous detail of her reportage. He would have liked to have had the chance to make Beverly’s life miserable too. Caroline looked like Fix—the brown hair, the skin that tanned to gold the minute they hit the beach. Franny was too much like their mother, too delicate and fair and uncoordinated. Too pretty while at the same time never as pretty. When their father took the girls to the alley behind the grocery store at six o’clock in the morning with their racquets and fresh cans of tennis balls, Caroline would have as many as twenty-seven consecutive hits without missing. Thwack, thwack, thwack, into the blank wall that was the back of the A&P, her long arms intuitively graceful in their swing. Franny’s personal best was three consecutive hits, and that had only happened once. But the real difference between Caroline and Franny was that Caroline cared. She cared about the law and tennis and her grades in classes she didn’t even like. She cared what their father said about their mother, what he said about everything. Franny just wanted to go back to the car and read Agatha Christie. Most of the time they let her go.
After their father had finished the second day of the California State Bar Exam, he called the girls in Virginia to tell them how crazy people were. They came into the test lugging their own desk chairs, their lucky study lamps. One guy was so superstitious he came with a friend and together they dragged in the guy’s desk. Crazy! The test was long and hard, like running all the way from MacArthur Park to the police academy in summer, but that’s why you practice, so that when the time comes to perform you’ll be ready. Fix had been ready, and the test was behind him now. He was done.
Franny told Bert. She went into his study and shut the door before she told him, and even then she kept her voice down. “Dad took the bar.”
Franny and Bert got along, even when Bert and Beverly no longer got along, even though Caroline and Bert had never gotten along. Bert looked up from the stack of file folders in front of him. “Did he pass?”
“He just took the test,” she said. “But I’m sure he passed.” Four years of doing nothing but working and studying and going to school, sacrificing vacations and what money he had—he had passed. There was no other possible outcome.
Bert shook his head. “California’s tough. A lot of people have to take the bar a couple of times before they pass.”
“Did you take it a couple of times?”
Bert, who was quick to be brash with everyone else, was kinder to Franny. He looked at her there, her very straight shoulders, and gave his head a shake as if he were sorry about it, then he went back to his work.
Fix didn’t pass the bar.
Marjorie was the one who called and told the girls. “Nobody passes the first time. I know plenty of lawyers and they all say forget it. Your dad is just going to have to take it again. The second time you know what you’re up against. The second time it all makes sense.”
“Will it be the same test the second time?” Caroline wanted to know. Caroline was crying and she was trying to be quiet about it, keeping her hand over the receiver.
“I don’t think so,” Marjorie said with hesitation. “I think the test is always different.”
“So what did he do?” Franny said from the extension, knowing that it was up to her to carry the conversation now. “What happened when he found out?” Fix had asked Franny and Caroline to pray for him on the day of the test, and they had. They had asked the nuns at Sacred Heart to pray for him too, and still he hadn’t passed.
“We went to my mom’s and she made your dad a nice dinner.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Franny said, because Marjorie had a mother who could make anybody feel better about anything.
“She made him a gin and tonic and fixed a meatloaf. She told him it was a shame that he didn’t pass the test but at least he’d get to take it over. She said most of the tests you take in life you only get one shot at. I think that made him feel better.”
For the second test Fix made index cards. He knew a guy who had done that the second time and that guy had passed. Fix showed the cards to the girls that summer. He kept them lined up in a shoebox, divided by topic. There were more than a thousand cards. Caroline quizzed him even when the car was going through the car wash, except she wasn’t quizzing him. She was telling him the answers, holding the card flat against her chest. “The doctrine under which a person in possession of land owned by someone else may acquire a valid title to it, so long as certain common law requirements are met, and the adverse possessor—”
Franny stood at the long set of windows and followed the car as it passed down through the slapping clothes that dangled from the ceiling (continuous), through the soap suds (hostile), the rinse (open and notorious), the spray wax (actual). She let the car wash fill her, every part of her, but still it was not enough to bear away the four elements of adverse possession.
As brilliant as the index cards were they didn’t work, even though the second time he took the test he brought his own desk lamp. Marjorie’s mother made him dinner again and told him he was going to have to take the bar a third time, nothing to be ashamed of, plenty of people had, and so Fix sat for the test the third time, and when he didn’t pass it then, he stopped. No one talked about law school anymore, except insofar as it applied to Caroline and Franny.
By the time Caroline took the LSAT her senior year at Loyola, her Kaplan guide was held together by duct tape, highlighted in three colors, and bristling with Post-it notes. Test takers are a superstitious breed, so while she was careful to read updated versions in her study groups, the copy she read in bed in her dorm room before going to sleep was the one her father had given her that Christmas in Virginia. Fix’s and Bert’s mutual theory that a consistent practice over so many years would result in a perfect score had not been correct. A perfect score on the LSAT is 180. Caroline Keating came in at 177. She didn’t know where she had lost those three points but she never forgave herself for them.