32
WITH EACH PASSING month and as the end of his time at Harvard came in sight, Raff learned better one major advantage of being at an elite law school in a great university. It is the potential power of the network of friends and professional contacts that can be built. Raff did not have to travel around the country in order to meet the right people. They came to Harvard to attend meetings, to give seminars, to consult libraries, to look up others among their peers visiting the university. Raff, in order to get information and help in the future, made contacts now in The Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund. While at it, he learned where to go in the federal Departments of Justice and the Interior, and whom best to see there. He made friends with several staff members in Alabama's congressional offices. He began to compile addresses and telephone numbers among environmental leaders and their private supporters in Alabama, the Mississippi coastal counties, and the Florida Panhandle.
He learned how to run down cases of conflict between private rights and public good in domains other than the environment. He became expert in the common law developed all across the breadth of such cases. He was convinced that this knowledge could be applied to even the most difficult problems arising in his homeland of the central Gulf Coast.
Raff increased his command of conflict resolution, building scenarios, arguing them with other students. He became more convinced than ever that the classic nature-versus-jobs could not be solved by outright victory of one side over the other. That would leave the loser bitter and spoiling for a fight the next time around. Much better, and the higher road to take, would be an agreement that satisfies both. But--how best to reach such an agreement? That was much the harder nut to crack. It is always tempting instead to let the courts, America's Solomon on the throne, listen to both sides and settle the matter with a decision.
There was some reason for optimism in taking the middle road. He discovered several promising procedures worked out over the previous several decades by the Department of the Interior and nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. Suppose, for example, that the owner of a tract of biologically valuable wild land wants to keep it intact but is forced by necessity to sell it to a waiting developer. In some cases the solution is simple: preserve the tract by acquiring it in exchange for biologically less valuable land suitable to the trader, and let the owner sell that for an equal or greater amount. Suppose, in a second situation, an owner wants to preserve the land and pass it on to his heirs but is afraid they would have to sell part or all of it to pay estate taxes. Arrange, if possible, a tax defferal without limit of time, granted so long as the tract is preserved in its natural state.
These kinds of solutions, devised case by case rather than top-down by some abstract application of constitutional law, were the weapon of choice Raff carefully added to his armamentarium for the fight to come.
In starts and reversals, spring comes absentmindedly to New England. April is a month of cold rain and occasional, charitably brief snowstorms. Nor'easters still visit regularly, whipping up winds that drive the chill factor down to the freezing mark. Finally, by the end of April and into early May, the forsythia bushes burst into brilliant yellow and along the narrow residential streets of Boston and Cambridge, and falling white-and-purple petals of deciduous magnolias carpet the ground of the meager gardens. Among them brave crocuses spring up and hurriedly bloom before being smothered by grass and crushed by dog droppings. Until that happy time, however, anyone wishing to see emerging plant growth must drive into the countryside, push his way through brambles into some roadside swamp, and search for clumps of skunk cabbage.
This year, because it was his last at Harvard, Raphael Semmes Cody had cheerfully endured the long postglacial winter. In mid-April letters from law firms began to trickle in: inquiries and even tentative offers from Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Miami, and New York. His specialty had recently become a seller's market. The word among the faculty at the Law School was that the big firms were stocking up on talent able to handle environmental litigation.
Raff made polite, deferential responses, keeping the doors open. But he knew his career would probably never go that way. He was going home to Mobile, with or without a job in hand.
That decision was still firm when he graduated two months later. The Harvard commencement was held, in accordance with custom, on the morning of the first Thursday in June. Raff invited his parents to be his guests for the event. The evening before, he took them to dinner at his favorite Indian restaurant, located on Massachusetts Avenue a block from Harvard Square. Ainesley was clearly uncomfortable with all things Cambridge. He was not feeling well after the long trip up from Mobile, and was irritable. Raff's love surged for him when his father put on spectacles, took a long time studying the menu, and finally asked, "Don't they have anything fried?"
The next day, contrary to custom--and some said in violation of divine providence--a light rain fell on eastern Massachusetts. The commencement ceremony, the grandest and most venerable in the nation, began with bells ringing from all the churches in the neighborhood to bring on happiness, joy, and cheers as President Lawrence Summers, accompanied by members of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers, emerged from the Old Yard and filed into the rain-soaked Tercentenary Theatre. Members of the faculty, draped in flowing pavorine robes from universities all over the world and wielding umbrellas, followed them in.
They passed along a narrow corridor walled in by the massed graduates. Cheers and greetings were exchanged back and forth over the heads of the packed thousands of families and guests assembled on all sides. The noise ended abruptly when, the groups on the platform having been seated, the sheriff of Middlesex County walked to front center with his staff of office, rapped thrice upon the hollow boards, creating a sound like rifle fire, and called the meeting to order.
There followed the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by the whole assembly. Then a prayer, carefully bowdlerized to be ecumenical in tone, the rendering of the anthem "Domine Salvum Fac," followed by student orations in Latin and English, de rigueur since the seventeenth century. There was more choral and instrumental music, and the calling forward of the summa arts and sciences undergraduates.
President Summers now conferred the earned Harvard degrees, school by school. The mood turned from sedate to merry. The M.D.s wore stethoscopes thankfully not yet used on any patient, and of course the Business School graduates threw fistfuls of one-dollar bills into the air. Raff rose with his classmates to receive his degree. He was now certifiably learned, as the president intoned, "in those wise restraints that keep us free." As he stood, Raff looked for his parents in the huge crowd, without success. In a moment of unexpected intense yearning, he also searched for JoLane Simpson among the graduating seniors. It was impossible to find her in the sea of capped heads.
Finally came the awarding of honorary degrees to nine luminaries. Each stood in turn, to applause ranging variously from polite to thunderous. Each heard his encomium read, poetic in tone and short enough to serve as a tombstone epitaph.
After the platform party recessed, filing back through the student-walled corridor, the great anthill of Harvard celebrants dispersed. Marcia and Ainesley went out into Harvard Yard to wait for Raff at the foot of the John Harvard statue.
As he waited, Ainesley went up to the statue and rubbed his hand on the tip of one of the shoes, brightly polished by the ministrations of thousands of tourists before him. He saw an elderly black man standing close by, leaning on a silver-headed cane, and speaking in a courtly Southern voice. Ainesley struck up a conversation and learned he was a professor at Southern Mississippi University, located in Hattiesburg. His granddaughter, who was waiting next to him, turned out to be one of the new graduates of Harvard Law School. She allowed that she had met Raff, but didn't know him well. When Ainesley asked about her plans, she said she was going to enter Mississippi politics. Marcia was startled to hear Ainesley say to the two, "I wish y'all would come over to our neck of the woods. We sure could use you."
The next day was spent touring Cambridge and Boston. At Marcia's insistence, a major part of it was spent at the Museum of Fine Arts. The morning afterward, the Codys returned. At the Mobile Regional Airport, Ainesley retrieved his new plum-colored Toyota pickup, of which he was very proud, and the three returned to Clayville. That evening Raff called some old friends from Nokobee Regional High who were still around, to collect news and gossip. The next day, Sunday, he drove over with his parents to Brewton and attended the Episcopal church service.
Through the rest of the afternoon Raff stretched out on his old bed, next to the unread Sunday News Register, and dozed. After supper, as they sat drinking coffee, Raff asked his father if he had any late word on the Nokobee tract. "It's fine as far as I can see. It's not going away," Ainesley said.
Raff was now set to implement his plan, over a year in the making. It had been constantly on his mind for weeks. Better now than later, he thought. Don't mess around. Just get moving. The next morning he called Cyrus Semmes's office and made an appointment.
Two days later, at seven A.M., he took the bus from Clayville to Mobile. He hoped that it would be one of his last bus trips anywhere. He'd told Ainesley the first thing he was going to buy when he had a job was his own car. From the station near Bienville Square, Raff walked to the Loding Building and rode the elevator up to the top floor.
Cyrus met him at the receptionist's desk, and hugged his nephew.
"By God. I can't tell you how proud I am of you, Scooter. I guess I ought at least to get started by calling you Raff now, or how about Mr. Cody? We'll save 'Scooter' for your own son, if you ever have one, and I sure hope you do. I know the Codys, on your father's side, are awfully proud too. I'll tell you one thing: you're going to be the big star in that bunch of peapickers, for sure. Listen, I'm going to take you to lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club. I want you to meet some of our family's friends, and, if you don't mind, let's talk a little bit about your future."
So they strolled together the five blocks to the Bankhead Tower, chatting like father and son. They took the elevator to the gated top floor and entered the sanctum of Mobile's business and professional elite. There followed hearty verbal greetings, handshakes, gripping of arms and shoulders, and good-natured jostling and laughing. The men were mostly middle-aged, white as June wedding gowns, and dressed in coat and tie. But there were also the mayor of Mobile and a sprinkling of other African-American leaders and businessmen. Almost all assembled spoke with Southern accents. Even those from other parts of the country slowed their speech a little, double-syllabled a few names, and dropped g's. "Come Saturday, Fray-yed," he overheard one say, "I think I'll do me some snapper fishin' out of Biloxi."
There were also a scattering of well-dressed women. Several, judging from the ease with which they conversed and laughed with the men, were professionals and executives themselves. The rest, in this proper environment, talked among themselves and were almost certainly all wives. The day you brought a mistress would be your last as a member of the Cosmopolitan Club.
Cyrus, with Raff following, was led to a corner overlooking the Mobile River. Raff went over to the two-sided window to look out. He stared at the traffic twelve stories below, then beyond to Cooper Riverside Park and the new Convention Center. Well away to the south he could see Pinto Island and the northwestern shore of Mobile Bay. He squinted to peer where the river flowed into the bay. Somewhere out there on the water, a great-grandfather on Ainesley's side, working as ship's engineer, had died when the boat caught fire and sank. Raff tried to picture that tragedy. He turned his attention to a freight train moving slowly northward out of the Mobile Yards. Its whistle blew once, the kind of three-o'clock-in-the-night farewell that never fails to stir a wisp of melancholy.
From the Alabama State Docks a bay pilot boat had begun its journey south to the shoals of Dauphin Island, where it would pick up another freighter from the bar pilots and bring it safely down the dredged channels of the Mobile Bay shallow.
Raff had come home. He had perspective now, and seeing its physical whole from this height he thought about Old Mobile when Marybelle was built, when sailing merchantmen crowded close in a forest of spars at the head of the bay. There was still continuous old-growth pine savanna close by to the north and south. People living at the center of the city could take a wagon to the bayfront and harvest crabs and oysters from still-unpolluted waters. The economic engine of Alabama was growing swiftly then, in the plantations and freeholds along the great river that ended here. Bales of cotton and tobacco flowed down onto the docks. Sugar, rum, and tropical hardwood timber flowed in from the West Indies, and every kind of manufactured goods arrived from the Atlantic Seaboard and faraway Europe. Down below, close by the Bankhead Tower, near the foot of Government Street, once stood the open slave market, where African people were bought and sold, families sundered in perpetuity, and sent upriver to work the plantations and docks.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Cyrus broke Raff's reverie.
Raff sat down, and two waiters brought them water and menus, speaking softly back and forth in a foreign language. It was Spanish. That's something new around here, he thought.
They began lunch. Crab gumbo and lobster Caesar salad. The lobster was the spiny Caribbean species, not the big-clawed kind from up North.
The conversation started up with Raff's career at Harvard Law and his impressions of life there, interspersed with Cyrus's comparing those from his own experience at the University of Alabama Law School.
Coffee and dessert were served, the latter a chocolate-and-brandy concoction Raff did not try to identify. Cyrus pulled out a Havana cigar from an inner coat pocket, unwrapped and lit it. He dragged deeply and blew the smoke upward toward the ceiling in a well-formed ring, as was his custom, then searched for an ashtray. There was no ashtray. Cyrus remembered: these conveniences had grown scarce at the Cosmopolitan Club. Many fewer members used them now, and the younger trustees of the club's board had begun to speak of making the Cosmopolitan Club smoke-free. One had commented, "What's so radical about that? This club used to have spittoons all over the place for tobacco chewers. Would you like to bring those back?"
Diners who still smoked often used coffee-cup saucers as ashtrays. Cyrus would have nothing to do with such an impropriety. He signaled a waiter by pointing to his cigar, and an ashtray was brought to him.
"I may have to bring my own in my pocket one of these days," he said.
Then he turned to Raff and came to the point.
"Well, have you made any plans yet? What do you want to do? All I can say is, I and a lot of our friends around here hope that whatever it is, you won't be straying too far away from Mobile."
Raff tensed. He'd rehearsed his response several times, and he had no idea what kind of reaction he was going to get.
"Well, sir, I know this might surprise you a bit. I've had some wonderful offers, more than you might imagine, from out of town. But what I really want to do is work here in Mobile as a legal counsel for Sunderland Associates. In fact, I was hoping that, unless you see some problem in that, you might speak to Mr. Sunderland on my behalf."
The two men, he knew, were not just allies in business and politics, but also connected in a manner that still mattered a great deal in the Old South. The Mobile Semmeses had been close to the Sunderlands socially for four generations. Promises, deals, and handshakes were binding as a matter of honor--and especially when family histories were intertwined somewhere back in history by marriage.
Cyrus stiffened, bent his head forward, and stared at Raff. When he spoke, he struggled to keep his voice down, to avoid others hearing in the crowded room.
"Are you serious? Is this some kind of Harvard humor?"
"Yes, I'm very serious."
"Do you realize what you're saying, then? You know as well as I do--we talked about it all a couple of years ago--that Drake Sunderland is absolutely determined to buy and develop the Nokobee tract when it comes on the market. He already owns the key parcel at Dead Owl Cove. Are you telling me you want to help him?"
"I'm telling you I want to work for him."
"But why? How can you do that honorably?"
"I'm telling you I can do that honorably and to everybody's satisfaction and save the Nokobee tract."
Raff then fell silent. He took a sip of coffee. He meant to keep this close to his chest, and say no more.
Cyrus turned and looked out the window and was silent himself for a while, struggling to construct a scenario that would make sense of what Raff had just said. He failed, and chose not to go that way for the time being. He also sensed from Raff's terse answers that his nephew would not disclose more even if he were asked.
Well, either trust your own blood, Cyrus thought, or simply send him away. He chose trust. But first, he wanted something more.
"Okay," he continued. "All right. Actually, I'm very pleased about how things appear to be working out. And it would be wonderful for me and Anne, and your parents, of course, to have you working right here in Mobile. But before I do anything, before I even think about approaching Drake Sunderland, I want your solemn promise--I want your oath--that you will be working exclusively in the interests of Sunderland Associates, and that you will never, ever undermine Sunderland in any way. Can you do that? Keep in mind here, Raff, that it's the honor of your family, not just your own, that's at stake."
Raff closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He was now on ethically dangerous ground, but that was inevitable. That was the challenge.
He let ten seconds pass, let out his breath and opened his eyes.
"Yessir." Then he corrected himself. "Yes, Cyrus. I promise. You have my word."
Cyrus picked up his cigar and took another drag. He pursed his lips and this time let the smoke curl out slowly. For one of the few times in his life, he couldn't estimate the consequences of a big decision he had to make. He couldn't calculate the odds. But he had no choice. And it would not look good if he hesitated.
He passed his anxiety on to the cigar, leaned over and with annoyed abruptness, crushed it out, muttering to himself, "Damn things.
"All right, Raff, I'll speak to Drake Sunderland tomorrow if he's around. He knows all about you. Lord knows we've bragged enough about you while you were at Harvard."
Then, nodding his head gravely, rubbing the bald spot on his head with the three middle fingers, he regained a little of the old Cyrus Semmes balance.
"Be warned, though. You might not get the job even with my help. Sunderland's a company that's always used a separate law firm. It would be setting a precedent to use an in-house counsel. On the other hand, to have on board a graduate of Harvard Law School, and a young local lawyer of good family to boot--not to mention one with a strong science background--that surely sounds like something they might want to try. But if they do take you on, you understand it will have to be on a probationary basis. Of course, that's true everywhere, including any law firm you might join."