Chapter 6: Lawyers who bear a slight resemblance to priests

I got back to Chattanooga in the fall. Mrs. W took me to her lawyer, a handsome short man with a good head of hair. Maybe my father’s age.

“Well I can’t do that,” he was saying. “It might be a conflict of interest.”

“I know,” she said. “Just tell me who to go to.” The lawyer looked surprised. I had gone to high school with his daughter, I think. Pretty girl.

“Oh,” he said. Not quite surprised, but her answer wasn’t what he’d expected. He paused to consider.

Mrs. W had decided several things, and she was right, as always. She had figured out that I was making money. She wanted it to get a good rate of return. The way we’d worked out of investing it, depositing it all into passbook savings, seemed to her a wasted opportunity. She wanted to invest it in other things, but to do that other documents had to be signed. I was too young to buy stocks, and even if I were old enough, my interest in money and things having to do with money was about as low as neap tides can go. I like having it and would find it extremely fretful not to have any, but I just can’t work up much of an interest in it. Wish I could. But Mrs. W could and she wanted to put my money in places where it would do me the most good. And the fact that I had no interest whatsoever in helping her do what was good for me wasn’t going to deter her from doing what was right. So she’d brought me to her lawyer, John Warmblood, knowing he couldn’t advise me about what to do, to get a recommendation from Warmblood about who I could go see about giving Mrs. W pretty much complete control over my money.

I really didn’t much care. I was a pool player who liked to play cards.

Mrs. W waited patiently while Mr. Warmblood thought through the question of who he was going to recommend I go to for advice to make sure Mrs. W wasn’t cheating me. I watched Mr. Warmblood as he thought about this and then he may have realized that Mrs. W was pretty much several steps ahead of him throughout the entire visit.

“Well, Margaret,” he said. I know that sentence continued to go somewhere else, but I didn’t really follow. I know everyone has a first name, but I’d never thought about Mrs. W’s and really didn’t like this yo-yo addressing her so familiarly. He should have respect.

Apparently he told us to go to a lawyer named Fieldey Atchling, but I didn’t hear it.

I was at his office the next day, in the afternoon. Mr. Atchling was a man in his late twenties who was wearing, against all probabilities, a Nehru suit. The Nehru suit was a fashion phenomenon of 1966 or 1967. I remember seeing Johnny Carson wearing one in one of those years. I also remember seeing a department store ad flogging them just a few months later and realizing that as soon as it had come, the Nehru suit had gone. It was a suit with a jacket that was supposed to be worn buttoned. The lapels were tuned up, in a way, and it was designed to be worn over a thin turtleneck rather than a coat and tie. It looked fine, it just didn’t catch on. So people had worn them in 1966 and 1967, and here was this lawyer wearing a black Nehru suit over a bright white turtleneck. I wanted so very much to be dismissive, but he has some sense. As I recalled, Nehru suits included bell-bottomed trousers, so I was craning my neck to see if Mr. Atchling was wearing bell-bottoms, too, but he was behind an enormous altar-like desk that hid his pants legs.

“So you’re coming to me for advice about how to structure a power of attorney so that the holder can’t cheat you, is that right?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. I wasn’t used to this kind of question. “I want Mrs. W to be able to invest my money however she sees fit, and I want you to write us up the documents that make that possible.”

“I know you don’t know me, but I actually have a role in this process,” he said, “And my role now is to advise caution.” He was leaning back in his office chair, left leg over right, figure four fashion. He looked almost like he might blow a smoke ring, only he wasn’t smoking.

“Look, Mr. Atchling, I appreciate the advice, but I just need to get some documents drawn.”

“So how much money are we talking about?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Wow. A lot of money,” he said.

“Thanks.” Where were we going with this?

“Where did it come from?” he asked.

“I made most of it playing pool. A big chunk came from playing cards in New Orleans.”

There was a pause while he thought about this. First both of his eyebrows went up, then the left one by itself, then, after it went back down, the right one by itself.

“I guess if I’m going to be giving you legal advice, I ought to advise you that gambling is illegal,” he said.

“So I’ve heard,” I said.

“It doesn’t worry you that making money by gambling might get you arrested?” he asked.

“That’s not the way it works. I’ve played thousands of pool games and hundreds of poker games. Nobody ever calls the cops. If they’re mad, they try to jump you in the street afterwards, but nobody calls the cops.”

“What do you think about that?” he asked, contemplatively

“That I want to learn more karate.”

“A very pragmatic response.” He paused for a few minutes and looked me over. “Okay. You don’t know me, but I’m a good lawyer. Actually, I don’t even know that. I’m just a lawyer who takes his position seriously. Warmblood sent you over to me because he represents Mrs. Wertheimer and you’re looking for a power of attorney that would allow her to invest your money however she sees fit. Is that about right?”

“That’s it,” I said.

“I can’t do that without talking to you about it.”

“Why not? All we want you to do is draw up a couple of documents.”

“I know, and I understand that it seems odd that I won’t just do that. But I’m not just a scribe; I’m a lawyer, so I can’t just write down what my clients want. I need to ask questions and make sure that my client is making good decisions.”

“Why? Mrs. W and I just want a service for an hourly fee.”

“The law’s not like that.”

“Why not?”

“The law is an institution. Like church. Like school. Like college. It has its rules and requirements. It plays a role in the way society and politics play themselves out. By becoming a part of that institution, I agreed to play my appointed role. And that role includes not doing anything that will traduce the system.”

“Traduce?”

“Tend to lower expectations. Degrade.”

“Okay. So what do I need to say to convince you I’m not traducing your institution?”

“Oh, answer a few questions, I think. One advantage of an established institution is that there’s always a book that tells you what questions to ask.”

“What other advantages are there?” I asked.

“Institutions change slowly, so last year’s questions are probably just as valid as this year’s questions.”

“Why is slowness to change an advantage?” I asked.

“Because everyone knows what to expect. Most people are resistant to change and the institutions around them make them feel secure. Banks. Schools. Churches. The United States Senate. All of them change slowly. If they evolved rapidly no one would know what was going to happen next, and most people wouldn’t like it.”

Why a Nehru suit?

“Okay, let’s start talking about this,” he said. “First, I need a complete name and address.”

“Henry Baida.”

“Middle name?” he asked?

“Don’t have one.”

“That’s odd.”

“My father was superstitious about numbers. His birthday was June 3, 1927, and mine was March 6, 1954. There’s some funny stuff about the number nine involved, but he wanted my name to relate to the number 72. My mom says he thought would be lucky for him and for me. He thought having middle initial would mess it up,” I said. He was the kind of guy who stuck with an idea once it lodged in his head and the fastest way to get out was to answer his questions.

“How does ‘Henry’ relate to the number 72?” he asked.

“The Greeks used their letters to express numbers. The seventh letter of the Greek alphabet looks like an H.”

“I see. And the first letter of your last name is the second letter of the Greek alphabet.”

“That’s it. Plus, my mother said I could choose a middle name at confirmation if I wanted.”

“Ah. I’m not Catholic. Is that common?” he asked.

“Well, you’re given a confirmation name, but it doesn’t stick. It’s not legal.”

“And what is yours?” he asked.

“Thomas.”

“Would you like to make it legal? It’s a very simple procedure,” he said.

“No, thank you.” I look at interactions with lawyers kind of like interactions with surgeons: I’m not a fan of elective surgery or elective lawyering either one.

Mr. Atchling was a contemplative, excruciatingly slow and thorough man, but he got everything done in one visit. He took notes in tedious detail, but at the end of it, he pulled a book off a shelf, handed it and his notes to his secretary, and a few minutes later handed me a “General Power of Attorney” giving Mrs. W authority to invest my money however she saw fit. His secretary was a notary, and came in with a seal before I signed it.

He stood up behind that great big desk and looked very seriously while the secretary and I sat in our chairs. Mrs. W had rejoined us, and looked like she was getting itchy for a cigarette. Back when she was a teacher, one day at the beginning of geometry class she had a white mark on her lipstick, and I was convinced she’d absent-mindedly tried to take a drag off of her chalk.

“Before we execute this document, Mr. Baida, I want to say before you and your attorney in fact, as well as Ms. Chat as a witness that this is a risky document to give to someone, and that as your attorney I advise you to carefully consider what you are about to do, and that if you do execute it, that you monitor and audit all of your accounts carefully.

“Did you say ‘Chat’? I asked.

“Yes,” he said, with a look that suggested that my question was vaguely irritating.

Ms. Chat smiled brightly at me. “It’s French for ‘cat’,” she said. Pretty girl. A few years older than me.

“Thanks,” said. “So where do I sign?”

We signed, Ms Chat notarized it, and I immediately handed it to Mrs. W. “Do I need another one for the bank?” she asked Mr. Atchling.

“No, don’t bother with that,” he said. “Banks, as institutions, don’t like dealing with powers of attorney. Just change the accounts into joint accounts. It will be far easier and cheaper for you, too.”

At the end of it, she had control of my money. I’m really not interested in money.

A good feeling, to be taken care of.

After we were done, we went out for a drink. She had scotch and soda, I had ice water. She enjoyed a cigarette.

“Henry, I want to thank you for trusting with all of this.”

“You’re doing me the favor. You’re doing all the work. I’m driving around playing pool.”

“I enjoy it,” she said. “I’ve also been looking into chaos theory. Are you still noticing anomalies when you play pool?” she asked.

“Not so much as a few months ago, but that could be due to several things.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“I don’t know for sure. I seem to have been visiting smaller and smaller towns the last few months. They don’t have pool halls, so it’s harder to practice alone. Usually when I play these days I’m playing against somebody else. I don’t make as many shots, so there aren’t so many chances for an observation.”

“Well, I thought chaos theory might give me a way to think about what you were talking about. I’m not sure it does that, but it still reminds me of you, in a way.”

“That whooshing noise is the sound of everything you said going over my head.” She smiled.

“There’s an MIT professor named Lorenz. He programmed his computer to create a kind of simplified climate. He has a group of I think it was twelve equations that governed things like ocean temperature and wind speed and that kind of thing, and it would print out numbers that showed what the weather was like each few hours. It fascinated everybody. They thought if they could refine the equations enough, it would be possible to make long-term weather predictions. He found something else entirely, though.” She paused to think, and looked at her cigarette in the ashtray. Teacher as she was, she was thinking of how to introduce a new concept to a student. She looked back at me. “He discovered instead that tiny differences are extremely important. He discovered that if he fed in the numbers for a starting point in the slightest bit off—say he put in an ocean temperature as .309160 instead of .309162, that within a few cycles the computer would reach a completely different result that wasn’t just a little off from the original, but completely off. It wouldn’t resemble the original at all. That wasn’t what people were expecting.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It turns out this notion we have of the law of large numbers just doesn’t apply to complex systems.”

I think I followed that. We tend to think that small variations don’t matter. She was saying they do.

“ Lorenz thought of it as being like turbulence,” she said. When a seagull flaps its wings, it creates turbulence in the air, and Lorenz came to the conclusion that the tiny bit of turbulence in the air was like the difference between .309160 and .309162.”

“So a seagull can cause a storm?” I asked.

“Sort of. No, not really. People in the years since have talked about the butterfly effect—the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Georgia can cause a hurricane in Louisiana, but that’s not really it, I don’t think. It’s an oversimplification that saps the truth out of the math. The seagull doesn’t cause the storm, but all elements of a complex system are interrelated, and billions of tiny, immeasurable forces, acting together, cause storms. A seagull alone doesn’t cause a storm, but all kinds of things that look unpredictable acting in concert do.” She took a drag off her cigarette and put it back in the ashtray. “Look at the smoke rising from my cigarette,” she said. “It rises from the coal in a steady stream but it gets to here, and the streak of smoke dissolves into a cloud. It doesn’t dissipate gradually, like a river delta or a tree branch, which is what you might expect. It gets to here and it turns into a disorganized cloud. You can see the little curlicues start to form, then almost immediately it turns into a cloud, a haze. Nothing organized about it at all.” She signaled to the bartender for another S&S. “Cutty this time,” she said.

“The seagull’s flapping wing is just one of these little curlicues in the smoke, and the cloud is the storm.”

“Okay, I said.” So can chaos theory predict the cloud? Or the storm?”

“Not exactly. What Lorenz did was to plot the divergences. It was too complex to graph the entire weather system, I think, but he found analogues in convection of heat within heated fluid cells, and I think that led him to the water wheel. There’s an old problem that Archimedes noted but didn’t understand. If you have a bucket style waterwheel, and water is introduced at the top—“

“Aren’t they all like that?” I asked.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Water coming to the wheel from the top.”

“Oh, no. That’s what a millwright would call an overshot wheel. That’s the most powerful kind of waterwheel, but also the most expensive to make, and it requires an enormous dam. They’re hard to site. Most are breast-shot wheels, where the water comes in about halfway up. If you don’t have any elevation at all at the mill site you can build what ought to be called an undershot wheel but is in fact called a tub wheel, because the mechanics of the flow are different. Anyway in ancient times people sometimes built waterwheels with actual buckets. A millwright would refer to the enclosures on a traditional waterwheel as buckets, but actually they’re blades, or paddles, constructed to capture both the weight of the water and its kinetic energy as it flows. Both then move the wheel. Back in Archimedes’ day waterwheel construction was more primitive, and sometimes waterwheels were made from actual buckets suspended from spikes driven into cart wheels at regular intervals. Everyone knew, in ancient times, that once the buckets became leaky, the waterwheel would sometimes reverse itself for no good reason. The Greeks and Romans avoided this by offsetting the water source slightly to the right or left—for the wheel reversal to happen, the water source pretty much had to be top dead center.”

She shrugged. “I’m sure this must be boring.”

“Not at all. I got good grades in your classes because I was interested in everything you had to say.”

“Henry, you got good grades because you understand math unlike anyone I’ve ever taught. You also have a memory like a steel trap.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Define the trigonometric functions,” she said.

“Sine equals opposite over hypotenuse, cosine equals adjacent over hypotenuse, and tangent equals opposite over adjacent, but that’s not really a fair test of my memory.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“That born-again student teacher you had with you for second semester of trig told us this really great mnemonic device.”

“Saddle our horses, canter away happily, to our adventures?” Mrs. W asked.

“Yes ma’am. That’s it.”

“Henry, every trigonometry teacher for the last two hundred years has told her students that mnemonic device and you may be the only student I’ve ever had who remembers it.”

“Oh, Mrs. W. I’m sure most of them remember it.” Surely so. It was so easy to remember.

“Back up a minute,” she said. “You’re referring to Miss Coombs, I expect. How did you know she was born again?”

“Oh, well, she was a pretty good teacher, so you used to leave us with her once you’d made sure all of our homework was done, every now and then. I think you went back to your office to take a smoke break.” She smiled and nodded. “On her last day, when she was saying goodbye to us, she told us that the only way to be happy was to be right with Jesus.”

“Ah, Hell,” Mrs. W said. “She shouldn’t have been doing that.”

“It really didn’t do any harm. It meant a lot to her to say it.”

“Yeah, well, I wonder what it meant to Sharmen Steinberg and Janice Shapiro,” she said.

“Nobody should be offended at that kind of thing. She wasn’t forcing her beliefs on s, she was just expressing hers. I’m a heretic and I still got an ‘A’. But wait a minute. We got sidetracked. Go back to chaos,” I said.

“I would have gotten to it eventually,” she said. “The waterwheel will rotate first clockwise, at a given speed, then will slow, then will speed up again, then will reverse, and will reproduce the pattern over and over again. It won’t ever settle into a pattern that exactly repeats itself, but will kind of alternate between one state and the next. So what Lorenz did next was to graph out the leaky-bucket waterwheel’s movement. It took a three-dimensional grid to represent it. I think he mapped out a couple of other simple equations that have similar properties, and they all produced graphs of this strange figure—a kin of lazy, folded figure eight. Because of the characteristic pattern that graphs out, it’s been described as a butterfly, or an owl’s mask. Anyway, this type of equation is known in the literature as a “Lorenz attractor” or “strange attractor,” because there will be two points of attraction, but nothing ever completely converges.”

“Why strange?” I asked.

“Because however many times you repeat it, it never scribes the exact same path twice.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“I have a fanciful theory that chaos is reflected in human behavior, but I’m not making much progress.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Say you were a strange attractor—that a strange attractor equation described part of your personality. Some of it would make sense. On the other hand, strange attractors seem to have two focus points, and you seem to be alone. I’ll keep working on it.” She smiled.