I saw my anxieties as a byproduct of my mother’s relentless criticism, her unending desire to mold me into a person I never wanted to be, fashioned in her own image. I placed all of my miseries squarely upon her shoulders. But I would come to discover that any real mistakes she made paled in comparison to the injustices she had endured in the past.
4
Scrutiny
A burst of adrenaline would rush through my tiny body when I heard the front door latch each day around six o’clock. Promptly putting a stop to whatever I was doing, I would sprint to the front of the house on my stubby legs and hurl myself into my father’s arms, breathlessly offering to carry his briefcase. With both of my hands gripping the well-worn leather handle, we would walk slowly down the long hallway as he listened intently to the highlights of my day—what I’d learned in school or a picture I had drawn in art class.
An old-fashioned lawyer, a true gentleman, and a statesman built on a bygone template, my father was brilliant and honorable. He never had a bad word to say about anyone, and he was honest to a fault. He would return a nickel if it were given to him in error, or leave a note if he barely nicked the paint on another car.
He held me to the same exacting ethical standards. Even an inconsequential lapse in judgment would become a teaching moment, a reminder of the importance of living a life of integrity.
I spent most of my weekend days at an equestrian center in nearby Woodside, a small town known for its horse culture, with trails in place of sidewalks and hitching posts for parking meters. When I was ready to be picked up, I would call my father from a pay phone located near the barn’s tack room. A friend gave me an idea on how to save money—call collect, and when the operator connects the call, just hang up. The aborted call would send the signal that I was ready. A clever way to save a quarter, it seemed.
“We can’t do that,” my father explained patiently when I proposed the idea. “That would be cheating the phone company, which is wrong.”
His corrections were always gentle, delivered without anger or judgment.
My favorite time of day was just before I drifted off to sleep, when my father would knock softly on my bedroom door, kiss me gently on the forehead, then prop himself up on the second twin bed. Curling onto my side, I could just make out his silhouette in the moonlight streaming in through the sheer white curtains. Resting my head on my clasped hands, I would let the slow and deliberate droning of his voice soothe me like a lullaby.
“Do you know what asbestos is?”
Instead of listening to fairy tales, each night I learned about what happened when a worker was injured on the job. My father was the managing partner of one of the leading workers’ compensation defense firms in California. Some of his stories were mundane—details on the burgeoning field of litigation due to the common use of asbestos, a mineral considered an excellent fire retardant that was commonly mixed with cement and used in construction. The “magic mineral” likely prevented thousands of untimely deaths by fire, but it was later discovered that the material’s tiny fibers could be inhaled, damaging workers’ and residents’ lungs and making them sick. When I discovered that the pipes leading to our own furnace were wrapped with asbestos, I worried that our entire family would fall sick, maybe even die. My father assured me that they had been properly covered, the hazard long since contained, but I still was fearful each time I ventured down into the basement. Some of his cases seemed like scenes out of a TV show, like the time he hired a private investigator and caught a man doing aerobics when he had claimed he was too injured to work. I imagined the investigator slinking between the bushes outside a gym, snapping photos of the con artist as he did knee raises and grapevines, oblivious to the fact that he had been caught red-handed. Another time, my father exposed a fraudulent claim by a member of the Mafia and was advised to hire a bodyguard. (He didn’t.)
Some of the bedtime stories came from the time before my father moved to California, when he served in the Tennessee legislature. There was corruption everywhere, he said. It was like the Wild West. Men would walk into the capitol building with canvas bags filled with cash ready to be delivered to legislators whose votes could be bought. Not long after my father took office, a former Tennessee Supreme Court justice approached him with promises of campaign contributions if my father could just “find a way” to support an upcoming bill. My father refused in no uncertain terms, establishing his reputation as a man whose vote wasn’t for sale.
I dreamed of becoming a workers’ compensation attorney, commuting each day to an office building in the San Francisco financial district, working alongside my father at his firm. That’s when I learned a new word: nepotism. “I don’t believe in it,” he explained when I asked him if he would hire me. “If you work hard, and you are the best candidate for the job, then you can work for me.”
I was disappointed, crestfallen actually, but my father told me that his work was boring, that if he could do it all over again, he would have joined the Peace Corps. Or, he went on, perhaps he would have taken a parallel path, but become a public interest lawyer.
“Do something good with your life,” he urged me. “Use what you have to help people.”
Following in the footsteps of my father’s dream career twenty years later, I knew that he had been right. Sorting through government files and reviewing inspection reports and toxicology records was exhilarating. I treated each case like a treasure hunt as I searched for data I would use to right a wrong. I would spend hours navigating bureaucratic mazes, making phone calls, camping out in government offices, and chatting up file clerks to uncover evidence of environmental improprieties.
Digging for gold amid dusty files and combing through volumes in search of empirical evidence was second nature to me—so much so that applying those same skills to the documentation I brought home from that second trip to London felt like finding an old friend. Many of the accounts of the Foundling Hospital’s history were out of print, written decades or generations ago. I looked forward to hearing the doorbell ring, and finding brown-papered packages from used-book sellers on the doorstep. Soon my desk was covered with books by historians, academic researchers, and learned governors who’d led the institution centuries ago—men whose names I didn’t recognize, like Jonas Hanway and John Brownlow. No book was too obscure for my notice.
The Foundling Hospital had been established in the middle of the eighteenth century to fill a dire need, I quickly learned. An unwed mother of limited means would have had few options in providing for her infant at the time. She would likely have been shunned by her family, perhaps forced out of her home. Existing poorhouses were frequently filthy and dangerous—temporary shelters filled with vagrants and lunatics, the aged and the ill. In contrast, the Foundling Hospital offered a clean and orderly environment, and women desperate to find a home for an unwanted infant flocked to its doors in great numbers. Administrators couldn’t keep up with the quickly escalating demand, and it wasn’t unheard of for fights to break out among waiting mothers desperate to give their children a safe home. On the sideline of the melee would be fashionably attired spectators who paid a fee to watch the admission process unfold.
To mitigate the chaos of the hordes of women gathered outside its doors, the hospital instituted a lottery system in 1742. The system amounted to little more than a mother drawing colored balls from a leather bag. If she drew a white ball, her child would be accepted, pending the results of a medical examination. A red ball meant that the child would be wait-listed, in case a child whose mother had drawn a white ball failed the medical test. A black ball doomed a child to rejection.