Intentional Pass

In 1976, seven years after she graduated magna cum laude from law school at Georgetown, Sally Deegan became a partner in the San Diego firm of Thompson, Roche and Royce. She specialized in corporate reorganizations, acquisitions and takeovers. She was good at her work and her work was good to her. Ten years later, on a cold November Thursday, she reported on her life to her classmate Paul Mariani at lunch in Parker's in the grand old hotel in Boston.

"Every so often," she said, using her right hand to encompass the velvet-draped, banquetted, heavily linened, hushed surroundings, "I stop and think about the way (continued on page 155) Intentional pass (continued from page 88) I spend my days. And how lucky I have been. I've got almost everything I wanted, being in the right place at the right time.

"I didn't ever think that things would turn out so well," she said. "I hoped they would, but I never dared to believe it. The first time I saw the Atlantic Ocean was when I came east to go to Georgetown. And I will tell you, Paul: I was scared. I may've acted like I thought I'd been everywhere and knew everything, but inside I was a California girl estranged from her friendly surroundings, in the wicked East, where everyone was mean."

"I wasn't mean to you," he said.

She reached across the tablecloth and patted his left hand. "No," she said, "you weren't. You were very nice to me, and so was everybody else. Except that bitch you married."

"Well," he said, smiling, "she was jealous of you."

"I know that," she said. "That was obvious. But why should she've been jealous of me? Should've been the other way around. She took you away from me."

"Not fair," he said. "You and I'd come to the fork in our road the previous spring. I was a free agent the summer I met Denise."

"I know it," she said. "Why'd we do that, anyway?"

"You mean, 'Why did I do that?' " he said, smiling.

She shrugged. "Whatever," she said.

"Reason escapes me now," he said. "It escaped me when it happened, far as that goes. I looked up and you were gone. Probably second-year tension. 'Now they know torts--let's see how they handle rank anxiety.' "

"Uh-uh," she said. "It was something more than that. When I came back that fall, after a perfectly rotten summer, I knew I'd made a mistake. But then I saw you with that stupid look on your face. I got rattled. Did not know what to do. So I didn't do anything. I knew it was really over then."

"Well," he said, "something else'd started, but it wasn't permanent then. That didn't happen till the following spring. Nothing else'd intervened, so I decided that was it. Denise was the real thing. And for the next fourteen years, she was."

"So what the hell happened? Between the two of you, I mean."

"Oh," he said, "I don't know. It's either a very long story or a very short one. Usual thing, I suppose. People not paying attention."

"You don't want to tell me," she said.

He gazed at her. "No, I don't," he said.

"But it's not personal. It's just very complicated and I don't want to tell anybody. It was bad at the end. The end was a long time coming. I like it better over. Talking about it revives it. So, can I be excused?"

She nodded. The sommelier appeared, silently poured the rest of the chardonnay into their glasses and silently went away. "I guess you'll have to be," she said. "It's just that it came as such a shock to me when I called you in Concord, thinking the best I could hope for'd be a couple of quick drinks and a kiss on the cheek, and I got her on the phone and she told me. I even said it to her, how surprised I was."

"And how did she take that?" he said.

"Oh," she said, "very well, actually. Entirely cool about it. 'No,' she said, 'he isn't here. The master's in his own apartment. You can reach him there.' And then gave me your number and graciously hung up. I don't think I would've been quite so pleasant if our positions were reversed."

"No," he said. "Well, you always were the more aggressive type."

She chuckled. "I think I'll let that one pass," she said. "You're enjoying your work, and your life?"

"To a degree," he said. "The work more than the life--it's much better organized these days." He frowned. He looked down into his lap and picked up the pink linen napkin. He crumpled it and put it on the table. He smiled. "I'd rather hear about your life than talk about mine. You're circumnavigating the globe, hobnobbing with prime ministers, making buckets of money and having lots of fun?"

She sat back in the banquette and smiled and nodded at him. "That's a good capsule description," she said. She drew a deep breath. "Two years after we graduated, I was living in Paris. At the Crillon. At the expense of Damon Steel. A year later, Baltimore Offshore was picking up my tabs at the London Savoy and then at the Excelsior in Rome. I spent most of my partnership year working out of my suite at the Plaza, overlooking Central Park while I worked on the NDT take-over. And the next two years, when I wanted a vacation from the work I was doing for NDT in the Far East, I took the planes from Hong Kong to New Zealand or Hawaii on their credit cards.

"I can tell you," she said, "anything you want to know about hotels in Zurich, restaurants in Florence, how to survive in Brussels when your luggage's been stolen and where to get a cold beer in Edinburgh. I know all about rental cars in Austria and layovers in Karachi, and there are a couple or three things you shouldn't do if you don't want to be delayed changing planes in Athens.

"Now I'm here in Boston," she said. "Back on Offshore's budget for the next six months or so. I wear out luggage left and right, but my life has not been dull."

"You've been around," he said.

"Is that a crack?" she said.

"No," he said, "I envy you. You've made a lot of money, and you've had a good time."

"Well," she said, "but haven't you? I mean, aside from the divorce and that unpleasantness? You're a Federal judge. Lots of people think that's close to the top of the profession. What the brightest lawyers want and the best lawyers get. You can still enjoy your kids, even if you don't live with them. And because you don't, you've got your privacy. Why not make the most of it?"

He hesitated. "I'm pretty busy," he said. "I'm aware most of the lawyers're convinced that hearing cases from the bench is a lot easier than presenting them in the pit, but in most instances they're wrong. I work most evenings at the office, and then I take work home."

"Don't you ever hear appeals?" she said softly, lowering her head so that she looked at him through her lashes.

He grinned. "I'm a trial judge, Sally," he said. "Not an appellate judge."

"OK, then," she said, "motions for new trials. Petitions for rehearing of old matters improvidently handled, with new evidence discovered." She gazed steadily at him.

He broke eye contact. He cleared his throat and played with the heavy silverware. "Next Tuesday," he said, "I'm sentencing Johnny Hadley. Two uncut kilos of cocaine. He is going to do some time. Man is forty-eight years old. Has a second family, three kids under twelve and a very worried wife, but he is going to go away."

"Should I know this man?" she said. "Name is not familiar."

"No, you never did like baseball," he said. "Unless you followed baseball closely, you would not know him."

"He was a ballplayer?" she said.

"Used to be," he said. "I first saw him play in high school, three years ahead of me. It was an intimidating experience.

"My father, in addition to being a math teacher, was a baseball coach," he said. "He was when he got to Norwood, at least, when I was about to turn thirteen. The old coach'd retired, and when they offered Dad the teaching position, at about fifty-two hundred a year, they also told him there was another six hundred bucks in the hamper for him if he coached the baseball team. That was serious money back then, in the early Fifties, and my father loved baseball. Shortstop. Lettered all four years at Holy Cross. Probably could've made it to the high minors if Hirohito hadn't taken it into his head to listen to his chiefs of staff and bomb Pearl Harbor the December before Dad graduated. Time the war was over, Dad was twenty-six, which is a little late to start a baseball career; and when you've been a combat infantryman and you've come home mostly whole, baseball probably isn't tops on your list of priorities. He got married instead.

"So far as I know," Mariani said, "the only time I ever disappointed my father--until I got divorced, of course--was when what he saw me doing in the infield when I was about fourteen made it impossible for him to pretend any longer that I could play ball."

"He was upset when your marriage broke up?" she said.

"Oh, he was devastated," Mariani said. "Absolutely destroyed. He still is. He's forgiven me now, I think, but he still can't quite get it out of his mind that I did something the Church forbids. Which is important to him, what the Church forbids. I take the boys down for dinner every so often, family gatherings and that sort of thing, and my sisters're there with their husbands and kids, and my father has to work very hard to pretend the group's complete. But he does it. He manages it better than he did concealing his feelings about my fielding when I tried out for his varsity team.

"We can joke about it now," he said. "When Tom Flanders had his stroke and the Senator put my name in for the court and the whole thing finally went through, I called up Dad and said, 'See? Just like you did, when I was a kid. They've got me on the bench.' And he said, 'You know something? I used to think God got it backward when He gave you your mother's athletic ability and my brains, but now I can see He was right.'

"When the Hadley case hit my desk," he said, "the first thing I thought of was that it couldn't be the same guy. Must be a coincidence. But it wasn't. He'd been arraigned before the magistrate, and the first time I saw him was when his lawyer, who's a boob, moved to reduce bail. Now, bail was set at fifty K. This guy lives in Florida, hop, skip and a jump from some Central American banana republic that doesn't extradite. The nose candy he sold to the agents was worth maybe a mill on the street. And he's griping about fifty K bail? The nerve of this cuckoo. So we disposed of that matter in short order, and I said, 'Off the record. Mr. Hadley, are you the same Johnny Hadley who pitched for Natick back in the early Fifties?' And he looked sort of sheepish and said, 'Yeah.'

"There are levels in every game," Mariani said. "There are levels in the game we play, and levels in every other game. When I was working for the Senator, doing what I did, I knew I was very good. I was good at that. But I also knew that there were four or five other guys who worked for different Senators who were better than I was. I could beat them, now and then, but I had to stay up lots later and work a lot harder and then catch them by surprise. It was very hard to do that, and I didn't succeed very often.

"It's the same thing in baseball," he said. "Johnny Hadley simply played baseball on a higher level than I did. Six or seven levels higher. But we both had to play on the same fields, under the same rules. So he would always win. And then, when he got into the seventh level, the majors, he was just barely good enough.

"Johnny Hadley," Mariani said, "almost singlehandedly beat my father's first two teams out of league championships. Norwood played home-and-home with Natick in those years at the end of the season, and Dad's first year they were going pretty well. Came into the last two weeks the first season needing only a split to tie for first. Two wins gave them the trophy. When my dad's team got off the bus for the first game, there was the Natick coach throwing batting practice to his team. He was a former high-minors player. He could throw very hard. My father expected to see him grooving the pitches for his kids. And that was what he did, until this rangy, six-two, fifteen-year-old junior stepped in. 'Guy cut loose,' Dad said. I stood there and I could not believe it. Was he trying to ruin the kid's confidence, and just before the game? And then I saw the kid's swing. Level as a table and the bat speed was terrific. And I said to myself, "Oh-oh, we are in for it, I think." And we were.'

"Hadley pitched the first game that year," Mariani said. "He walked nine, but he struck out sixteen--they played seven-inning games--and he drove in six runs. Natick won, seven--zip. The next week, Hadley played outfield at Norwood; drove in three with two home runs and beat Dad three to two.

"Next year, same thing," Mariani said. "End of the season rolls around, the two teams are tied for first. Hadley threw a two-hitter at Dad's team in the first game at Natick, hit two homers to win four--one. Second game, at Norwood, Hadley played outfield, drove in six runs, Natick eight to four. Dad came home that night and said, 'You know what I am going to do? I am going to send that kid a savings bond when he graduates. With it I enclose a card: "Glad to see the last of you. Please do not come back." '

"The Cubs signed Hadley out of high school," Mariani said. "There was a story in the paper about how he got the bonus, which today would be pocket change, and a lot of optimistic stuff about how he'd be out of double A and into the majors in a couple years. I envied that kid so much. I would've given my left ball to be in Johnny Hadley's shoes."

"Careful," she said. "Let's not be reckless here."

"Then, I would've," Mariani said. "Now I certainly would not. Just let me finish here.

"After Hadley's lawyer gave his spiel to cut the bail and I denied his motion, I called a short recess and had counsel in the lobby. Because I've learned from the other judges that the first thing you do, if you want to keep your calendar moderately up to date, is hammer the opposing parties every chance you get, maybe induce a plea. The woman from the U.S. Attorney's office has a well-deserved reputation for being a hardass. Hadley's lawyer is a guy named Holgate who I didn't know before and don't wish to know better. She said she'd be looking for fifteen on a plea. He looked at her like he smelled something that he didn't like. Then he looked at me.

" 'Your Honor,' he said, 'did you ever play baseball?' I admitted I had tried. 'Well,' he said, 'as your Honor is aware, my client was a very good ballplayer. For several major-league teams.'

"I told him I knew that," Mariani said. "I knew it because I had mentioned the case to my father, who'd followed his career and had the books at hand. 'Fourteen years in the bigs,' he said. 'Cubs traded him to the Dodgers in Nineteen fifty-three. Dodgers brought him up, middle Nineteen fifty-four. Two-ninety-two, eleven homers, forty-nine R.B.I.s. Next season: three-oh-four, twenty-one homers, seventy-eight R.B.I.s.' And so on with the stats. Traded to the Phillies, winter 'Fifty-seven. Two-ninety-eight. Twenty-one, sixty-eight R.B.I.s. 'Fifty-nine, Phillies--Cards. Three-oh-five, nineteen, seventy-eight. Stays there five years, two-ninety--three-ten, around two dozen homers, seventy, eighty ribbies.

" 'Cincinnati, 'Sixty-five. Same kind of production. Better 'n most, not as good as the best. Stays there another year. Winter, 'Sixty-seven: He goes skiing in Vermont and tears his knee to shreds. 'Sixty-eight, he misses spring training. Late start. Traded midseason, back to the Cubs, outright release. Retired, Nineteen sixty-eight.'

" 'Well,' says brother Holgate, 'I don't think a jury will convict a guy like that. No deal.'

"So," Mariani said, "two weeks ago we tried the case, and the Government had him cold. Hand to hand with the junk. He had some cockamamie story that he took the stand to tell, and the jury had all it could do to keep from snickering."

"What happened to him?" Deegan said. "Why did he do that?"

"Oh," Mariani said, "money. Greed. After he left baseball, he started managing a country club outside Orlando. And he's got two kids from his first marriage in college and three more coming along. He doesn't make that much now and he didn't make much then. He played before the players on his level made five hundred thousand bucks a year, and now that they are making it, he's become too old. It was his misfortune to have the ability I never had to play baseball but to have it too soon. It's my misfortune to have to sentence him."

"What are you going to do?" she said.

"Wallop him," he said. "I don't have any choice. We can't have people doing what he did, no matter what they've done before.

"But that's not my point," he said. "There isn't a scintilla of doubt in my mind that if he had that drug transaction to take back and never do it, that's what he would do. There isn't the slightest doubt in my mind that if he could choose not to go skiing or choose to be born twenty years later, that's what he would do. Timing is everything. Mistakes count. You have to learn both things."

"You're trying to tell me something."

"Same thing I told Mr. Holgate," he said. "Baseball and lives change. Neither always for the better. Told him to tell that to his client. 'Life and baseball are alike. They are the cruelest sports. What you did before you made the mistake, no matter how good it was, doesn't' matter now. Time, hope, regret--they don't change what's gone before. Don't count in either game. And no one can go back.'

"You follow me?" he said.

She plucked the napkin out of her lap and dropped it onto the table. "Well," she said, "I did this time. I won't do it again."

" 'You were very nice to me, and so was everybody else. Except that bitch you married.' "