Daddy's Girl
Lisa Scottoline
Chapter 1
Nat Greco felt like an A cup in a double-D bra. She couldn't understand why her tiny class was held in such a huge lecture hall, unless it was a cruel joke of the registrar's. The sun burned through the windows like a failure spotlight, illuminating two hundred empty seats. This class filled only nine of them, and last week the flu and job interviews had left Nat with one very uncomfortable male student. The History of Justice wasn't only a bad course. It was a bad date.
"Justice and the law," she pressed on, "are themes that run through William Shakespeare's plays, because they were central to his life. When he was growing up, his father, John, held a number of legal positions, serving as a chamberlain, bailiff, and chief alderman."
As she spoke, the law students typed on their black laptops, but she suspected they were checking their email, instant-messaging their friends, or cruising the Internet. The classrooms at Penn Law were wireless, but not all technology was progress. Teachers didn't stand a chance against sex.com.
"When the playwright turned thirteen, his father fell on hard times. He sold his wife's property and began lending money. He was hauled into court twice for being usurious, or charging too much interest. Shakespeare poured his empathy for moneylenders into Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice. It's one of his most complex characters, and the play gives us a historical perspective on justice."
Nat stepped away from the lectern to draw the students' attention, but no luck. They were all in their third year, and 3Ls had one foot out the door. Still, as much as she loved teaching, she was beginning to think she wasn't very good at it. Could she really suck at her passion? Women's magazines never admitted this as a possibility.
"Let's turn to the scene in which Antonio asks Shylock to lend him money," she continued. "They agree that if Antonio can't pay it back, the penalty is a pound of his flesh. By the way, future lawyers, is that a valid contract under modern law?"
Only one student raised her hand, and, as usual, it was Melanie Anderson, whose suburban coif and high-waisted Mom jeans stood out in this clutch of scruffy twentysomethings. Anderson was a forty-year-old who had decided to become a lawyer after a career as a pediatric oncology nurse. She loved this class, but only because it was better than watching babies die.
"Yes, Ms. Anderson? Contract or no?" Nat smiled at her in gratitude. All teachers needed a pet, even lousy teachers. Especially lousy teachers.
"No, it's not a contract."
Good girl. . . er, woman. "Why not? There's offer and acceptance, and the money supports the bargain."
"The contract would be against public policy." Anderson spoke with quiet authority, and her French-manicured fingertips rested on an open copy of the play, its sentences striped like a highlighter rainbow. "Antonio essentially consents to being murdered, but murder is a crime. Contracts that are illegal are not enforceable."
Right. "Anybody agree or disagree with Ms. Anderson?"
Nobody stopped typing emoticons to answer, and Nat began second-guessing herself, wondering if the assignment had been too literary for these students. Their undergraduate majors were finance, accounting, and political science. Evidently, humans had lost interest in the humanities.
"Let's ask some different questions." She switched tacks. "Isn't the hate that drives Shylock the result of the discrimination he's suffered? Do you see the difference between law and justice in the play? Doesn't the law lead to injustice, first in permitting enforcement of the contract, then in bringing Shylock to his knees? Can there be true justice in a world without equality?" She paused for an answer that didn't come. "Okay, everyone, stop typing right now and look at me."
The students lifted their heads, their vision coming slowly into focus as their brains left cyberspace and reentered Earth's atmosphere. Their fingers remained poised over their keyboards like spiders about to pounce.
"Okay, I'll call on people." Nat turned to Wendy Chu in the front row, who'd earned a Harvard degree with honors in Working Too Hard. Chu had a lovely face and glossy hair that covered her shoulders. "Ms. Chu, what do you think? Is Shylock a victim, a victimizer, or both?"
"I'm sorry, Professor Greco. I didn't read the play."
"You didn't?" Nat asked, stung. "But you always do the reading."
"I was working all night on law review." Chu swallowed visibly. "I had to cite-check an article by Professor Monterosso, and it went to press this morning."
.Rats. "Well, you know the rules. If you don't do the reading, I have to take you down half a grade." Nat hated being a hardass, but she'd been too easy her first year of teaching, and it hadn't worked. She'd been too strict her second year, and that hadn't worked either. She couldn't get it just right. She was like Goldilocks and all the beds were futons.
"Sorry," Chu whispered. Nat skipped Melanie Anderson for the student sitting next to her, class hottie Josh Carling. Carling was a tall twenty-six-year-old out of UCLA, with unusual green eyes, a killer smile, and a brownish soul patch on his square chin. A Hollywood kid, he'd worked as an A.D. on the set of a TV sitcom and he always wore an Ashton Kutcher knit cap, though it never snowed indoors.
"Mr. Carling, did you do the reading?" Nat knew Josh's answer because he looked down sheepishly.
"I didn't have time. I had a massive finance exam to study for. Sorry, for reals."
Damn. "Then you're a half-grade down, too," she said, though her heart went out to him. Carling was in the joint-degree program, so he'd graduate with diplomas from the law school and the business school, which guaranteed him a lucrative job in entertainment law and a spastic colon.
Nat eyed the second row. "Mr. Bischoff? How about you?"
"I would have done the reading but I was sick." Max Bischoff looked the part, with credibly puffy eyes, a chapped ring around his nostrils, and his library pallor paler than usual. "Yesterday, I ralphed all over my—"
"Enough." Nat silenced him with a palm and quizzed the rest of the second row, Marilyn Krug and Elizabeth Warren. They hadn't done the reading either, and neither had Adele McIlhargey, San Gupta, or Charles Wykoff IV.”
"So no one else in the entire class has done the reading?" Nat blurted out in dismay, and just when she thought things couldn't get any worse, in the door strolled Vice Dean James McConnell, Faculty Vampire.
Nat stiffened. She wasn't sure what McConnell did except hire and fire people, and she had already been hired.
McConnell was in his sixties, with a silvery wave of hair that rolled sideways across his head. Today he was dressed in a dark wool suit with a bloodred tie, unusually formal for this school's faculty. Everybody here dressed academic casual, which was like business casual only with footnotes.
McConnell entered the lecture hall, took a seat, and crossed one leg over the other, scrutinizing Nat from behind his tortoise-shell bifocals. Nat imagined how he saw her. She was thirty years old but looked thirteen because she was only five foot one, with her mother's sparrow-thin bones. Her features were nice in a forgettable way; large brown eyes, a slightly upturned nose, and a small mouth. She had thick, straight hair, a deep red brown, which she wore shoulder length in an overpriced cut. Today she had on a tailored black pantsuit, but nevertheless came off more middle school than law school. Her childhood nickname was Gnat for a reason.
She saw her career flash before her eyes. She was only an assistant professor and was up for tenure next year, and McConnell must have come to evaluate her. Did he hear her say that nobody had done the reading? For a minute, she didn't know what to do. She didn't want to lower the grades of the entire class, especially for the students without job offers. But she couldn't let them get away with it, not in front of McConnell. The vice dean watched her, puckering his lined mouth in apprais
al.
Do something, Gnat! She squared her shoulder pads to show that she deserved her job, despite all evidence to the contrary, and said, "Well, then, class, you leave me no alternative."
The students gulped collectively. McConnell half smiled and folded his arms.
"Mr. Carling?" Nat pointed to him. "Please come up here and bring your book."
"Uh, okay." Carling rose, slid his paperback from his desktop, and climbed the steps to the stage with a too-cool-for-school smile.
"Come here, please," Nat said, motioning him over to where she was standing.
Carling crossed the stage, scanning the high-tech lectern, with its touch-screen controls and multicolored display.
"This is sick up here."
When Carling was beside her, Nat reached up and took the wool hat from his head.
"May I borrow this?"
"Sure." Carling refluffed the layers of his sandy hair, looking at the class from the stage. "I could get used to this, yo."
"Now stay there, please." Nat scanned the lecture hall. "Mr. Wykoff?" She pointed to Charles Wykoff IV, an all-Ivy lineman from a Main Line family, via Dartmouth. Wykoff had a big baby face, a fringe of crayon-yellow bangs, and guileless blue eyes that telegraphed Legacy Admission. "Please come up and bring your book. And Ms. Anderson, please come with him."
"Sure." Anderson happily made her way to the steps. Wykoff followed her, mystified.
"Hurry up, guys." Nat hustled over as the students made their way to her. She positioned Wykoff by his shoulders, solid as bowling balls under a faded Patagonia fleece. "Good. Now, Mr. Wykoff, you be Bassanio."
"Ba-what-io?"
"Bassanio. He's the hunky boyfriend in the play you didn't read. Open your book. You've got lines." Nat turned to Anderson. "Lady, you're Shylock."
"Terrific!" Anderson grinned.
"Whoa, we're putting on a skit, in law school?" Carling asked in disbelief.
"Not a skit, a play," Nat answered. "It's William Shakespeare, not David Letterman."
"Pssh. What's next? Milk and cookies? Nap time?"
Wykoff guffawed. "Damn, I left my protractor at home."
"Guys, would you rather I lowered your grades?" Nat didn't wait for an answer. "You'll read this play, one way or another. By the way, Carling, you're Antonio."
"But he's gay!"
"So what?" Nat turned on her heel. "And how do you know that, if you didn't read the play?"
"I saw the movie. Jeremy Irons borrows the money from Al Pacino because he's in love with a dude!'
"Way to miss the point, Mr. Carling. Don't discriminate in the class about discrimination."
The students laughed, and Nat startled at the unaccustomed sound. They'd never laughed at any of her jokes before. In fact, all nine of them were paying attention for the first time ever. Behind them, McConnell leaned back in his seat, but she couldn't stop now. She took her place downstage.
"Everybody," Nat said, "please turn to act one, scene two, the big courtroom scene. I'm playing Portia, one of Shakespeare's best female characters, except that she fell for the wrong guy. She's about to save the day, and in this scene, she disguises herself as a man, like this." She shoved Carling's wool hat on her head and hurried to the lectern for her purse.
"You look hot, Professor Greco!" Elizabeth Warren hollered, and the class laughed.
"You ain't seen nothin' yet." Nat rummaged through her makeup bag, found her eye pencil, and drew a crude mustache on her face with two quick strokes, courtesy of Clinique.
"Awesome, professor!" San Gupta shouted, making a megaphone of his hands. The class broke into applause that echoed in the cavernous hall. Somebody in the back of the room wolf-whistled, and Nat looked toward the sound. It was Angus Holt, whose blond beard and ponytail qualified him as Faculty Freak. Angus taught in this room after Nat's class, but she didn't know him except to say hello and goodbye. She smiled, then caught sight of McConnell in the foreground, which gave her an idea.
"We need a judge." Nat rubbed her hands together.
"I'll do it!" Max Bischoff volunteered, forgetting he had typhus.
"Pick me! It should be a woman judge!" Marilyn Krug shouted, and Adele McIlhargey chimed in, in an unprecedented traffic jam of class participation.
"Wait a minute, gang." Nat waved them off. "Vice Dean McConnell, would you please be our judge this morning?"
The students turned around, surprised to see McConnell sitting in the back. The vice dean frowned at the sudden attention, cupping his earlobe as if he hadn't heard, but Nat wasn't buying.
"Vice Dean McConnell, we'd love for you to play the Duke of Venice. Right, class?"
"Yes!" Everybody shouted, smiling, and Nat started a cheer.
"McConnell! McConnell! McConnell!"
The students joined her, and as if on cue, Angus Holt lumbered down the sloped aisle of the lecture hall. He scooped up McConnell on the way and escorted him to the stage, amid laughter and clapping.
"Special delivery, Professor Greco!" Angus handed over a slightly winded vice dean.
"If it pleases, Your Grace." Nat extended her arm to McConnell with an Elizabethan flourish.
Gotcha.
Chapter 2
After class was over, Nat said goodbye to McConnell, who had rendered judgment on Shylock and presumably on her, too. She grabbed her stuff to leave, but by then Angus Holt's class was entering the hall, pouring down the center aisle, laughing and joking like they were at a party. They kept coming and coming, and soon she found herself swimming upstream against a student tsunami of water bottles and Coach purses. She watched, astounded, as one by one they filled every seat in the lecture hall. Nat had never seen so many students in one place, except at graduation.
She started up the aisle, where Angus stood surrounded by a circle of clinic students, identifiable by their unruly hair, so collectively curly it hovered above them like a cloud. She didn't know much about the clinic, except that it taught students to work as lawyers for the public good, while avoiding the abstract legal issues that bored everyone but her. Whatever Angus was doing, it was working. Faculty Freak trumped Faculty Comic Relief.
"Natalie!" he called out, waving to her. His student circle broke up and went to their seats, and Angus strode down the aisle in jeans and Frye boots.
What do you teach?" Nat asked, looking up at him. He towered over her by a full foot and wore his blond hair parted messily down the middle. His thick, uncombed ponytail trailed over his shoulders and the knitted cables of his fisherman's sweater.
"Issues in Constitutional Law. Why?" Angus's eyes flashed a bright, amused blue. His nose was straight and his grin omnipresent, even if buried inside a mellow-yellow beard, and he smelled vaguely of patchouli, or marijuana.
"Because... this room, it's full. It must be a great course. You must be a great teacher."
Angus smiled modestly. "Not at all, and by the way, I love your mustache. Most women shy away from facial hair, but I say, go for it."
Nat had forgotten. Her hand flew to her face and she almost dropped her purse and papers. She spit on her fingertips and wiped her upper lip.
"You're just smearing it around." Angus laughed, his teeth white and even. "Forget it, it doesn't matter. That was a cool move with McConnell."
"Thanks." Nat gave up on the mustache. "Did he say anything when he left? I thought I saw him speak to you on the way out."
"Don't worry about it. You love your course, and it shows."
It's my passion, which I suck at. Rather, at which I suck. "Did McConnell say that? Am I fired?"
"All he said was that he found the class 'unusual.'" Angus made quote marks in the air. "Don't sweat it. Of course you're not fired."
"Easy for you to say. You have tenure. I have nine students."
"How do you do in your other classes?"
"I fill the room when the courses are mandatory. And they're 1Ls, so they're too terrified not to listen."
"You know what your problem is? You're not getting t
o the right students. You need marketing."
"Marketing, of justice?" Nat recoiled. "They're law students. They should be interested in justice."
"No, they're interested in law, and there's a difference. Isn't that your point?" Angus looked down at her, smiling. "For example, how many of your students want to practice law?"
"I assume all of them."
"I bet you're wrong. In my non-clinic classes, like this one"—Angus gestured around the noisy hall—"many of the students are going into business. They just want the law degree."
"Really?"
"Absolutely. Didn't you ever ask them? Talk to them about their future? Their plans? What they want out of life?"
"No." Nat reddened. She had office hours but no one came in, and she communicated with her students mostly by email. She probably kept too much to herself; that's what her father always said. She felt guilty that she didn't network, especially now that it had become a verb.