The Divorce Papers: A Novel Page 3
6. Accounts not paid by their due date shall be subject to interest at the rate of 1.5% per month until paid. Failure to pay billings promptly will permit the Attorneys after notice to the Client to terminate the Attorneys’ representation of the Client, and the Attorneys shall be entitled to file a notice of withdrawal in any pending judicial action.
7. If the total cost of the legal services performed by the Attorneys shall be less than the amount of the initial retainer paid by the Client, the balance shall be refunded to the Client.
8. The Court may award counsel fees to one party and order the other party to pay the amount awarded. Alternatively, the parties, to avoid a contested trial, may agree by settlement contract to provide that one of the parties will contribute an agreed amount toward the other party’s legal expenses.
a. No representation is made in this Agreement that any contribution by the other party will be obtained toward the Client’s legal expenses.
b. In the event a contribution is obtained from the other party for the benefit of the Client, the amount in question shall be credited against the Attorneys’ final bill to the client.
9. This Agreement represents the full and complete agreement between the Attorneys and the Client as to the terms of the Attorneys’ representation of the Client in the matter described. There are no exceptions.
THIS IS A LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT. IF THE CLIENT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE CONTRACT, THE CLIENT IS URGED TO SEEK INDEPENDENT COUNSEL.
We, the Client and the Attorneys, have read the above Fee Agreement and understand and accept its terms. Both have signed it as their free act and deed, and the Client acknowledges receipt of a copy of the Agreement.
Signed this 17th day of March, 1999.
Traynor, Hand, Wyzanski
By:
Client Maria M. Durkheim Attorney Anne Sophie Diehl
1 TRAYNOR, HAND, WYZANSKI
2 222 CHURCH STREET
3 NEW SALEM, NARRAGANSETT 06555
4 (393) 876-5678
5
6
7
8 Intake Interview
9
10 Interview Subject: Maria Meiklejohn Durkheim
11 Interviewer: Anne Sophie Diehl
12 Date: March 17, 1999
13 RE: Legal Separation and Divorce
14
15 Transcription by: Hannah Smith
16 Date: March 18, 1999
17-32
33 Q. Good morning. I’m Sophie Diehl. David Greaves, your
34 father’s lawyer, asked me to meet with you this morning. I am
35 an associate with the firm.
36 A. Hello, I’m Maria—Mia—Durkheim, née Meiklejohn.
37 Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.
38 Q. Not at all. I would like to tape this interview, if that’s all
39 right with you, to have an accurate record.
40 A. That’s fine.
41 Q. How can I help you?
42 A. On February 15th—here are the papers—my husband,
43 Daniel Durkheim, Dr. Daniel Durkheim, had his lawyers,
44 the scumbag firm of Kahn & Boyle, serve me with a summons
45 for divorce, I think that’s what it’s called, while I was having
46 lunch at Golightly’s on Cromwell. I can’t believe that’s
47 standard practice, no? The University Club perhaps, maybe
48 the Plimouth or the New Salem Cricket Club, but Golightly’s?
49 Your grandmother’s restaurant. That cozy bastion of linen
50 tablecloths, padded booths, hotel silver plate. I was with
51 a colleague, not even a friend, when this damp, cringing
52 person sidled up to me and asked if I was Maria Meiklejohn
53 Durkheim. I said I was. He handed me the summons, then
54 backed away. I thought at first, stupidly, it was the wine
55 list. When I saw what it was, I almost fell into my Niçoise.
56 I thought I’d black out. Pulling myself together, I realized
57 my colleague was staring at me. Other people too. I sat up
58 straight, called the waiter over, and ordered a bottle of Pouilly-
59 Fuissé. “I feel like celebrating,” I told my colleague. “My
60 treat.” It was an extreme test of my savoir faire. Even now it
61 makes me catch my breath. Can you believe it?
62 Q. I can. I’m a criminal lawyer. Bad behavior doesn’t
63 surprise me. But I’ve never heard of anyone else being served
64 at a restaurant.
65 A. I got served at a restaurant. Ha. I suppose I should return
66 service on a squash court. The Cricket Club. I wouldn’t
67 mind smashing him—or those scumbag lawyers. What do
68 I do now? It’s been at least a month. I didn’t say anything
69 to my husband for several days, then I wrote him an acid
70 note, threatening to have him served during a speech he was
71 planning to give at the annual Pediatric Oncology conference
72 in Boston. I have a copy. Would you like it?
73 Q. Yes, I would. Did you actually carry out the threat?
74 [Note to Hannah: I’m placing the letter in the file.]
75 A. Oh, no. It’s been my experience that there’s no need to
76 carry through on a well-crafted threat with upper-middleclass
77 types. The purpose is to wrong-foot them, raise their
78 blood pressure, gin up their anxiety level. I kept imagining
79 him looking up all the time as he was reading his paper, to see
80 if a sheriff’s deputy was closing in on him. I thought I had a
81 good chance of ruining the conference for him. I think I may
82 have. Of course, he never said anything. Nor did I.
83 Q. Is it only on the upper-middle classes that threats alone
84 work?
85 A. I can’t say for everyone, but with the rich, you have to
86 carry through or they don’t take you seriously. My father
87 would tell you that.
88 Q. Other than the threats, have you done anything?
89 A. What do you mean by “done”?
90 Q. Have you responded more formally?
91 A. No. That’s why I came in today. I’m guessing I need to
92 make some sort of response. What should I do now?
93 Q. Ah. The usual next step is to retain a lawyer to represent
94 you. You may wish to consult more than one, to determine
95 who will provide you with the services you need for a fee you
96 judge reasonable.
97 A. When it comes to lawyers, I trust my father, and he says
98 Traynor, Hand is the best there is. Consider yourself retained.
99 Tell me what your fee is. I’ll pay it.
100 Q. Oh, I am not the lawyer you want to retain. David asked
101 me to fill in this morning for Fiona McGregor, who’s on
102 holiday. We have terrific divorce lawyers in the firm. Besides
103 Ms. McGregor, there’s Felix Landau, who is in court today,
104 and David, too, because he can do anything. I’ve never done
105 a divorce.
106 A. Somehow, I find that reassuring. It’s my first divorce too.
107 Q. But I’m a criminal lawyer.
108 A. Just what I need for Ray Kahn.
109 Q. Don’t worry about him. 90% blowhard. Let’s look at
110 these Divorce Work Sheet: Summary Biographies. We can go
111 over them together, and I’ll explain Narragansett divorce law
112 as best I can. But why don’t we start by my asking you some
113 questions about you, your husband, your marriage, and your
114 daughter, yes?
115 A. Shoot.
116 Q. How old are you? How old is your husband? How long
117 have you been married?
118 A. I’m 41. Daniel is 52. We’ve been married for 16 years,
119 since 1982. But we lived together for 2 years before that.
120 Daniel was married when I met him, to Helen Fincher. They
121 were married in 1974, separated in 1980—there was a bit of an
122 overlap, I’m afraid, with Helen and me, tacky, I know—and
123 divorced in 1982, a New York record, I believe. She has so
124 much family money, it wasn’t an issue, and then she couldn’t
125 stand him. I didn’t understand that; I thought he was the most
126 wonderful person I’d ever met. Our opinions are probably
127 more aligned now.
128 Q. Were there any children from your husband’s first marriage?
129 A. Sorry, yes, a son, Thomas Maxwell Durkheim. Tom.
130 He’s 22 now. He was born in 1976. An Amherst grad.
131 Lovely boy, much easier, kinder, sweeter than his father, or
132 his mother for that matter. Bad asthma, bad lungs since he
133 was a baby. Premature. He’s working now on Wall Street, at
134 Fincher & Morgan, his grandfather’s firm. Daniel paid no
135 alimony to Helen, only child support, $15,000/year, until
136 Tom was 18. It stayed the same throughout. Then he paid for
137 college. Theoretically. Mather pays 50% of college tuition for
138 its employees, which with Amherst, I think its tuition was
139 $24,000; he only had to pay $12,000, plus room and board,
140 another $8,000. Not much for a man making $300,000 plus
141 a year. [Pause] I’m sounding bitter—and common. I’ll pull
142 myself together.
143 Q. Did Thomas live with his mother? Or with you and your
144 husband?
145 A. He grew up in New York City and lived with his mother.
146 When we lived there—we moved to New Salem in ’91,
147 when Daniel was appointed Chair of the Pediatric Oncology
148 Department here at Mather Med—we saw a lot of him. We
149 saw less of him after we moved. He was 14. Daniel is a bit
150 rough on him. Tom wants his dad’s good opinion, but also
151 thinks Daniel can be a prick. Can I say something like that?
152 You don’t mind, do you? You must have heard worse. I don’t
153 think they’ve seen each other since Christmas. I don’t know
154 what Daniel has said to Tom about our separation. I asked
155 him last week how Tom was taking it. “Taking it?” he asked.
156 “You’re not his mother. What difference should it make to
157 him?” Eighteen years, since he was three, and his father
158 thinks it means nothing. [Pause] I don’t know what Tom
159 is thinking. I’ve spoken to him twice now. He doesn’t give
160 anything away. He doesn’t want to talk about himself, only
161 asks how Jane and I are doing. He’s stoical and doesn’t expect
162 too much of his parents. Helen’s got a leg up on Daniel. She’s
163 already married to her third husband.
164 Q. Can you give me some financial history of the marriage?
165 A. When we met in 1980, I was working as an assistant
166 editor at Femina magazine. Do you remember Femina? It
167 believed in good clothes, good haircuts, and good books. I was
168 making $28,000, which wasn’t bad for that kind of job. Daniel
169 had finished school; he has an M.D./Ph.D. from Columbia
170 but was only making $23,000, as a resident, working 90 hours
171 a week at Presbyterian Hospital. All of his salary, after taxes,
172 went for child support. But at least he had no med school
173 debt. M.D./Ph.D.’s are fully funded. Our rent was $325;
174 we had a Columbia apartment, on baja Claremont. It was a
175 serious comedown for him. When he was married to Helen,
176 they lived off Central Park West on West 69th. But he was
177 never home, and I didn’t mind it. My father might have given
178 us some money, but his money always comes with strings;
179 I didn’t think it was worth it. Except, he did give us each
180 $10,000 a year as a gift once we married. And then after Jane,
181 our daughter, was born, he gave her $10,000 a year too.
182 Q. Tell me about Jane.
183 A. She’s perfect. She’s 10 years old, almost 11. She goes to the
184 Peabody School, where I went and everyone in my family went,
185 back to the egg. My mother was a trustee and her mother and
186 her grandmother were trustees. We are old, old New Salem.
187 My mother was a Mather and Granny was a Peabody. I don’t
188 she was a Maria. We are all Marias, from mother to daughter,
189 back to my Great Great Great Gran, whose mother’s first
190 name was Humility. The family was, is, horribly ingrown. Up
191 through my mother’s generation, you couldn’t marry outside
192 the magic circle. My father didn’t really belong; his family
193 were latecomers, upstart 19th-century immigrant Scottish
194 merchants, but they’d gone to the right schools and weren’t
195 Catholics. My mother’s full name was Maria Maple Mather
196 Meiklejohn. Her family nickname was 4M. My full name is
197 Maria Mather Meiklejohn. [Pause] Durkheim. I need to ditch
198 that. In school, I was called 3M or Scotch, for Scotch Tape.
199 Daniel used to say my family went back to the Mayflower and
200 his to the ark. I never imagined I’d be back in New Salem. I
201 thought I had escaped. I was working on becoming—rather
202 successfully, I thought—a New York Jewish intellectual. Here,
203 I’m seen as part of the cotillion crowd.
204 Q. Are you working?
205 A. I’m a writing tutor at Mather. I decided to get my Ph.D.
206 in American studies when we moved here. The only publisher
207 in town is the Mather Press, and I wasn’t interested in
208 publishing foreign-language translations, which is what they
209 mostly do. Their big project now is a complete translation by
210 a French/American couple of Remembrance of Things Past.
211 Did you know no one has ever finished translating all seven
212 volumes? They all die mid-series; it’s like a curse. Have you
213 read Proust?
214 Q. No. My mother is French, and if I ever read it in English,
215 instead of French, which would do me in, she would be very
216 disapproving. So I don’t read it at all. You?
217 A. I’ve read the third book, The Guermantes Way. Bill
218 Pritchard, Tom’s English professor at Amherst, said to start
219 there, then go backward. But I couldn’t.
220 Q. Are you making progress with your Ph.D.?
221 A. I finished my course work in 1996. For my thesis, I’m
222 working mostly on Jacob Riis but also on other late 19th-/
223 early 20th-century American journalists, photojournalists,
224 muckrakers. This divorce thing has thrown me off. I can’t see
225 making much progress this year. Some days, getting out of
226 bed is a serious challenge. I do manage to do my job, but it’s
227 a struggle, and it’s only four afternoons/evenings a week, 16
228 hours altogether.
229 Q. Do you make a living wa
ge as a writing tutor?
230 A. Oh, no. I make $14,000, which is a scant $1,000 more
231 than Jane’s tuition. Last year Daniel made $370,000, 25 times
232 as much as I. These are things I think of when I think about
233 divorce. My lack of resources. I don’t worry about it exactly—
234 my father won’t let Jane and me starve—but I would hate
235 having to ask him or Daniel for money. Too humiliating to
236 have to keep going back to the trough.
237 Q. You said your husband was in oncology?
238 A. He’s chair of the Department of Pediatric Oncology,
239 which is one of Mather Medical School’s great departments,
240 and Dowling Professor. He’s a big star, both as a clinician and
241 a researcher, and he’s very ambitious. He won the Freeman
242 Prize, and was nominated for the Lasker. I’d guess he’s
243 gunning for a MacArthur and, in his late-night fantasies, a
244 Nobel. His specialty is brain tumors. He’s the best there is,
245 even though most of his patients don’t make it. They just
246 make it longer than other docs’ patients. It’s given him a Jesus
247 complex. He’s so used to being admired, starting with his
248 parents, that he expects it from everyone, even Jane and me.
249 Mather recruited him very heavily; so did Harvard, Stanford,
250 and Yale. He’s been generously funded by NIH for the last
251 13 years, and his current grant has 4 years to run. When
252 he left Columbia, he brought his grants and lab with him,
253 including four researchers. I was wretched about the decision.
254 Who with any sense would live in New Salem when they
255 could live in New York? I had close friends, a nice social life,
256 a good job. I didn’t want to be a chair’s wife. I didn’t want to
257 be unemployed, I didn’t want to come back to New Salem. In
258 ’88, I’d left Femina and gone to work for Monk’s House as a
259 nonfiction editor, and I loved it. I wanted him to turn it down,
260 but he said the offer was one he couldn’t refuse and I thought