Chapter 9
ELSIE HAD ASKED EDDIE IF IT WOULD BE Possible to get the judge to come down to the club to see her perform some night. He had smiled and said no. Then she suggested she do her routine in court.
"For what reason?" he asked.
"To show that it's artistic and not vulgar," she told him.
Eddie wasn't at all sure that it would do anything of the sort, but he didn't cross her on that matter; he just said it could not be done. But she was firm, and Eddie now saw how stubborn she could be when she got something in her head. He could understand what her husband had been up against.
She stuck to her guns, and he finally gave in. After all, he was only her lawyer, and new at the game, at that.
When he brought up the matter in court, the attorneys for the husband objected, and the judge wanted to know what purpose it would serve. Eddie said that Mrs. Van Nessen's artistic abilities had been challenged. The opposing attorneys denied this, although it was true that her talents were at least questionable. If an artistic opinion was wanted, let qualified experts be brought in. Eddie wondered if they didn't think the judge was qualified to render an average citizen's judgment upon her dancing-because Mrs. Van Nessen didn't have any pretensions of being Pavlova, but only a dancer capable of bringing pleasure and beauty to the audiences of the common masses, not of the ballet-loving type. Thus Eddie once more pinned on his opponents a label of being snobs-this time, cultural snobs. It was already assumed that the Van Nessen bloc represented the snobbery of wealth and power.
That was the image that was given out in the newspaper reports. The newspapers of the city couldn't ignore a story of so much popular interest, and the wire services had their men covering it, and throughout the country people were reading the amusing details of the plump wife who wanted to dance for the crowds. When the judge said she could now dance for the court in her working costume, the newspapers around the nation demanded more on the case, and they and the television networks wanted pictures of Mrs. Van Nessen.
The whole thing had gotten out of hand. The Van Nessen family certainly hadn't expected anything like this when they instigated the divorce proceedings, and the judge had seen it only as a routine case.
As for Eddie, he wished he were anywhere but in the courtroom that day. No photographers were allowed in the place, of course, but they were heard milling around outside. The room was packed with far more spectators than it was meant to handle-everybody wanted to be there on this big occasion.
Everybody was, it seemed, excited, angry, or in a tizzy. Everybody but Elsie.
Elsie was calm. She was getting what she wanted now-to show the world, as it were, officially that she was a dancer.
When she came into the courtroom that afternoon after the recess, Eddie slid down .in his chair, trying to look as inconspicious as possible. He thought everybody must be laughing not only at Elsie, but at him. Here he was, a young lawyer getting involved in such a dumb thing. His fellow barristers must despise him as a P.T. Barnum type.
During the recess, Elsie had gone to the women's rest room to change into her dancing outfit. She returned to court with a coat over her shoulders.
She had thought of bringing a tape recorder along and dancing to music, but Eddie had advised against it. It would be too much, he had told her. Indeed, this was the finest piece of advice he could have given her. If she had taped that rinky-tink piano playing from the bar, it might have had a disastrously cheapening effect.
She got up, and stood there. Just stood there. It took Eddie a moment to realize she was waiting for him to get up and remove the coat. He stumbled up and did that. It was a gesture to a lady, to an artiste.
The tables had been pushed to one side in the area in front of the judge's bench. Now, silently, with no accompaniment but her own sense of rhythm, Elsie danced.
To Eddie, who had seen her perform previously, it still seemed a bit pathetic. But not funny. She was fat, sure but there was no doubt she was graceful. And without the surroundings of a dim saloon and the noise of drinking patrons and the cheap piano, it wasn't vulgar. Hell, it wasn't great art, but she had never pretended to that. All she had ever said was that she loved to dance and she wanted to entertain people with it. It was obvious from her absorbed look now that she did love it, and it was obvious that the people were very diverted.
When he put the coat around her shoulders afterward, he felt no humiliation at having been part of this. He had begun to like and admire this woman.
He guessed that they had won their point about her not being some sort of freak stripper, which was the impression the opposing forces had given.
Downstairs in the lobby of the courthouse later, Eddie was standing waiting for Elsie when one of the younger lawyers of the vast team of Van Nessen legal counsel stopped by to say, "Marvelous move, Kilby. You really handled this one neat." He moved away quickly so none of the other attorneys could see that he had spoken to Eddie, whom they regarded as an upstart.
At first Eddie had thought that the young lawyer had been sarcastic, and yet his tone was actually admiring. Eddie shrugged.
Elsie came along, surrounded by newspaper and television people. She asked him if they could go to the studio where she wanted to repeat her dance for the network and cameramen. Did he think that all right? He-wanted to say no! They'd been damned lucky so far that the judge hadn't reamed him out for making the trial, a circus. But it was so obvious she wanted to do this-and probably would do it no matter what he said-that he just smiled and said, "Okay."
Eddie had had the idea that this notoriety might ruin his chances for advancement in his profession. He couldn't have been more wrong. In fact, it was the very thing to get him rolling. He had realized that getting his name connected with this case had set it in front of a vast public. The lawyers in that state couldn't advertise, but here he was getting a million dollars worth of free publicity in the news columns of the papers, and his name mentioned on radio and television.
He began' getting calls from clients who wondered if he could take them on. He had snorted not long ago when Elsie had put the same question to him, but soon it became a matter of trying to squeeze new ones in.
Naturally, since he was so identified with the Van Nessen divorce case, most of his prospective clients were those thinking of divorce. They thought he was an expert-he must be. And it was certain he was becoming one, all right.
As for Elsie, she had triumphed any way her case was looked at. The Van Nessens and their legal aides had come into court expecting to push her aside and take away her married name-and pay peanuts to her. She now exacted her sweet revenge, and the Van Nessens probably wished she'd asked for a pound of flesh rather than what she asked for and got. Rather than have one of the Van Nessens give an accounting of his full wealth in public court, they settled with Elsie after the judge quickly granted the divorce. Elsie didn't mind that her husband divorced her, and not vice-versa, because as consolation she got a lump trust fund of half a million dollars, plus $4,500 a month living expenses, plus some jewelry and art objects that had been given her and her husband over the years from the family treasures.
They paid Eddie's fee also. He had no idea what he should ask for, so he made up a figure out of air-$42,500. He got a check for it the next month. He did not know if he had asked too much, but he suspected that he'd have been paid almost anything that he'd asked for. He thought of that afterward, but at the time, it seemed like such a miracle that he had real, honest-to-God tears in his eyes.
Bless that fat dancer!
The rather sudden affluence of Eddie's law practice upset the equilibrium of his marriage. Marion had never groused about carrying the major load of their financial burdens. On the other hand, when Eddie was now able to support them, he was cocky as hell about it, and made Marion feel like a real dependent when he shelled out the cash from some purchase for her self or their house. This attitude, in turn, soured Marion, and she at this point began to hark back to the days when she had paid for everything. His rising reputation in the community was also disconcerting to her. Previously, at the office, she had been the object of some pity-because she had to support her husband. Mixed with this was some cattiness about her having to pay for her loving. And envy that the object of her love was a young, handsome guy. At this time, the pity was dropped. They wondered why she worked since she had a husband who could support her; why not give the job to someone who needed it?
As the general level of his living standard zoomed, Eddie became increasingly dissatisfied with Marion. He had never been delighted fully with her as a wife, not even being ungrudgingly grateful for all she had done for him. But he'd never been in a position to kick much about this crude trick that had been played on him-he, Edward Kilby, getting this older, homely female as a housemate. Because she had paid the bills and she had been his only source of steady sex, unsatisfactory as he found it over the long haul. He couldn't bewail his fate when he wasn't making I any money; if he hadn't liked it, he could have cleared out, he knew, but he had been too cowardly and too much of a sponger to do that.
Even Eddie himself couldn't have told how deadly serious he might have been about wanting to get rid of Marion at this time. As a matter-of-fact, he wasn't certain he wanted a divorce. In the first place, his being divorced would prove embarrassing. It would be one of those funny items that newspapers and magazines liked to pick up: the local paper would pick up the news and report it humorously-well known divorce lawyer is divorced himself by dissatisfied wife. And every so often, a wire service or magazine would do one of those cute features about various amusing things like that-safety expert gets traffic ticket on his way to banquet to get award for safety work-that sort of thing, and no doubt Eddie and Marion's case would be repeated again and again.
So he didn't actually push for an actual termination of their marriage. Because he, no more than she, had no alternative. There were women he liked to take to bed, who were in fact, terrific at the sport of love ... but he couldn't see having them around all the time any more than old Marion.
So he didn't push for his own divorce ... until he met Belda Kassnar.