Part 27 (1/2)
”Mami, Omar, I'm going to tell you something, but you have to promise to keep it a secret. There won't be a public announcement for a couple of weeks, but I've been given permission to tell you.” I asked if they knew who Senator Patrick Moynihan was. Tentative nods. ”The senator is going to nominate me to become a U.S. district court judge in Manhattan.”
”Sonia, how wonderful! That's terrific news!” As always, Mami's initial reaction was enthusiasm. She didn't always understand fully what my news meant, but as a matter of maternal principle she was a loyal cheerleader. Omar too congratulated me earnestly. Then the questions started.
”So, you're going to earn more money, right?” my mother said.
”Not exactly, Mami. A judge's salary is much less than I'm earning now.”
She paused for a long moment. ”Well, I guess you'll be traveling a lot, seeing the world?”
”Not really. The courthouse is in downtown Manhattan, and I can't imagine I'll be going anywhere else. Not the way I have at Pavia.”
The pauses were growing a little longer. ”I'm sure you'll meet interesting people and make friends as nice as the ones you've met at the firm.”
I was determined not to laugh. ”Actually, the people who appear before a judge are mostly criminal defendants in serious trouble or people fighting with each other. There are ethical reasons too why I wouldn't be socializing with them.”
Silence, and then: ”Sonia, why on earth do you want this job?”
Omar, who knew me well by now, came to my rescue. ”Conoces tu hija. You know your daughter, Celina. This must be very important work.” The look on Mami's face carried me back to that moment under the rumbling El train when we shared our uncertainty about what lay ahead of me at Princeton: ”What you got yourself into, daughter, I don't know ...” In truth, I'd had no idea then that Princeton would be only the first stop on a magical ride that by now had already taken me farther than I could have ever foreseen.
Now all I had to do was wait for the political process to run its long and b.u.mpy course. It's the president who appoints federal district court judges. In many states, however, including New York, the senators propose candidates, and the president accepts their suggestions as a courtesy. In a twist special to the Empire State, Senator Moynihan had long before hammered out a bipartisan agreement with his Republican counterpart, Jacob Javits, that would survive turnover in the Oval Office: for every three nominations from a senator of the president's party, a senator from the loyal opposition could offer one. There were several vacancies at the time, and it was Senator Moynihan's turn to submit names to President George H. W. Bush. But the existence of this entente between gentlemen of the Senate didn't oblige the administration to like it or even facilitate the process.
The eighteen months that it took my nomination to clear were an education in the arts of politics and patience. I knew that the delays had nothing to do with me personally. Two interviews with the Justice Department, investigations by various government agencies, and eventually the Senate confirmation hearings had all gone smoothly. No one had voiced doubt about my qualifications or otherwise objected to my appointment. But I was still just one piece on the board among many to be sacrificed or defended in the baroque, unknowable sport that was the biggest game in town and in which procedural delay was a cherished tactic. Through it all, Senator Moynihan was as good as his word, never flagging in his effort or allowing me to give up hope. I tried not to be overly disheartened, but the delay did put me in an awkward limbo at work. I was trying to make a graceful if protracted exit, wrapping up business with clients and making the appropriate handoffs to colleagues, but there was no clear end in sight. I can be patient but not idle, and I still needed to earn a living.
Meanwhile, I would become aware of a chorus of voices rising in my support. The Hispanic National Bar a.s.sociation lobbied the White House steadily and rallied gra.s.sroots support from other Latino organizations. If confirmed, I would be the first Hispanic federal judge in the state's history, a milestone the community ardently wished to achieve (Jose Cabranes had very nearly claimed the honor in 1979 but was simultaneously nominated for a judges.h.i.+p in Connecticut and chose to serve there instead, though much later he would take a New York seat on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals). Even before Senator Moynihan had settled on my name for the nomination, a veritable This Is Your Life cast of backers came forward: my fellow board members at PRLDEF, Bob Morgenthau and others at the DA's Office, Father O'Hare and colleagues on the Campaign Finance Board, lawyers I'd known through mutual clients. They wrote letters, made phone calls, and volunteered to make the sorts of informal appeals to colleagues that can be persuasive when echoing from many sides. I was astonished to see all the circles of my life telescoping on this one goal of mine, making it seem all the more as if everything until now had been a prelude to this moment.
Finally, on August 12, 1992, the U.S. Senate confirmed my nomination to the District Court for the Southern District of New York, the mother court, the oldest district court in the nation. The public induction ceremony followed in October. Though brief-perhaps all of five minutes-it was far from perfunctory. Every moment of it moved me deeply: donning the black robe, swearing solemnly to administer justice without respect to persons, equally to the poor and the rich, and to perform my duties under the Const.i.tution faithfully and impartially. So help me G.o.d. I took, for that occasion only, the traditional newcomer's seat between the chief judge, Charles Brieant, and Judge Constance Baker Motley, the next most senior of the estimable colleagues I was joining. Such ritual was profoundly humbling, signaling as it did the paramount importance of the judiciary as an inst.i.tution, above the significance of any individual, beyond the ups and downs of history. Whatever I had accomplished to arrive at this point, the role I was about to a.s.sume was vastly more important than I was.
The sense of having vaulted into an alternative reality was compounded by no less disorienting changes in my personal life. I moved to Manhattan, because I needed to live within the area of my jurisdiction. Dawn was appalled that I would shatter our neighborhood idyll on account of some minor rule, frequently bent. I feared she would never forgive me for abandoning her in Brooklyn, but for me there was a deep sense of honor at stake. I was becoming a judge! How could I not follow the rules? I don't claim to be flawless. I'm a New Yorker, and I jaywalk with the best of them. On more than one occasion I may have broken the speed limit. But at that moment in my life, my deep and rational respect for the law as the structure upholding our civilized society was tinted with a rosy glow of irrational emotion. I felt a sense of awe for the responsibility I was a.s.suming, and my determination to show it respect trumped even my loyalty to a wonderful neighborhood and the close company of dear friends.
My mother meanwhile had plans of her own. In what seemed a flight of wild impetuousness, more in keeping with the Celina who'd run off to join the army than the mother I'd known, she decided to move to Florida, leaving me to feel once more, perhaps irrationally for an adult and now a judge, the sting of her abandonment. She and Omar had gone there on vacation the Monday after my induction, and the next thing I knew, Mami was on the phone, telling me in a giddy voice that she'd rented an apartment.
Within days of their return to New York, the apartment in Co-op City was packed up. When the cartons were removed, I stood with Mami in the empty apartment, our voices bouncing off the scuffed walls, the hollowness echoing with so many years, amid a confluence of our tears and memories. We hugged, and then it was good-bye, Mami and Omar driving away.
Before they even reached Florida, I got a phone call from Puerto Rico: t.i.ti Aurora had died. She had gone there to move her husband to a nursing home-the second husband, who was even crazier than the first and who'd entangled her already hard life into still further knots of sadness and exhausting labor. This was not news I could break to Mami over the phone. I needed to get on the next flight to Miami and be with her when she heard it. t.i.ti had fought bitterly with Mami over the move to Florida. They squabbled often over all sorts of small things, but this had become a much deeper rift. To learn that death had cut off any possibility of reconciliation would, I well knew, cause Mami unbearable pain.
I marveled at how two such very different women could live so tightly bound to each other. Affection was not part of the recipe, nor was any emotional expression beyond their habit of snapping at each other. There was no confiding of secrets, no sharing of comfort visible to others. A lesson would emerge for me from their strange sisterhood: the persistence or failure of human relations.h.i.+ps cannot be predicted by any set of objective or universal criteria. We are all limited, highly imperfect beings, worthy in some dimensions, deficient in others, and if we would understand how any of our connections survive, we would do well to look first to what is good in each of us. t.i.ti could be disagreeable because her life had been harsh, but she lived it honorably, firmly grounded on a rock-solid foundation of personal ethics that I deeply admired. For her part, Mami, though more compa.s.sionate with strangers, brought to this relations.h.i.+p grat.i.tude beyond measure for mercy shown in hards.h.i.+p a very long time ago. It was a grat.i.tude time hadn't faded, and that too I deeply admired.
I rented a car at the airport and arrived at the unfamiliar apartment complex very late at night after getting lost, driving in tearful circles. My mother must have phoned Junior before I arrived; however it happened, when she opened the door, it was clear that the news had already reached her. She fell into my arms sobbing.
We traveled together to Puerto Rico to bury t.i.ti Aurora. I didn't break down until I was handed the envelope of cash that she had set aside with my name on it. We'd kept the old ritual: whenever she was going to Puerto Rico, I would lend her the money for the plane ticket. In recent years, I desperately wanted to give her the money, considering I could now afford it and she was living on Social Security. But she wouldn't have it: if she simply accepted the cash as a gift, she could never ask for it again, as, of course, she would surely need to.
Back in New York, I helped sort out the few wisps of a material life that t.i.ti had left behind. There was precious little for someone known to us as a pack rat. Most of what remained was a closetful of gifts that she couldn't bear to part with or to use.
”WHAT ARE YOU so scared of?” Theresa asked. ”What could possibly go wrong?” She had come with me from Pavia & Harcourt, her rea.s.suring presence in chambers perhaps the only thing keeping me tethered to any semblance of sanity. My first month as a judge I was terrified, in keeping with the usual pattern of self-doubt and ferocious compensatory effort that has always attended any major transition in my life. I wasn't scared of the work. Twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks, were normal for me. It was my own courtroom that scared me. The very thought of taking my seat on the bench induced a metaphysical panic. I still couldn't believe this had worked out as dreamed, and I felt myself almost an impostor meeting my fate so brazenly.