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“Really? An assistant D.A.?” Ben had asked, genuinely surprised. “Good-looking blondes don’t come to mind when I hear that term.”
“On the other hand, you do look like a doctor,” Eileen heard herself say, adding quickly, “What kind?”
“Chest-cutter,” Ben had said. “Thoracic surgeon. What do you mean, I look like a doctor?”
“Your eyes,” Eileen said. “You have intelligent, kind eyes.”
When she heard what she had said, she blushed.
“So do you,” Ben had said, softly, after a minute. “Can I buy you breakfast?”
“Breakfast?”
“And lunch, and dinner, and whatever else you want to eat for the rest of your life?”
“You’re sure you haven’t been drinking?”
“I don’t drink,” he said. “If I sound a little strange, I was at the table all night-until about an hour ago. And then I met you.”
Benjamin Solomon, M.D., and Eileen McNamara, L.L.D., were united in matrimony not quite a month later, which caused varying degrees of joy and despair within their respective Eastern European Hebraic and Irish Roman Catholic communities.
They had been married three years when Eileen told Ben the strangest thing had happened the previous afternoon. She had been asked if she would be interested in running for judge in a special election called by the governor to fill two vacancies caused by the incarceration of two incumbent jurists.
“I think you should,” Ben had said after a moment. “You’ve been on both sides of the fence, and I think you’d do a good job straddling the middle. And you already have the name. Judge Solomon the Second.”
She won the election handily, primarily, she believed, because nobody had ever heard of her, and there was general contempt for those whose names were known to the voters.
And she liked the bench, at least trying to keep things fair and just.
They hadn’t been able to have children-Ben’s fault, the gynecologists said, probably because he’d worn Jockey shorts all of his life-and she really regretted that. But she told herself that a child whose parents both had independent careers could not have gotten the attention it deserved, and that made being childless a little easier to bear.
She had been on the bench six years when a delegation of pols came to her and proposed that she run for district attorney. The incumbent had been elected to Congress. Her service as an assistant D.A. and her six years on the bench had taught her that there was considerable room for improvement in the Office of the District Attorney.
She talked the offer over with Ben. She was sure that she would make a hell of a good D.A., but she hadn’t been at all sure that she could win, and if she lost, she would be out of a job. She couldn’t run for reelection to the bench and for D.A. at the same time.
Ben said she should give it a shot; she would always regret it later if she didn’t. And, Ben said, it wasn’t as if they were going to have to sell the dog to make the car payments if she found herself unemployed. That was a reference to the fact that Ben’s scalpel earned more than ten times as much money for them as the government paid her to wield her gavel.
She ran, and won with fifty-two percent of the vote. The first time she ran for reelection, she got fifty-eight percent, and the last time, she’d garnered sixty-seven percent of the vote.
Eileen McNamara Solomon had two cellular telephones, which, when she was there, she placed in rechargers on her desk beside the office phone with all its buttons. One of the cellulars, which buzzed when called, was her official phone. She made herself available with it around-the-clock.
The second Nokia cellular had a green face, and when it was called, it played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” This was her private line, its number known to very few people. It had been a gift from Ben, who said that, believe it or not, he had a busy schedule, too, and didn’t like to be put on hold.
When the green phone began to play “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” she thought it was probably Ben, and wondered if he was about to ask her to lunch.
“Hi,” she said to the telephone.
“You busy, Eileen?” a female voice inquired. She knew the voice.
“Never too busy for you, Martha. How are you?”
Eileen McNamara and Martha Peebles had met in Art Appreciation 101 at the University of Pennsylvania, and the tall, then sort of skinny eighteen-year-old Irish girl and the seventeen-year-old slight, short WASP with an acne condition had been immediately comfortable with each other.
Eileen had told Martha all about her family, then taken her home to meet “King Kong”-her brother-and her father, both bricklaying subcontractors, and her mother. Martha had been visibly reluctant to talk about her family, except to say that her mother had died and she lived with her father and brother, who was a would-be actor.
Martha had not offered to take Eileen home with her, and Eileen wondered if she was maybe ashamed of her father, or her home, and went out of her way to make sure Martha understood she didn’t care if her father “had problems” or what her house looked like, or how much money there was.
It was four months before Martha finally took Eileen
