The Great Dissent by Thomas Healy

Author:Thomas Healy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

11

“Workers—Wake Up!”

The trip back to Washington was difficult. Fanny was still weak and easily fatigued, so Holmes made the preparations himself. He booked a stateroom on the Federal Express, sent their trunks to the station, and gave instructions to the servants for closing down the house. His hands trembled as he thought of everything that could go wrong, his old train fever coming on again. “My apprehensive mind has contrived a catastrophe,” he wrote to Baroness Moncheur on the morning of their departure. “I know it won’t happen but I need to assure myself that it hasn’t.” They stopped first in Boston, where Holmes paid a call on Nina Gray, then continued south, passing overnight through New York, Philadelphia, and Wilmington. The train was delayed as usual, and when they finally arrived in the capital they were forced to check into a hotel because Fanny lacked the strength to mount the stairs at home.

Over the next two days, while Fanny recuperated from the journey, Holmes worked in his study, digging through the piles of books and pamphlets that had accumulated over the summer. He was joined by his new secretary, a Harvard Law graduate named Stanley Morrison. With Frankfurter in Paris the previous spring, Holmes had asked Laski to recommend a man for the job. George Osborne, the president of the Law Review, was “passionately anxious to come,” Laski responded. But Osborne was lame, and Holmes decided that a man on crutches would not do (“though I grieve”). So the job went to Morrison, an editor on the Law Review and a first lieutenant in the army. He arrived at the house on the appointed morning, and the two men worked until dinnertime, filing the books Holmes wanted on his shelves and tossing the rest into the fireplace.

Brandeis stopped by in the midst of their labors, full of good cheer and news from the recess. Like Frankfurter, he had spent the summer overseas, traveling to Palestine as part of a Zionist delegation. It was his first trip to the Holy Land, and he talked excitedly about the experience. For his part, Holmes confessed that he had made little progress in his study of facts. What with Fanny’s illness and a delay in getting the proper reports, the whole project had simply been too much for him. He was sorry, he said, he had meant to do more. Brandeis waved off the apology. Gracious and understanding as always, he said not to give the matter another thought. And after he had left, Holmes reflected once more on the warmth and kindness of his friends.

But mostly he was glum. Even after he and Fanny moved back to the house, a sense of futility and despair hung over him. “I don’t feel the usual glow in getting back to my books and etchings,” he wrote to Laski. “It hardly seems as if I had been away—whether preoccupation, age or accident I don’t know.”

Detecting the note of pessimism in Holmes’s letter, Laski did his best to reassure him.

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