Every year, a few days after the school year ended, he would see us off at the station when we started the overnight train trip to The City. That is what my mother always called it, the place where she had been born and raised, the place where she had met my father when he was still a student. The City. Everyone who ever lived there, everyone who lives there now, calls it that and looks at you like there is something a little wrong with you if you do not immediately understand they are talking about San Francisco.

We went there every summer. We stayed with my aunt-my mother's sister, made a widow by the war-and, without anyplace to play outside, I spent most of my time indoors. The only fun I had was when my cousin Bobby, three years older, took pity on me and let me go somewhere with him. Sometimes, after my mother, all dressed up, tucked me in and said good night and then went somewhere with my aunt, Bobby and I would sneak down the back stairs and wander around the streets, watching through windows at what went on in the neighborhood bars. Once we followed two sailors and the two women they had picked up to their car and waited until the windows started to steam up. That's when we were supposed to bang on the car door and then run as fast as we could. We crouched down, just below the passenger-side window. Bobby raised his head just enough to see inside. He turned away, an angry, frightened look on his face, grabbed me by the shoulder, and, pulling me behind him, ran up the street. He never told me what he had seen, and he thought I was still too young to guess.

We kept going there, to the city, my mother and I, summer after summer, and sometimes Christmas as well, until I started high school. My mother still visited her sister, but for only a few weeks at a time, whether because she missed me or was afraid of what other people might think, I'm not sure even she could have said. Not truthfully, anyway. My mother was never one to flaunt convention, not when she was so good at deception. It is one of the things I inherited from her, this talent for appearances, this need to believe that all my transgressions are forgivable because they are somehow always the fault of someone else.

She had done what she had to and had done it as long as she could. I was finished with school and had become a lawyer. She would have preferred that I had become a doctor, but if I could not do that for her, at least I could have joined a Wall Street firm. Night school lawyers became sole practitioners willing to take any criminal case they could get, but not graduates of Harvard Law School.

She was telling me all this while she packed her things, getting ready to leave for the last time, measuring her martyrdom by the almost willful defiance with which I had disappointed her expectations. Without the advantages of a Harvard education, she reminded me with no little irritation, my cousin had become a junior partner in one of the most prestigious firms in San Francisco. It was the last thing I wanted to talk about and the only thing she had on her mind. Everything was Bobby, and how well he had done, and how she had always known I could do even better. It was only because of the example of my father, she insisted, that I had never developed the right kind of ambition.

She was talking out loud, and I was standing right there in front of her, but she was really talking to herself, and the more she did, the more worked up she became. She had told me without any apparent regret she had married my father because she was pregnant with me; now, wondering why she had done it at all, she told me she should have waited until my real father was divorced and married him instead.

It seems strange when I think about it now, but at the moment she said it, I did not care if it was true or not; I only cared that my father, the only father I had ever known, did not know. When she said that she had not told him and never would, I was almost grateful that she had chosen to tell me instead.

We never spoke again about what had been said the day she left. If she made some passing reference to my father in the years that followed, I never detected even a hint of irony in the way she used the word. It would have been like her to have forgotten that she had ever said anything to me about my own illegitimacy. She had a remarkable capacity for putting out of mind things she found unpleasant.

If she had any purpose in what she said to me the day she left, I suppose it might have been to convince me that my lack of ambition was not an inherited trait beyond my power to change. It was astonishing how little she knew me: I had more ambition than she imagined, though not for the kind of things she prized. I certainly had no desire to end up like my cousin, a lawyer who made his living advising the wealthy how to take advantage of every legal loophole in the tax code, a lawyer who had never tried a case and never would. Yet I could not blame her for thinking what she did. When we were growing up, he was everything I thought I wanted to be and was afraid I could never become. Bobby was an all-league running back on one of the best high school football teams in California; I was last string on the freshman team at a high school no one outside Portland had ever heard of. The year he became an All-American at the University of California, I finally made the high school varsity. Bobby was always surrounded by people who wanted to be his friend and girls who wanted to go out with him; I was uncomfortable around people I did not know very well and even at that age far too intense, and far too secretive, to devote any time to making any friends of my own.

We seldom saw each other after my mother stopped taking me to San Francisco for the summer, but from a distance I followed at least the major events of his life. He invited me to his wedding when he got married his senior year at Cal, but I was still a freshman at the University of Michigan and it was much too far to go. I had not seen him for almost twenty years when his wife died of cancer and I flew down for the funeral. A few weeks later, he sent me a handwritten note thanking me for coming and expressing the hope that we would see each other more often. A year later we had dinner together in San Francisco while I was in the city trying a case in federal district court. That was nearly two years ago. I did not hear from him again until he called and asked me if I might be willing to talk to his partner about taking a case. It was a case that every defense attorney in the country would have given anything to get.

Since the night it happened, the murder of Jeremy Fullerton in a parked car on a San Francisco street had been the only case anyone could talk about. The murder of a United States senator was bound to be news, but Fullerton had also been the Democratic candidate for governor of California. What made it even more interesting, Fullerton, according to all the stories now being written, had only been running for governor because he thought it was his best chance to become president.

Bobby explained to me that the police had made an arrest but that his partner, Albert Craven, seemed convinced they must have made a mistake. Even if they were not mistaken, Craven had known the mother of the suspect for a long time. He had promised to do everything he could to find a lawyer who could help.

"That shouldn't be difficult," I remarked. "This is the kind of case that can make a career. It's once-in-a-lifetime. Lawyers will be lining up to take this case, begging to take it."

"Nobody in the city will touch it," replied Bobby. It made no sense. Whoever took this case would be famous. Something was not right.

"Albert promised her he'd get her son one of the best."

I remembered the way I had looked up to him when we were kids, and how I had wanted to be just like him. I wondered if he had thought about that when he called and if he knew that just by saying he thought I was one of the best I would like him even more. I listened to him tell me that there were probably half a dozen lawyers in the city who could do it but that they were all afraid of the possible repercussions.

"Repercussions?" I asked automatically when he paused. It did not matter to me what they might be.

The following Monday morning I watched out the window as the plane from Portland began its descent into San Francisco. They were right to call it The City. It had always drawn everything toward it. Before the bridges were built, before the Golden Gate connected the north shore and the Bay Bridge connected the east, millions of people were ferried back and forth every year. After the bridges were built, millions more came by car and by bus and by train. Everyone wanted to be here, but the city, rising up at the end of the narrow peninsula that jutted out between the ocean and the bay, could never become larger than it was. The great light-blocking buildings of Manhattan could never be built where at any moment a slight shift in the fault that ran miles below the surface could lay the whole city in ruins, the way it had once before. That earthquake, the one that happened in 1906, the one that seemed to destroy everything, had saved it from a more permanent form of destruction.

Other cities kept growing, outward, upward, each new monotonous glass building crushing out everything that was individual and unique in a relentless march toward an amorphous gray efficiency. San Francisco, no matter how long you had been away, no matter how much you might have changed, was still the place you had always dreamed about, still the place that was just the way it had been the last time you were here, even if you had never been here before in your life. But the city, at least the part you saw with your eyes, had begun to change. With the same unstoppable ingenuity that threw bridges over miles of open, treacherous water, skyscrapers were brought to the city, built on enormous steel coils to absorb the shocks that would otherwise bring them down. When the next big earthquake hit, the skyscrapers swayed from side to side, but the buildings that were destroyed were the old ones built of wood and cement. Searching the skyline, down the hillside to the water's edge, buried behind blocks of glass and steel, I caught a glimpse of the clock tower on the Ferry Building. It did not seem that long ago that it was the tallest building in town.

Bobby was there when I landed, an eager smile stretched across his mouth as he waited off to the side of the crowd. There was something about the way he held himself, the way his shoulders hunched slightly forward, the way he kept his feet spread apart, the way his blue eyes were in constant movement, seeing everything around him, alert, ready for whatever came next, that made him seem like he was already in motion before he had taken a step. It was only when he was in motion that he did not seem to be moving at all.

He insisted on carrying my bag. When we stepped outside the terminal into the balmy California air, he raised his head, looked around for a moment, then waved his hand. I thought he was signaling for a cab; instead, a limousine, which had been waiting a half block away, pulled up to the curb.

I settled into the back seat, across from Bobby. He looked different now, older, with the first touch of gray in his hair and the first telltale lines at the corners of his eyes. The smile still flashed, quick and alert, but it was a little dimmer, like a light that almost imperceptibly had begun to fade.

"It was good of you to come," he remarked as he turned away from the driver, to whom he had just given instructions. "I know it's an imposition, and I appreciate it."

His voice was as clear as ever, but he spoke a little more slowly than the way I had remembered.

"It's not an imposition at all," I told him. "Whether or not I take the case, I'm glad you thought of me."

He shook his head emphatically, as if it were for some reason important that I understand I was wrong about that.

"No, this wasn't my idea. Albert Craven asked me to call you. He's done a lot for me, and he never asks me for anything. That's the only reason I did it: because I couldn't think of a decent way to say no. But I made it clear to him that while I was willing to ask you to talk to him, I wouldn't ask you to take the case. It's up to you whether you do it or not. And if you decide not to, that's all right. You don't owe Albert anything; and you don't me anything, either. Okay?"

Suddenly it was right there in front of us, gleaming in the golden light, sweeping down across the hills toward the bay. The City.

Bobby saw the look in my eye. "Ever think about living here?"

I shook my head. "I think I'd miss the rain," I said with a lying smile.

Leaving the freeway, the limousine began to crawl through the city streets.

"You said something on the phone about repercussions. You said none of the lawyers here were willing to take the case. And now you've just finished telling me in no uncertain terms that you're not asking me to take the case. What's the reason no one wants to be involved in this? Is it because Fullerton was a United States senator who wanted to be president, and, from what I hear, had a pretty good chance of doing it?"

It was not the reaction I expected. Bobby laughed, and then he sighed.

"It doesn't have anything to do with Fullerton-not directly, anyway. You won't find many people-people who actually knew him-who are all that upset that he's dead." We pulled up in front of a dark gray stone facade in the heart of the financial district, where the firm of Craven, Morris and Hall had established their offices long before any of the new skyscrapers had been built. The firm had grown with the city. Many of the small banks and businesses that had retained its services in the beginning had become major financial institutions and international corporations. Fees, which had been barely large enough to cover the monthly overhead, had gradually become enormous, and the original three partners, nearly destitute when they first started, had become wealthier than they had ever dared dream.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Legacy by D. W. Buffa Copyright © 2002 by D. W. Buffa. Excerpted by permission.
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