The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans - 7

The Honorable Judge James Landy

98 Dumbarton St. NW

Washington, DC 20007

September 3, 2012 (Labor Day)

Dear James,

First things first. How is Harry doing? In his last letter I did think he seemed awfully melancholy. It’s good you finally got the child a dog, but I think you also need to get him a different therapist than this Dr. Oliver. The man sounds dreadful. Are you certain he’s not a pedophile? And as a matter of fact, as long as we’re on the matter, you know I really don’t even think Harry needs a psychotherapist. Leave it to your generation to take someone who is absolutely brilliant and turn it into a problem.

Now I’m sure you heard, but in case you hadn’t, and in case you’ve gone down the toilet like the rest and are failing to maintain a proper newspaper subscription (IN PRINT, adequately edited, without the muck of advertisements blinking away) and only saw it on the internet, I’ve included the obituary. (Guy died over the weekend.) The article is a bit bland, watered down, evidently striving for the neutral language that won’t stir up one political spat or another, but the photo is nice with the courthouse in the background. I think it’s the same photo the papers ran when he retired. He looks very distinguished. Imagine, I thought him decrepit back then, HA, and now I’m almost the age he was.

I’d gone to see him oh, I don’t know, maybe a few months ago now. You know, I don’t typically travel. I go out to a few places, but I don’t journey. Bruce gave me a GPS system for my car last year and it even speaks to you. Do you have one of these? It’s very clever. You plug in an address and adhere the device to the windshield by suction cup, and the map moves along with you and the English voice says ‘turn left here, turn right in one hundred feet,’ so it would be easy for me to use it, but I don’t. I’m not sure why I don’t, but anyway the point is that I’d gone to visit him. (Guy, I’m talking about. He has been exclusively at his house on the bay there the last few years.) Had to drive across the Bay Bridge. I’ll say I hate to drive across the Bay Bridge. I always have. Four miles, so high up it makes you sick, I was gripping the wheel. Oh, my sons used to find it so funny, if we’d drive over for the day, how I couldn’t speak on that bridge. Anyway, he sat with me for about a half hour before he was tired out, and honestly most of his mind was already gone. It’s a hell of a thing, to lose one’s mental faculties. Guy never forgot a case, not ever, but then this series of strokes and a heart attack last year. You think of all the years, all the cases between us, this memory we shared. Honestly, I hated to go, it was very disturbing. When I first got to the house he was trying to hit on me like I was some call girl, although eventually the mists did seem to clear. He said something about the courthouse, so I knew he’d found his way back there in his mind. I was really going for Liz. I haven’t spoken to her since, but it was obvious he wouldn’t last much longer. Dear God, if I hope I don’t live to be ninety-three. A nightmare.

The Sun did a big spread about him yesterday and you’ll never believe it, but Alex Toole featured ME in her What Ever Happened To column (you cannot believe this): ‘What Ever Happened to Sybil Van Antwerp?’ You know I saw it there in print and I gasped. Honestly, the absurdity of it. Can you imagine? (I couldn’t have. Not in a million years. Absolutely absurd.) Journalist said she tried to contact me; she most certainly did not, but even if she had I would not have dignified it with a response. The thing is foolishness, but I bought a few extra copies of the paper to be able to send the obituary, et al., to the children, Felix, etc., so it’s enclosed here with the obit because I knew YOU would get a kick out of it.

How’s Marly? How are the girls? Harry said you’ll be traveling to Africa. You’ll need to make sure you have your proper vaccinations. How’s Washington? (Honestly, from my angle Washington is looking like a carnival on fire, but what else is new? I will say, it surprises me how much I like President Obama. He’s a wonderful speaker, I could listen to him read the phone book.) I’m fine. It’s been a nice summer. My dahlias are splendid, I am very pleased. And look, this is what I’ve been reduced to, an old woman writing with gardening reports while you crack on at the center of the world trying to keep the ship right.

It’ll be fine to see you, presuming you will be at the funeral. The paper says they are postponing the ceremony, which is, frankly, gauche. To leave the dead in limbo like that, but nobody is consulting my opinion.

Warm regards,

Sybil

Enclosure

The honorable Judge Guy D. Donnelly of Frederick, Maryland, and St. Michaels, Maryland, has died. Judge Donnelly will be well known to many after his twenty-eight-year service to the Circuit Court of Maryland in Frederick County (1971–1999), a sober, thoughtful man of very few words who ruled with a crystal-clear justice, respected by both sides of the line, a renowned feminist. In other words, a unicorn in modern times. He died in his home with two women at his side: his wife, Elizabeth, and his daughter, Nancy Louise (married name Young), but what ever became of the other woman in his life?

In all of my research into Donnelly and his history as a judge, there she is again and again, her name spoken in every interview; her initials on documents; her face there in sketches of the courtroom; her small frame, glasses, neat pumps, even, in a photo of the judge leaving the courtroom after the explosive case of the State of Maryland v. James Ross , a murder case that ascended to the national stage in 1982. Sybil Van Antwerp was well known to have served as Judge Donnelly’s chief clerk for almost thirty years. They retired on the same day in 1999, and there is very little information about who she was, outside of her position in relationship to the judge. She seems, as a matter of fact, to have disappeared into thin air.

Details known include: Van Antwerp graduated from law school at the University of Virginia (UVA), top of her class, in 1967, the year after the conclusion of the grueling, public Thackery Materials v. Harold Boyne case in which Guy Donnelly (then attorney in private practice) represented the victims. For reference, this was a case pertaining to asbestos used in naval ships as a fire retardant and the resulting asbestosis in hundreds of navy men decades after the conclusion of their service. Donnelly, now highly sought-after, with more work than he could manage, was looking for a partner, and a close friend of his, a former attorney and faculty at UVA Law, contacted Donnelly to suggest he bring on Sybil Van Antwerp with her acuity, disposition, and dogged work ethic.

Donnelly and Van Antwerp Legal was formed, and according to several people with whom I spoke, the pair shared a spark right off the bat. Sybil Van Antwerp, twenty years his junior, quickly became his collaborator. They worked hand in hand on every case. “It was like they shared a brain,” Elizabeth Donnelly said. “She was his sounding board, his voice of reason. She was his equal. His work wife, they used to call her. I didn’t mind; he needed her.”

In 1971 Guy Donnelly was appointed to the Circuit Court of Maryland in Frederick. Faced with the prospect of maintaining the firm they had built, finding a new partner or finding another firm in the midst of raising her three young children, Sybil Van Antwerp chose the fourth option. She went with him. She left the prestige of their firm and all that money, and fell in behind Donnelly as a lowly clerk. In a Washington Post article from the time, the journalist mentioned contacting Van Antwerp for comment and getting her refusal. They closed the firm in short order and she followed Donnelly to the courts as his chief clerk.

“Everyone was shocked,” Watts Doyle, principal attorney at the firm Ridley, Doyle, Mack & Loughlin and a friend of Donnelly’s and Van Antwerp’s said when I reached him by phone in Key Largo, where he is spending his retirement. “It just wasn’t done. As a clerk you didn’t make any money, and she was very successful by then. It really surprised us. Everyone, I mean. But in some ways, it didn’t. You really couldn’t imagine them ever splitting up. Butch and Sundance.” And later, “An opinion from them—it’d be as clean and neat as a pin. If you sat with them for even a short time, you could see they were intellectual counterparts. They were a closed circuit. A duo. He respected her more than he respected anyone else. People used to say if she’d have been a man, she’d have been the judge. She was brilliant.”

As we reflect upon the tremendous life and work of Judge Guy D. Donnelly, I cannot help but wonder after his lionized clerk. What was the full extent of their partnership, and furthermore, as charming as this perfected collaboration sounds, as idyllic, is a judgeship a position meant to be shared? Or, rather, is not this the nature of the concept of judicial installment, the entrusting of sentencing to an elected or appointed individual ?

Van Antwerp disappears from the public record after her retirement, though it is purported she lives in or near Annapolis, Maryland. I sought a way to reach her, extending every resource, and found no phone number or email address.