Taking no pains to conceal the immensity of his accumulated weariness even on the morning of the first day of the week, sometime around 10:00 when he was 'good and ready," he would take his place in his tall black chair behind the bench in Canterbury Courtroom 1. There as usual he would regard Merrion, whatever news that he came bearing, and the world and his own place in it the same way he had gradually come to view nearly everything: disapprovingly, usually powerlessly, with what he intended to convey as quiet resignation bordering on noble endurance.
"If you saw him you'd have no trouble believing he's the judge who's been sitting the longest. He looks it," Merrion would say, when Cavanaugh's occasionally-puzzling, sometimes-intemperate behavior on the bench came up in conversation. "He looks like it's been damned hard work, too; like it hasn't been easy for him. He doesn't look as though what he's been doing all these years's been a job that involved the use of his brain which a lot of times, he'll tell you, it hasn't.
"That's just the way they write it up." He looks like it's been heavy lifting. Hods of brick. Or he had to wear a wooden yoke, like they put on oxen, throw his shoulders into it all day, move a lot of heavy weights from here to over there. And then come in tomorrow and drag 'em back again. But he says he wont retire until they make him."
Cavanaugh had been appointed an associate justice of the Canterbury District Court in 1958 at the age of twenty-nine. Like many lawyers he had in his student days begun to harbor an ambition to become a judge, seeing the judicial selection as official validation of professional distinction. But in 1958 his career history although bright was rather short. His student days were not yet six years behind him. His resume recorded two years in the army's Judge Advocate General's corps discharging the ROTC obligation he had undertaken both to avoid the draft during his years at the College of the Holy Cross and then at Fordham Law School and for the Army Reserve pay that helped to subsidize the education and four years teaching commercial law at Northeastern Law School. He had also begun to lay the foundation of a money-making outside practice; he was Of Counsel to a seven-lawyer Boston firm specializing in corporate law. He had published two ponderous scholarly articles in the Hastings Law Journal on provisions proposed for inclusion in Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code:
Secured Transactions. They had been cited favorably by two obscure commissions established by state legislatures considering the UCC; the Maryland commission had invited him to contribute two days of expert testimony, paying his expenses and a consulting fee of $1,200.
He had thus positioned himself nicely to make a lot of money when the day at last arrived as it did, a decade later when the UCC governed almost all business transacted in the United States; all he had to do was persist in the same fashion and his measured opinions about what the new law really meant and actually allowed 'would carry considerable weight," a euphemism lawyers use for 'worth big money."
In those days when he now and then allowed his mind to stray from productive thought and muse about his career, he usually thought ruefully about the time, energy and passion that his work was taking from his days and many nights, and wondered guiltily whether what was left for his wife, Julia, and their three young children was truly adequate. They were building a good life for themselves in their new Royal Barry Wills-designed colonial-reproduction home in Sudbury the Maryland consulting fee had really boosted their hopes that soon they'd actually be able to afford it and he was quite content with the progress he had made, reasonably sure that he had made full use of his time, intelligence, education and good fortune. His only real uneasiness came from his awareness that he was selfish, neglecting his family by working too hard, too many hours, as much because he revelled in it, knowing that he did it well, as because it was a dead-certain lock to lead to his advancement and the enrichment they would share. He soothed his conscience by telling himself that a young matron who insisted on a custom home in a wealthy suburb and started making Ivy League plans for her children before delivering them assumed the risk of spousal inattention.
So, unlike most prospective judges inwardly rejoicing but striving mightily to blush when their appointments are at last announced, Leonard Cavanaugh when singled out had not considered, wanted, sought or anticipated nomination to the bench in Canterbury, a town that he had never visited or any other judicial nomination for that matter, that soon. Consequently he was not prepared to evaluate the development carefully, in order to decide calmly what he ought to do.
