"Coming In with Their Hands Up"

Joseph Epstein's story, "Coming In with Their Hands Up," is quite different from the Hemingway and Faulkner stories that we've read. First of all, it's quite obvious, straightforward, and sincere. In the beginning, we get a nice little trick, when the narrator describes how he is listening to two people standing in line and talking about this fellow Allen Bernstein. And then suddenly we get a surprise: "I'm Allen Bernstein." It's a nice trick, and it also tells us something important about the narrator. His reaction after listening to other people talking about him is not surprise, as it would be for most of us. He is calm and self-satisfied. We have a sense that he is accustomed to being talked about, maybe even that he is famous in some way.

After this opening, the narrator tells us the story of his career. The tone is straightforward because the narrator's main concern is with making money. He is hungry for success; he wants to be rich. Maybe this is just like us? And then he tells us about the people he gets to know in his job as a divorce lawyer. We can see that he doesn't really enjoy his job, especially when he tells us the story of the woman who wants to divorce her husband because he looks funny when he is not wearing his glasses.

Surprisingly, the narrator doesn't tell us about his own feelings of guilt here, even though he sees that the woman is wrong to want a divorce. He simply says, "I was able to get her just about everything she wanted... Poor Howard, I assume, recovered..." But isn't this assumption a little too easy? Isn't the narrator thinking that the husband is all right because this helps him not to feel guilty? Isn't he trying to hide the fact--from himself, or from us, or both--that he has just helped a woman to take a lot of money away from a man for no good reason?

I think we skipped an important paragraph at the bottom of page 225 where the narrator's character really comes out. At the top of the next page we read: "There's only one point, winning, which means getting your clients what they want, and making them pay you well for it." There is only one point, one goal, one purpose: to win. But where is the sense of right and wrong, where is the moral sense? For this guy, it seems to be absent.

And then, suddenly, immediately after describing his rather empty philosophy of life, the narrator tells us about how he got married. He is aware that it is ironic for him, as a divorce lawyer, to marry. And he says that he keeps his wedding private and quiet, because it would be "bad for business" if a lot of people found out about it. But he is not very much bothered by this contradiction, this conflict, between what he does in his job and what he expects at home.

And then, suddenly, we get a bomb of a surprise in the last couple of paragraphs of the story. Bernstein decides to divorce his wife... because he loves her. I finished the class last week proposing that we have a good example of poetic justice here. "Poetic justice" is just a fancy term for a story which shows that justice exists, that people get what they deserve. And the justice here is that this fellow, who has done so much to help other people break up their marriages, cannot keep his own marriage. But some other people that have read this story may have a different opinion. They may say that it is wrong for this guy to leave his wife the way he does. It seems that she wants to stay married because this is more important for her than having children--but Bernstein assumes that he knows what is good for her better than she knows it herself. What do you people think?