Digby, Attorney At Law

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After seven years of night study, Francis Michael Digby was graduated from the Rutgers School of Law, Newark, and some time thereafter, admitted to the New Jersey Bar. His modest ambition already spent, he hung his shingle outside a storefront below the cold-water flat in which he was born in 1927, some thirty-five years ago, and settled into the agreeable life of a small-town lawyer.

With his family providing references, Digby became the attorney of choice among the Narrows Gate Irish who hadn’t escaped when the piers and factories began to shutter. Often, he was asked to represent both parties to a grievance. Thus it was with the Rooneys.

“A cross I need not bear,” Mary Catherine Rooney summarized with a terse nod.

“Seeing as I’m pushed beyond the brink of dignity…” Leaky Rooney explained when he turned up at day’s end, surprisingly sober and equally resolute.

Though Leaky and Mary Catherine seemed opposites-he gray, wiry, and devilish, she blonde, stout, and considerate-they were of a like mind on the issue at hand: Divorce was the only solution. Both parties instructed Digby to draw up papers.

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