up, what counts as a family, and, in a quiet but stubborn subtext, whether the ability to pay for good dentistry enhances a legal claim to be something more than a godmother. The case was the first of its kind in the city. “It’s as if you gave me the keys to your apartment and, suddenly, I’m saying, ‘The apartment is mine,’ ” Hamilton told me, bleakly, last fall. “What the fuck? Where does it end?” Her life had been put on hold, and her possessions were stuck in a shipping warehouse in New Jersey. Abush had returned to school; Hamilton couldn’t take him out of state without permission. The court had allotted Gunn time with Abush on Sundays and on Thursday afternoons. Several times a week for months, Hamilton and Gunn sat a few feet from each other in a bright, shabby courtroom, at 80 Centre Street. A sign on the wall noted that “loud and angry words generally indicate a weak argument,” but the white noise of the city, through open windows, risked drowning out any form of speech gentler than a reprimand. Abush was not in the courtroom, but visitors in the public seats sometimes glimpsed his image when attorneys looked at e-mail printouts with photo attachments: a smiling boy with big eyes and a high forehead, playing with a dog or being held in the air. If Gunn had filed her petition even a few days earlier, it might well have been quickly dismissed, and Abush would have spent Christmas in Oxfordshire. But Gunn came to court just after New York had expanded the definition of who counts as a parent. On September 8th, when Judge Frank Nervo began hearing the case, he understood—as did the halfdozen attorneys in front of him, and the wider community of family lawyers— that Gunn’s petition would help set the limits of that expansion. If Gunn won the case, this would create a striking precedent. Her supporters would laud the court for having restrained a woman who, with blithe unilateralism, had attempted to put an ocean between a small boy and one of his mothers. Supporters of Hamilton would see presumption rewarded; to them, a Gunn victory would suggest that legal chutzpah, and the funds to pay for it, could convert the desire to be a parent into the fact of being one. In New York City, in particular,
¥ where improvised extended families are commonplace, such a ruling would risk emboldening people who, having been invited into the lives of single parents, then object to being asked to leave: neighbors, babysitters, childless friends, siblings, flings. ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ 2016,” Nancy “ I t’sChemtob told me, over a drink, in October. “It’s wild.” She had the air of a morning-news anchor after a few cups of coffee. The litigation was in its second month. Chemtob hadn’t taken a day off since the summer. In court, she could be oddly playful. Several times, after fractious exchanges between her and Hamilton’s lead attorney, Bonnie Rabin, of Cohen Rabin Stine Schumann, she asked me, in mock-exhaustion, “Do you want to take over?” Chemtob’s informal style sometimes surprised Hamilton’s lawyers, who maintained a more scholarly air. One of Rabin’s colleagues told me that she’d never before seen the phrase “the bun was in the oven” in a legal memo. During the proceedings, Rabin, whose firm frequently handles L.G.B.T. cases, often struck a pose of speechless astonishment at what she was obliged to hear from the other side.
¥ By the time Chemtob met with me, Gunn had spent eleven days on the witness stand. Chemtob recalled a recent conference in Judge Nervo’s chambers, in which he addressed both sets of lawyers and protested that the slow-moving case was creating a backlog. “He was really sweet,” she said. “He was ‘Look, I’d love to be on the front page of the Law Journal, but I’d also love this case to be over. Why don’t we, instead of making law, just see how we can get both to settle?’ ” But under New York law there’s no legal middle ground between being a parent and not being one. Neither party was likely to settle, and, whatever the Judge’s ruling, an appeal was inevitable. Chemtob, confident in her case and aware of Gunn’s financial advantage, had repeatedly urged Rabin to “throw in the towel.” Chemtob mentioned a recent client, a financier who had impregnated a woman he met on Ashley Madison, a Web site for people seeking extramarital affairs; he did not want to support their child. Boys in fourth grade, Chemtob said, should be taught that “if you ever have sex you need to flush the condom down the toilet.” She also recalled how she took Gunn’s case. An acquaintance, Jane Aronson—a pediatrician who THE NEW YORKER, MAY 22, 2017
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