The Emperor of Ocean Park (12 page)

Even after all these years, knowing that the committee might have been right does nothing to assuage the pain of my father’s disgrace. Strangers accost me at conferences:
Aren’t you Oliver Garland’s son?
I mutter banalities through thick curtains of red and flee as quickly as I can. So it is just as well that I do not accompany Kimmer on her Washington rounds; my pain would hinder her and, in the end, might injure her. Besides, Bentley and I have made other plans for the day. In a little while, we will head over to Shepard Street and then off with Mariah and her crew for a morning of in-line skating at some suburban rollerdrome. Miles Madison, whose professional life now consists of occasional conversations with the managers of his various properties, has left for the golf course, despite the rainy weather. “If they can’t play golf,” sighs Vera Madison, “they’ll just play cards and drink all day.” My mother-in-law, who always asks me to address her by her first name, has all of Kimmer’s handsomeness and height but is a good deal thinner; my wife’s breadth comes from the Colonel, who has grown buttery since his retirement, and who, on his good days, allows me to call him Mr. Madison. Vera has offered to watch Bentley if I need to talk to my sister. I decline. I am keeping my son very close to me until I figure out what Uncle Jack was talking about. Probably nothing, but still. I have not yet told Kimmer, unsure how she will react, but when I asked her before she left this morning to please be careful, she looked at me hard—Kimmer misses little—and then kissed me lightly on the lips and
said, “Oh, I will, Misha, I will.” I was smiling at Kimmer when she walked out into the cold morning drizzle. She was smiling too, probably in anticipation of her day.

Kimmer headed into town in her mother’s midnight-blue Cadillac, so Bentley and I take the rental car—a prosaic white Taurus—for the five-minute drive down Sixteenth Street to Shepard. Our journey takes us through the heart of the Gold Coast, a lovely corner of Northwest Washington where, over the middle decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of lawyers and physicians and businessmen and professors of the darker nation created an idyllic and sheltered community for their families in the midst of racial segregation. The lots tend to be large, the lawns manicured to perfection, and the houses spacious and beautifully furnished; in the white suburbs, they would sell for double or triple their value in the city. On the other hand, the ritzy black enclave of the Gold Coast might be integrating: Jay Rockefeller, for example, now lives on a vast estate that sprawls from just beyond Shepard Street down to Rock Creek Park. Perhaps for aesthetic balance, many rising black professionals who would once have purchased homes here are now busily integrating the suburbs.

Stopping briefly for a red light, I peek at my son in the rearview mirror. Bentley is a good-looking boy. He has my thick black hair, pointy chin, and deep chocolate skin, along with his mother’s huge brown eyes, striking eyebrows, and full lips. He is also a quiet and very serious child, given to shyness around others and introspection when alone. Our son talked late: so late that we consulted pediatricians and even a pediatric neurologist—some friend of some cousin of Kimmer’s—all of whom assured us that, although most children have spoken a few words midway through their second year, and some much earlier, it is neither unusual nor a sign of an impending mental deficiency for a child to start talking later. Just wait it out, everybody told us. And Bentley made us wait. Now, half a year past his third birthday, he has begun to babble in that peculiar mixture of proper English and mysterious prelinguistic code that so many toddlers discover shortly after turning one. He is talking it now, sternly lecturing his new dog, fiery orange and filled with stuffing, a gift from Addison, who never misses a chance to create a fan: “And no and doggie no said no cause Mama red you uh-oh doggie bad okay go home now go no no dare doggie Mama no no said dare okay no no okay dare doggie bad dare you . . .”

I interrupt this string of gorgeous gibberish:

“You okay, buddy?”

My son shuts up and eyes me warily, his pudgy hands clutching the yet unnamed dog as though he fears it might disappear.

“Dare doggie,” he whispers.

“Right.”

“Dare
you!”
he bursts out happily, for he adds new words and phrases just about daily. I wonder which television show he picked this line up from. “Dare
don’t!”

“Okay, buddy. I love you.”

“Wuv you. Dare you.”

“Dare you, too,” I answer, but this only puzzles him, and his laughter subsides into uneasy silence.

I shake my head. Sometimes Bentley makes us uneasy, too—Kimmer especially. She spoils him hopelessly, unable to bear his unhappiness for an instant, because she has always blamed herself for whatever is wrong with our son, if, indeed, anything is. His first morning outside the womb swung rapidly from exhilarating to terrifying. Laboring in one of the brightly colored birthing rooms at the university hospital’s sparkling maternity wing, pressing down when ordered, holding back on request, working on her breathing, doing all of it exactly right in typically splendid Kimmer fashion, my wife suddenly started to bleed very heavily, even though the baby’s head had hardly crowned. I watched in amazement as the white sheets and green hospital gown turned bright, viscous red. The jolly, encouraging midwife who had been supervising the event all at once lost her jolliness and stopped encouraging. From my coaching perch on a wooden stool, I asked if everything was all right. The midwife hesitated, then offered me a wobbly smile and said that pregnant women can easily afford to lose a lot of blood, because their blood supply doubles. But she also whispered to a second nurse, who hurried from the room. The bleeding continued, a coppery red sea, as the midwife tried to deliver the baby’s head. Her gloved hands slipped and she cursed. Kimmer felt things going awry, then looked down and saw all the blood and screamed in terror, which I had never heard before and have never heard since. I had never seen so much blood either. Our baby’s little head was awash in it. The fetal monitor began braying a series of desperate objections. A doctor I had never seen before materialized to replace the midwife. She took a quick look and barked a series of swift orders; without further conversation, I was pressed physically from the room by two nurses as a phalanx of blue
gowns converged on the bed, leaving me all alone in the modern, soulless waiting area to contemplate the possibility that I would lose both wife and son on what should have been the happiest day of my life.

Kimmer, it later turned out, was suffering from abruptio placentae, a premature separation of the uterine lining, similar to a menstrual period, but often deadly when one is carrying a late-term child; more specifically, as we were later told, Kimmer suffered a rupture of the myometrium, which might easily have been fatal, for she could have bled to death and our baby could have asphyxiated. To this day, my wife believes the condition was brought on by her continuing to drink during pregnancy, for she scoffed at claims that her personal habits could possibly do the baby (or fetus, as she called our child growing inside her) any harm. If her fears are true, then I must share the blame, not because I am a drinker—I am not—but because I have never been strong where Kimmer is concerned. After she thrice angrily ignored my nervous entreaties, I gave up trying to stop her. The first few hours of our son’s life were harrowing: there was a chance, the doctors told us, stone-faced, that we might lose him. And Kimmer herself needed treatment for the blood she’d lost. A day or so later, when everybody turned out alive after all, my wife and I knelt in prayer, the last time we have done so outside of a church, thanking a God we have usually ignored.

Bentley, I believe, was God’s answer.

Yet our son’s birth also marks the point from which our marriage began its downhill slide. Today, my wife and I live together on uneasy terms. There are things she does not want to know and things she wants me not to know. If she is out of town, for instance, she calls me, not the other way around. Only in emergencies do I dare break the rules. When Mallory Corcoran called on Thursday afternoon to tell me my father had died, I checked our home answering machine by remote to see whether my wife had called. She had not. I immediately tried her at her hotel in San Francisco. She was out. I called her cell phone. It was turned off. I picked up Bentley from day care, explained to him solemnly what had happened to his grandfather, then returned to our house and tried again. She was still out. I called for hours, until midnight in the West—3 a.m. in Elm Harbor—and Kimmer was always out. Finally, in a burst of dreadful inspiration, I called the hotel again and asked for Gerald Nathanson. Jerry was in his room. He was nervous. The work was still going on, he told me. He did not know where my wife was, but he was sure she was safe. He promised to have her call if he ran into her. She called me ten minutes later. I never asked from where.

(II)

A
T SHEPARD STREET
, the door is opened by Cousin Sally, who is skipping work this morning in order to sit in my father’s kitchen torturing my sister with dubious stories from our shared childhoods. Sally smothers me in those powerful arms, which is the way she greets just about everybody, but Addison in particular. Inside the house, smooth jazz is playing: Grover Washington, I think.

Bentley shrieks at his first sight of little Martin and Martina, who are, as usual, hand in hand. Within minutes, my son has joined the younger members of my sister’s posse in some complicated game that has them trooping through the house in a dignified line, led by Marcus, the youngest, touching one and exactly one piece of furniture in each room before proceeding to the next, then reversing course and doing the same backward. I find Mariah and Just Alma in the twin wicker rocking chairs on the back porch. Alma, a Kool protruding jauntily from her mouth, grins in what could be delight, and Mariah allows me to kiss her cheek. Alma seems to be at the tail end of one of her raunchy stories, as well as her energy: she has to be going, she says, explaining for my benefit that one of her granddaughters will be along any minute to drive her back to Philadelphia. As she stands up, Alma pulls one of her famous tricks, squeezing the tip of the cigarette to put it out, then slipping it into the pocket of her cardigan.

I nod at the empty rocker, and Sally, reading my signal, takes Just Alma’s seat. I then walk with Alma into the house. In the foyer, while she hunts for her coat, I ask her casually what she meant when she said the other day that
they
would let me know about the plans my father had made for me.

Alma’s wise old eyes move in her dark face, but she does not quite look at me. “It ain’t nothin to do with me,” she murmurs after a moment.

I haven’t a clue what she is talking about, and I say so.

“Ain’t no
they,
” she explains as I help her into her coat. “Just you and your family.”

“Alma . . .”

“Your job is to take care of the family.”

The honking of a horn announces the arrival of her granddaughter, who is, like quite a few of the numberless cousins, too young to consider the possibility that one should try to be polite, even the day after a funeral.

“Gotta go,” Alma informs me.

“Alma, wait a second. Wait.”

She is walking away from me, but her voice floats over her shoulder. “If your daddy has plans, he’ll tell you soon enough.”

“How can he possibly . . .”

We are standing at the open front door. Alma’s huge suitcase is sitting on the floor of the foyer. A brown Dodge Durango is in the driveway, her rude granddaughter a blur behind the windshield. Alma takes my hand, and this time she does look at me.

“Your daddy was smarter than all of them, Talcott. That’s why they were afraid of him.” This is another precious bit of family mythology: that the Judge was denied his seat on the Supreme Court by lesser intellects who were jealous and racist at the same time. “You just wait and see.”

“See what?”

“See how afraid of your father they were. When they come. But don’t let it worry you none.”

“When who comes?”

“They might not come, though. Your father thought they would. But they might be afraid.”

“I’m not following . . . .”

“Like Jack. Jack Ziegler. He was afraid of your father, too.”

It takes me a moment to process this. Somewhere deep in the house, I hear the shrieks of joyful children.

“Alma, I . . .”

“Gotta go, Talcott.” She has rescued her Kool from her pocket and seems to want to light it. “I just emptied my bladder and I wanna get back to Philly before I gotta do it again.”

“Alma, wait. Please. Wait a second.”

“What
is
it, Talcott?” The peeved tone of an exhausted but indulgent parent.

“Jack Ziegler—what were you saying about him?”

“He’s just an old man, Talcott, Jack Ziegler is. Don’t let him scare you. He didn’t scare your father none, and he shouldn’t scare you none either.”

(III)

I
SUGGEST
we go for a walk, but my sister declines. Mariah is lonely, tired, and irritable—not hard to understand, perhaps, when her only
grown-up company so far this morning has consisted of the self-centered, confusing Alma and the intermittently reliable Sally. I persuade my sister to come in from the porch. We sit down together in the kitchen. Mariah’s makeup lacks its usual precision, her hair is in curlers, and the house she will formally inherit as soon as the will is admitted to probate is already the worse for wear, with evidence of young inhabitants—everything from tiny shoes to Playmobil sailors—scattered everywhere. Howard is gone, having returned to New York on the first shuttle to repair some collapsing deal, and leaving Sally and me to sit in that remarkably white kitchen listening to Mariah rail against Addison for his insufficiently vigorous defense of the Judge when he spoke at the funeral. And, indeed, I found my brother’s brief reference to the hearings confusing, perhaps because he was trying to please too many constituencies:
Some of the attacks on my father were unfair. Some were pretty nasty. But some were thoughtful. Some were respectful. There were issues about which reasonable people could differ. We must never, in our love for Dad, forget that. And, certainly, the Christian in me will not allow me to condemn those who took the other side, because they, too, were doing what they thought was right.