The Emperor of Ocean Park (36 page)

Usually, when Mariah calls after a few days in the attic, we fight. The conversation always begins the same way. She whispers unhappily of her discoveries, always things I would rather not know—an ancient love letter to the Judge from a woman whose name neither of us quite recognizes, an award from his college fraternity for victory in a drinking contest, a note in his appointment book to meet some Senator whose politics make her ill. My sister sets great store by such artifacts. She believes that she is reconstructing our father, that she will learn from his simulacrum a deeper truth he kept hidden from us. That his shade lives on amidst the flotsam and jetsam of his written life, and that it will finally speak. I try to tell her that these are just worthless scraps of paper, that we should discard them, but I am speaking to a woman whose five-million-dollar home is decorated almost entirely with photographs of her unprepossessing children, and whose sentimentality, as
Kimmer once observed, would lead her to save her children’s soiled diapers if she could only think of a way to do it neatly. I gently suggest to my stubborn sister that we did not understand our father when he was alive, and we will not understand him any better now that he is dead, but Mariah, alone among the children of Claire and Oliver Garland, has never conceded that there are things beyond her understanding, which is doubtless why she was the only one of us to earn straight A’s in college. I try to tell her that we certainly will not come to know the Judge through his papers, but Mariah remains a journalist at her core, with a master’s degree in history, and my words are a challenge to her faith. So, in the end, unable to bear another dramatic reading from a request for a zoning variance to enable installation of a nonconforming septic system at Vinerd Howse, I always tell her that I have problems of my own, and she snaps back that blood is thicker than water, which was one of our mother’s favorite phrases, and which Mariah repeats often, even if she claimed as a child to hate it. My sister and I are talking more often than in the past, but, truce or no truce, we get along as badly as we ever did.

Consequently, when she tells me that she has found something we need to talk about, I brace myself for the worst—meaning the most useless, boring, trivial. Or the scariest—more talk of bullet fragments, which, lately, she has not mentioned. Or the most likely—she has heard about the death of McDermott/Scott, and wants to explain how it fits into the conspiracy.

What actually comes out of her mouth, therefore, takes me by surprise.

“Tal, did you know Daddy owned a gun?”

“A gun?”

“Yes, a gun. As in a handgun. I found it last night, in the bedroom, in the back of a drawer. I was just looking for papers, and I found this gun. It was in a box, with . . . well, with some bullets. But that’s not why I called.” She pauses, presumably for dramatic effect, but there is no need: she has my full attention. “Tal, I had somebody look at it this afternoon. An expert? It’s been fired, Tal. Recently.”

CHAPTER 19
TWO TALES ARE TOLD

(I)

“T
HE
D
ISTRICT OF
C
OLUMBIA
probably has the strictest gun law in the country,” Lemaster Carlyle assures me. “It’s pretty much impossible to obtain a permit there.” Pause. “On the other hand, Virginia is right across the river, and it is one of the easiest places in the civilized world to purchase a legal handgun. People buy them there and take them everywhere.”

“Huh,” is my thoughtful contribution.

“So, if a relative of
mine
who lived in D.C. died and left a gun behind”—in his teasing Barbadian lilt, he is tossing my transparent hypothetical back at me—“my guess would be that he purchased it in Virginia and simply ignored the District’s laws. Plenty of people do.”

I nod slowly, my half-finished grilled-chicken sandwich, the specialty of the house at Post, gone cold and chewy. Lemaster is a former prosecutor and knows about these things, but his information dovetails with my intuition. Once again, my father seems to have lived on the edge of the law. I would rather uncover fewer of these distressing tidbits of information, but I cannot seem to stop looking for them.

“You have to turn the gun in, of course.”

“What?”

“The gun. It is still unregistered and unlicensed. Nobody can legally possess it. It has to be turned in.”

“Oh.” Lemaster Carlyle is a person of sufficient integrity that I suspect this would be his advice even had he not spent three years as an Assistant United States Attorney before turning to the academic world. I watch him pick at his shrimp salad. He never seems to eat very much, never seems to gain an ounce of weight. His suits always fit perfectly.
He is a small man with a huge mind, a few years older than I, a Harvard Law School graduate who was also in his day a divinity student before joining our ranks. His smooth, lean face, at once playful and wise, is a rich West Indian purple-black. His perfect wife, Julia, is as small and dark and cute as Lemaster himself. They live in one of our tonier suburbs with their four perfect children. He stands miles above me in the school’s unwritten hierarchy, and is adored by everybody in the building, and most alumni as well, for he is also a nearly perfect politician. Although he calls himself a progressive, Lem has voted Republican the last few elections, citing the Democratic Party’s opposition to school vouchers, which he sees as the only hope for the children of the inner city. He was cofounder and, for all I know, sole member of a forgotten organization called Liberals for Bush. His pithy, closely reasoned op-eds dot the pages of the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post.
He seems to be on television every five minutes. He is also said to be restless. Many of our colleagues are begging him to wait patiently to succeed Lynda Wyatt, becoming our first black dean, but the rumor mill reports that Lem has grown as bored with the academy as he has with most things he has conquered, and will soon be leaving us for a full-time position at one of the television networks. At the Judge’s funeral, people made a great fuss over him. I often wish I could like Lemaster more, and envy him less.

“And if the person who found the gun didn’t turn it in?” I press.

He sips his water—nobody claims ever to have seen him drink anything else—and shakes his slender head. His small eyes smile at me above a thin mustache. “Finding it is not a crime. Possessing it is a crime.”

So I will advise my sister to turn it in. Case closed.

Except that Lemaster Carlyle levers it back open. “This relative of yours, Talcott—do you know why he thought he needed a gun?”

“No.”

“Most people buy them for self-protection, even people who buy them illegally. But some of course are purchased in order to commit crimes.”

“Okay.”

He dabs at his lips with the paper napkin, then folds it carefully before depositing it on the table, next to his plate. He has eaten perhaps four bites. “If it were a relative of mine, I would not be interested in where he got the gun, or what could happen to me for possessing it. I would be interested in learning why he bought it in the first place.”

(II)

B
ACK INSIDE
O
LDIE
, heading for the central staircase, I pretend to myself for a silly moment that I want to put all of this behind me. But I am no longer chasing the truth; the truth seems to be chasing me. Why did my father want a gun? To protect himself or to commit a crime, Lemaster Carlyle suggested. Neither one is happy news. What was my father involved in? I think of Jack Ziegler in the cemetery. I think of McDermott-Scott, deemed harmless by his local sheriff, but dead nevertheless, the circumstances suspicious. My shoulders sag. Kimmer’s judgeship seems miles and miles distant. I am struck by a sudden urge to rush upstairs to visit Theo Mountain, for I need to be cheered up, but I have to avoid making my onetime mentor my full-time crutch.

I pass a knot of students: Crysta Smallwood arguing heatedly with several other women of color, as they nowadays style themselves. A few words float outward from their confab:
dialectical interstices
and
outsider position
and
reconstructed other.
I long for the days when students argued over the rules of civil procedure or the statute of limitations, back when the nation’s leading law schools thought their job was teaching law.

Nearing my office, I notice Arnold Rosen, one of the faculty’s great liberal hard-liners, gliding toward me in his powered wheelchair. He smiles his thin, superior smile, and I smile back reluctantly, for we are not close. I admire Arnie’s mind and his determination to stick to his principles, but I am not sure that he admires anything in me, especially given that I am the son of the great conservative hero. Arnie came to us from Harvard about a decade ago, Stuart Land’s masterful recruiting coup, and is said to be Lem Carlyle’s only competitor to succeed Dean Lynda when she one day steps down.

A flick of his finger on a control rod slows the chair. His pale eyes are distant and judgmental as he looks up at me. “Good afternoon, Talcott.”

“Hi, Arnie.” My key is in my hand, signaling, I hope, that I do not really feel much like talking just now.

“I don’t think I’ve had the chance to tell you how sorry I am about your father.”

“Thank you,” I mutter, too tired to be annoyed by his hypocrisy. Arnie teaches legal ethics and a variety of commercial law courses and is a prodigious scholar, but saves his real enthusiasm for the three great
causes of the contemporary left: abortion, gay rights, and a very strict separation of church and state. A few months ago, my former student Shirley Branch, the first black woman we have ever hired, gave a paper at the semi-weekly faculty lunch arguing that the form of separation we intellectuals today take for granted is too strict, that its application would have harmed, for example, the civil rights movement. Arnie disagreed, suggesting that Shirley’s notion would lead us back to the days of America as a Christian nation. The two of them went at it quite heatedly, until Rob Saltpeter, the moderator, defused the situation with a wry observation:
The trouble with America is not that it is a Christian nation but that too often it isn’t.

Rob, like Lem, has style.

“You know, Talcott,” Arnie murmurs, smiling up at me, “one of our colleagues came to talk to me about you the other day.”

“About me? What about me?”

“Well, it was peculiar. He thought you might have violated a rule of ethics. I set him straight, I assure you.”

I sway on my feet. “What rule? What are you talking about?”

“You’re doing some consulting work for a corporation. Something to do with toxic torts, correct?”

“Uh . . . yes. Yes, I am. So?”

“Well, our colleague asked me if it was proper for you to continue to write in the area when you were getting paid as an advocate to take a particular view.”

“What!”

“You see the problem, I’m sure. Legal scholarship is supposed to be objective. That’s our myth and we cling to it. We have to, or we’re in the wrong business. That’s why the school frowns on professors’ doing too much consulting work.”

“I understand that, but—”

Arnie circles his chair backward an inch or two, waves a hand in dismissal. “Not to worry, Talcott. It’s a common misconception. There is no rule against it—there aren’t really any ethical rules about legal scholarship—and, besides—”

“And, besides, I would never slant my scholarship for the sake of a fee!”

“Well, that’s what I said, too.” Nodding his head. “But our colleague seemed pretty sure. I have the impression we haven’t heard the end of this.”

I make a small sound. Disbelief, maybe, or simply anger. Is this more of the pressure Stuart mentioned?

“Arnie, listen. Who was it that came to you? Who brought this up?”

His hand flaps again. “Ah, Talcott, I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”

“You can’t? Why not?”

“Attorney-client privilege.” Still smiling, he sails off down the hall.

CHAPTER 20
THE HALLS OF JUSTICE

(I)

“M
ISHA
, it is so good to see you.” A hug, because I am a man and he is a man. Male judges nowadays are afraid to hug their female clerks, or so my father used to say. But some of his facts he made up. “Come in, come in.”

Wallace Warrenton Wainwright steps to one side, beckoning me to join him in his inner office. The chubby black messenger who walked me in from the clerk’s office has vanished. As the door to the anteroom closes, it is just me and Wallace Wainwright. He is a tall man, at least five inches over six feet, with shoulders more thick than muscular, thinning brown-white hair, and a pale, studied asceticism about his friendly face. He seems too happy to be as smart as he is. He looks less like a judge than a friar—Franciscan, to be sure—and if you sat next to him on an airplane, you would never take Wallace Wainwright for an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. But that is how history will record him. Outside this spacious room, computers buzz and bleep, printers zip, law clerks rush about, telephones softly burr—the sounds, as Justice Wainwright would surely describe the tumult, of justice being done. And maybe, from time to time, the Court
has
done justice, but a good deal less than most people seem to assume, for it has been, for most of its history, a follower, not an agent, of change. We law professors like to speak and write as though the past is otherwise, as though the Justices have lately abandoned a traditional role of protecting the weak against the strong.

We speak and write nonsense.

Like every other social institution, the Court has mainly been the ally of the insiders, a proposition that should come as no surprise,
because only the insiders become the Presidents who nominate the Justices, the Senators who confirm them—or the candidates from whom the nominees are chosen in the first place. Liberals point to
Brown v. Board of Education
and
Roe v. Wade
as though they have identified the Court’s appropriate role in the nation’s governance, whereas all they have really identified is a peculiar epoch in history, during which the Justices set about trying to change America rather than trying to keep it the same. The epoch died, and the Court swiftly faded as an engine of social evolution, which probably would have made the Framers of the Constitution very happy. After all, Madison and Hamilton were insiders too.