The Emperor of Ocean Park (41 page)

“Of course, dear.” She heads for the basement stairs at once, and I am reminded, for the thousandth time, just what Kimmer was rebelling against. But I also know that there is nothing wrong with the cigar, that the Colonel is just sending her away.

“What a doll,” he murmurs, watching her go. “You’re a doll!” he calls, but she is out of earshot, which is what he is waiting for. He leans toward me, and suddenly is all business. “Look, Talcott, I don’t know exactly what the hell was going on. I never saw your father scared in my life, and I’ve known him—sorry, I knew him—for twenty years. But he was white as a sheet, if you’ll excuse the expression. He wouldn’t tell me why he wanted the gun, just that he wanted it fast.”

“You gave it to him? No questions asked?”

“I asked lots of questions, I just didn’t get any answers.” A guffaw. He has dealt with pipsqueaks before. Then the serious tone again. “Look, Talcott. I saw him before we left on our cruise and he was fine. Then I saw him when we came back and he was . . . oh, hell, he was terrified, Talcott, okay?”

I try to picture the Judge terrified. I draw a blank.

Miles Madison is still talking, his voice low and sure. “So whatever happened to scare him, it happened while we were away. I’m talking about last October, just about a year before he died, and it spooked the hell out of him. If you find out what happened, you’ll know why he wanted a gun.” His head jerks, for he is preternaturally alert, as he must have been in his days in the infantry. “Vera! Thanks for the cigar, doll!”

“The one you have looks just fine to me,” she points out as she empties the ashtray into a wastebasket decorated with a map of the Caribbean.

He grins sheepishly up at her. “Damn imports. No quality control.” He turns back to look at me, winks. “Talcott and I were just making a friendly wager on a game of pool.”

But nobody beats the Colonel at pool. He cheats.

(II)

V
ERA AND THE
C
OLONEL
wind up giving me dinner. I want to escape, but declining their hospitality would be rude. By the time I return to the Hilton, almost four hours have slipped past. It is nearly eight, and the streets of Washington are full pre-winter dark. I have missed the final day of the conference, but I am sure I was not missed.

The lobby is crowded with citizens of the darker nation, most of them in evening attire: black tuxes with bright and distinctive cummerbunds for the men, glittering gowns of various lengths for the women. They glide up and down the escalators, striking poses for the absent cameras. The beautiful people! Nobody seems an ounce overweight. Every patent-leather shoe is perfectly shined. Every hair on every head appears to be perfectly in place. Every nose is in the air. My parents’ kind of crowd. And the Madisons’.

I wonder what event they are attending. In my plain gray suit, sweaty from my brief run, sweatier still from my long walk, I feel out of place, as though I exist on a level far below the paradise inhabited by this radiant throng. From the skeptical looks they cast my way, some of the well-to-do folk gathered in the lobby have the same thought: that this disheveled man slinking along in the gray suit is not, as my mother used to say in the old days, our kind of Negro. Although the absurd American system of racial counting would consider all of these glitterati black, most of them are of hues pale enough to have passed the paper-bag test that so justifiably enraged Mariah back in college, when she flunked it, even though it is, supposedly, no longer in use:
If your skin is any darker than this paper bag, you can’t join our sorority.
Oh, but we are sick people! A buried sentiment catches me by surprise, welling up from some putrefying source deep inside me, a wave of cold, brutal hatred for my parents’ way of life, for their exclusive little circle and its usually cruel snap judgments about everybody on the outside. And hatred for myself, too, for all the times I actually answered their snide little questions about where this friend of mine went to school, who that one’s parents were, and, sometimes, where the
parents
were educated. Addison, as he grew, began to talk back to our mother and father; Mariah and I never did; and perhaps he preserved an independence of being that my sister and I lost. The lobby reels redly about me for a moment, and I find myself wondering, as I did in my nationalistic college days, who the real enemy is, for those of us who considered ourselves the radical vanguard of the battle for a better future used to sit up half the night cursing the black bourgeoisie. E. Franklin Frazier was right: I see my father and his cold intellectual amusement at “the other Negroes,” I see my mother and her elite sororities and social clubs as living a dark imitation of white society, ultimately mimicking, in their desperate quest for status, even the racial attitudes of the larger world. So stunned am I by the visions pulsing angrily through my mind that I am, briefly, unable to move or speak or do anything but watch these beautiful people swirl around me.

And then the part of me that lapped up the Judge’s occasionally pompous wisdom reasserts itself. These thoughts, I remind myself, are unworthy, a distraction, and not entirely fair; besides, I have more immediate worries. So I wrestle the visions down.

For now.

I edge through the lobby, sucking in my belly, my eyes on the elevators, but I also find myself checking the exultant swarm, almost automatically, for any sign of the roller woman—or, for that matter, for the late Colin Scott’s partner, the missing Foreman. I wonder why the roller woman was following me. I wonder why she searched for me so hard, and why I decided at once to run away. I was tempted, quite seriously, to leap from my concealment and confront her, for I was unable then, and am unable now, to believe that the roller woman could have meant me any harm. Perhaps I am kidding myself. I keep seeing her face, not suffused with the concentrated anger of this afternoon’s failed search, but alight with the flirtatious, toothy grin of our first meeting. I shake my head. Trying to figure it out is like chewing on cotton.

Like trying to figure out why the Judge was scared enough to get a gun.

Off toward the gift shop, I spy two law professors from the symposium, members of the paler nation, looking rather lost in flannels and tweeds as they watch the dark conclave with apprehensive eyes. They wave to me as though relieved to come across a friendly face in a lobby that suddenly resembles the
Essence
fashion show, and I smile back but decide not to go over to join them for the usual evening round of postconference academic gossip, which would feel, somehow, like rejecting my own. I decide instead to head upstairs to play chess on my laptop until I get sleepy, which is how I spend most evenings when I am away from home, and many when I am not. I weave through the happy multitude, trying not to bump into anybody and intermittently succeeding, now and then nodding at a vaguely familiar face. I have nearly reached the elevator bank when a pleasantly round shape, draped in an outrageously tight purple gown, detaches itself from a circle of laughing friends and strides purposefully in my direction.

“Tal! I had no idea you were in town!”

I stare in disbelief as Sarah Catherine Stillman née Garland materializes before me.

“Sally?” I manage. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” Cousin Sally giggles and pats my cheek and takes my hand in both of hers. Her palm is moist. Her eyes are
slightly wild from whatever substance she is abusing this week. She is wearing her hair in long, beaded braids now, some of which are black, some of which are light brown, most of which are quite fake.
“I’m
here for the fundraiser. The real question, sweetie, is, what are
you
doing here? And where the hell’s your tux?” Tapping my wool jacket with feigned disapproval.

“Uh, I’m not here for the fund-raiser. I’m here for the tort-reform conference.” I am babbling but seem unable to stop. “It’s just a bunch of law professors. I delivered a paper yesterday.” I wave vaguely toward the stairway down to the room where we have been meeting. I am sure she has no clue what I am talking about.

Sally is peering at me closely. Her eyes shine wetly “Are you all right, Talcott? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine. Listen, Sally, it’s nice to see you, but I really have to go.”

I wait for what seems an eternity but is probably two seconds, and then she answers me, ignoring my brisk effort to escape as she conveys her own message: “I’m so glad I ran into you, Tal. I’ve been thinking about calling you.” Sally gets up on her toes—no easy trick in heels that high—to whisper in my ear: “Tal, listen. I need to talk to you about where I saw Agent McDermott before.”

After the events of the past several hours, it takes me an awkward moment to recall that McDermott was the name used by the late Colin Scott; that Sally told me on the day I met him that she thought she knew him.

All at once I am tired of theories. My father is dead but leaving me notes, my wife is doing goodness-knows-what, and I am being followed by a mysterious woman who was on the Vineyard when Scott/McDermott drowned. The human mind, especially when under stress, can assimilate only so much information. And I am beyond my capacity.

“I appreciate it, Sally, but I don’t think this is the time or the place—”

She cuts me off, her wine-soaked breath tickling the side of my face.

“I saw him in the house, Tal. On Shepard Street. Years ago.” A pause.
“He knew your father.”

CHAPTER 23
THE AMBIGUOUS FIGURE

(I)

“I
T WAS SUMMER
,” Sally begins, sipping a bottle of beer from the mini-bar. I would rather have given her plain water, or maybe coffee, but standing up to tough women has never been my forte. “Maybe a year or two after Abby died. Mariah was in college. I think maybe you were, too, but I can’t remember. But I know where I saw him. I’m sure of that part.”

I wait for my cousin to get the story out. She is lounging on one of the two double beds in my hotel room. I am seated at the tiny desk, the chair turned in her direction. We have ordered food from room service, because Sally told me she has not eaten all day. I would rather not have this meeting in my room—she has a certain reputation, after all—but one look at her in the lobby made clear that she was in no shape to sit in a public place. Still, I tried a variety of excuses to avoid talking to her at all. Sally blew each of them away. A pile of work awaiting me?
Oh, this won’t take too long.
Her children?
Oh, they’re with my mom for a couple of days.
And the ever-jealous Bud?
Oh, he’s not around so much any more.
So we came up here, where my stout, showy, overdressed cousin, the hem of whose flaming purple gown is several inches too short, immediately kicked off her shoes and demanded a drink.

If I am going to hear the story, this is the only way.

“I was at your house,” she says. “On Shepard Street. It was nighttime. I guess I was sort of asleep. Until . . . until the sound of an argument woke me up.”

“Where was I?”

“I think you were probably on the Vineyard. You and your mom. Maybe Mariah. But not your father. And not Addison. That’s why I was over at your house. I was, um, sort of with Addison.” Sally is a very dark
woman, but she blushes anyway. Lying on the bed, she twists physically away, as though it is easier to tell her story if she can pretend she is alone. And she at once launches a digression, in which Misha is the villain: “I know what I used to do with Addison was wrong, Tal, so I don’t need you to tell me that. It’s over, okay? It’s been over like forever. I know you never approved. You always let me know. Oh, you never said a word, but you’ve always been, in the family, I mean, sort of like your father—you have all these rules and things, and when somebody doesn’t follow them, you don’t get mad, you get this disapproving look. Like everybody’s morally smaller than you are. I
hate
that look. Everybody hates it, Tal. Your brother, your sister, everybody.” I almost speak up, but remind myself that Sally is probably on something, that she certainly is not herself: knowledge that does nothing to reduce the sting of her words.

“My dad hated it, too,” she is saying. “Your Uncle Derek, I mean”—as though I have some question about who her father is, or was. “He hated it when Uncle Oliver would look at him that way, and Uncle Oliver looked at him that way a lot. Because he hated my dad’s, you know, his politics. He thought my dad was a Communist.”

I venture my second interruption: “Sally, your dad
was
a Communist.”

“I know, I know, but, what’s that old joke? He made it sound so dirty.” She laughs screechily as she repeats this line, although it cannot possibly be the whole joke, and then, suddenly, she is weeping. Whatever drug she is using, it seems to cause severe mood swings. Or perhaps there is no drug and she is simply unhappy. Either way, I decide to let her cry. There are no words of comfort I can offer, really, and putting my arms around her on the bed is out of the question.

“See, Tal,” she resumes after a couple of minutes, “you think the world is made up of simple moral rules. You think there are just two kinds of people in the world, people who obey the rules and people who break them. You think you’re so different from Uncle Oliver, but you’re just like him. In some good ways, sure, but in some of the worst ways, too. You look down your nose at people you think are your moral inferiors. People like your brother. People like me.”

Now I remember why Kimmer and I never socialize with Sally: you have to fight through ten minutes of her verbal abuse before you can have anything resembling a normal conversation. So I grit my teeth and keep silent, reminding myself that she is not a well woman.

Besides, what she says about me is probably right.

“So, anyway, that’s why I didn’t tell you before. About McDermott, I mean. I sort of pretended I didn’t remember, but that wasn’t true. I knew who McDermott was the minute I saw him. I probably should have said something, but I knew I would have to tell you why I was in the house that night, and I didn’t want to see that disapproving look.” She turns toward me long enough to glare, and I ponder the way belief in right and wrong can interfere with the project of human communication. “See, Tal, that’s why we always had to sneak around, because people like you and Uncle Oliver . . .”