The Emperor of Ocean Park (42 page)

She stops. A shudder runs through her. Another sob? No, a memory, a recollection she prefers to hold at bay.

“It’s ancient history,” I murmur, trying to divert her. If Sally is seeking an apology, she is out of luck, for I cannot pretend there was nothing wrong with what she and Addison did.

Sally knows what I am thinking. “Even Mariah’s not as bad as you are, Tal. You know what? When Mariah is in D.C., she always calls me up. We have some good times . . . .”

“She told me you’ve been helping her go through the Judge’s papers.”

Sally snickers. “Is that what she told you? Well, yeah, we do that sometimes, but that’s not what I mean. I mean we have
good times.
We talk. She listens to me, Tal. We go to the clubs. You know. Your sister likes to get down sometimes. Not like you. And she isn’t judging me all the time like you are. She takes people just the way they are. So that’s why I didn’t tell you, Talcott. Because of the way you are. Because it involves Addison, too. I mean, me and Addison. You’re just like your father,” she repeats. I am playing catch-up, stuck on the image of my sister in a club—the kind of club that Sally likes—
getting down.
You would not think, to look at Mariah, that she was the partying type; sole black member of the yacht club is more her style. My cousin, on the other hand, is a party and a half all by herself.

“You could never understand about Addison,” Sally continues, her voice excited and angry and full of life’s broken promises. “You could never understand what we had. Okay, it was wrong. But it was
special”
—as though I have disputed her. “We were lovers, Tal. It wasn’t just sex, it was love. Now, is that crude enough for you?”

She is up on her elbow, eyes aglow with belligerence. Her mood is swinging, all right, and she is saying anything that comes to mind.

“I’m not judging you, Sally,” I lie carefully, my tone as neutral as I
can make it. “I just want to know what you remember about McDermott.”

“You
are
judging me.”

“I’m just glad it’s over,” I assure her. But I marvel at how a civilized world can make a virtue of having no judgment, teach it to kids, preach it from the pulpit.

“You know something, Tal? You’re a fake. Misha.
Mikhail.
A fake.” A harsher laugh. “My dad
gave
you that nickname, in case you forgot, and you still treat his daughter like trash.” My cousin flops back onto the bed, her braids settling around her head like an ebon halo. The tirade seems to be over.

The room-service waiter wisely chooses that moment to arrive. When Sally makes no effort to get up from the bed, I sign the bill in the corridor, blocking the waiter’s view of the room, and roll the cart in myself.

We eat in silence for a few minutes: mushroom soup and a club sandwich for me, shrimp cocktail and filet mignon for Sally. Having shared a healthy repast with my in-laws just an hour ago, I should not be eating again so soon, but I tend to find the self all too easy to indulge, which perhaps explains my burgeoning waistline. In short, I eat too much; when I am nervous or stressed, my will to resist is weaker still. I am, unfortunately, like Mark Twain, who once said that he ate more on some occasions than others, but never less. Sally and I sit facing each other on the two beds with the table between us. She eats fast and without any finesse, simply fulfilling a bodily desire. The food seems to revive her, or maybe the drug, if there is one, has worn off; whatever the reason, when she next opens her mouth, she is her old flirty self.

“I’m sorry I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, Tal, but men don’t buy me dinner very often any more, so I figured, what the hell, make the most of it.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Of course, sometimes a man expects something in return.”

“All I expect is to hear about Mr. McDermott.” Giving her my best stone face.

“Sure that’s all you want?” Coy, as if the intimacy of sharing a secret dinner with a man in a hotel room has given her permission to misbehave. “Most men have other things in mind.”

“I’m not most men.”

“Come on, Tal, don’t you
ever relax
and have fun?”

“Only on Tuesdays and alternate Saturdays.”

This, at least, brings a genuine smile. “Okay, Tal,” she says. “Let’s be friends.”

“Okay.”

“Look, I’m sorry for what I said before.” Although she does not sound
very
sorry. She curls her solid legs underneath her. “I just can’t seem to help myself tonight. I guess that’s my flaw, I always say what I’m thinking. At least, when I’m with a man.”

“That’s not necessarily a flaw.” Not liking, however, her use of the word
with.

“Well, no, not if the man I’m with happens to like what I’m thinking.” A pause as she contemplates a punch line. “And if he doesn’t? To hell with him.”

Again she laughs, a light, trilling sound: there is nothing hateful in her words. Sally does not dislike men, even though she has not been well treated by them. She is amused by them. By us. It occurs to me that Sally, when she is not being melancholy, can probably be a lot of fun. I begin to see why Addison, and so many other men, have found my plump cousin attractive. Last year, I saw an exhibit at the university museum of some of those drawings that used to be popular early in the twentieth century, the ones that look like smiling dogs until you invert them, when they turn into angry cats, or change from a beautiful woman to an unhappy sultan, and so on. “Ambiguous Figures,” the exhibit was called. Sally is like one of those ambiguous figures: at first glance she seems wild, overweight, hopeless, pill-popping, pathetic; catch her from another angle and she is bold, bright, sexy, scathingly witty. I am catching her, at this moment, from that second angle, which means that I need, quickly, to bring some discipline to our conversation.

“About McDermott—”

“Yes,
sir!”
She snaps off a mock salute. “At your service,
sir!”

And then she tells me the story.

(II)

W
E HAVE FINISHED DESSERT
—the fruit cup for me, tiramisù for Sally. I have rolled the room-service cart back into the hallway. Sally is lounging on the bed, weight on her elbow, one toe touching the carpet.
I am at the desk once more, my hands folded in my lap, as I wait for her to begin.

“I was at the house on Shepard Street, like I said. I don’t know if you remember or not, but in those days, Dad and Mom and I lived down in Southeast. He used to work for that little private library. You remember.”

Indeed I do:
Were you aware, Judge Garland, that the library where your brother worked was a known Communist front?
And, inevitably:
No, Senator, I was not aware. My brother and I did not have much to do with each other.
Then the switch to maudlin mode:
That must have been a source of some pain, Judge.
My father at his coldest, yet his most disarming:
I loved my brother, Senator, but our differences were pretty strong. Communism is a terrible, terrible thing—at least as bad as racism. Maybe worse in some ways. I could not be a part of his world. He could not be a part of mine. I suppose I wasn’t the best brother in the world, and if I hurt my brother, I’m very sorry. Each of us thought the other was pretty dangerous, I guess. But I admit I don’t think about it much.
Absolutely destroying this line of questioning.

“I remember,” I say softly.

“Well, anyway, in those days, I used to take a bus—was it the S4?—up to your house. You know, to see Addison? I mean, if he happened to be in town? I never went when your parents were there, or when you and Mariah were there either. I sort of only went to meet Addison alone.” A small, sheepish grin. “The truth is, I never told my folks where I was going either. Dad was just as bad as Uncle Oliver—that disapproving look, I mean. Maybe all the guys in your family have that frown. I mean, except Addison.”

I consider suggesting that we were disapproving because there was something to be disapproving
of,
that a sexual relationship between first cousins is incest. But Sally would probably remind me that she and Addison are not blood relations. Or perhaps she would cite Eleanor and FDR at me; and I would answer that they were actually first cousins once removed, contrary to popular understanding, which means that their family relationship was distant indeed, their last common ancestor something like five generations back; and Sally would accuse me of patronizing her; and the conversation would spiral downhill from there.

Besides, she has already admitted that what they did was wrong.

I say: “If I could just hear about McDermott . . .”

“You’re so damn single-minded.” She laughs and lies down on the
bed again, this time with her heavy knees in the air. “The thing is, Tal, you have to understand, I would never have been in that house if I knew your father was going to be there. I was supposed to meet Addison, and we were supposed to be alone. Your father—well, he was supposed to be away.” She closes her eyes, frowns. “Not on the Vineyard, though. I think—I think he was supposed to be at some judges’ convention.”

“Probably the Judicial Conference,” I murmur.

“Huh?”

“The Judicial Conference. Federal judges’ group. Meets during the summer. He was probably there.”

She shakes her head. “Maybe he was
supposed
to be there, maybe he
told Aunt Claire
he would be there, but where he
was,
was in D.C.”

I bite my tongue. If Sally is telling the truth, she has caught the Judge lying to my mother, which, I would have sworn until this moment, never happened once.

“Anyway, I didn’t know your father was around. I was supposed to see Addison. We were both just out of college, both in town for the summer, and he was living at home. So was I. And he called me up and said everybody was away for a few days, so we could . . . we could spend some time together if I wanted. Well, I wanted.”

As I nod and offer no comment, I see something behind Sally’s words: Addison was the pursuer. He was a year younger than his cousin, but, from the start, even on the Vineyard, my brother was the seducer, not, as family folklore has it, the other way around; and a part of her hates him for it.

“So, anyway,” Sally is saying, “I told my folks I was going out with some girlfriends or something and not to wait up for me, then I hopped on, let’s see, must have been the 30 bus, or the 32, and then got on the S4”—wanting me to know, from all this, how hard she worked to see her love—“and, well, anyway, I got to Shepard Street and went up to the house, and Addison was there . . . .”

Pausing to see if I have any reaction. When I do not, she resumes.

“Anyway, after a while, I fell asleep. I don’t know how late it was. I know it was dark when these voices woke me up. Not loud. Kind of whispery. But still angry. I mean, they were arguing, and maybe they were trying to argue quietly, but I still heard them. I realized there was somebody else in the house, and I sort of got scared. So I turned to wake up Addison, but he wasn’t there. So I figured it must be Addison arguing with somebody. I thought it must be Uncle Oliver, which
would probably mean we were caught, which would mean we were seriously up the creek. So I put my clothes on. I figured I would sneak out the back door. I’ve snuck out of a lot of back doors in my life, haven’t I?” Another one of her mirthless laughs. There is no point in responding; the question is clearly rhetorical, and we both know what the answer is.

“Addison’s bedroom was on the third floor,” she continues, rolling onto her side, facing me now, except that her eyes are still closed. “At the end of that long hallway. The old servants’ quarters, I guess. You know, low ceiling, gables, the Nathaniel Hawthorne thing.” Actually, I know perfectly well what the house looks like, having grown up in it, but I have no intention of breaking the flow, now that she is telling the story. “The argument was way down in the foyer, two floors away, but I heard it anyway. I think it was some trick of the ducts or something.”

Now it is my turn to smile in memory. The Shepard Street house has old-fashioned heating grates, metal screens covering what are basically holes in the wall with chutes behind them, left over, I suspect, from the days when the whole house was heated by a single stove. We had radiators, of course, but they were added sometime after the house was built. The ducts themselves were never removed. My parents never realized that sounds from the first floor, especially the foyer, routinely found their way to the top floor, where Addison and I slept. Perhaps there was some common vent: I never figured out how all the old ductwork ran. In any event, my brother and I were always able to hear what was going on down there.

“So, anyway,” Sally resumes, “I got dressed and went on downstairs. I planned to sneak out, but first I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Down the back stairs, I mean. The servants’ stairs.”

We both laugh, although nothing is funny. I glance at the digital clock on the nightstand. It is close to ten.

“So I went down to the second floor and then went out into the hall. You remember there’s this long landing that runs all around the foyer, what do they call it?”

“The gallery.”

“Oh, right. And the gallery has this, um, this balustrade, I think is the word, and the, uh, the wooden posts—what are they called? Spindles? Dowels? Whatever they are, the posts that hold the balustrade? They’re very wide. Almost wide enough to hide behind.”

“Especially for a child.” I smile briefly, remembering how, when we
were children, Addison and Mariah and Abby and I loved to play hide-and-seek, and I used to hide up in the gallery there all the time. One of the things I quickly discovered was that, if the lights were on in the foyer and off in the hall, and the one who was
it
was down in the foyer, he—or she—couldn’t see me hiding in the gallery.

“Well,” says Sally tartly, “I was never that tiny, but I could hide up there anyway. Or I did that night.” She stirs: the memory is starting to bother her. Maybe her moral sense has kicked to life. But she does not stop talking. “Anyway, the only light that was on was in your father’s study. That’s the part I remember best. It was so dark in the foyer, like Uncle Oliver was . . . oh, like he was doing something that needed the darkness. I know that sounds crazy, Tal, but that’s the way it felt. And the voices I heard were from inside the study. I couldn’t make out what your father was saying, I think because he was trying to keep his voice down, but the other man was yelling: ‘That’s not how the game is played.’ Something like that.”