The Emperor of Ocean Park (45 page)

“I didn’t spend much time at the house,” I say finally. “I was still in law school.”

“I remember,” says Lanie, smiling with warm reminiscence and gossipy mischief. “You and Kimmer had just started dating, right?”

I hesitate, for Lanie has, perhaps unintentionally, set me a little verbal trap. In 1986, at the time of my father’s nomination, Kimmer and I were classmates, nothing more, each of us—technically, anyway—dating someone else. In truth, the two of us were in the
oh-no-we-better-stop-wait-what-about-Kathy
stage of rekindling what had once been a rather passionate relationship; like most young adults of that era—or, for that matter, this one—we were besotted with the notion, dangerously antithetical to civilized life, that obeying our instincts was not merely our right but our responsibility. Somehow that tendency has always been the leitmotif of our attraction: three times, maybe more, depending on how you count, we have wound up in each other’s arms at a moment when at least one of us belonged to someone else.

Not ready to confess to Lanie what everybody already knows, I decide, as so often, that the best answer is a distraction. “I guess you
could be right. About my father’s drinking, I mean. I wasn’t living in the house. If my father was drinking, say, at night . . . well, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

“I’m sorry, Tal.”

“No, it’s okay. It’s . . . believable.”

“You know, Tal, my husband tried . . . the first time, after Abby . . . he tried to get your dad some help for his drinking. But Oliver kept saying no. And, of course, he stopped on his own.” Drumming her nails on the table. “Leander said your father always seemed a little insulted when he brought up the idea of treatment.”

“He would have been.” I sigh, heart heavy with memory. “He considered counseling and therapy the final resort of the weak of will.”

“Alcoholism is a disease . . .” the doctor in her begins, automatically.

Laughing, I put up my hands in surrender. “Hey, you don’t have to convince me. I know it’s a disease, and I know there’s a genetic tendency to it, which are two reasons that I never touch the stuff.” Then I grow sad again. “And if it’s a disease and my father never had any treatment . . . well, yes, I can believe that he would have started again.” I play with my food, my appetite fading. None of this is what I came for. All I have done is reopened the never-quite-healed wounds of those debilitating days. But I press on. “Is that all your husband told you? The drinking? The . . . the crazy phone calls?”

“Well, no. No, there was more.” Lanie clucks her tongue thoughtfully. She is about to drop another veil and, obviously, wondering whether she should. “Like . . . the chess,” she says at last.

“The chess? What chess?”

Lanie’s strong brow furrows in thought. She brushes her hair back again, forks some salad into her mouth. I wait while she sips her water. “Leander used to drop by to see your father in the evenings, both while this was going on and . . . and afterward. He didn’t always call first . . .”

“Because he wanted to see if my dad was drinking,” I suggest.

“I suppose that was part of it. But also remember, Tal, they were from a different generation. Dropping by unannounced was what friends did. It wasn’t like today, where nobody’s house is ever neat or ready for company, so you call first so your friends can clean everything up. People’s houses, people’s lives were more . . . oh, more open in a way. Not that nobody had any secrets, but, you know, there was a kind of a sense that . . . that . . . that your friends could see you as you really are. Were. You know what I’m saying.”

“Yes.” I smile slightly, hoping Lanie will hurry, because it is quarter
past one and I know she has a patient at two. Or perhaps my secret memories of the neighborhood itself are generating this unexpected urge to rush. A few blocks up Columbia Road is the apartment where I lived in the late 1980s, and where Kimmer, although married to André, sometimes slept. Probably we ate a furtive meal or two in this very restaurant.

“Anyway. So Leander would drop by and he would usually find your father down in his little study—you know the room I mean—and Oliver would have his chessboard out, the one he was so proud of, always showing off the pieces, and he would be playing chess with himself.” She makes a face. “No, that’s not right. Let me think. I don’t know much about chess, so it’s hard to remember. No. He wasn’t playing. He was trying . . . he was making chess puzzles . . . .”

“Problems.”

“Hmmm?”

“Chess problems. My father liked to . . . They call it
composing.
He liked to compose chess problems. I guess you’d call it his hobby.”

“Right!” Her face brightens. “Because, I remember, Leander told me he thought it was great therapy, should be very relaxing for your father, except . . . except that . . .”

“Except what?” I am running out of patience as well as time and wish she would just say it right out.

She looks me straight in the eye. She has caught my mood and is ready to give me the unadorned truth. “Leander thought Oliver had grown obsessional about it. About the chess problems he was composing. He didn’t even want to play golf any more, because he always was at his chessboard. He hardly went to the poker games. I’m talking about the months after the . . . after the problem with his nomination. So Leander would go to Shepard Street to visit him. And your mother would let him in, and he would find his way back to the study, and he would walk in the room, Oliver’s best friend, and Oliver wouldn’t even get up from the chessboard. Sometimes he wouldn’t even look up. He kept talking about how even chess was fixed, white moved first, white usually won, black could only react to what white did, and even if black played a perfect game he still had to wait for white to make a mistake before he would have any hope of winning—that kind of thing.” Lanie frowns, remembering another point. “But . . . but I think I remember that Leander said that was why Oliver liked to—what was that word?—to compose. He liked composing problems because there was some special kind of problem, where black moved first . . . .”

“Helpmate problems, they’re called,” I say, even though this was never the side of chess that intrigued me. But something is crawling upward in my memory. “Black moves first in a helpmate, and black and white cooperate to checkmate the black king.”

Lanie raises a thin eyebrow to show what she thinks of this. “Okay, maybe so. But, Talcott, the thing is, your father, well, he kept saying that this would be his redemption, that he couldn’t win in one field but he could win in another. And . . . now, I don’t remember this so well . . . but Leander said your father had some kind of chess problem he was working on, something that had never been done before, and he somehow thought if he could solve it . . . or compose it, I guess . . . that it would make up for what happened to his nomination to the Supreme Court. Something about a knight? Double . . . something. I don’t remember what it was called. Chess isn’t my game. But Leander said your father seemed so . . . so desperate to do it, so obsessed about it, that, for a while anyway, he didn’t seem to give much time to anything else. Even his work started to slip, so Leander told me. All so he could . . . could compose his chess problem. Which is why my husband thought Oliver had a . . . a kind of breakdown. That’s what Leander said, anyway.” She looks at her watch, and I know our time is up.

Back out on Columbia Road, good old Lanie is Dr. Melanie Cross once more, and she is also in a sudden hurry to be free of me. I want to ask her whether she ever heard anything about my father wanting a gun, or whether she knows what might have spooked him a year before he died, but I see no way to phrase the questions that does not sound absurd. I walk her to her Volvo. I am not riding back to Howard with her, because my hotel is right down the hill, a ten-minute stroll. I am holding the door for her, and she is chattering about how it would be nice to get Bentley together with her grandchildren, it’s such a shame we don’t see more of each other, and I am nodding at all the right places, when the thought that has been trying to jostle its way into my consciousness suddenly bursts free.

“Lanie?”

“Hmmm?” Half in the Volvo and half out, she looks up in surprise and just a smidgen of annoyance. In her mind she is already back in her office, free of conversation almost as painful for her as for me.

“Lanie, just one other thing. The chess problem your husband told you my father was working on . . . the one he thought would turn everything around if he could only solve it?”

“What about it?”

“Can you try again to remember what it was called. You said . . . Double something?”

“I don’t know much about chess, Tal.” Smiling to hide her impatience. “I told you.”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. But can you remember anything your husband might have said about it? Please. I know you’re in a hurry, but this is important.”

She does that brow-furrowing thing again, her eyes distant. Then she shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Tal, it’s been too long. I don’t know. I know Leander mentioned a name, he said your father kept calling it by name—the chess problem, I mean. But, I’m sorry, I honestly don’t remember. I should remember the name, Leander talked about it so much, because your father talked about it so much. Let me see. Maybe ‘Double Excellence’? Or ‘The Triple Exception’? Something like that.” She looks at me again, very much the doctor, very much in a hurry. “Thanks for lunch, Tal, but I really have to run.”

“I know,” I murmur, suddenly dispirited. I remember it all now. The problem the Judge hoped to compose. The one about which he talked to me from time to time when I was much younger, even though his explanations bored me stiff. I wish now that I remembered more about it. “Thanks for trying. And thanks for your time.”

“My pleasure.” Lanie Cross brightens as she slides into the car in a flurry of thin arms and legs. I close the door solidly behind her. She rolls down the window. “Oh, I do remember one other thing. Leander told me that your father kept saying he was tired of the way white won all the time. He was going to fix it so that black would win instead.”

“You mean the chess problem? Black would win?”

“I think so. I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything else.” She gives me a harried smile. “So, Tal, let’s definitely get the families together, maybe this next summer, on the Vineyard.”

“That would be nice,” I say softly, but my mind is elsewhere.

As I watch the Volvo disappear into the swarming traffic, I am thinking of my father, out of his mind with fear and fury after the collapse of his nomination, sitting alone night after night in his little study, ignoring the overtures of his oldest and dearest friend, getting drunk, letting the rest of his world collapse around him, as he tried to fix it all by composing a special kind of chess problem called the Double Excelsior.

CHAPTER 25
A MODEST REQUEST

(I)

“I’
D LIKE TO ASK YOU A FAVOR
,” murmurs the Reverend Doctor Morris Young.

“Of course,” I say softly, because Dr. Young exudes a peace that calms those around him, as well as a power that seems to make everybody say yes.

“I hope I will not embarrass you.”

“That depends on what the favor is.”

Morris Young smiles. When happy, his pocked, orange-brown face seems gently rounded, casting warm beams of sunlight on anybody nearby. When angry, the same face is all hard planes and square corners and final judgments. His hair is sparse and gray; his reddish eyes are no longer sharp, even aided by his thick glasses; his lips are insolently protrusive, although he is as humble as they come. Though large of girth, he wears nothing in public but vested suits of dark wool, white shirts, and dark ties, a throwback to an earlier generation of preachers. He is in his early seventies, but possessed of all the evangelizing energy of the era of “muscular” Christianity. He is the pastor of Temple Baptist Church, probably the most powerful institution of the darker nation’s battered outpost in the divided city of Elm Harbor, which makes him, by many accounts, the most influential black man in town.

He is also, with the possible exception of my colleague Rob Saltpeter, the finest man it is my privilege to know. Which is why, last summer, mired in depression over the state of my marriage, I chose him for my counselor. And why I have decided I need to see him again.

Last weekend, I returned from Washington to face a buzz saw:
It’s not enough for you to lust after my sister, you have to spend the night with your fat slut of a cousin!
Evidently, somebody saw me going upstairs with Sally and told somebody else who told somebody else, the word reaching Elm Harbor in less than half a day. And, like every married man in America who has found himself in this situation, I raised my palms for peace and insisted,
Nothing happened, darling, I promise
—which in my case happens to be true. Kimmer was quite unappeased:
So what? Everybody thinks something did, Misha, and that’s almost as bad!
I was stung by the realization that Kimmer is less concerned about what I might have done than by what people believe I might have done; that my wife, who long ago liberated me from the stultifying prison of my parents’ expectations, has locked me away in the tight dungeon of her own.

I spared Kimmer the details of the dreary denouement of my night with Sally. So I omitted, cravenly, any mention of how I sat awake half the night in the uncomfortable wooden chair, fighting the impulse to stretch out on the other bed, lest Sally wake and misinterpret the situation. I did not tell my wife that I woke abruptly in the morning, still in the same position, feeling as though I had spent the night with my body twisted in some medieval torture device, my mouth clogged and muzzy, my head pounding, the vague lust of the night before a distant, barely plausible memory. My cousin was still asleep, breathing regularly now, and in the hard glare of daylight she was just dull, overweight Sally Stillman again. I had no trouble shaking her shoulder to wake her. She was no longer witty or cute or bold: her eyes red and puffy, she was panicky and disheveled and worried about being late for work, as well as being caught by Bud, who apparently remains more present in her life than she admitted. She could not get out of the room fast enough. Her coat, unfortunately, was in the cloakroom downstairs. To cover her wrinkled gown, I loaned her my tattered Burberry, which she promised to send back by Federal Express. She spent a few minutes in the bathroom, fixing her face, as she put it, and then was gone. It remains to be seen whether she took my reputation with her.