The Emperor of Ocean Park (29 page)

F
IVE MINUTES LATER
, I pull the Camry into the driveway of our twelve-room Victorian in the heart of the faculty ghetto. We are, as Kimmer often reminds me, surrounded by the law school on all sides. Dear Dana Worth lives two blocks farther along Hobby Road, around the corner is Tish Kirschbaum, our token feminist, and Peter Van Dyke, our token fascist—these are Kimmer’s nicknames, not mine—is right across the street. Theo Mountain’s back yard abuts Peter’s. Four more faculty members live within an additional three-block radius. Once the mansions of Hobby Hill were hideously expensive, available to only the most senior professors in the university, and only those among them who came from money. But the Elm Harbor housing market has been soft now for close to fifteen years running, and youngish professors in the financially advantaged schools—law, medicine, and business—have purchased the huge homes once reserved for the masters of Mencius and Shakespeare and the curvature of space.

Still—home! Number 41 Hobby Road is a massive house, built at the end of the nineteenth century, with wide rooms and high ceilings and graceful wainscoting. A house to entertain in, although we never entertain. A house to hold gaggles of children, although we will never have more than one. Everywhere floors are sagging and panels are cracked and pipes are groaning—but they are
our
floors and panels and pipes. We are only the third black family ever to live in the section of town called Hobby Hill, sixteen square blocks of elegance, and the other two deserted the cause long before we arrived. I do not know how many owners our particular house has had, but it has survived them all, has even thrived. Somebody turned the basement into a playroom, somebody renovated the kitchen, somebody added a cramped garage where Kimmer, despite my entreaties to protect the more expensive of our cars, refuses to park her BMW because she fears the narrow entry might scratch the blinding white paint, somebody updated all four full and two half baths, including the one for the maid in the attic, if we only had a maid and could afford to heat the attic; yet I like to think the house has hardly changed since being built. Eight years after we bought the place, I am still tickled to walk in the front door, because I know that the original owner was the longtime provost of the university, a fussy Latin and Greek scholar named Phineas Nimm, who died around the time of the First World War. Something over a hundred years ago, responding to a survey from an unknown Atlanta University professor named W.E.B. Du Bois, Provost Nimm wrote unapologetically that a colored man, whatever the level of his educational achievement, would not be welcome as a student. As an undergraduate, I discovered a copy of the letter in the university archives and nearly stole it. After all these years, the irony of owning Nimm’s house still brings me a bitter satisfaction.

As the daylight fades, Bentley and I play kickball in the yard for half an hour, watched with approval by Don and Nina Felsenfeld, our elderly next-door neighbors, who are sitting on their screened porch, as they do every day around this time, sipping lemonade. Don was in his day one of the nation’s leading experts on particle physics, and Nina remains an expert at welcoming strangers, the Jewish tradition of
hesed:
within an hour of the arrival of the moving truck eight years ago, she was at our door with a tray of cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches. She has brought us other trays over the years, including one three weeks ago, after my father died, because she grew up in the kind of family
where, when somebody died, bringing food was what neighbors did. Don and Nina believe that nothing is more important than family, and Don, who often spends a friendly evening whomping me at chess, is fond of saying that nobody ever lay on his deathbed wishing he had spent a few more hours at work and a few less with the kids.

Kimmer thinks they are interfering busybodies.

And they are, evidently, about to interfere again, because, as soon as I judge that my son is too tired to play any longer and turn around to head inside, Don rises to his feet and opens the door to his porch. He beckons to me over the high, thick hedge that separates our lots. I nod, take Bentley by the hand, and wander toward the front of the house, which is the only way around the sprawling, prickly hedge. Don and I meet on his front lawn, and there is a moment while he plays around with his pipe.

“How’s the little chap?” he asks at last, referring to Bentley.

“Bentley’s doing great,” I answer.

“Grape! Bemmy grape!” chirps my magnificent son, reaching out his free hand for Don’s. “Dare you!”

“Yep,” says Don with every appearance of seriousness, swallowing the tiny proffered fingers in his own. “Yep, you’re quite a grape little chap.”

Bentley giggles and hugs Don’s bony leg.

Don Felsenfeld is a tall, awkwardly thin man, graceless and aloof, the son of a Jewish farmer from Vermont. In his heyday, it is said, he knew more about subatomic particles than anybody on the planet, and a favorite bromide on campus is that he should have had the Nobel Prize twice. A sometime socialist and full-time atheist, Don once wrote a popular book whose title made a joke of Einstein’s famous and difficult line:
The Science of Unbelief: How the Universe Plays Dice with God,
he called it. Now he is close to eighty, dresses every day in khaki trousers and the same blue cardigan, and spends most of his time gardening or smoking his pipe or both.

“Been quite a couple of weeks for you,” says Don. No smile, few words: Jewish he may be, but Don Felsenfeld is pure New England too.

“I suppose.”

“Nina’s cooking for you.”

“She’s sweet.”

“That she is.” For a moment, we both stand in silence, appreciating his wife. Then Don begins to fiddle with his pipe again, the way he does
just after unleashing a devastating attack over the chessboard, and I know we are finally at the heart of the matter. “Talcott, listen.” I do. I am. “Are you having some kind of trouble?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I swallow with effort, thinking: McDermott has been skulking around asking questions. Or Foreman. Or the real FBI. “What makes you ask that?”

Don does not look at me. Still puffing his pipe, he seems to take great interest in a white-throated sparrow hopping along the sidewalk, somehow left behind when the great flocks migrated south.

“It’s been a pretty nice autumn, don’t you think?” Don asks slowly. Bewildered, I nod. Is he thinking about the bird? “Weather’s been fair, not too cold. Pleasant.”

“Yes, it’s been nice.”

“One of the warmest since you’ve been in town, as a matter of fact.”

“I guess it could be.”

“Kind of autumn weather where folks keep their windows open at night to catch the breeze.”

“Uh, right.” Over the years, Don and I have discussed, in detail, everything from the university’s policies on patent ownership by faculty, to the relative merits of John Updike and John Irving, to the relationship between capital gains tax rates and capital formation, to how Bobby Fischer would have fared against the current crop of chess champions, to whether the Book of Isaiah, which Christians believe prefigures the birth and ministry of Jesus, predicts the arrival of one infant or two. But we have never once held a lengthy conversation about the weather . . . which leads me to believe something important is on the way.

“You know, Talcott, there are no perfect marriages.”

“I never thought there were.”

“Your windows are open at night in this weather. Ours too.”

A sudden awareness dawns. I look at him hard, but his gentle gaze is still locked on something in the middle distance. I know what is coming, and I know that Nina has put him up to it—for Don, like the Judge, would never willingly discuss an emotion, or even admit to having any.

“Uh, Don, look—”

In his kindly but single-minded way, the old physicist rides right over me, just as he does when we play chess. “Voices carry, Talcott. Couldn’t help overhearing the other night. You and your wife, I mean. Two of you had quite a set-to.”

Three nights ago, I am remembering: Saturday. The one sour note in an otherwise loving week. Kimmer announced she was leaving for San Francisco in the morning, and I asked, stupidly, about her promise to take Bentley to Miguel Hadley’s birthday party so that I could drive over to the campus after church to catch the tail end of Rob Saltpeter’s conference on the implications of artificial intelligence for constitutional law. She told me that she had no choice, that this was work. I told her mine was work too. She said it wasn’t the same. She had made a commitment. I asked her who to. She asked what that was supposed to mean. I said she knew. She asked what
that
was supposed to mean. I said I didn’t want to talk about it. She said I was the one who brought it up in the first place. I can see how Don and Nina overheard: our voices were certainly raised. Kimmer’s anyway.

“I’m sorry if we disturbed you.”

“Don’t give it a thought, Talcott.” He puts a hand on my shoulder, man to man, the way my father used to. Bentley, sensing the seriousness of the conversation, has ambled away. He is stooping on the Felsenfelds’ lawn, examining Don’s carefully tended flowerbeds, now mostly covered over for the coming cold weather. I have tried to get my son to stop picking the buds, but Don and Nina do not seem to mind. “I just wanted you to know I’m here if you ever need to talk. Sometimes talking things through is the most important step. Nina and I, well, we’ve had a problem or two of our own over the years. We got through ours, you’ll get through yours if you let your friends help.”

For a moment I am too humiliated to speak: there are
standards,
after all, my mother used to preach, and nobody should ever get the idea you aren’t living up to them. As for the talking-things-out idea, my father always mocked the idea of counseling, which was, he said, nothing more than coddling the weak of will.
You draw a line, Talcott. Put the past on one side, the future on the other, and decide which side you want to live on. Then stick to your decision.
In my family, problems were secrets; so none of us ever received training on what to do if some outsider discovered that we actually had one.

Yet I manage somehow to gather enough wit to respond lightly:

“Oh, Don, thanks, but Saturday night, that was nothing. You should hear Kimmer when she gets
mad.
” I would wink, too, but I never actually learned how.

Don summons a smile and gazes at me the way the Judge used to, when I joked about grades or tenure or politics or anything else my
father considered important and I chose not to discuss. Don’s bright, intelligent eyes convey the pitiless judgment of a man who has spent his seven-plus decades on earth getting all the answers right. I adore Nina, but not Don, probably because he reminds me too much of the Judge. The fact that my father was, for lack of a better word, a Tory, and Don is very much the other thing, does not change the essential similarity of their natures, particularly the somber self-satisfaction that commands those foolish enough to hold wrong political opinions to go to hell.

“I’m here if you change your mind,” Don tells me. Which is something else that the Judge used to say. Only I never did, and he never was.

CHAPTER 16
THE THREE FOOLS

(I)

W
E TAKE FORMAL POSSESSION
of the Vineyard house in the middle of the week after Thanksgiving, driving Kimmer’s sleek BMW up to Massachusetts, then down the Cape to Woods Hole, and crossing on the auto ferry. The ferry, my father used to say, is two of the Island’s blessings: one because the trip over the water is so pleasant and restful that you arrive on Martha’s Vineyard in the mood to relax, and the other because the Steamship Authority, which operates the ferry service, holds a monopoly on the franchise and runs only a limited number of ships, which means that only a limited number of cars, and thus of people, can get to the Island, especially in the high season of July and August. Whenever one of the children, usually Addison, whispered that this joy smacked of elitism, the Judge would respond happily with one of his favorite
bons mots,
quite possibly original with him: “Being part of the elite is the reward for working hard and living right.” (Implying, of course, that if you are not part of the elite you either did not work hard or did not live right.)

I have always loved the crossing, and today’s journey is no different. As the Cape falls farther and farther behind, I can feel my fears and confusions fading with it, receding in importance as the Vineyard looms ever larger off the starboard bow, first a distant gray-green shimmer, next a dreamlike vision of trees and beaches, now near enough to make out the individual houses, all gray-brown and weathered and beautiful. I gulp down its image like an alcoholic tumbling gratefully off the wagon as the ferry thrums steadily across the waves, a few dozen automobiles waiting in the hold to explode onto the Island in a noxious rush of joy. (In season there would be a hundred or more.) Bentley and
I stand at the rail, my son calling to the gulls that soar in the salty autumn air, seeming to hang motionless as they match their speed to the speed of the boat, hoping to gorge on what we wastrel humans toss aside. A chilly, distant sun beams its indifference across the water. My son stretches his pudgy hands over the side and, rather than frustrating him, I hook a prudent finger in his belt and try to convince myself that he is indeed all of three years old, with four swimming toward us fast, no longer a baby, yet the last child I will ever father as well as the first. For Kimmer is through with pregnancy: she has made that icily clear, even as so much in our marriage remains hotly confused. Part of it, I know, is fear, after our near miss with Bentley; but fear is not the entire explanation. A new child would be a fresh commitment to a marriage about which Kimmer remains unsure. To my desire for a large family, she answers correctly that she, not I, must carry the baby—except that Kimmer always says
fetus,
and is at pains to make everybody else say it too. My wife, who is never political except when she is, can sniff out an anti-abortion plot before it is hatched. This past March, Dear Dana Worth, who loves children but will never bear one, gave Bentley for his third birthday
Horton Hears a Who
by Dr. Seuss, one of her favorites, she told us, when she was a child. Kimmer thanked Dana, leafed through the book in horror, and put it away in the attic without ever troubling to read it to our son. She forbade me to read it to him either. “An anti-choice tract,” she huffed, and, when I asked what she was talking about, she smiled dismissively and quoted the book’s recurring tag line,
A person’s a person, no matter how small.
“What else could it be about?” she demanded.