The Emperor of Ocean Park (35 page)

Before Abby was killed, my father was already a favorite of conservatives, but only because he was, as somebody once said, to his fury, a “reasonable Negro”—the kind of black man you might be willing to negotiate with. In the sixties, the Judge was not yet the dour, distracted, somehow depressing man you no doubt remember from his regrettable confirmation hearings. Even after Abby’s death, I have often thought, his career might not have taken the bizarre direction that it did, had he only experienced the emotional satisfaction of seeing her murderer—that was always the Judge’s word for the hit-and-run driver, and, by his lights, a fair one—seeing her murderer caught and punished. But the police never found a suspect. My father being who he was, my parents were regularly briefed by a senior detective: a few leads, he would tell them month after grueling month, but nothing concrete. The law had been the anchor of my father’s faith, as it was for so many civil rights lawyers of the fifties and sixties, and the inability of the vast machinery of American justice to find a sports car that killed one little girl first bewildered him, then angered him. He badgered journalists, belittled the police, and, at the recommendation of friends, hired a private investigator, an expensive one from Potomac, whose supposed leads the police scornfully dismissed, to my father’s fury. He bearded friends in the White House, friends on Capitol Hill, even friends in the District Building, the shabby brown structure housing what there was in those days of the city’s government, and received in response only pitying condolences. He posted ever-larger rewards, but all the calls were from cranks. According to Addison, the Judge even consulted a psychic or two—“but not the right ones,” adds my brother, the radio talk-show king, who no doubt could have provided better names.

As his ideas evaporated and his wrath mounted, my father spent more and more time locked in his study at Shepard Street. (This was before he knocked down the walls upstairs.) I would listen fretfully at the closed door, soon joined by Mariah, home for the summer from Stanford, neither of us sure whether there was something we should be doing. We would hear him muttering to himself, possibly weeping, certainly drinking. He passed the midnight hours on the phone with his
few remaining friends, who began to avoid his calls. He ate little. He fell behind in his judicial work. He stopped playing poker with his cronies. My mother soldiered on in the manner of her class, hosting her parties, often alone, and representing the family at a variety of functions, always alone, but we children were terrified.

When the time came for our annual trek to Oak Bluffs, Mariah, with a summer job in Washington, stayed behind, leaving me alone to suffer through what I truly thought was my father’s madness. I worried that it might be contagious, or hereditary. My mother offered endless tearful hugs and desperate reassurances, but no explanations. September arrived. Mariah returned to Stanford and I began my final year of high school. The house on Shepard Street became a single vast silence. The family spiraled downhill, and nobody talked about it. I stopped inviting schoolmates home. I was too embarrassed. Some nights, I myself stayed away. To my chagrin, my parents scarcely noticed. A year passed, a year and a half. I made my own escape to college. Now my parents had only each other for comfort, and their marriage—so my brother later assured me—came as close as it ever would to sundering. I spent most of my vacations away from Washington. I had no sense of being missed. And then, quite suddenly, the sea of melancholy in which the Judge was drowning dried up. I never quite understood why. All I knew was that the will of which he had preached throughout our several childhoods reasserted itself: he drew a line, as Addison later explained it, and placed Abby and the mystery of her death on the side marked
Past.
He came roaring out of his study like a recently uncaged animal, alive once more to life and its possibilities. He began to laugh and joke. He reawakened to his old goal of being the fastest writer on the court of appeals. He stopped his frightening new habit of drinking, and resumed his boring old one of interfering in his children’s lives. He seemed himself once more, and would not admit his momentary weakness had ever existed. So, when his old friend Oz McMichael, the cantankerous Virginia moderate who sat in the Senate forever, lost his own son to a hit-and-run driver, and dared suggest that my father join his support group of parents whose children had been killed the same way, the Judge curtly refused, and—this is still according to Addison—stopped speaking to the man altogether.

A support group, I am thinking, gazing at my contemplative, and now sleepy, little boy. Maybe, now that Scott is gone, I need to overcome my family’s prejudice against counseling and get some. Last summer
I gave it a try, pouring out my marital woes to a pastor—not my own, which would have been too risky, but a gentle man named Morris Young whom I met through my work in the community.

And Morris Young helped. A little.

Maybe, I am thinking now, maybe if I promise to stop tracking down the various mysteries my father left behind, Kimmer and I can go to counseling together, and make the marriage work. It will be easier, of course, if the President picks her for the court of appeals, but, I admit glumly, that prospect seems to fade with every online crank who spreads a theory just crazy enough to keep the story alive.

(III)

M
ARIAH CALLS
while Bentley is in the bathtub. I am doing the nighttime duty with our boy because Kimmer, who usually draws sustenance from caring for him, is away. Not that I mind spending this time with him. Oh, no! Ever since our return from the Vineyard, I have hardly been able to bear having Bentley out of my sight—although life and work make it necessary. Still, I could listen to his
Dare you
for hours on end, even as my heart twists with the hopeless pain of the failed desire to give him a normal childhood . . . whatever counts as normal these days. Two parents who actually love each other might be an interesting and radical beginning, but the mere suggestion that the traditional household might turn out to be good for children offends so many different constituencies that hardly anybody is willing to raise it any longer. Which further suggests, as George Orwell knew, that within a generation or two nobody will think it either. What survives is only what we are able to communicate. Moral knowledge that remains secret eventually ceases to be knowledge.

Although it may still be moral.

When the telephone rings, Bentley is performing a delicate experiment in which he stuffs into his bright red plastic boat as many little Playmobil characters as it will hold and waits to see if it will sink. Sometimes it sinks. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes he can pile on fifteen soldiers and the boat remains comfortably afloat. Sometimes fewer than a dozen will sink it. Bentley frowns, trying to reason out a principle. I do not see one either, which pleases me: No matter how much of the universe the physical scientists are able to explain, some events
remain chaotic, even random. The sinking or floating of Bentley’s red boat seems to be one of them.

We live so much of our lives in chaos. Human history can be viewed as an endless search for greater order: everything from language to religion to law to science tries to impose a framework on chaotic existence. The existentialists, sometimes wrongly described as disbelieving in an underlying order, saw the risks and the foolishness of the obsession with creating one. Hitler showed the risk, as did any number of populist tyrants before him. I teach my students that law, too, shows the risk, when we try to regulate a phenomenon—human behavior—that we do not even understand. I am not arguing against law, I add as they scribble in furious confusion, but against the Panglossian assumption that we can ever do law particularly well. The darkness in which we live dooms us to do it badly.

Which is why, weighing up the balance of my life, I would rather be bathing my son at this moment than finishing any of the pointless work piled up in my small study down on the first floor. On my desk is the edited version of the overdue manuscript on mass tort litigation that I am publishing in the school’s snooty law review. I sometimes wish I had the courage of my colleagues Lem Carlyle and Rob Saltpeter, two of our genuine superstars, who announced in a joint letter to
the American Lawyer
three years ago that they would no longer write for student-edited law reviews because they were tired of kids two or three years out of college purporting to know the law—to say nothing of how to write—better than their professors. As nearly all the nation’s law reviews are edited by students, this means, in practice, that Lem and Rob, if they want to be taken seriously as scholars, are forced to write books, which neither one of them seems to have any trouble getting done. But most of us labor on in the trenches, filling the pages of the nation’s law reviews with ideas that, to paraphrase what someone wrote about the great eighteenth-century chess theorist François-André Philidor, move at dizzying speed from being too far in advance of their time to be taken seriously to being too outmoded to matter.

Yes, there are days when I love being a law professor; but there are days when I hate it, too.

(IV)

B
ENTLEY’S HEAD
jerks up furiously at the sound of the telephone, for he knows that it commonly presages a parental abandonment. I carry the portable into the bathroom whenever he is in the tub, a habit I picked up from Kimmer, who does not want to miss the chance that a client might call, allowing her to dry Bentley and dress him for bed with the handset cocked in her neck, talking away, able to bill an hour or two while doing her maternal duties.

I try to compromise, picking up the receiver with one hand, piling Playmobil men and women onto the red boat with the other.

“Did I wake you?” Mariah begins, which has been her idea of a joke ever since the early days of my marriage to Kimmer, when calling after the dinner hour was always a risk: the chances were excellent that we were already in bed, although never asleep.

“No, no, I’m sitting here with Bentley. He’s in the tub.”

“Give him my love.”

“Auntie Mariah says she loves you.”

My son ignores me, shoving aside the Playmobil boat, plunging his face into the water, and blowing bubbles to the surface.

“He says he loves you, too.”

“So how are you guys doing?”

“Oh, great, we’re great,” I enthuse, knowing Mariah did not call to chitchat. We have made peace from our fight of a few weeks ago, but I pay tribute in the form of listening whenever she wants to talk. I carry the portable phone over to the sink and fill a paper cup with water. This could take a while.

“Anyway, Tal, I’m in Washington, and I found something that might interest you.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

We share a laugh, small and strained, like the forced hysterics that paper over pain. Early in her seventh month of pregnancy, my sister has made the round trip between Washington and Darien three times in the five weeks since we buried the Judge. After years of moody silence toward me, Mariah now phones every three or four days, probably because nobody else will listen to the theories she revises so fast that they now and then seem to switch identities in the middle of a sentence. Her husband is too busy, our big brother is too hard to track down, and her friends . . . well, her friends, I suspect, are not taking her calls.
As for myself, I do not mind the calls, as long as she talks only to me; if I can keep her speculations within reasonable bounds, or keep her from voicing them aloud, I can help Kimmer and my big sister at the same time.

Besides, Mariah could be on to something; Colin Scott, after all, did not go off to Canada; he followed my family to the Vineyard, and died there. Or maybe I am simply joining my sister in her headlong rush toward the far reaches of fantasy.

This evening’s call is typical. Mariah is down at Shepard Street again, and was apparently awake for half the night, going through the papers in the attic. Her obsession ever since the night she and Sally began the search, after our meeting with Sergeant Ames. Mariah sits for hours on end, surrounded by mountains of contracts, letters, check stubs, drafts of essays and speeches, menus, folded press clippings tearing along their ancient creases, diagrams of chess positions, notes for the Judge’s books, recipes, unframed awards and commendations, bills from the man who boards the window of Vinerd Howse every winter, condolence cards,
Playbills
from forgotten Broadway shows, deeds, drafts of long-forgotten opinions from his days on the bench, printed instructions from a long-vanished game called Totopoly, unused yellow legal pads, photographs of our mother, hardcover editions of Trollope, memoranda from various assistants, outdated maps of the Vineyard, credit card receipts, pocket diaries, and newspapers and magazines galore: back issues of the
Washington Post,
the
Wall Street Journal,
and the
National Review,
a handful of yellowing front pages from the
Vineyard Gazette,
even, astonishingly, two or three tattered copies
of Soldier of Fortune.
And, amidst it all, a grim sentinel guarding the debris, sits my big sister. Patiently examining the bits, one by one. Looking for a pattern. A clue. An answer. Hoping to finding something the police missed. And Mallory Corcoran’s minions, who spent an afternoon in the house three days after the funeral, hunting for any confidential papers that belonged at the firm. Mariah believes she can outsearch them all. Real investigative journalism, I suppose, is like that: the sifting of details to find more details to find a muddle, and then discerning in the muddle an outline, and finally rendering the outline clear for one’s readers.

I have lately seen the low-ceilinged attic of the house on Shepard Street, its dreary, dusty shadows lighted by the single skylight. I dropped in while Kimmer and Bentley and I were in D.C. for our miserable
Thanksgiving. You have to climb a narrow staircase behind the bathroom to get up to what the Judge called the garret, but Mariah climbs it regularly, and scarcely a corner has been spared her researches. I have stood there, hunched over, letting my gaze wander across the stacks and sprays and crosses of papers, some lying underneath glass paperweights borrowed from our mother’s collection downstairs, some shoved up against the single gabled window, some connected by pins and colored yarn—red for this, green for that. It is not right to call her creation a shambles. Mariah has explained the system to me, or tried to, during our late-night calls, and she has described for me the little black composition book where she has sketched her theories and drawn her connections.
My ledger,
she called it in one late-night call.
Next to my family, the most precious thing I own.
Looking around at the chaos that Mariah thinks is orderly, I worry. Surely Arthur Bremer’s apartment once looked as the attic now does. And John Hinckley’s. And Squeaky Fromme’s. I have had a few chats with Howard, who tells me that he is starting to worry about his wife, that he never sees her, she is down in Washington nearly every weekend. She often takes the children, too, sometimes bundling all five of them, along with the au pair of the moment—she fires them fast—into the Navigator for the rumble down the New Jersey Turnpike. Marshall and Malcolm are old enough to help a little with the sorting, but the twins only play, and Marcus, soon to relinquish his role as the baby, naps in my sister’s old bedroom on the second floor, watched over by the au pair, who rarely speaks English, at least to me.