The Emperor of Ocean Park (89 page)

(III)

M
AY
. June. Final exams, caps and gowns. The graduating class rewards me for my bullet holes, or maybe for losing my wife to our most famous student, by electing me the commencement speaker. I march through the ceremony with the help of a new cane, heavy and dark and quite ornately carved, a gift from Shirley Branch, who brought it back from a March vacation in South Africa with Kwame Kennerly. It looks very smart with my drab academic gown. A few weeks ago, Kwame quit
working for the mayor over some matter of high principle—I forget just what—and now Shirley tells me that he has decided to run against his former boss next year.

I am too busy missing Bentley to care.

In my remarks, I tell the students to use their skills for good, not evil, and they grow restless, because it is the same speech they hear every year. So I throw away my text and lean over the lectern and warn them that when lawyers place client service ahead of virtue, people die. They applaud wildly. I tell them that if they decide that their only role is to do what their clients tell them to do, they will be part of the destruction of a great nation, dying already from our stubborn refusal to look at life as more than an opportunity to get what we want. They applaud cautiously. I talk about the proliferation of handguns and the lack of political will to do anything about it. They applaud dutifully. I talk about the proliferation of abortions and the lack of political will to do anything about it. They do not applaud, but many of their parents do. I propose that both are signs of a self-indulgence that is replacing both capitalism and democracy as the nation’s true ideology. Nobody applauds, because nobody thinks I am making any sense. I tell them that they need to find a vision of a greater nation and then to work toward it, not only in their professional lives but in their personal lives. I tell them that the contemporary dichotomy between the public and the private quite overlooks the fact that it is our so-called private lives that teach our children what it means to live rightly—and that living rightly, not using law to force others to live rightly, is the definition of the life well lived. I hear polite coughing. I am boring them. I imagine myself addressing Kimmer, stating my side of our unfinished argument. I paraphrase Emerson: the world is everything that is not
me
—including not only that which is outside of me, but much that is within me. So much of life today, I point out, seems to involve counseling people to be more of what they already are. But Emerson, I warn them, had it right. Sometimes even the body, its needs and desires at war with the will, is other.

They do not know what I am talking about. They do not want to know. They want to be congratulated on their achievements and sent out into the world to self-indulge. A titter runs along the rows of gowned students and suddenly uneasy parents. The members of the graduating class see now that they made a mistake inviting me to speak, that being shot and nearly killed in the Burial Ground has made me
only angrier, not wiser; I am refusing to offer them the comfort that is expected on graduation day.

I try one last time. I select a story from Exodus. I tell them how, when God fed his people in the wilderness, Moses warned them to take only what they needed. It was easy to tell who had taken too much, I remind them, because those who had extra kept it overnight, in defiance of God’s instruction, and the surplus rotted and filled with maggots. I look out over the sea of fresh young faces, excellently educated, ready to file off to staff the mighty law factories of the great cities. A good chunk of them, I remind myself, have never read Exodus, and probably remember Moses as the star of an animated movie. Still, I have to try. Take only what you need, I tell them. Not simply in terms of money—they know that part of God’s law already, although ninety percent of them will ignore it once they enter upon the project of remuneration, as most of us do. Also in terms of what you take from others: emotional energy, for example. Take only what you truly need in love. In family life. In your relations with your colleagues.

They are silent.

And in what you demand of yourself, I add. Take only what you need from yourself. Law is a killing profession. I cite statistics: our absurd rates of suicide, of alcoholism, of clinical depression, of divorce. Because we do not listen to the wisdom of Exodus. Because we demand, even of ourselves, more than what we really need. We look at our bodies, our energies, and we think we own them: we do not recognize, with Emerson, that they are a part of the world to be husbanded with care, to be respected, not to be misused; we think they are ours to do with what we will. And so, thinking we have been liberated, we joyfully pave the paths to our own destruction.

They do not realize that I am finished. Neither do I, until I walk back to my seat. The students applaud, but only because they are expected to. Marching off the platform, I console myself with the thought that they probably would have booed Aristotle, from whom I cribbed my central idea.

Rob Saltpeter tells me later that I was brilliant. Dear Dana Worth kisses my cheek and says it made her sad. Stuart Land barks that it was certainly different. Lem Carlyle, attending his final commencement as a member of the faculty, informs me that it was gutsy, which could mean anything. Arnie Rosen pronounces it a little bit mystical for his taste. Betsy Gucciardini murmurs that it was fascinating, campus-speak
for
I hated it.
Dean Lynda, shaking my hand, says it was just fine—another negative euphemism—but asks if I couldn’t have tried to be a teensy-weensy bit more upbeat. Ben Montoya warns solemnly that Biblical analogies are exclusionary and very often offensive in our increasingly diverse society. Tish Kirschbaum confides that she knows what I meant about abortion, but the way I put it is likely to give comfort to the far right. Shirley Branch suggests that I should have talked explicitly about my subtext, which, she says, is racial subordination. Ethan Brinkley smiles that it reminded him of a chat he once had with the Dalai Lama.

Marc Hadley advises me that I got the quote from Emerson wrong.

CHAPTER 55
THE ELM HARBOR CONNECTION

“Y
OU WEREN’T AT GRADUATION
,” I say to Theo Mountain the next day. We are, once more, in his office, and I am standing in the huge bay window.

“No.”

“Everybody noticed. You haven’t missed one in—what? Twenty years?”

“I couldn’t make it,” he mumbles, but this is a new, shiftier Theo. All the triumphal condescension has been drained from his manner. He sits listlessly at his desk, waiting for the ax to fall. I know perfectly well why he was not present, and he knows I know. He has been able to read the fury in my face every time I have seen him over the past two weeks. The last thing he wanted to do yesterday was sit among the faculty on the stage and worry about whose fault it was that I got shot.

“You know, Theo, you have a great view from up here.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“You can see down the alley to the Original Quad. You have a straight line almost to the edge of the campus.” I turn back to face him. He is a hunched, beaten shadow. I know now why he took so long to offer his condolences on my father’s passing. He was ashamed of his own actions, as well he should have been. But trying to hate him does no good. I lean heavily on my cane. The pain is bad today. Dr. Serra says I will suffer from internal aches on and off for the rest of my life.

Which, if I miscalculate over the next few weeks, may not be very long.

“Why did you do it, Theo?”

“Do what?” he asks, in an unpersuasive stab at an innocent tone.

“Why did you send me the pawns?”

Still he will not look at me. Nor will he speak. He is gazing at the photographs on his desk: one of his late wife; one of his only child, a daughter, now in her early fifties and a very senior partner at a Wall Street firm, but in the photograph a shy undergraduate; and one depicting the three Mountain brothers climbing rocks somewhere, looking tough and strong, back in the days when, together, they ruled the world of legal academia. He just shakes his head.

“Come on, Theo, talk to me. I know most of it. I want the rest of it.” When he says nothing, I move around to the front of the desk. “You saw me leave Oldie that day, because you can see everything from your window. You made a pretty good guess from my route that I was headed to the soup kitchen. It was lunchtime. I was rushing. And you’re the one who hooked me up with Dee Dee in the first place. And so you called whoever you called and told her to drop off the first envelope. Who was it, by the way? That you called?”

“My granddaughter,” he says at last, still hunched over. “I couldn’t very well trust anybody else.” So simple. His granddaughter, a student at the college. Had my wits been about me, I might have figured it out. “I told her not to go inside, and to make sure to leave before you came outside,” he adds, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “I told her to give it to Romeo, and to tell him she was paid. No point in having you identify her.”

Or you, I am thinking.

I hobble to a chair, shove aside the papers stacked on it, and manage to sit. Anger seems to make my lingering pains that much worse. “And the other pawn? The black one?”

“That was easier. I saw you and Dana go to lunch.” His gaze bounces around the room, settling briefly on my glowering face before landing on the file cabinet where, for twenty clever years, Theo hid the evidence of Marc’s plagiarism. Perhaps it should have stayed there. “It didn’t matter whether you got them inside the law school or outside, so I did one of each. They were supposed to arrive close together, but . . . well, for a while, I chickened out.”

“Instructions from my father,” I propose. Who wanted to remind me that the Double Excelsior was a chess problem, revolving around two pawns, and wanted to signal me that white moved first . . . and wanted me sufficiently intrigued to keep hunting.

“Yes,” he says grudgingly. “He asked me to do this for him . . . you know, if anything ever happened to him. We were on a television show
together, oh, two years ago.” He focuses on me again. “He asked me while we were in the greenroom.”

“But he didn’t give you the pawns at that time.”

“No. No, he said they would arrive when they were needed. And they did, a week or so after . . . you know, after he died.” He sighs. “And, before you ask, Talcott, I’m afraid the envelope didn’t have a return address.”

“Was it, by any chance, postmarked Philadelphia?”

Theo Mountain’s sad eyes brighten briefly. “I think it might have been Delaware.”

My turn to sigh. Good old Alma, in such a hurry to get away the morning after the funeral, the pawns probably hidden in her handbag, stopping on her way home to mail them to Theo. No wonder she went off to the islands. I wonder just how many people the Judge drew into his lunatic conspiracy.

“So, when you told me you weren’t close to my father at the end, when you told me he was close to Stuart, you were lying. Trying to point me in the wrong direction.”

“I was trying to point you in the wrong direction, yes, but I wasn’t lying.” Spoken like an elected official charged with perjury. “Your father and I weren’t close any more. That was true. He and Stuart
were
close. That was true, too. When your father came to me, I asked him why he didn’t want Stuart to do it. He got irritated and said he didn’t really trust Stuart.” Theo shakes his shaggy head, regaining, for that tiny instant, his old bonhomie. “Who could blame him? Stuart would sell his granddaughter for a nice fat consulting fee.”

But I see that Theophilus Mountain has not penetrated to the truth. Stuart, whatever his politics, is a better man than Theo. More direct, less underhanded. Either Stuart turned the request down flat, or the Judge guessed that he would and never bothered to ask. He came to Theo precisely because of his old teacher’s byzantine love of conspiracy.

“And what about Marc Hadley?” I ask.

“What about him?” Theo echoes faintly, exhausted from pretending to be strong.

“You told me you didn’t tell the White House about his plagiarism . . . .”

“I didn’t, Talcott! That was true!”

“I know it was. But somebody was feeding the White House transcripts of Marc’s after-dinner talks, where he floated all those crazy
ideas. That was you, Theo. Okay, so you didn’t have the right political views to have any influence with the current administration. But Ruthie Silverman was your student, too, just like she was Marc’s. She would have listened to you.”

He shrugs.

My rage boils over. “And did you ever think, Theo, did you ever think for a moment that it would boomerang on my wife? That you would wreck her chances while you were in the act of sabotaging Marc Hadley’s? That you would wreck what was left of my marriage, too?”

Theo says nothing. He looks genuinely shocked. By the cost? By his discovery? I find that I no longer care. I cannot bear his presence any more, this man I so admired. I stab the Oriental carpet with my cane, push myself to my feet.

“Goodbye, Theo,” I mutter, making for the door.

“I would never have done it,” Theo insists, his voice climbing a couple of registers into true shrillness in his urgent effort to persuade me, “if I had known how it would turn out.”

From the door, I give him a look. “Yes, you would.”

CHAPTER 56
A SUMMER STROLL

(I)

T
HREE DAYS LATER
, Sally finally agrees to see me. She has been in her rehab facility past the requisite two months and can receive visitors. The old brick house perches on a bluff overlooking the Delaware River: if you happen to be crossing the bridge from New Jersey, you can probably see it, looking like the tumbledown mansion that it is. A high brick wall surrounds the property on three sides. The fourth is the river.

Sally and I walk the lavish grounds trailed at a dozen yards or so by a male orderly and the center’s chaplain, the Reverend Doris Kwan, who is present because Sally wanted her to be. The orderly is present because of some rule. Before I was allowed to see Sally, I had a talk with Reverend Kwan in her sunny office. She is a compact, muscular, imperious woman of perhaps fifty, dark hair tied back heedlessly. The air around her crackles; if she turns out to run marathons in her spare time, I will not be surprised. She has a doctorate in social work to go with her divinity degree. The diplomas hang on her walls, along with a bad reproduction of
The Last Supper.
During our brief conversation, her skeptical glare never strayed from my face.
I was against this meeting,
she told me,
but Sarah insisted.
She explained the program: two group meetings a day, four one-on-one counseling sessions a week, mandatory chapel every morning, an hour in the gym every afternoon.
We are trying to heal her mind, body, and spirit. We take faith very seriously here. Sarah is coming around, but she has a long way to go.