The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  Justice Wainwright smiles again. “Oh, well, he was a very special man. He meant a great deal to me. A giant, an absolute giant. The finest judicial craftsman it has ever been my privilege to know. I suppose you would have to say he was my mentor on the bench. Yes. What happened . . . well, it does nothing to alter my admiration for him.” A pause, now that he has made his little speech. “Yes. So. What would you like to know?”

  Here goes. “Well, I was wondering . . . not about the days after what happened, but the days before. When he was nominated in the first place. Around then. What was going on. Including what was, or wasn’t, going on with Jack Ziegler.”

  “You know, it’s interesting. Interesting. Nobody has asked me about any of this, not even when the Congress”—the is his affectation, as are the studied repetitions and pauses that give him time to think—“was doing all those investigations. A few reporters, I guess, who somehow wangled my home number. Reporters. Of course I didn’t talk to them.” Like most judges, Wallace Wainwright regards journalists in the way that the human body probably views the E. coli bacterium: you know you need a little of it for everything to work right, but you still kind of keep hoping somebody will kill it off. “There’s been a great silence about your father, Misha. A silence. Yes. I mean about what it was like in the courthouse in those days. And maybe that’s best.”

  I hesitate. Is he warning me away or drawing me in? I do not know. I cannot read the signs. So I press my own agenda instead. “That’s what I want to know, I guess. What it was like in the courthouse. What my father was like in those days.”

  “What it was like.” Repeating my line, repeating his, the Justice recrosses his long legs and leans back in his chair. He is looking now not at me but at the ceiling, where, perhaps, he is reading the waves and currents of memory. “Well. Yes. You have to remember that, at the time all of this happened, your father was a nominee for the Supreme Court.”

  “I know that.”

  He catches my impatience and patiently corrects it. “Well, you know and you don’t know. You have to have a sense of what a court is like when one of the judges is headed for the high bench—or when everybody thinks he is headed that way, anyway. I’ve been through that several times. Several times. I was there for Bob Bork. For Oliver Garland. For Doug Ginsburg.” A wry smile. “Of course, when I list the names that way, I guess you could say the odds are not very good from the D.C. Circuit.”

  I smile back.

  “But, still, even though none of those nominees . . . ah, none of them prevailed . . . even so, at the time of the announcement, the atmosphere was, well, special.”

  “Special how?” I prompt.

  “Well,” says the Justice again. “Well, now, at first, when Reagan announced that he was nominating your father? Nobody was entirely surprised, but, still, there was this . . . this excitement around the place. Your dad, well, he was always an impressive figure, but, after the news was out, he kind of . . . when he walked down the hall, into the courtroom, wherever, it was kind of . . . well, breathtaking, I suppose. Breathtaking. I mean that literally. It was as though he was incandescent, burning the oxygen right out of the air. I don’t know what the word is. Magic, maybe. People did not exactly fawn over him. No. Come to think of it, it was just the opposite. People drew back a little bit, grew . . . mmmm, let’s say diffident, as though he was being elevated to some higher plane of existence, and the rest of us mortals were no longer fit company. No longer fit. Not a king, but . . . a crown prince! That’s the analogy. There was this . . . this glow. Incandescent,” he repeats.

  I nod, hoping he will get to the point. Wainwright’s judicial opinions have this same scattered quality, full of weak allusions and awkward metaphors. Law professors reward him for this literary confusion by referring to his writing as stylish. But perhaps my own tendency to drabness makes me envious.

  “Well. Your father handled it all beautifully. We might have been diffident, the other judges, and, especially, the law clerks, but your father was as friendly as always.” Another smile, soft, reminiscing, and I wonder whether he is teasing, for the Judge was many things, some of them admirable, but none of them friendly. “You know, now that I think about it, I suppose your father had a lot of time to prepare himself, to think about how he would behave if lightning struck. You might remember that it was not exactly a surprise. Your dad was one of the finalists, it was in all the papers, and, besides, people were talking about your dad even back in ’80, right after the election. Yes. Right after the election. Come to think of it, when Reagan was elected, some right-winger or other—excuse me, no offense to your father—but somebody from one of those terribly conservative think tanks was quoted in the newspaper about your father as the possible successor to Justice Marshall. He said something offensive, something like, ‘I hope Thurgood is keeping Oliver’s seat warm.’ Words to that effect.”

  I have forgotten the atmosphere of the time, but Justice Wainwright’s tale brings it tumbling back. I even remember, for the first time in years, the quote he mentioned. I was outraged by it, and so was nearly everybody else I knew, including my father. Outraged by the presumption, for instance, that there could be only one black Justice at a time. And by the presumption that the speaker was on a first-name basis with both my father and the great Thurgood Marshall. And then the racist choice—there is no other way to put it—to call both jurists by their first names. I cannot recall any similar quote along the lines of “I hope Lewis is keeping Bob’s seat warm”—not when the Justice and the potential nominee were both white. My father, for a strange, shining, sacrificial moment, pondered removing himself from all consideration as a future member of the Court, out of respect for Justice Marshall, before flaring ambition triumphed once more.

  “I remember,” is all I say now.

  “It was a terrible thing to say, Misha, a terrible thing, and your father was furious. But, well, this Court . . . there’s been a circus atmosphere around the nominations for decades. Longer. It goes back at least to Brandeis. Maybe even to Salmon Chase, or Roger Taney. Of course you know the storms their nominations caused! Well, this is getting far afield, and I know I’m boring you. You didn’t want to know about the mood around the courthouse. You know it already. You wanted to know . . . well, about your dad around this time, right?”

  “Yes. Whatever you feel you can share.”

  “Mmmm.” Wainwright has unveiled a different nervous gesture. He is worrying his retreating hair with one hand, drumming the fingers of the other on the arm of the chair. Doing both at once is actually a rather impressive display of coordination, like the juggler who also dances on a ball. “I’ll tell you, Misha, your father, as I said . . . he was incandescent. But not always. Even before the scandal broke, there were times, when I would catch Oliver at an unguarded moment, when he seemed . . . strained, I suppose, is the word. Worried about something. Yes. We would meet in the judges’ elevator and he would look tense and I would ask him what was wrong. I would remind him he should be walking on air. Yes. And he would shrug and mutter about how anything can come out in these hearings. ‘Look at Fortas,’ he said one night when we went down to the garage together. ‘The man takes perfectly legal money from a foundation and they destroy him for it.’” Wainwright twists his mouth in prim distaste. “Not that the problem with Fortas was legality, of course. He took money from . . . well, a shady character.” Then he sits up straight. “I guess I see the comparison.”

  I am stunned. “You’re not saying . . . my father didn’t . . .”

  “Take money? Oh, no, no, nothing like that. I’m sorry, Misha, I didn’t mean to leave that impression.” Wainwright actually laughs. “Your father taking money. That’s a real joke. I know there were some nasty rumors about that, but I knew your father as well as anybody, I sat with him on, literally, hundreds of cases over the years. I would have known. We all would have known. No chance. None. What a silly idea. I am only trying to explain that your father was nervous, that he thought something
would come out, something perfectly innocent that would be distorted into something completely different.”

  “Did you have any idea, at the time, what that something might be?”

  “No, no. How could I? Your father was—what’s the old phrase?—oh, yes, a man of transparent rectitude. An impeccable résumé, a wonderful marriage, fine children. An exemplary career. Nobody would have imagined that scandal could attach itself to such a man. Your father was a great man, Misha, no matter what happened. You have to bear his greatness in mind.”

  He is trying to reassure me, I know, but I find his cockiness off-putting. On the day of the funeral, Mallory Corcoran, too, spoke of my father’s greatness, and I sensed he meant the past tense. I wonder now whether Wallace Wainwright means the same thing. For a difficult moment, it bothers me, Wainwright’s smugness. Bothers me, I know full well, because he is white and untouchable. Was the Judge this smug? Would he have been as smug had he been confirmed? Yes, I suppose he was, and, yes, I suppose he would have been, except that he would have behaved even worse. But it would have been different. And not because he is—was—my father. After all the painful centuries, there is still a gap, a gulf, a yawning chasm between the smugness of a successful white man and the smugness of a successful black man. I suppose that white folk must find the first far easier to bear. Not black folk, however. Not this one, at least.

  Yet I must press on to my point. I am not here to judge Wallace Wainwright. I am here to gather information. I am here because of the arrangements. Because there is little time. Because I have to know.

  (III)

  “JUSTICE WAINWRIGHT, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to ask you about what happened . . . um, after the scandal broke.”

  “By all means.” He settles his hands over his knee, looking for all the world like an alert schoolboy. But his generosity seems forced, as though I am opening a wound, and perhaps I am.

  “Do you remember the security logs from the hearings? How they registered all those visits from Jack Ziegler?”

  He nods slowly. “I wish I didn’t. It was a sad moment.”

  If it was sad for you, I almost say, think of how it felt for us. Until the logs showed up, I suppose I mostly believed my father’s denials, under oath, of Jack Ziegler’s visits. I was quite ready to accept that Greg Haramoto was, whether out of bizarre mental illness or sheer perversity, a perjurer. Even after the Democrats sprung the logs, when my mother would no longer speak to us on the question, Mariah and I would sit around for hours in the evening, arguing over whether (as my sister proposed) the records might somehow have been forged.

  I can say little of this to Wallace Wainwright. “Yes, it was. A very sad moment. But let me ask you a question. Do you believe my father was lying when he said he had not met Jack Ziegler at the courthouse?”

  Wainwright is definitely nervous now; this is territory he would rather not cover; and it occurs to me, too late, how much he is like me, for I, too, hate to deliver unpleasant news in person. Waiting, I notice, to my surprise, a photograph I had overlooked before: Wainwright and my father, standing in a small boat, displaying the fish they have caught. That he would keep this picture hanging, in the Supreme Court yet, touches me deeply. I realize with a surge of warmth that his affection for my father is not feigned; that Wallace Wainwright never cut him off as other friends did; and that he came to the funeral because we were burying a man he admired. He will not, of his own free will, say a bad word about my father. So, even before the Justice speaks, I know roughly what he is going to say. “Misha, you have to understand, your father was in a difficult position. A difficult position. Yes. Obviously, he did not attach much attention to the courthouse visits. Forgive me. It was the first time I ever saw Oliver overwhelmed. He was not quite able to believe people were making such an issue over the matter. For him—for your father—the visits were simply acts of friendship, occasions to offer comfort to his college buddy who had gotten himself into trouble. You remember what your father used to say about friendship? Something to do with bricks . . .”

  I have the words ready: “Friendship is a promise of future loyalty, loyalty no matter what comes. Promises are the bricks of life and trust is the mortar.”

  “Yes, that’s it. Bricks and mortar.” The twisted smile again, giving him the cherubic look his fans adore. “So you see the point. To your father, it was all so terribly unfair. On television, before the nation, in the scrutiny of the media, the visits looked sinister. To your father, they were innocent gestures of friendship. Innocent. Yes. I think he simply decided there was no sensible way of explaining them—that is, nothing that would make sense in that hearing room. So of course he denied the meetings. You’re a semiotician. You know what I’m trying to say. Yes. Your father did not mean that there were no meetings. He was denying the meetings as his critics were constructing them, not as he himself understood them. Had the question been, ‘And did you, out of loyalty and friendship, meet with Jack Ziegler and encourage him to keep his spirits up in his time of travail?’—something more like that—well, then, I think perhaps Oliver would have given a more acceptable answer.” He notices something in my face. “I’m sorry, Misha, I know this is not exactly the answer you wanted.”

  “I just want to understand. You’re saying my father lied. When you cut away all the underbrush, that’s it, right? He lied under oath?”

  Wainwright sighs. “Yes, Misha. I’m sorry. I do think your father lied.”

  “So Jack Ziegler was in the courthouse on . . . well, however many occasions it was.”

  “Three, I believe.” Greg Haramoto only knew of one visit. The courthouse logs told the nation about the others.

  “I think that’s right. Three meetings, all after hours.”

  “Yes. After hours.”

  My turn to see something in his face. He drops his eyes briefly. I have no idea what could be troubling him. And then I do. “You knew,” I say softly, wonderingly.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Oh, no. You knew. You . . . you saw them in the hallway or something. Maybe you dropped by my father’s chambers after hours, and there was Jack Ziegler. But somehow . . . somehow you knew, didn’t you? You knew my father was meeting with Jack Ziegler.”

  He looks off toward the far window, as though the view of the Library of Congress down the hill will rescue him from the dilemma into which he has talked himself. “This is off the record. You’re not writing a memoir or an essay for The Atlantic or something like that, are you?”

  “It’s off the record,” I agree. I would agree to almost anything to get him to keep talking.

  “I’ll deny it if you quote me.”

  “I understand.”

  Wallace Wainwright sighs. “Yes, Misha, I knew,” he says to the wall. “I saw them together, as you say. Not in the hallway. In the elevator. The private elevator for judges. Late one night. It must have been, oh, ten o’clock. Maybe later. I didn’t notice the time, because I didn’t attach so much . . . so much importance to it when it happened. Anyway, you will recall that my chambers and your father’s were on the same floor. I rang for the elevator, and, when it arrived, there was your father and a man I did not recognize at first. Both of them seemed surprised to see me. In retrospect, I suppose your father thought all the other judges had left the building, so that taking the private elevator was a good way to whisk Mr. Ziegler in while minimizing the chances that anybody would see. I don’t know. Anyway, they were, as I say, quite surprised. Quite surprised. But Oliver was never caught up short. He introduced us. He described his companion as his college roommate, I believe, and at first I attached no significance to the name.”

  “At first?”

  “Perhaps I was a little slow that night. It hit me a couple of days later. That the man in the elevator was not just a Jack Ziegler—he was the Jack Ziegler. An accused murderer, extortionist, I don’t know what else. Right in the courthouse, with a federal judge. Which left me, to say the least, uneasy. As well as unsure
what to do. Quite unsure. Perhaps I should have talked to your father directly. Perhaps I should have raised the matter with the chief judge. In the event, I did not acquit myself admirably. I said nothing to anybody. I suppose I thought your father had his reasons. After all, I respected him, I considered him a man of enormous integrity. I still do.”

  “Even though he lied under oath.”

  “That was a terrible, terrible mistake on his part, Misha. To be perfectly honest with you, I considered it disqualifying. Lying under oath! I told you before that I understood it, but I do not want you to think for a moment that I approved of it. Not at all. Your father was right to withdraw. It was an honorable thing to do. Or would have been, that is, if your father had only shown . . . well, some contrition. Contrition. Yes. Your father . . . I know, Misha, that this is hard for you. But the fact is that he never seemed to accept that he had done anything wrong, either by bringing a man about to stand trial for murder into the courthouse or by lying about it under oath. Unfortunately, like a lot of defeated nominees, all your father could think about was the motives of the people who had ferreted out the visits in the first place. And now I have to apologize again. You have come seeking assurance and I have made a speech, and a painful one at that.”

  “No, that’s okay. I know my father lied.” A pause. “But there is one thing I don’t understand. If you knew about Jack Ziegler from way back when it happened, why didn’t you speak to anyone about it when the issue arose during the confirmation hearings?”

  He answers so quickly I know he has anticipated me. “Nobody ever asked. The FBI never came around and interviewed the other judges, you know.”

  “You could have volunteered the information. You would have spared Greg Haramoto so much anguish.”

  “Oh, Misha, really! One judge ratting on another. Unthinkable. It simply isn’t done. Nor is it in the spirit of the Constitution. The legislative branch passes upon the fitness of the nominees for the judiciary. It would not have been right for me, as a member of the third branch, to try to influence a confirmation hearing in any respect.”