The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  “That’s what she’s counting on,” Dana points out.

  “Then I guess she wins this round,” I snap, although my dilemma is hardly Dana’s fault. Yesterday marked Bentley’s birthday, which meant presents from Daddy in the afternoon, more presents from Mommy in the evening. He seemed calm, although confused; weakened by my injuries, I went home and wept.

  Dana is consoling, in her way: “See, Misha? That’s what the same-sex-marriage folks have wrong. Why should I want to go through that nonsense?” For Dear Dana is no fan of what she calls the heterosexist lifestyle.

  I refuse to let Dana discourage me. My four-year-old son and I stroll on the beach, or what passes for a beach in Elm Harbor, and I cannot believe the change in him. He does seem taller. He walks with an unexpected straightness. His gaze is more direct. And Kimmer is right: he cannot stop talking. Well, he never could, but now, suddenly, he is making sense.

  “Do oh Daddy look the seagull, see the seagull Daddy?”

  I nod, afraid to speak. My heart seems massive, a hot, painful weight in my chest. A few months ago this was a toddler whose favorite words were Dare you, and we worried about whether he was a little slow, and now he is absorbing language almost faster than the world can teach it.

  I spend more time at the soup kitchen. Dee Dee and I compare canes: she can tell from the sound mine makes that it is second-rate. I grow fond of the women I serve. I know that few of them will see another decade, but I begin to admire their feistiness in the face of life’s many disasters, their cleverness in foraging around the edges of the welfare state for the benefit of their children, and, in many, their surprisingly strong faith. Most of the women, I finally see, truly want to love their children but do not know how. I visit Dr. Young to talk about getting some of the women into his Faith Life Skills program. He sighs. The program is nearly out of money and has no more slots available, but he tells me to send a few of them over anyway, and he will see what he can do.

  “God will provide,” I remind him, smiling.

  “In his own good time, not ours,” he corrects me.

  I begin to attend Temple Baptist, and listen with a hidden smile as pudgy Morris Young, who loves ribs and fried fish, preaches on self-restraint. I go to the YMCA with Rob Saltpeter. I can no longer run the floor, and, thanks to several pulled muscles around my ribs, I can shoot only a little, but I can coach and root. Alone in my condo at night, I get in the habit of building a fire and sitting in front of it, reading.

  One afternoon, limping back to Oldie from the campus bookstore, I turn in my tracks, feeling somebody’s eyes on me, but I see nothing. The next day, I give Romeo from the soup kitchen twenty dollars to walk through downtown Elm Harbor a couple of blocks behind me, trying to spot a tail. Maybe, he reports when we rejoin. Maybe not.

  Nothing to do but go on.

  March slips into history. I return to the classroom, hobbled a bit, not able to bounce up and down as I once did, but the students seem to like me better this way. Though I am nervous, there turns out to be no cause. My fifty-seven ad law kids, who have spent the past month being lectured by Arnie Rosen, offer a standing ovation when I walk back in the door. Arnie may be brilliant, but I have been shot, which seems to lend me a special authority. So impressed are they at the sight of a professor with three bullet holes in him that they do not bother to raise any of their usual clever challenges. When I ask questions, I am rewarded by blankly adoring stares, as though they are far too awed to concentrate on the subject matter.

  So I set out to cure them of the adoration, by being as strict and demanding as I used to. Eventually, they realize that getting shot rarely turns men into saints, and then we are back to our usual arrangement, in which they do not particularly like me, but work their tails off in my class. Yet I have lost a little of my force, and they seem to sense it. It is like a playlet: You know we know you’re not what you used to be, they are telling me, smiling behind their irritation.

  My faculty colleagues are more restrained. They tell me how great it is to see me, in the loud, gentle voices we use to communicate with the hard of hearing, assuring ourselves, through our volume, of our physical superiority. At meetings of the Officers, my colleagues listen to me indulgently, compliment me on my perspicacity, then rush onward to their verdict as though I have not spoken.

  I stop attending.

  Once or twice I see the great Lionel Eldridge slouching around the halls of Oldie, but always from a distance. He never looks in my direction. I never call his name. Nothing in my years of teaching has prepared me to deal with the situation. What becomes of the paper he owes me? Is there a special rule that applies when you are required to grade a student who has stolen your wife? I consult Dana and Rob, each of whom advises me to hand Lionel off to somebody else.

  One evening, just to be on the safe side, I ask Romeo to watch my back again, and this time, having fun, he does it for free. But still nothing to report.

  April plods on. Kimmer announces that she is off to visit relatives in Jamaica for a week. I protest about safety, as usual, but she does not share my fear of flying. She does not say whether Lionel is going, and I do not ask. I do not even know if he has actually left his wife: I seem to be out of the loop on the rumors, and I am afraid to ask Dana, who could surely tell me the truth. Either way, I have Bentley for seven days straight. I am excited, but Bentley is uneasy; his new circumstance, living in two houses, his family sundered, is wearing him out. He displays a short temper that has never before been a part of his personality. When I burn the chicken on the third night, he throws his plate to the floor. When I punish him, sending him to his room for a time-out, the tantrum gets worse. He says he hates me. He says he hates Mommy. He says he hates himself. I hug him hard and tell him how much I love him, how much Mommy loves him, but he fights his way free and runs, wailing, to his bed. I am confused and frightened and furious at my wife. This is the moment when good parents call their own parents for help, but I have none to call, and I would no more ask my sister for child-rearing advice than I would swim to Antarctica. In the morning I contact Sara Jacobstein, Rob Saltpeter’s wife, who is a child psychiatrist affiliated with the medical school. Presuming on our friendship, I catch her at home before she leaves for work. She is very patient. She tells me that Bentley’s anxiety is normal, that I have to be firm with him but also loving and supportive, and that I should under no circumstances criticize his mother in front of him. Then she warns me that, sooner rather than later, Kimmer and I must settle on one of our two residences as his home, the other as a place he regularly visits. He will need that structure in the months and years to come, she explains gently. I experience Sara’s words as a physical pain in the vicinity of my heart, and I make no comment: I know what the outcome of any negotiation with Kimmer will be. Sara is above all things a kind woman. Reading my silence correctly, she offers to see Bentley this afternoon, as a courtesy to me, if I think it important.

  I decide to wait.

  The following morning, Meadows calls to tell me that Sharik Deveaux, street name Conan, confessed killer of Freeman Bishop, was murdered in a jailhouse brawl while awaiting sentencing. The key witness against him, the posse member turned state’s evidence, has disappeared. I hang up the phone and cover my face, wishing I had done more to get Conan released, but there was no time, and my energies were directed elsewhere. I pray for his soul, although, in truth, I have little sympathy to spare just now, especially for a drug dealer with a history of violence. Still, he did not commit the particular crime to which he pled guilty, and he died in that brawl, I am certain, so that nobody would find out the truth. I even know who somehow arranged this final murder.

  Colin Scott, reaching out from the grave.

  (III)

  MAY. 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 an
d 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

  “YOU 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 of
f 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.”