Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  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)

  MARIAH 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)

  BENTLEY’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 di
aries, 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.

  Usually, when Mariah calls after a few days in the attic, we fight. The conversation always begins the same way. She whispers unhappily of her discoveries, always things I would rather not know—an ancient love letter to the Judge from a woman whose name neither of us quite recognizes, an award from his college fraternity for victory in a drinking contest, a note in his appointment book to meet some Senator whose politics make her ill. My sister sets great store by such artifacts. She believes that she is reconstructing our father, that she will learn from his simulacrum a deeper truth he kept hidden from us. That his shade lives on amidst the flotsam and jetsam of his written life, and that it will finally speak. I try to tell her that these are just worthless scraps of paper, that we should discard them, but I am speaking to a woman whose five-million-dollar home is decorated almost entirely with photographs of her unprepossessing children, and whose sentimentality, as Kimmer once observed, would lead her to save her children’s soiled diapers if she could only think of a way to do it neatly. I gently suggest to my stubborn sister that we did not understand our father when he was alive, and we will not understand him any better now that he is dead, but Mariah, alone among the children of Claire and Oliver Garland, has never conceded that there are things beyond her understanding, which is doubtless why she was the only one of us to earn straight A’s in college. I try to tell her that we certainly will not come to know the Judge through his papers, but Mariah remains a journalist at her core, with a master’s degree in history, and my words are a challenge to her faith. So, in the end, unable to bear another dramatic reading from a request for a zoning variance to enable installation of a nonconforming septic system at Vinerd Howse, I always tell her that I have problems of my own, and she snaps back that blood is thicker than water, which was one of our mother’s favorite phrases, and which Mariah repeats often, even if she claimed as a child to hate it. My sister and I are talking more often than in the past, but, truce or no truce, we get along as badly as we ever did.

  Consequently, when she tells me that she has found something we need to talk about, I brace myself for the worst—meaning the most useless, boring, trivial. Or the scariest—more talk of bullet fragments, which, lately, she has not mentioned. Or the most likely—she has heard about the death of McDermott/Scott, and wants to explain how it fits into the conspiracy.

  What actually comes out of her mouth, therefore, takes me by surprise.

  “Tal, did you know Daddy owned a gun?”

  “A gun?”

  “Yes, a gun. As in a handgun. I found it last night, in the bedroom, in the back of a drawer. I was just looking for papers, and I found this gun. It was in a box, with … well, with some bullets. But that’s not why I called.” She pauses, presumably for dramatic effect, but there is no need: she has my full attention. “Tal, I had somebody look at it this afternoon. An expert? It’s been fired, Tal. Recently.”

  CHAPTER 19

  TWO TALES ARE TOLD

  (I)

  “THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA probably has the strictest gun law in the country,” Lemaster Carlyle assures me. “It’s pretty much impossible to obtain a permit there.” Pause. “On the other hand, Virginia is right across the river, and it is one of the easiest places in the civilized world to purchase a legal handgun. People buy them there and take them everywhere.”

  “Huh,” is my thoughtful contribution.

  “So, if a relative of mine who lived in D.C. died and left a gun behind”—in his teasing Barbadian lilt, he is tossing my transparent hypothetical back at me—“my guess would be that he purchased it in Virginia and simply ignored the District’s laws. Plenty of people do.”

  I nod slowly, my half-finished grilled-chicken sandwich, the specialty of the house at Post, gone cold and chewy. Lemaster is a former prosecutor and knows about these things, but his information dovetails with my intuition. Once again, my father seems to have lived on the edge of the law. I would rather uncover fewer of these distressing tidbits of information, but I cannot seem to stop looking for them.

  “You have to turn the gun in, of course.”

  “What?”

  “The gun. It is still unregistered and unlicensed. Nobody can legally possess it. It has to be turned in.”

  “Oh.” Lemaster Carlyle is a person of sufficient integrity that I suspect this would be his advice even had he not spent three years as an Assistant United States Attorney before turning to the academic world. I watch him pick at his shrimp salad. He never seems to eat very much, never seems to gain an ounce of weight. His suits always fit perfectly. He is a small man with a huge mind, a few years older than I, a Harvard Law School graduate who was also in his day a divinity student before joining our ranks. His smooth, lean face, at once playful and wise, is a rich West Indian purple-black. His perfect wife, Julia, is as small and dark and cute as Lemaster himself. They live in one of our tonier suburbs with their four perfect children. He stands miles above me in the school’s unwritten hierarchy, and is adored by everybody in the building, and most alumni as well, for he is also a nearly perfect politician. Although he calls himself a progressive, Lem has voted Republican the last few elections, citing the Democratic Party’s opposition to school vouchers, which he sees as the only hope for the children of the inner city. He was cofounder and, for all I know, sole member of a forgotten organization called Liberals for Bush. His pithy, closely reasoned op-eds dot the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. He seems to be on television every
five minutes. He is also said to be restless. Many of our colleagues are begging him to wait patiently to succeed Lynda Wyatt, becoming our first black dean, but the rumor mill reports that Lem has grown as bored with the academy as he has with most things he has conquered, and will soon be leaving us for a full-time position at one of the television networks. At the Judge’s funeral, people made a great fuss over him. I often wish I could like Lemaster more, and envy him less.