Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  “Anyway. So Leander would drop by and he would usually find your father down in his little study—you know the room I mean—and Oliver would have his chessboard out, the one he was so proud of, always showing off the pieces, and he would be playing chess with himself.” She makes a face. “No, that’s not right. Let me think. I don’t know much about chess, so it’s hard to remember. No. He wasn’t playing. He was trying … he was making chess puzzles … .”

  “Problems.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Chess problems. My father liked to … They call it composing. He liked to compose chess problems. I guess you’d call it his hobby.”

  “Right!” Her face brightens. “Because, I remember, Leander told me he thought it was great therapy, should be very relaxing for your father, except … except that …”

  “Except what?” I am running out of patience as well as time and wish she would just say it right out.

  She looks me straight in the eye. She has caught my mood and is ready to give me the unadorned truth. “Leander thought Oliver had grown obsessional about it. About the chess problems he was composing. He didn’t even want to play golf any more, because he always was at his chessboard. He hardly went to the poker games. I’m talking about the months after the … after the problem with his nomination. So Leander would go to Shepard Street to visit him. And your mother would let him in, and he would find his way back to the study, and he would walk in the room, Oliver’s best friend, and Oliver wouldn’t even get up from the chessboard. Sometimes he wouldn’t even look up. He kept talking about how even chess was fixed, white moved first, white usually won, black could only react to what white did, and even if black played a perfect game he still had to wait for white to make a mistake before he would have any hope of winning—that kind of thing.” Lanie frowns, remembering another point. “But … but I think I remember that Leander said that was why Oliver liked to—what was that word?—to compose. He liked composing problems because there was some special kind of problem, where black moved first … .”

  “Helpmate problems, they’re called,” I say, even though this was never the side of chess that intrigued me. But something is crawling upward in my memory. “Black moves first in a helpmate, and black and white cooperate to checkmate the black king.”

  Lanie raises a thin eyebrow to show what she thinks of this. “Okay, maybe so. But, Talcott, the thing is, your father, well, he kept saying that this would be his redemption, that he couldn’t win in one field but he could win in another. And … now, I don’t remember this so well … but Leander said your father had some kind of chess problem he was working on, something that had never been done before, and he somehow thought if he could solve it … or compose it, I guess … that it would make up for what happened to his nomination to the Supreme Court. Something about a knight? Double … something. I don’t remember what it was called. Chess isn’t my game. But Leander said your father seemed so … so desperate to do it, so obsessed about it, that, for a while anyway, he didn’t seem to give much time to anything else. Even his work started to slip, so Leander told me. All so he could … could compose his chess problem. Which is why my husband thought Oliver had a … a kind of breakdown. That’s what Leander said, anyway.” She looks at her watch, and I know our time is up.

  Back out on Columbia Road, good old Lanie is Dr. Melanie Cross once more, and she is also in a sudden hurry to be free of me. I want to ask her whether she ever heard anything about my father wanting a gun, or whether she knows what might have spooked him a year before he died, but I see no way to phrase the questions that does not sound absurd. I walk her to her Volvo. I am not riding back to Howard with her, because my hotel is right down the hill, a ten-minute stroll. I am holding the door for her, and she is chattering about how it would be nice to get Bentley together with her grandchildren, it’s such a shame we don’t see more of each other, and I am nodding at all the right places, when the thought that has been trying to jostle its way into my consciousness suddenly bursts free.

  “Lanie?”

  “Hmmm?” Half in the Volvo and half out, she looks up in surprise and just a smidgen of annoyance. In her mind she is already back in her office, free of conversation almost as painful for her as for me.

  “Lanie, just one other thing. The chess problem your husband told you my father was working on … the one he thought would turn everything around if he could only solve it?”

  “What about it?”

  “Can you try again to remember what it was called. You said … Double something?”

  “I don’t know much about chess, Tal.” Smiling to hide her impatience. “I told you.”

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry. But can you remember anything your husband might have said about it? Please. I know you’re in a hurry, but this is important.”

  She does that brow-furrowing thing again, her eyes distant. Then she shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Tal, it’s been too long. I don’t know. I know Leander mentioned a name, he said your father kept calling it by name—the chess problem, I mean. But, I’m sorry, I honestly don’t remember. I should remember the name, Leander talked about it so much, because your father talked about it so much. Let me see. Maybe ‘Double Excellence’? Or ‘The Triple Exception’? Something like that.” She looks at me again, very much the doctor, very much in a hurry. “Thanks for lunch, Tal, but I really have to run.”

  “I know,” I murmur, suddenly dispirited. I remember it all now. The problem the Judge hoped to compose. The one about which he talked to me from time to time when I was much younger, even though his explanations bored me stiff. I wish now that I remembered more about it. “Thanks for trying. And thanks for your time.”

  “My pleasure.” Lanie Cross brightens as she slides into the car in a flurry of thin arms and legs. I close the door solidly behind her. She rolls down the window. “Oh, I do remember one other thing. Leander told me that your father kept saying he was tired of the way white won all the time. He was going to fix it so that black would win instead.”

  “You mean the chess problem? Black would win?”

  “I think so. I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything else.” She gives me a harried smile. “So, Tal, let’s definitely get the families together, maybe this next summer, on the Vineyard.”

  “That would be nice,” I say softly, but my mind is elsewhere.

  As I watch the Volvo disappear into the swarming traffic, I am thinking of my father, out of his mind with fear and fury after the collapse of his nomination, sitting alone night after night in his little study, ignoring the overtures of his oldest and dearest friend, getting drunk, letting the rest of his world collapse around him, as he tried to fix it all by composing a special kind of chess problem called the Double Excelsior.

  CHAPTER 25

  A MODEST REQUEST

  (I)

  “I’D LIKE TO ASK YOU A FAVOR,” murmurs the Reverend Doctor Morris Young.

  “Of course,” I say softly, because Dr. Young exudes a peace that calms those around him, as well as a power that seems to make everybody say yes.

  “I hope I will not embarrass you.”

  “That depends on what the favor is.”

  Morris Young smiles. When happy, his pocked, orange-brown face seems gently rounded, casting warm beams of sunlight on anybody nearby. When angry, the same face is all hard planes and square corners and final judgments. His hair is sparse and gray; his reddish eyes are no longer sharp, even aided by his thick glasses; his lips are insolently protrusive, although he is as humble as they come. Though large of girth, he wears nothing in public but vested suits of dark wool, white shirts, and dark ties, a throwback to an earlier generation of preachers. He is in his early seventies, but possessed of all the evangelizing energy of the era of “muscular” Christianity. He is the pastor of Temple Baptist Church, probably the most powerful institution of the darker nation’s battered outpost in the divided city of Elm Harbor, which makes him, by many accounts, the most influential black m
an in town.

  He is also, with the possible exception of my colleague Rob Saltpeter, the finest man it is my privilege to know. Which is why, last summer, mired in depression over the state of my marriage, I chose him for my counselor. And why I have decided I need to see him again.

  Last weekend, I returned from Washington to face a buzz saw: It’s not enough for you to lust after my sister, you have to spend the night with your fat slut of a cousin! Evidently, somebody saw me going upstairs with Sally and told somebody else who told somebody else, the word reaching Elm Harbor in less than half a day. And, like every married man in America who has found himself in this situation, I raised my palms for peace and insisted, Nothing happened, darling, I promise—which in my case happens to be true. Kimmer was quite unappeased: So what? Everybody thinks something did, Misha, and that’s almost as bad! I was stung by the realization that Kimmer is less concerned about what I might have done than by what people believe I might have done; that my wife, who long ago liberated me from the stultifying prison of my parents’ expectations, has locked me away in the tight dungeon of her own.

  I spared Kimmer the details of the dreary denouement of my night with Sally. So I omitted, cravenly, any mention of how I sat awake half the night in the uncomfortable wooden chair, fighting the impulse to stretch out on the other bed, lest Sally wake and misinterpret the situation. I did not tell my wife that I woke abruptly in the morning, still in the same position, feeling as though I had spent the night with my body twisted in some medieval torture device, my mouth clogged and muzzy, my head pounding, the vague lust of the night before a distant, barely plausible memory. My cousin was still asleep, breathing regularly now, and in the hard glare of daylight she was just dull, overweight Sally Stillman again. I had no trouble shaking her shoulder to wake her. She was no longer witty or cute or bold: her eyes red and puffy, she was panicky and disheveled and worried about being late for work, as well as being caught by Bud, who apparently remains more present in her life than she admitted. She could not get out of the room fast enough. Her coat, unfortunately, was in the cloakroom downstairs. To cover her wrinkled gown, I loaned her my tattered Burberry, which she promised to send back by Federal Express. She spent a few minutes in the bathroom, fixing her face, as she put it, and then was gone. It remains to be seen whether she took my reputation with her.

  Yet my life continues. Onward and upward, one might say, given my father’s emphasis on the word excelsior. At Oldie earlier this morning I sat through a brief and respectful session with two quiet investigators from the FBI, this time in connection with my wife’s background check. Kimmer, interviewed twice, is excited. She thinks the portents may yet be favorable if, as she puts it, we stay on the same page. Over breakfast, she rehearsed me carefully in what to say and what to omit. She wants nothing more about the arrangements on the official record. I was too worn out to argue, and, besides, I really do want her to get what she wants. So I followed the script.

  “We’ve known each other a long time, Talcott,” says Dr. Young now, leaning forward to fold his hands on his immaculate desk. His office in the basement of the church is cramped and airless, the heating vent noisy. I am sweating. Dr. Young is not. His tie is perfectly knotted, his shirt crisp and fresh, although it is late afternoon. “How many years is it?”

  “Since the time the boys made a fool of me.”

  He chuckles. “They didn’t make a fool of you, Talcott. A man can only make a fool of himself. All they did was treat you like they treat every other outsider. And”—he holds up a pudgy hand to forestall my interruption—“and, you can be sure, I gave them a difficult time for it. You know what we teach in the program. Understanding that every human being we meet, white or black or brown or yellow, rich or poor or in between, police officer or pusher, whether he helps us or hurts us, every person we meet is made in the image of God, and it is our task, therefore, to seek that image in each encounter.”

  “I think I’ve heard this one before, Dr. Young.” My turn to smile.

  “I know, I’m a bit of a broken record. But you see how it is with the boys.”

  “I do,” I tell him, and, at this moment, I would rather talk about the boys in his Faith Life Skills program than almost anything else, although, at some point, we need to talk about … well, about my marriage. I am trying to be patient and calm, as Kimmer, desperate worry in her eyes, keeps urging me. And Dr. Young, in his jovial, evangelical way, is helping. His reminder about the boys in his Faith Life Skills program helps, too.

  “We’ve made some progress,” the pastor murmurs, and I am not sure, at first, if he is talking about me or the boys. He leans toward me once more, his brown eyes blazing. “But, you understand, Talcott, all that these young men have learned from the world is mistrust. You know how many of them ever see their fathers? About one out of ten. You know how many of them have brothers or best friends who deal drugs? About nine out of ten. Half have been arrested. Some have been to prison. Not one has held a real job for more than a few months. They have no idea what a job is. They think the boss is dissing them when he tells them what to do. They think customers are a pain in the rear. They have no education to speak of. The schools have failed them. Welfare has trapped their mothers, but what else are their mothers to do? So the boys fight back. They hate white people, and they’re scared of them too. Successful black people”—he points a pudgy finger at my chest—“they also hate, but they do not fear. They hate the whole world, Talcott, for leaving them behind and leaving their mothers behind and leaving their mothers’ mothers behind. How are they to see God in others? They do not even see God in themselves.”

  “I believe you’ve mentioned this before.”

  Morris Young nods, satisfied. His face relaxes once more into its usual expression of quiet serenity. I have known him for about six years, since he invited me to talk to some of the young black men in his program for at-risk kids. I prepared a half-hour lecture about some of the heroes of the civil rights movement. It was a disaster. The younger boys dozed off; the pre-adolescents whispered behind their hands; the older teens, burdened with gold and attitude, were ostentatiously bored. Not a single one of them seemed remotely interested in anything beyond his own immediate experience. When the time mercifully ran out, Dr. Young shook his head and said, Welcome to the real world. A few months later, I persuaded my colleague Lemaster Carlyle, the former prosecutor, to speak to the same boys about the criminal justice system. I stood in the back and watched him engage them on everything from the way the jury looks at them (They’ll vote you guilty in two minutes if you walk into the courtroom the same way you walked in here) to how to avoid getting shot by police (Just saying “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and keeping your hands where he can see them will do a lot more to keep you alive than “Get out of my face,” even if he’s in your face). I would not say Lem’s performance was spellbinding, but the young men warmed to him as they never did to me. Since that time, I have spoken to the boys at least twice each year; Lem Carlyle, star of the nightly network news, only once more. But he is the one they remember.

  Yes, okay, I am envious.

  Now, sitting in the church basement, I exchange more pleasantries with Dr. Young and wait for him to get around to the point. He has been appropriately consoling about the loss of my father and about the death of Freeman Bishop, whom he knew for my family pastor, as he seems to know every fact about every African American in the city. He has asked after my wife and my son, and I have asked after his wife and three daughters, the eldest of whom is a first-year law student at the state university. I have always admired Dr. Young for not asking my help to get his daughter into our law school, and for the way he politely but firmly rebuffed the offer I made without his asking. The Lord has given Patricia certain talents, and she will go as far as her talent and achievements take her, praise the Lord, was all he said.

  We turned her down.

  “So,” murmurs the good reverend, “I suppose we should get back to your fight
with your wife.”

  “Please.”

  “You would agree, would you not, Talcott, that what you did was unwise?”

  “Yes.”

  “A woman in your hotel room,” he murmurs.

  “I realize it was a mistake. I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”

  He nods. “You know, Talcott, I know a man, a good Christian man, a pastor, a lifelong friend, who is never alone with a woman other than his wife. Not for a moment. If he is on a trip, he insists that a man pick him up from the airport. If he has to counsel a female parishioner, he always has his wife or a female deacon present. Always. That way, there is never even the hint of scandal.”

  I try not to smile. “I don’t think that would work in my part of the world. People would call it sex discrimination.”

  “A strange part of the world.” He seems about to say more, then decides not to pursue the point. “But, as I say, it is easy to understand your wife’s anger, isn’t it? You have hurt her, Talcott, you have hurt her reputation … .”

  Suddenly I cannot contain myself. “Her reputation! She’s the one who has affairs, not me! She has no right to get angry just because … just because people think I had one!”

  “Talcott, Talcott. Anger is not a right. It is an emotion. It flows from our fear or our pain, of which we broken creatures possess a surfeit. Your wife’s sins, her weaknesses, give you no right to impose further pain upon her. You are her husband, Talcott.” He folds his hands and hunches over his desk, and I reciprocate, drawing closer. “You know, Talcott, I have asked you for quite a few favors on behalf of the boys, and you have always been more than generous.”

  I grimace. One of the favors was to accompany the boys, along with three or four other adults, on a trip to the beach, an event that confirmed my utter lack of influence over them. Another was to persuade my famous student Lionel Eldridge, the onetime basketball star known as Sweet Nellie, to talk to the boys last spring. I have been paying for that one ever since, for Lionel seems to think, having done me a good turn, he no longer needs to finish his seminar paper … from last spring.