Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 6

Although it is no longer our home, Washington is very much Kimmer’s city. With the Congress, the White House, a gaggle of federal regulatory agencies, countless judges, and more lawyers per capita than any locale on the face of the earth, it is a place for those who like to make deals, and making deals is what my wife does best. My wife’s first task when she arrived in the city was to build a base camp, complete with laptop and portable fax machine, in the guest room of her parents’ home, on Sixteenth Street up near the Carter Barron Theatre, a half-mile or so north of Shepard Street. She spent Monday, the day before the funeral, lining up appointments for Wednesday, the day after, one meeting over at the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of a client, the rest in furtherance of her candidacy for the court of appeals. And so this morning she leaves her parents’ house early, for breakfast with another old friend-“the new girls’ network,” she gushes, although some are men. This particular friend is a political reporter at the Post, a woman appropriately named Battle, a buddy from Mount Holyoke, who is said to be connected.

Kimmer has always cultivated the press and is frequently quoted in the pages of our local newspaper, the Clarion, and, now and then, in the Times. I have a different attitude toward journalists, one I have exercised frequently over the past few days. When reporters call me, I have no comment, no matter what the subject. If they persist, I simply hang up. I never talk to reporters, not since the press savaged my father during his hearings. Never. I have a student named Lionel Eldridge, a onetime professional basketball star who, having ruined his knee, now hopes to be a lawyer. Kimmer and I know him and his wife a little bit, because he worked at her firm last summer, a job I helped him to obtain at a time when other firms, vexed by his grades and trying to prove they were not awed by his celebrity, turned him down. Lots of journalists still do stories about “young Mr. Eldridge,” as Theo Mountain likes to call him-I think in jest, for Lionel may be half a century younger than Theo, but he is almost a decade older than the rest of the second-year students. In any event, the media still adore young Mr. Eldridge, and love to chronicle his doings. Once a reporter was foolish enough to call me. She was writing a profile of Sweet Nellie, as he was called in his playing days, and wanted, she said, to capture his eagerness to master this new challenge. She had spoken to Lionel, who had identified me as his favorite professor. I was flattered, I suppose, although I am not in this business to be liked. But still I had no comment. She asked why, and, as she caught me at a weak moment, I told her. “But this is a nice piece I’m writing,” she wailed. “I write sports, for goodness’ sake, not politics.” As though the distinction would reassure me. “I hate sports,” I told her, which was a lie, “and I’m not a nice man,” which is the truth.

Even though my wife keeps telling me otherwise.

But Kimmer thinks her newspaper friend can help her, and perhaps she is right, for my wife has a nose for knowing who might be able to boost her closer to her goal. Later, she will meet with the Democratic Senator from our state, a graduate of the law school, to try to cajole him out of Marc Hadley’s corner and, at minimum, onto the sidelines: a meeting I went hat in hand to Theo Mountain, the Senator’s favorite teacher, to arrange. She is lunching with Ruthie Silverman, who warned her that everything about the process is confidential but at last agreed to see her anyway, for everybody who knows Kimmer develops the habit of doing what she wants. After lunch, my wife will visit the chief lobbyist for the NAACP, an appointment arranged by her father, the Colonel, who is also connected. Then, in the late afternoon, Kimmer and I will join forces, because the great Mallory Corcoran himself has squeezed the two of us into his calendar at four; Kimmer and I will see Uncle Mal together, in the hope that he will agree to put a portion of his considerable influence her way.

Washington, as I said, is Kimmer’s city. It is not, however, mine, and it never will be; it is far too easy to close my eyes and remember all the long, bleak hours of hearings as my father sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee, first confident, next disbelieving, then angry, and finally sullen and defeated. I remember the days when my mother sat behind him, the days when I did. How Mariah was too upset to attend after the scandal broke, and how Addison, often summoned, never showed, to my father’s distress. How the Judge’s distress irritated me when I was so loyal and so ignored and Addison, as usual, so flighty and so loved: the prodigal son indeed. I remember the television lights, after the hearing was moved down the hall to a larger room, and everybody sweating. I had no idea that television lights were so hot. Senate staffers dabbed the members’ foreheads; my father dabbed his own. I remember his grim refusal to accept any coaching from Uncle Mal, from the White House, from anybody who might help. I remember looking up at the Senators and thinking how distant and high and powerful they seemed, but also noticing how they read most of their long, pompous questions from cue cards, and how some of them grew confused if the conversation wandered too far from their briefings. I recall the baize on the tables: until I had the chance to touch it, I never realized it was simply stapled in place, a kind of special effect for the cameras. In reality, the tables were plain wood. I remember the crowds of reporters in the hallways and the entrances, shouting for attention like preschoolers. But most of all, like everybody else, I remember the dreary and repetitive and ultimately necessary questions: When did you last see Jack Ziegler? Did you meet with Jack Ziegler in March of last year? What was the subject matter of the discussion? Were you aware of the pending indictment at that time? On and on and on. And my father’s dreary, monotonous answers, which sounded less and less convincing with every repetition: I don’t know, Senator. No, I did not, Senator. I do not recall, Senator. No, I had no idea, Senator. And, finally, the beginning of the end, which always starts with friends running for cover and with the same signal to the now disgraced nominee, usually spoken by the chairman: Now, Judge, I know you to be a decent man, and I have a great deal of respect for your accomplishments, and I would really like to believe that you are being candid with this committee, but, frankly…

Nomination withdrawn at nominee’s request.

Nominee and family humiliated.

Grand jury convenes.

Fade to black.

Or, as I might have said back in college, during my more overtly nationalist days, to white.

Even now I shudder at the memory. But there is no escaping it, at least not here in Washington. Last night, Kimmer and I sat up with her parents, watching the eleven o’clock news. When the anchorwoman reached the funeral of Oliver Garland, about the third story in, there, suddenly, were scenes not of today’s events but of the humiliation of many years ago, my father seated before the Judiciary Committee, his mouth moving soundlessly as the reporter continued to talk. Cut to footage of Jack Ziegler in handcuffs following one of his many arrests: a nice, if biased, touch. Cut to the Judge giving a fiery speech before one of the Rightpacs as the reporter chattered about his later career. Cut to the rueful face of Greg Haramoto, interviewed outside the church just after the funeral, expressing his sorrow at the passing of “a great man” and extending his condolences to the family-although he made no effort to condole us in person, or by telephone, or even by note. Greg turns out to be the only attendee whose post-funeral comments made the news; but perhaps he was the only one the journalists found worth interviewing. Just as he was, before the Judiciary Committee in 1986, the only witness who mattered.

Even after all these years, knowing that the committee might have been right does nothing to assuage the pain of my father’s disgrace. Strangers accost me at conferences: Aren’t you Oliver Garland’s son? I mutter banalities through thick curtains of red and flee as quickly as I can. So it is just as well that I do not accompany Kimmer on her Washington rounds; my pain would hinder her and, in the end, might injure her. Besides, Bentley and I have made other plans for the day. In a little while, we will head over to Shepard Street and then off with Mariah and her crew for a morning of in-line skating at some suburban rollerdrome. Miles Madison, whose professional life now consists of occasional conversations with the managers of his various properties, has left for the golf course, despite the rainy weather. “If they can’t play golf,” sighs Vera Madison, “they’ll just play cards and drink all day.” My mother-in-law, who always asks me to address her by her first name, has all of Kimmer’s handsomeness and height but is a good deal thinner; my wife’s breadth comes from the Colonel, who has grown buttery since his retirement, and who, on his good days, allows me to call him Mr. Madison. Vera has offered to watch Bentley if I need to talk to my sister. I decline. I am keeping my son very close to me until I figure out what Uncle Jack was talking about. Probably nothing, but still. I have not yet told Kimmer, unsure how she will react, but when I asked her before she left this morning to please be careful, she looked at me hard-Kimmer misses little-and then kissed me lightly on the lips and said, “Oh, I will, Misha, I will.” I was smiling at Kimmer when she walked out into the cold morning drizzle. She was smiling too, probably in anticipation of her day.

Kimmer headed into town in her mother’s midnight-blue Cadillac, so Bentley and I take the rental car-a prosaic white Taurus-for the five-minute drive down Sixteenth Street to Shepard. Our journey takes us through the heart of the Gold Coast, a lovely corner of Northwest Washington where, over the middle decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of lawyers and physicians and businessmen and professors of the darker nation created an idyllic and sheltered community for their families in the midst of racial segregation. The lots tend to be large, the lawns manicured to perfection, and the houses spacious and beautifully furnished; in the white suburbs, they would sell for double or triple their value in the city. On the other hand, the ritzy black enclave of the Gold Coast might be integrating: Jay Rockefeller, for example, now lives on a vast estate that sprawls from just beyond Shepard Street down to Rock Creek Park. Perhaps for aesthetic balance, many rising black professionals who would once have purchased homes here are now busily integrating the suburbs.

Stopping briefly for a red light, I peek at my son in the rearview mirror. Bentley is a good-looking boy. He has my thick black hair, pointy chin, and deep chocolate skin, along with his mother’s huge brown eyes, striking eyebrows, and full lips. He is also a quiet and very serious child, given to shyness around others and introspection when alone. Our son talked late: so late that we consulted pediatricians and even a pediatric neurologist-some friend of some cousin of Kimmer’s-all of whom assured us that, although most children have spoken a few words midway through their second year, and some much earlier, it is neither unusual nor a sign of an impending mental deficiency for a child to start talking later. Just wait it out, everybody told us. And Bentley made us wait. Now, half a year past his third birthday, he has begun to babble in that peculiar mixture of proper English and mysterious prelinguistic code that so many toddlers discover shortly after turning one. He is talking it now, sternly lecturing his new dog, fiery orange and filled with stuffing, a gift from Addison, who never misses a chance to create a fan: “And no and doggie no said no cause Mama red you uh-oh doggie bad okay go home now go no no dare doggie Mama no no said dare okay no no okay dare doggie bad dare you…”

I interrupt this string of gorgeous gibberish:

“You okay, buddy?”

My son shuts up and eyes me warily, his pudgy hands clutching the yet unnamed dog as though he fears it might disappear.

“Dare doggie,” he whispers.

“Right.”

“Dare you!” he bursts out happily, for he adds new words and phrases just about daily. I wonder which television show he picked this line up from. “Dare don’t!”

“Okay, buddy. I love you.”

“Wuv you. Dare you.”

“Dare you, too,” I answer, but this only puzzles him, and his laughter subsides into uneasy silence.

I shake my head. Sometimes Bentley makes us uneasy, too-Kimmer especially. She spoils him hopelessly, unable to bear his unhappiness for an instant, because she has always blamed herself for whatever is wrong with our son, if, indeed, anything is. His first morning outside the womb swung rapidly from exhilarating to terrifying. Laboring in one of the brightly colored birthing rooms at the university hospital’s sparkling maternity wing, pressing down when ordered, holding back on request, working on her breathing, doing all of it exactly right in typically splendid Kimmer fashion, my wife suddenly started to bleed very heavily, even though the baby’s head had hardly crowned. I watched in amazement as the white sheets and green hospital gown turned bright, viscous red. The jolly, encouraging midwife who had been supervising the event all at once lost her jolliness and stopped encouraging. From my coaching perch on a wooden stool, I asked if everything was all right. The midwife hesitated, then offered me a wobbly smile and said that pregnant women can easily afford to lose a lot of blood, because their blood supply doubles. But she also whispered to a second nurse, who hurried from the room. The bleeding continued, a coppery red sea, as the midwife tried to deliver the baby’s head. Her gloved hands slipped and she cursed. Kimmer felt things going awry, then looked down and saw all the blood and screamed in terror, which I had never heard before and have never heard since. I had never seen so much blood either. Our baby’s little head was awash in it. The fetal monitor began braying a series of desperate objections. A doctor I had never seen before materialized to replace the midwife. She took a quick look and barked a series of swift orders; without further conversation, I was pressed physically from the room by two nurses as a phalanx of blue gowns converged on the bed, leaving me all alone in the modern, soulless waiting area to contemplate the possibility that I would lose both wife and son on what should have been the happiest day of my life.

Kimmer, it later turned out, was suffering from abruptio placentae, a premature separation of the uterine lining, similar to a menstrual period, but often deadly when one is carrying a late-term child; more specifically, as we were later told, Kimmer suffered a rupture of the myometrium, which might easily have been fatal, for she could have bled to death and our baby could have asphyxiated. To this day, my wife believes the condition was brought on by her continuing to drink during pregnancy, for she scoffed at claims that her personal habits could possibly do the baby (or fetus, as she called our child growing inside her) any harm. If her fears are true, then I must share the blame, not because I am a drinker-I am not-but because I have never been strong where Kimmer is concerned. After she thrice angrily ignored my nervous entreaties, I gave up trying to stop her. The first few hours of our son’s life were harrowing: there was a chance, the doctors told us, stone-faced, that we might lose him. And Kimmer herself needed treatment for the blood she’d lost. A day or so later, when everybody turned out alive after all, my wife and I knelt in prayer, the last time we have done so outside of a church, thanking a God we have usually ignored.

Bentley, I believe, was God’s answer.

Yet our son’s birth also marks the point from which our marriage began its downhill slide. Today, my wife and I live together on uneasy terms. There are things she does not want to know and things she wants me not to know. If she is out of town, for instance, she calls me, not the other way around. Only in emergencies do I dare break the rules. When Mallory Corcoran called on Thursday afternoon to tell me my father had died, I checked our home answering machine by remote to see whether my wife had called. She had not. I immediately tried her at her hotel in San Francisco. She was out. I called her cell phone. It was turned off. I picked up Bentley from day care, explained to him solemnly what had happened to his grandfather, then returned to our house and tried again. She was still out. I called for hours, until midnight in the West-3 a.m. in Elm Harbor-and Kimmer was always out. Finally, in a burst of dreadful inspiration, I called the hotel again and asked for Gerald Nathanson. Jerry was in his room. He was nervous. The work was still going on, he told me. He did not know where my wife was, but he was sure she was safe. He promised to have her call if he ran into her. She called me ten minutes later. I never asked from where.

At Shepard street, the door is opened by Cousin Sally, who is skipping work this morning in order to sit in my father’s kitchen torturing my sister with dubious stories from our shared childhoods. Sally smothers me in those powerful arms, which is the way she greets just about everybody, but Addison in particular. Inside the house, smooth jazz is playing: Grover Washington, I think.

Bentley shrieks at his first sight of little Martin and Martina, who are, as usual, hand in hand. Within minutes, my son has joined the younger members of my sister’s posse in some complicated game that has them trooping through the house in a dignified line, led by Marcus, the youngest, touching one and exactly one piece of furniture in each room before proceeding to the next, then reversing course and doing the same backward. I find Mariah and Just Alma in the twin wicker rocking chairs on the back porch. Alma, a Kool protruding jauntily from her mouth, grins in what could be delight, and Mariah allows me to kiss her cheek. Alma seems to be at the tail end of one of her raunchy stories, as well as her energy: she has to be going, she says, explaining for my benefit that one of her granddaughters will be along any minute to drive her back to Philadelphia. As she stands up, Alma pulls one of her famous tricks, squeezing the tip of the cigarette to put it out, then slipping it into the pocket of her cardigan.

I nod at the empty rocker, and Sally, reading my signal, takes Just Alma’s seat. I then walk with Alma into the house. In the foyer, while she hunts for her coat, I ask her casually what she meant when she said the other day that they would let me know about the plans my father had made for me.

Alma’s wise old eyes move in her dark face, but she does not quite look at me. “It ain’t nothin to do with me,” she murmurs after a moment.

I haven’t a clue what she is talking about, and I say so.

“Ain’t no they, ” she explains as I help her into her coat. “Just you and your family.”

“Alma…”

“Your job is to take care of the family.”

The honking of a horn announces the arrival of her granddaughter, who is, like quite a few of the numberless cousins, too young to consider the possibility that one should try to be polite, even the day after a funeral.

“Gotta go,” Alma informs me.

“Alma, wait a second. Wait.”

She is walking away from me, but her voice floats over her shoulder. “If your daddy has plans, he’ll tell you soon enough.”

“How can he possibly…”

We are standing at the open front door. Alma’s huge suitcase is sitting on the floor of the foyer. A brown Dodge Durango is in the driveway, her rude granddaughter a blur behind the windshield. Alma takes my hand, and this time she does look at me.

“Your daddy was smarter than all of them, Talcott. That’s why they were afraid of him.” This is another precious bit of family mythology: that the Judge was denied his seat on the Supreme Court by lesser intellects who were jealous and racist at the same time. “You just wait and see.”

“See what?”

“See how afraid of your father they were. When they come. But don’t let it worry you none.”

“When who comes?”

“They might not come, though. Your father thought they would. But they might be afraid.”

“I’m not following…”

“Like Jack. Jack Ziegler. He was afraid of your father, too.”

It takes me a moment to process this. Somewhere deep in the house, I hear the shrieks of joyful children.

“Alma, I…”

“Gotta go, Talcott.” She has rescued her Kool from her pocket and seems to want to light it. “I just emptied my bladder and I wanna get back to Philly before I gotta do it again.”

“Alma, wait. Please. Wait a second.”

“What is it, Talcott?” The peeved tone of an exhausted but indulgent parent.

“Jack Ziegler-what were you saying about him?”

“He’s just an old man, Talcott, Jack Ziegler is. Don’t let him scare you. He didn’t scare your father none, and he shouldn’t scare you none either.”

I suggest we go for a walk, but my sister declines. Mariah is lonely, tired, and irritable-not hard to understand, perhaps, when her only grown-up company so far this morning has consisted of the self-centered, confusing Alma and the intermittently reliable Sally. I persuade my sister to come in from the porch. We sit down together in the kitchen. Mariah’s makeup lacks its usual precision, her hair is in curlers, and the house she will formally inherit as soon as the will is admitted to probate is already the worse for wear, with evidence of young inhabitants-everything from tiny shoes to Playmobil sailors-scattered everywhere. Howard is gone, having returned to New York on the first shuttle to repair some collapsing deal, and leaving Sally and me to sit in that remarkably white kitchen listening to Mariah rail against Addison for his insufficiently vigorous defense of the Judge when he spoke at the funeral. And, indeed, I found my brother’s brief reference to the hearings confusing, perhaps because he was trying to please too many constituencies: Some of the attacks on my father were unfair. Some were pretty nasty. But some were thoughtful. Some were respectful. There were issues about which reasonable people could differ. We must never, in our love for Dad, forget that. And, certainly, the Christian in me will not allow me to condemn those who took the other side, because they, too, were doing what they thought was right.

“He can be a real bastard,” my sister informs us, her finger stabbing the air. “All Addison ever thinks about is Addison.” Her tone suggesting that this is news. Sally’s pug mouth twists in a half-grin, half-grimace: she adores my big brother, but also knows him to be a selfish… what-Mariah-said. Sally’s mother, Thera, avoids my father’s side of the family, even skipping the funeral, and I suppose what happened between Addison and her daughter is one of the reasons. Addison himself, along with Beth Olin, the great white poet, left town shortly after the funeral, heading on to Fort Lauderdale, where my brother had a speaking engagement. “Love amongst the Rats,” sniffed Kimmer, when she learned that Beth was going along. “Good riddance,” sniffs Mariah now, who is more like my wife than she will ever admit.

Yet Addison also has another side, the side for which I admire him. At Shepard Street yesterday afternoon, before he left with Beth, my brother took me aside, into the library, the same room where I found the diabolical scrapbook. Some relative murmured condescendingly that the brothers were going off to plan the future of the family. With the door closed behind us, I once more managed to place my body in front of the bookshelf, not wanting Addison to see the worrisome volume. But he wasn’t looking. He surprised me with an earnest bear hug, then let me loose and offered his handsome smile. He told me he had caught snatches of the conversation with Jack Ziegler, and that I had acquitted myself admirably-one of the Judge’s favorite phrases. We both laughed. He asked me what I planned to do about whatever Uncle Jack was looking for, and added, before I could speak, that he would help in any way he could. I had only to call. My heart hammered with sibling love. For so much of my youth, and even my early adulthood, Addison was protector, helper, role model. He cheered when I succeeded and consoled me when I failed. Strong Addison, wise Addison, popular Addison, whose advice at critical turnings of my life was far more helpful than the Judge’s. He was there for the trivial-like when I was trounced in the election for editor in chief of the law review-and for the profound-like when my work kept me from making a planned trip to see my ailing mother, and she died while I was busily writing an article on mass tort litigation. And he urged me, against the wishes of the family, to go ahead and marry Kimmer-a decision, despite its occasional difficulties, that I believe I will never regret.

Looking into his somber, caring eyes yesterday, however, I could think of nothing with which I needed help. I told him the truth: that I had no idea what Uncle Jack was asking about, and therefore had no plans to do anything about it. Addison shifted tracks swiftly, as a good politician should, and said that might be best: Jack Ziegler is crazy as a loon.

Mariah, after three cups of coffee, finally announces that it is time to depart. But the intention, as so often, is easier than the act. Last night, my sister’s king-sized family was augmented by the au pair of the moment, a matronly and delightful woman from the Balkans whose name I never do get straight. Even with the au pair’s assistance and Sally’s, it takes an astonishingly long time to get five children dressed to go off to the rink. And Mariah herself must prepare for the day. Waiting, I wander the house with Bentley, who stares around my father’s long study with wide-eyed wonder. It occurs to me that my son has not been in this room in a year. My father loved his privacy, and this was his most private room. I lift Bentley in my arms and point to the signed photographs of my father with the great that line the wall opposite the windows, pronouncing the names carefully for my son, even though he will never remember them: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, then the doorway to the hall and, at the far side, a sharp shift in political emphasis to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush pere et fils, Dan Quayle, Bob Dole, John McCain, Pat Robertson. Bentley giggles and frowns and giggles again, pointing at some of the pictures and ignoring others, but I can find no ideological pattern to his responses.

At the time of his death, my father had at his disposal a formal and suitably impressive corner office right down the hall from Uncle Mal’s, on the tenth floor of a glass-walled building at Seventeenth and Eye, a short walk from the White House, where, despite all that happened, he was still an occasional guest, at least during Republican administrations. In Washington, downtown office buildings are much shorter than in other large cities. The tenth floor is considered fairly posh, and posh was very much my father’s style in the last, tortured years of his life. He seemed determined to earn, all at once, the money denied him during his two decades on the bench. Although he lived so frugally that what he spent it on is anybody’s guess.

The Judge rarely used his corner office downtown. He preferred to work at home, sitting alone in this cavernous study, which he constructed after my mother’s death. To build it, my father simply knocked down the walls that separated the three family bedrooms ranged along the gallery at the top of the curved stair that swept upward from the foyer. This meant that, whenever any of his children visited overnight, we slept on a fold-out sofa down in the musty basement playroom, or in the dilapidated and probably illegal maid’s quarters some earlier owner had shoehorned into one end of the attic. Which is how Kimmer and Bentley and I got into the habit of staying at her parents’ home whenever we were in Washington. The Judge seemed not to mind. He was not the sort of grandfather who doted on his children’s children. He hated to give up, even temporarily, his access to any corner of his house. He would chafe and fume if we came down late any morning from the maid’s room, then run up the stairs for an inspection. He would shush Bentley if his laughter grew too loud. How he put up with Mariah and her enormous brood, I have no idea, for after the death of our mother, he came to like the security of chosen silence. Put simply, my father preferred his privacy. Unlike most of us, my father probably would not much have minded dying alone, which, it seems, is exactly what he did.

I glance down the long room to my father’s large but shabby desk-an antique, he likely would have called it-an old partners desk, with kneeholes on both sides, each surrounded by a surfeit of drawers for all occasions. The wood is dark and pitted and desperately in need of a polishing, but I suppose my fanatically private father never brought anybody up here, so there was nobody to polish it for. Besides, the desktop itself is in perfect order, the pens and blotter and telephone and photographs-only of Claire, not of the children-all arranged with a realistic precision signaling that the office is used, yes, but by an individual of extraordinary self-discipline, which is how my father thought of himself. And, as with all the elements of good character, acting as though you are disciplined is not much different from actually being disciplined.

This is where my father died, sprawling across the desk, found by the housekeeper an hour or so later (a woman we will wind up paying a goodly sum to keep her away from the eager tabloids, Mallory Corcoran’s minions drafting the ironclad contract for her signature, Howard Denton providing the cash). No note clasped in my father’s hand, no finger pointing to a clue, and no evidence of foul play. I wonder what crossed his mind at the end, what fear of judgment or oblivion, what anger at a life’s work left unfinished. Mariah imagines a killer standing over him, hypodermic in hand, but the police found no sign of a struggle, and her determination to show that the Judge was murdered seems to me, at this moment, no more than a mechanism for staving off anguish she would rather not experience. Or am I failing to penetrate to a deeper reality that only my sister so far perceives? I gaze at the desk and see my father, a bulky man, grabbing at his chest, eyes sick with disbelief, an angry old man with a bad heart, dying with none of his family nearby or even forewarned. The housekeeper called 911 and then called the firm, as the Judge had instructed her to do should something like this happen, and, although Mariah has had the carpet shampooed, I still discern faint outlines here and there where the paramedics left dirty footprints.

Across the room from the desk, positioned before one of the three windows looking out on the yard, is the low wooden table, manufactured by Drueke, on which my father used to compose his chess problems. Atop the table is a marble chessboard, the alternating gray and black squares each almost three inches on a side. Wandering over to the windows, I caress the ornately carved Indian box that holds the Judge’s treasured chess set, the lid neatly shut, conveying a sense of abandonment, perhaps even bereavement. Call it anthropomorphism, call it romanticism: I envision the pieces mourning their master, the touch of whose fingers they will never feel again. I was, once upon a time, a serious chess player, having learned the moves from my father, who loved the game but rarely played against an actual opponent, for he was of a different, more exclusive fraternity, the chess problemist. Problemists try to find new and unusual ways to use the fewest possible pieces as they challenge solvers to figure out how white can play and checkmate black in two moves, and so on. Problems were never to my taste; I always preferred to play an actual game, against a flesh-and-blood opponent; but the Judge insisted that the only true chess artist was the composer. A few of his problems were even published in minor magazines here and there, and once, back in the early Reagan years, in what was then known as Chess Life and Review, the leading chess publication in the country, a page that hangs framed, even now, in the upstairs hallway of the Oak Bluffs house.

I open the box and admire the three-inch-high chess pieces stuffed into their two felted compartments, each beautifully stained piece carved of ebony or boxwood, traditional in design but with enough added fillips and whorls to make the set distinctive. I smile a bit, remembering the way we used to come into the study when it was downstairs-before the Judge knocked down the walls to make this one-and find him hunched over the table, a notebook at his side, working out his compositions. It relaxed him, he said; although at times it resembled an obsession, it was better than his drinking.

Then I frown. I sense something peculiar about the set, even as it lies in the box, but I cannot quite work it out.

I glance around at Bentley, who has plucked a volume of C. S. Lewis from my father’s shelf and seated himself in my father’s recliner. The Judge used to quote Lewis by the yard. His grandson has selected a page at random and is running his stubby fingers along the lines of type, his mouth moving as though he can read the words. Well, maybe he can a little, maybe he will surprise us all, as he so often has.

I close the box and put it back on the table. I cross to the desk and settle myself in the executive swivel chair, the oxblood leather old and cracked. I am not sure what I am doing, why I am even in this room, much less why I am sitting at the Judge’s desk. On the credenza behind the desk stands a computer, complete with a printer-scanner-fax machine, nothing but the best, meaning the most expensive, for the Honorable Oliver C. Garland, as much of his mail was still addressed when he died. As usual, the computer is enveloped in a form-fitting green plastic dust cover-a dust cover!-because, although Addison, who loves computers, insisted that the Judge ought to have the latest technology and often went out and purchased it for him, my father hardly ever used it, preferring to compose his speeches and essays and angry letters to the editor, even his books, on yellow legal pads, which Mrs. Rose, his assistant, would later transcribe. Two pads sit on his desk, one of them missing the top few pages, both of them entirely blank.

No clue there, either.

I slide open a file drawer at random and find a few drafts of this and that, along with a scattering of financial records. Leafing through the next drawer, which seems to contain letters, I am startled briefly by a rapping sound behind me. Bentley has crawled into the kneehole on the far side of the desk and is knocking on the wood and giggling. I realize that I am supposed to answer, like at a door.

“Who’s there?” I say, very loud, holding in my hand some mutually flattering correspondence between the Judge and a syndicated columnist sufficiently far to the right that the Heritage Foundation probably would not have him in.

“Knock-knock,” my son says with a laugh, getting the joke backward.

“Who’s there?” I repeat.

“Bemmy. Bemmy dere.” He comes flying out, uncoiling at that remarkable speed that three-year-olds of both sexes seem able to summon at an instant, sprawling cross-legged on the vast Oriental carpet, then rolling to his feet like a paratrooper who has made a perfect landing. “Bemmy dere! Dare you!”

I step deftly around the desk to hug my son, but he shoves happily free of me and tears off toward a little sitting area my father arranged under the largest of the three windows on the long side of the room. From his parents, or at least his father, Bentley has inherited a certain reckless clumsiness. So I am not entirely surprised when, looking back to see whether I am playing, my son smashes into the Judge’s chess table. The marble board lifts, then crashes back onto the glass-topped table. Nothing breaks, but the elegant box tumbles onto its side and the hand-turned pieces patter like rain against window and walls, then drop to the floor. Bentley tumbles backward, landing on his well-padded rump with a surprised grunt.

“Bemmy hurt,” my son announces in wonderment. He sheds no tears, perhaps because he possesses, already at age three, the Garland frugality with displays of emotion. “Bemmy ouch.”

“You’re okay,” I assure him, crouching for a hug he does not seem to want. “You’re just fine, sweetheart.”

“Bemmy ouch,” he reminds me. “Bemmy fine. Bemmy okay.”

“That’s right, you’re okay.”

Bentley climbs to his feet and toddles off in the direction of my father’s desk. I stoop to pick up the scattered chess pieces, setting them not in the box but in the positions from which they would begin a game. I note with irritation that two pawns are missing, one white and one black. I glance around the carpet again but see nothing. Pieces of this size are not easy to miss. I peek under the wooden chairs on either side of the chess table: still nothing.

From out in the hallway, I hear the mischievous chatter of two or three of my sister’s children, fresh from the shower, and, as Bentley rushes out to join them, my mind sparks with unreasoning anger. Why do the pawns number only fourteen instead of sixteen? The answer is infuriatingly obvious. The missing chess pieces are evidence that Mariah’s children have been frolicking in here. My sister, as usual, sets no limits on the freedom of her spoiled little brood. True, the house will soon be hers, but she might wait more than a week before letting her kids turn the room where the Judge died into a playpen-or a pigpen.

Still, having a rambunctious child of my own, I can see why the cavernous room might qualify as an attractive nuisance. Unfortunately, a collectible chess set, like the one my father used to compose his problems, is worth a good deal less with pieces missing. I assume that the missing pieces will turn up, and I catch myself wondering whether Mariah, about to inherit the house and all its contents, might be persuaded to let me have the chess set. I could even return it to the Vineyard, where my father used to work on his compositions in the good old days, sitting alone on the porch in the evening, sipping lemonade, hunched over the board-

Downstairs, the doorbell rings, and I shiver, suddenly certain that somebody has come to the house to deliver more bad news. I am already halfway out the door when Sally’s substantial voice comes blasting up from the foyer:

“Tal, there’s some men here to see you.” A pause. “They’re from the FBI.”