Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 15

Bentley! Home! Two of my favorite words!

I arrive twenty minutes late to pick up my son because of my time on the phone with my sister, and I endure the unemotive glares of the teachers-all women, all white-whose grim silence informs me that they are prepared to call the Department of Family Services to report the Garland-Madison team as far too frequently tardy and therefore unfit to parent. I take some solace, however, from the fact that Miguel Hadley is still there, too, his parents therefore every bit as unfit as Bentley’s. Miguel, a pudgy little boy, is an amazingly bright child but never an ebullient one. He seems particularly solemn today. He hugs Bentley to say goodbye. The school encourages hugging between boys in the service of some unarticulated ideological goal-making sure they don’t grow up to be the kind of men who drop bombs on innocent civilians, perhaps. But I am not sure why the teachers bother. University kids are far more likely to grow up to be the kind of men who sit in the White House ordering others to drop the bombs, in between hugging their constituents.

Standing off to the side, waiting for the two little boys to finish their embrace (the school preaches that we mere parents should never separate them by force), I gaze out the window toward the parking lot, hoping, through this device, to avoid having to make small talk with the teachers who staff the school. They are hopelessly well-meaning, in the manner of white liberals of their class, but because they believe they have transcended racism (which afflicts only conservatives) they remain blissfully unaware of how their disdainful elitism is perceived by the few black parents who can afford the school. Nor is there any point in enlightening them: their desperately sincere apologies would only make matters worse, signaling, as liberal apologies tend to, that the members of the darker nation are so weak of character that there can be no greater sin than insulting one.

White liberals, of course, believe themselves to be made of stronger stuff. That is why they so often support rules punishing nasty comments made by whites about blacks but readily forgive nasty comments made by blacks about whites.

I shake my head, struggling against the angry red direction of my musings. Does any of this diatribe actually represent what I believe? I scratch at the fading outline of a flower sticker in the corner of the window, wondering why these teachers, with their cultlike grins of welcome to every dark face, bring out the worst in me. And why I condemn liberals alone. The racial attitudes of conservatives are no better; often they are worse. These teachers, for all the arrogance of their sympathy, are not the ones scrawling KKK with cheap paint on the lockers of black high-school students or sending money to the National Association for the Advancement of White People. What is the source of my vitriol? Is it possible that I am just recalling, albeit dimly, some furious article or speech by the Judge? Odd how difficult it is becoming to tell the difference, as though my father, in death, owns more of my mind than he ever did in life.

I wonder whether I will ever escape him.

As I brood in the corner, waiting for the teachers to decide that Bentley has learned his anti-war, anti-macho, pro-hugging lesson for the day, I notice a trapezoidal black Mercedes minivan streaking and thumping across the potholes of the pitted lot. Dahlia Hadley, Miguel’s mother, has arrived in her usual heedless rush. She bustles inside, a tiny, slender whirlwind of smile and energy, and the teachers, so unnerved by my presence, begin to beam again, because everybody loves Dahlia; it’s like a rule.

“Talcott,” she murmurs breathily, as soon as she has waved to her son, “I am so glad you are here. I was thinking of calling you. Do you have a minute?”

“Of course,” I say, certain that something unpleasant is coming.

Dahlia takes my large hand in her small one and draws me off to another corner of the long room, where wooden blocks lie helter-skelter, sloppiness passing as juvenile creativity.

“It has to do with our mutual concern,” she says, glancing around. Her indigo jeans and matching sweater are a little showy, but that is Dahlia. “Do you know what I am talking about, Talcott?”

Of course I know, but I am still free to pretend that I do not, because the Elm Harbor Clarion, no whiz at digging up stories unrelated to municipal corruption (of which our fine city has plenty), has yet to run the obligatory article on the finalists for the seat on the court of appeals. But I decide not to play games.

“Ah… I think so.”

She hesitates, then meets my eyes and smiles again. Dahlia Hadley is in her early thirties, a raucous, hennaed Bolivian even Kimmer, in spite of her best efforts, cannot help liking. Marc and Dahlia met, Dahlia points out whenever somebody will listen, after his first marriage was on the rocks. (But before he left his wife, Kimmer adds savagely.) Marc’s first wife was Margaret Story, a very distinguished historian a year older than he, with whom he had two children, the younger of whom is Heather, now a student at the law school, and the older of whom is Rick, a poet often published in The New Yorker, who lives in California. Margaret was broad and quiet and distant, even forbidding, whereas Dahlia is slim and loud and gregarious and loves to tease. But she is no mere trophy. Although she lacks a full-time academic appointment (which, in a university, makes her a citizen of the second class), she possesses a doctorate in biochemistry from MIT and, supported by various corporate grants, labors in some obscure corner of the Science Quad, testing unlikely cures for unknown diseases, passionately killing lab rats by the hundreds. The greatest threats to the impoverished, according to Dahlia, who has been one of them, are neither political nor military nor economic but biological: scientific progress and nature alike are constantly releasing new microbes into the ecosystem, and it is the poor they usually kill first and fastest. Dahlia believes that justice will be found at the bottom of a test tube. Once a group of animal-rights activists invaded her laboratory, smashing reagents, releasing contagious rodents from their cages, and spreading dangerous germs. Most of the staff fled, but Dahlia stood her ground and called the protesters racists, which first confused and then defeated them. The leader of the group, struggling to respond, made things worse, drawing an awkward analogy between the situation of the rats and the situation of the people in the barrios. He evidently assumed that Dahlia, whose skin is the red-brown of desert clay, was Mexican American. She corrected him furiously in two languages. The campus police arrived while the leader was struggling to explain his solidarity with the oppressed people of Bolivia-which, unfortunately for his argument, happens to be a democracy.

Later, Dahlia testified at the trial. She talked about the experiments he wrecked, the people who might die: not testimony that would ordinarily be admissible, but the prosecutor pretended Dr. Hadley was merely describing the damage, and the judge went along. Dahlia drew plenty of hate mail from people who love animals more than they do human beings, but won a substantial increase in the grant from the pharmaceutical company that backs her research.

Dahlia is a wise woman.

“This is not an easy time for us,” she says now, and I find myself wondering briefly, and foolishly, whether she might after all have pulled me aside to discuss another subject, whether perhaps Ruthie has kept confidential what is confidential and not told Marc that his main rival for the post he craves is my wife-or, if she has told him, whether Marc might have kept it secret from his wife. Dahlia herself answers my unspoken question, saying, almost casually: “You know, Tal, the FBI has started to bother all our friends. I guess it must be the same for you.”

“Oh, yes, right,” I mumble, quite taken by surprise, and now forced to wonder why no friends have called us to share the same news, other than John Brown’s call about Foreman, which obviously doesn’t count. Maybe the FBI has made no visits. Certainly no agents-no real agents-have been by to talk to Kimmer herself. Have they interviewed Marc? If so, the fight presumably is already over… and with it, possibly, my marriage.

“Marc is very tense just now,” Dahlia whispers. “How is Kimberly holding up?”

“Hmmm? Oh, fine, fine.”

Mguel calls out to his mother in Spanish. Dahlia half turns in his direction and says “En un minuto, querido,” but does not release my hand. She glances at the teachers, all of whom have been watching, all of whom now pointedly look away. She pulls me farther into the corner. She seems not to want to be overheard. The teachers are probably wondering what kind of tete-a-tete they are observing. Most people consider Dahlia quite an attractive woman, but I find her features too soft and undefined, and her ambition far too openly worn, for true beauty.

“It’s just so hard to get any news,” she pouts. “Have you heard anything?”

And then I have it-and am stunned. Marc doesn’t know any more than we do. All of Dahlia’s clumsy pumping is a fishing expedition on her husband’s behalf. It isn’t over at all! I want to laugh aloud, so great is my relief. But I control my instincts and, as usual, my facial expression.

“Not a word, Dahlia.” I have seen very little of Marc these past weeks: nothing more than an occasional tense hello as we pass in the hallway. I decide to do a little investigating of my own. “I guess we’ll all have to wait.”

Dahlia does not seem to hear. She looks up at me again. She is no longer smiling. “Do you know Ruth Silverman?” Not Ruthie, I notice.

“Yes, I know her.”

Dahlia closes her eyes briefly. There is a girlish innocence about the gesture. Out in the parking lot, a couple of fathers are in the midst of a loud dissing match over the relative merits of the Jets and the Giants. I want to be a part of their universe, not Dahlia’s.

“Well, she was Marc’s student. He got her her job. But she is so ungrateful. She will not tell us anything.” She shakes her head. Across the room, the restless teachers are casting surreptitious glances in our direction and irritated glances at the clock. Very likely marveling at what they take to be our intimacy, in a hurry to get home to gossip to spouses, lovers, friends, because Elm Harbor, for all its Ivy League sophistication, is nothing but a small town. You’ll never guess who I saw together at school today! I realize I am oversensitive to appearances, but my history with Kimmer has left me with that burden. “Marc keeps telling me that she has an obligation to keep quiet, but I was raised to believe you return a favor for a favor.” She has released my hand. She is gritting her perfect teeth and making fists. I notice that her nails are bitten so deeply that the flesh is fiery pink.

“Marc is right, Dahlia. Ruthie-Ruth can’t talk about her work.”

“It is just all so sudden,” she explains, which I take to mean that Ruthie revealed confidences to Marc earlier but, for some reason, has now stopped. Dahlia’s next words confirm my suspicion. “Three weeks ago, Marc was the leading candidate. That is what Ruth Silverman said. Then she told us that the President was looking at other names, in the interest of diversity.” Emphasizing the word in a way that suggests how little it should count when anything real is at stake. Last year, I greatly upset the students in my seminar on Law and Social Movements by suggesting to them the following proposition: Any white person who truly believes in affirmative action should be willing to pledge that, if his or her child is admitted to a Harvard or a Princeton, he or she will at once write to the school saying, “My child will not be attending. Please hold the slot for a member of a minority group.” The consternation among my students confirmed my belief that few white people, even among the most liberal, support affirmative action when it actually costs them something. They like it precisely because they can tell themselves that they are working for racial justice while pretending that the costs do not exist. But it is not their fault: who believes in sacrifice these days?

Diversity, I am now thinking. Ordinarily a word so empty of content that everybody can sign on without agreeing to anything, but, in this case, doubtless a code for Kimberly Madison. Which Marc must realize and, obviously, Dahlia as well. My wife’s chances are better than I thought, better than Kimmer hoped… if we can just manage to keep the lid on everything else. An image of Jerry Nathanson drifts across my mind, and I stifle a surge of anger at my wife, less for violating her vows than for taking such a risk with so much at stake.

“I’m sure the President will pick the person he thinks will be the best judge,” I say, even though no President in history has actually selected judges that way.

“I don’t know,” says Dahlia-but, then, of course, she thinks that Marc would be the best judge. Never mind that he has never practiced law a day in his life. “To tell you the truth, Tal, Marc has… not been himself.”

“I’m sorry, Dahlia.”

“This is not like him, missing his son’s party,” she continues. She somewhere lapsed from the interrogative mode into the confessional, but I am not sure when. She notices my distraction. “You remember, last Sunday? Mguel’s birthday?”

I do remember. I had to take Bentley to the party, because Kimmer, who had promised our son she would be there, had to fly to San Francisco on Sunday morning. My wife and I fought about that, as we fight about so many things. And I remember, too, that Marc was absent. Dahlia made excuses for him: he had to attend a conference in Miami, she said, something about Cardozo. I noticed even at the time that she did not seem particularly happy about it.

“I’m sorry.” Just something to say.

Dahlia gazes at the dying brown carpet. Tears glisten in her dark eyes. “Usually Marc is so loving. With me and with Miguelito. But now the tension…” She shakes her head once more. “He has grown short-tempered. He will not talk to me.”

I do not know what has prompted Dahlia to open this window on the private life of the Hadley family, but it is not a burden I want to bear. Unfortunately, I continue to take refuge in inanities: “It’s a tough time for everybody,” I disclose.

Dahlia is hardly listening. “You are lucky, Tal. Kimberly is young. If it does not happen for her this time, there is another time. But so much in Marc’s life has not been what he hoped it would. All the writing he has not… managed to complete. I worry about what will happen to him if this position goes to somebody else. I’m scared for him.”

So that’s the game. Marc is going to jump if he doesn’t get it, and Kimmer will have another shot, so, pretty please, won’t you make your wife withdraw? Desperate indeed! I remember Stuart Land’s complaint that Marc has not been attending to his work because he is so upset… and his comment that he could help Kimmer in Washington. Perhaps he did.

“It isn’t easy for any of us. I’m sure it’ll come out the way it’s supposed to.” A little unfeeling, I guess, but how can Dahlia Hadley think it is my job to reassure her?

Dahlia refuses to give up. “You do not understand, Talcott. This is not just jitters. Marc is worried. Yes, that is the word. He is worried, Talcott. He will not tell me what is on his mind. We have always shared everything, ever since we have been together, and now he is keeping something from me. And it is… eating him.” She shakes her head, waving her hand vaguely toward her son, who is drawing a picture with Bentley. “It is wrecking my family, Talcott.”

I am not sure how to respond, but I want to say the right thing, my sense that it is not my place to comfort her blasted from my mind by the sudden exposure of her pain. Maybe Dahlia is not manipulating me. Maybe she really is worried about her husband. Maybe there is really something to worry about.

“I’m sorry, Dahlia,” I say at last, patting her shoulder. “I really am.”

She clutches my jacket, and, for a scary moment, her head bobs forward, as though she is about to rest it on my chest. Then Dahlia stiffens, less in anger than in embarrassment: she let the conversation get away from her and, belatedly, is concerned about what the wide-eyed teachers must be thinking.

“Oh, Talcott, I am sorry too.” Standing straight once more, no longer holding my hand, she is wiping her nose with a handkerchief. There are tears on her face, but I did not see them begin. “It is not right to burden you. Go and get your boy, take him home, and hug him. That makes everything better.”

“You do the same, Dahlia. And don’t worry.”

“Or you. And thank you.” Still sniffling. “You’re a kind man.” Spoken as though she does not meet a lot of them.

I walk heavily across the room to get my son. The teachers step away, making a path: my furtive chat with Dahlia has transformed me into a celebrity.

Strapping a sleepy Bentley into the car seat he has probably outgrown, I glance back at the school I am beginning to hate. Miguel and his mother are in the doorway, holding hands. Dahlia, evidently herself once more, is chatting with one of the teachers, making her laugh. Miguel waves haughtily, very much his father’s son. As I steer around the potholes, bumping the undercarriage of the Camry no more than three or four times, I marvel at the vicissitudes of fortune. If McDermott has truly fled to Canada, and if Conan Deveaux truly killed Freeman Bishop, then Kimmer is right: it is time for me to stop worrying. It is just a matter of getting my sister to stop all the conspiracy nonsense. If Addison will help, maybe I can.

The skeleton, I remind myself exultantly, as sharp memories of Jack Ziegler’s sickly face swim upward into my consciousness. Marc is worried about the skeleton.

Five minutes later, I pull the Camry into the driveway of our twelve-room Victorian in the heart of the faculty ghetto. We are, as Kimmer often reminds me, surrounded by the law school on all sides. Dear Dana Worth lives two blocks farther along Hobby Road, around the corner is Tish Kirschbaum, our token feminist, and Peter Van Dyke, our token fascist-these are Kimmer’s nicknames, not mine-is right across the street. Theo Mountain’s back yard abuts Peter’s. Four more faculty members live within an additional three-block radius. Once the mansions of Hobby Hill were hideously expensive, available to only the most senior professors in the university, and only those among them who came from money. But the Elm Harbor housing market has been soft now for close to fifteen years running, and youngish professors in the financially advantaged schools-law, medicine, and business-have purchased the huge homes once reserved for the masters of Mencius and Shakespeare and the curvature of space.

Still-home! Number 41 Hobby Road is a massive house, built at the end of the nineteenth century, with wide rooms and high ceilings and graceful wainscoting. A house to entertain in, although we never entertain. A house to hold gaggles of children, although we will never have more than one. Everywhere floors are sagging and panels are cracked and pipes are groaning-but they are our floors and panels and pipes. We are only the third black family ever to live in the section of town called Hobby Hill, sixteen square blocks of elegance, and the other two deserted the cause long before we arrived. I do not know how many owners our particular house has had, but it has survived them all, has even thrived. Somebody turned the basement into a playroom, somebody renovated the kitchen, somebody added a cramped garage where Kimmer, despite my entreaties to protect the more expensive of our cars, refuses to park her BMW because she fears the narrow entry might scratch the blinding white paint, somebody updated all four full and two half baths, including the one for the maid in the attic, if we only had a maid and could afford to heat the attic; yet I like to think the house has hardly changed since being built. Eight years after we bought the place, I am still tickled to walk in the front door, because I know that the original owner was the longtime provost of the university, a fussy Latin and Greek scholar named Phineas Nimm, who died around the time of the First World War. Something over a hundred years ago, responding to a survey from an unknown Atlanta University professor named W.E.B. Du Bois, Provost Nimm wrote unapologetically that a colored man, whatever the level of his educational achievement, would not be welcome as a student. As an undergraduate, I discovered a copy of the letter in the university archives and nearly stole it. After all these years, the irony of owning Nimm’s house still brings me a bitter satisfaction.

As the daylight fades, Bentley and I play kickball in the yard for half an hour, watched with approval by Don and Nina Felsenfeld, our elderly next-door neighbors, who are sitting on their screened porch, as they do every day around this time, sipping lemonade. Don was in his day one of the nation’s leading experts on particle physics, and Nina remains an expert at welcoming strangers, the Jewish tradition of hesed: within an hour of the arrival of the moving truck eight years ago, she was at our door with a tray of cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches. She has brought us other trays over the years, including one three weeks ago, after my father died, because she grew up in the kind of family where, when somebody died, bringing food was what neighbors did. Don and Nina believe that nothing is more important than family, and Don, who often spends a friendly evening whomping me at chess, is fond of saying that nobody ever lay on his deathbed wishing he had spent a few more hours at work and a few less with the kids.

Kimmer thinks they are interfering busybodies.

And they are, evidently, about to interfere again, because, as soon as I judge that my son is too tired to play any longer and turn around to head inside, Don rises to his feet and opens the door to his porch. He beckons to me over the high, thick hedge that separates our lots. I nod, take Bentley by the hand, and wander toward the front of the house, which is the only way around the sprawling, prickly hedge. Don and I meet on his front lawn, and there is a moment while he plays around with his pipe.

“How’s the little chap?” he asks at last, referring to Bentley.

“Bentley’s doing great,” I answer.

“Grape! Bemmy grape!” chirps my magnificent son, reaching out his free hand for Don’s. “Dare you!”

“Yep,” says Don with every appearance of seriousness, swallowing the tiny proffered fingers in his own. “Yep, you’re quite a grape little chap.”

Bentley giggles and hugs Don’s bony leg.

Don Felsenfeld is a tall, awkwardly thin man, graceless and aloof, the son of a Jewish farmer from Vermont. In his heyday, it is said, he knew more about subatomic particles than anybody on the planet, and a favorite bromide on campus is that he should have had the Nobel Prize twice. A sometime socialist and full-time atheist, Don once wrote a popular book whose title made a joke of Einstein’s famous and difficult line: The Science of Unbelief: How the Universe Plays Dice with God, he called it. Now he is close to eighty, dresses every day in khaki trousers and the same blue cardigan, and spends most of his time gardening or smoking his pipe or both.

“Been quite a couple of weeks for you,” says Don. No smile, few words: Jewish he may be, but Don Felsenfeld is pure New England too.

“I suppose.”

“Nina’s cooking for you.”

“She’s sweet.”

“That she is.” For a moment, we both stand in silence, appreciating his wife. Then Don begins to fiddle with his pipe again, the way he does just after unleashing a devastating attack over the chessboard, and I know we are finally at the heart of the matter. “Talcott, listen.” I do. I am. “Are you having some kind of trouble?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I swallow with effort, thinking: McDermott has been skulking around asking questions. Or Foreman. Or the real FBI. “What makes you ask that?”

Don does not look at me. Still puffing his pipe, he seems to take great interest in a white-throated sparrow hopping along the sidewalk, somehow left behind when the great flocks migrated south.

“It’s been a pretty nice autumn, don’t you think?” Don asks slowly. Bewildered, I nod. Is he thinking about the bird? “Weather’s been fair, not too cold. Pleasant.”

“Yes, it’s been nice.”

“One of the warmest since you’ve been in town, as a matter of fact.”

“I guess it could be.”

“Kind of autumn weather where folks keep their windows open at night to catch the breeze.”

“Uh, right.” Over the years, Don and I have discussed, in detail, everything from the university’s policies on patent ownership by faculty, to the relative merits of John Updike and John Irving, to the relationship between capital gains tax rates and capital formation, to how Bobby Fischer would have fared against the current crop of chess champions, to whether the Book of Isaiah, which Christians believe prefigures the birth and ministry of Jesus, predicts the arrival of one infant or two. But we have never once held a lengthy conversation about the weather… which leads me to believe something important is on the way.

“You know, Talcott, there are no perfect marriages.”

“I never thought there were.”

“Your windows are open at night in this weather. Ours too.”

A sudden awareness dawns. I look at him hard, but his gentle gaze is still locked on something in the middle distance. I know what is coming, and I know that Nina has put him up to it-for Don, like the Judge, would never willingly discuss an emotion, or even admit to having any.

“Uh, Don, look-”

In his kindly but single-minded way, the old physicist rides right over me, just as he does when we play chess. “Voices carry, Talcott. Couldn’t help overhearing the other night. You and your wife, I mean. Two of you had quite a set-to.”

Three nights ago, I am remembering: Saturday. The one sour note in an otherwise loving week. Kimmer announced she was leaving for San Francisco in the morning, and I asked, stupidly, about her promise to take Bentley to Miguel Hadley’s birthday party so that I could drive over to the campus after church to catch the tail end of Rob Saltpeter’s conference on the implications of artificial intelligence for constitutional law. She told me that she had no choice, that this was work. I told her mine was work too. She said it wasn’t the same. She had made a commitment. I asked her who to. She asked what that was supposed to mean. I said she knew. She asked what that was supposed to mean. I said I didn’t want to talk about it. She said I was the one who brought it up in the first place. I can see how Don and Nina overheard: our voices were certainly raised. Kimmer’s anyway.

“I’m sorry if we disturbed you.”

“Don’t give it a thought, Talcott.” He puts a hand on my shoulder, man to man, the way my father used to. Bentley, sensing the seriousness of the conversation, has ambled away. He is stooping on the Felsenfelds’ lawn, examining Don’s carefully tended flowerbeds, now mostly covered over for the coming cold weather. I have tried to get my son to stop picking the buds, but Don and Nina do not seem to mind. “I just wanted you to know I’m here if you ever need to talk. Sometimes talking things through is the most important step. Nina and I, well, we’ve had a problem or two of our own over the years. We got through ours, you’ll get through yours if you let your friends help.”

For a moment I am too humiliated to speak: there are standards, after all, my mother used to preach, and nobody should ever get the idea you aren’t living up to them. As for the talking-things-out idea, my father always mocked the idea of counseling, which was, he said, nothing more than coddling the weak of will. You draw a line, Talcott. Put the past on one side, the future on the other, and decide which side you want to live on. Then stick to your decision. In my family, problems were secrets; so none of us ever received training on what to do if some outsider discovered that we actually had one.

Yet I manage somehow to gather enough wit to respond lightly:

“Oh, Don, thanks, but Saturday night, that was nothing. You should hear Kimmer when she gets mad. ” I would wink, too, but I never actually learned how.

Don summons a smile and gazes at me the way the Judge used to, when I joked about grades or tenure or politics or anything else my father considered important and I chose not to discuss. Don’s bright, intelligent eyes convey the pitiless judgment of a man who has spent his seven-plus decades on earth getting all the answers right. I adore Nina, but not Don, probably because he reminds me too much of the Judge. The fact that my father was, for lack of a better word, a Tory, and Don is very much the other thing, does not change the essential similarity of their natures, particularly the somber self-satisfaction that commands those foolish enough to hold wrong political opinions to go to hell.

“I’m here if you change your mind,” Don tells me. Which is something else that the Judge used to say. Only I never did, and he never was.