Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 35

“You’ll never guess what happened,” announces a gleeful Dana Worth, striding into my office uninvited.

“That’s right,” I tell her crossly, barely looking up from the galley proofs I am busily correcting with a broken red pencil. I have not had the emotional energy to do a lot of work since my return from the Vineyard. It is the end of the second week of January and Elm Harbor’s streets are choked with dirty snow. The spring semester formally begins on Monday, but the minutiae of law school life cannot hold my attention. Students have been coming in with excuses for not having their papers done on time. I have not wasted words scolding them. The library still wants the book I have misplaced. Earlier today, Shirley Branch called, still depressed about her missing dog. I tried to be comforting, as a mentor should, even though I was tempted to tell her-it was a near thing-that I can only look for one missing item at a time. On the Vineyard, Maxine begged me to continue the search for the arrangements, but I am not sure I will be able to do it. Too many ghosts now haunt me.

Last night around eleven-thirty, the telephone woke us, and Kimmer, who sleeps on that side of the bed, picked up the receiver, listened for about three seconds, and handed it to me without a word: Mariah again, calling to disclose a fact she had previously hidden. As my wife pulled the blanket over her head, my sister told me what she had wheedled out of poor Warner Bishop when the two of them finally talked over a cozy dinner in New York. In the telling, Mariah confirmed my fears. Warner, it seems, lied to the police. On the night Freeman Bishop died, just as Sergeant Ames said, he informed his vestry that he would be a little late for the meeting because he had to stop and comfort a distraught parishioner. But he told his son, who happened to call just before he left, a different story. Father Bishop said he would be late because he had to see an FBI agent who had dropped by the church earlier in the day, set up a clandestine meeting to talk about an unnamed congregant, and sworn him to silence. Why did Warner keep this fact from the police? Because he was scared, said Mariah. Of whom? Of whoever killed his father. She grew enthusiastic. I wanted to tell you earlier, Tal, when I was over at your house. But you spent so much time dissing me that I didn’t really trust you. Now I do. I tried to remember whether I was really so cruel. Before I could figure out whether Mariah expected me to apologize, she was on to the next point in her brief. See why I don’t trust the FBI? But she knew as well as I did that the real FBI had nothing to do with what happened to Freeman Bishop.

“Misha, come on, pay attention.” Dear Dana brushes aside a stack of papers-never mind where I want them to be-and hops onto the corner of my desk. Her feet do not reach the floor. She strikes her famous pose again, soles flat on the side. “This is good news. This is important.”

I lean back in my aged chair and hear the familiar crack of the broken bearings. In my experience, nothing but faculty politics ever arouses such exuberance in my occasional friend, so I steel myself for an interminable tale of triumph or tragedy, related somehow to the question of who will or will not be appointed to the faculty, an issue, although I have not informed Dana, about which I no longer actually care.

“I’m listening,” I tell her.

Dana flashes her pixie grin, the one she reserves for teasing old friends and baiting new students. She is wearing a dark sweater and a pair of beige pants that would fit a twelve-year-old, but the sharp crease suggests a product affordable only by twelve-year-olds who live in Beverly Hills. “It actually has more to do with that wife of yours than with you.”

“I’m still listening.” I cannot imagine what aspect of Kimmer’s life Dana would find so fascinating, but I am always willing to learn.

“This is a good one, Misha.”

“No doubt.”

“You’re no fun, you know that?”

“Dana, are you going to tell me or not?”

She pouts briefly, unaccustomed to this new, less playful Misha Garland, but decides, as Dana always will, that her gossip is too juicy to remain unconfided.

“Well, you’ll never guess who spent the last two hours in Dean Lynda’s office.”

“True.” I turn my attention back to the proofs.

“True?”

“True, I will never guess. So why don’t you just tell me.”

Dana makes a face and waits for me to notice, then plunges on. “I’ll give you a hint, Misha. They were using both of her telephone lines-this person and Lynda, I mean-and they were on the telephone to just about everybody in Washington, trying to persuade them that he didn’t plagiarize the world-famous Chapter Three of his one and only book.”

My chair tilts forward with a surprised crunch. For a marvelous instant, the worries about my father and his arrangements and Freeman Bishop and the roller woman evaporate.

“You don’t mean…”

“I do mean. Brother Hadley.”

“You’re kidding. You’re kidding. ”

“I’m not kidding. Chapter Three? The one he’s always quoting? The one everybody is always quoting? Well, it turns out he copied it from an unpublished paper by none other than Perry Mountain.”

“Marc plagiarized Theo’s brother? Marc? I don’t believe it.”

Dana is disappointed by my skepticism; she wanted my cheers. “Why do you find it so hard to believe? You think Marc is some kind of paragon? You think he doesn’t cheat and steal like everybody else?”

“Well, no, it’s just that I can’t believe Marc would ever think that somebody else’s ideas were good enough to call his own.”

This wins me the coveted Dear Dana Worth grin of approval.

“Well, in case you’ve forgotten, Brother Hadley also has the greatest writer’s block in the history of Western civilization. So maybe stealing somebody else’s ideas is better than never publishing at all, huh?”

I shake my head. This is happening too fast. Kimmer’s path is suddenly clear-

Except-except-

“Dana, what exactly is Marc supposed to have done?”

“Well, this is the good part, my dear.” She hops off my desk and begins to wear the familiar circle in my carpet. “It seems that some student was going through the archives out at UCLA, you know, throwing away old files-”

“- and he comes across some papers of none other than Pericles Mountain,” I tell Kimmer on the telephone minutes later, having had her secretary call her out of a meeting as soon as Dana went on to spread the bad news along the corridor. I sense my wife’s growing impatience as I repeat the story Dana told me. Impatience, but excitement too. “And so now he’s sitting there in some subbasement of the UCLA Law School, reading through this stuff, the way students do when they’d rather not be working, and it happens that he just read Marc’s book in one of his classes, and he notices this draft, and the language is very similar, and he gets to wondering if this is maybe an early draft of the book. Like maybe he can show it off next week in the seminar, surprise everybody by telling them what the great Marc Hadley thought about writing before he changed his mind.” We both laugh. Kimmer is so delighted by this news that we are almost happy together. “Only, when he looks at it a little more closely, it turns out not to be a draft of The Constitutional Mind. It’s just a draft of some paper that Perry Mountain wrote. He’s about to throw it away, but the similarity of the language sticks in his mind. So he saves it from the recycling bin and takes it back to his apartment and a couple of days later he compares it with the book and, sure enough, it’s almost word for word the same. So the next day he tells his professor, and one professor tells another, and, well, here we are.”

“I don’t believe it,” my wife marvels, although she plainly does. “Do you know what this means, Misha? I can’t believe it.”

“I know what it means, darling.”

“He’ll have to withdraw, won’t he? He’ll have to.”

She is almost giddy, a Kimmer I have never seen.

“I think you’re right. He’ll have to withdraw. Congratulations, Your Honor.”

“Oh, honey, this is so wonderful.” It strikes me suddenly that Kimmer is taking a little too much pleasure in her rival’s misfortune-or, rather, misfeasance-and it seems to strike her, too. “I mean, I’m sorry for Marc and all, and, if I’m gonna get it, I didn’t want to get it this way. This is just…” A pause. I can almost hear her mood beginning to shift, even if for no other reason than that she is moody. “Have you talked to Mallory?”

“Nobody but you.”

“I’d love to know what folks are saying in D.C.”

“I’ll call him as soon as we’re done,” I promise.

“I think I’ll make a few calls of my own.” I am not sure why this strikes me as more ominous than optimistic.

“It’s pretty amazing,” I say, just to keep the conversation going.

“But I don’t get it.” Kimmer throws in an objection because she thinks human beings are rational. “I don’t understand why he would be so stupid. Marc, I mean.”

“Well, we all make mistakes.”

“This is a pretty big one.” As she thinks it through, her mood shift continues, clouds of doubt forming. I can hear it in her voice. “It doesn’t make any sense, Misha. Why would Marc copy it? Wouldn’t he be afraid of getting caught?”

“Well, here’s the interesting part. It turns out that Perry Mountain got sick and never published the article. The Constitutional Mind came out three years after Perry Mountain died.”

Skeptical Kimmer remains unpersuaded. Her good humor is definitely beginning to fade. “And nobody noticed? Perry didn’t send a draft to anybody else? Maybe Theo, for instance? I mean, I’d have thought Theo would be screaming from the day the book was published.”

I frown. I did not consider this possibility. I tell her I will call Dana and see.

“Dana is your source for all this?” Kimmer splutters. Thinking to bring my wife the news she most wants to hear, I have instead managed to anger her. “I mean, come on, Misha, I know she’s your buddy and all, but it’s not like she always has her facts right.”

“Kimmer-”

“And she can’t stand Marc,” my wife adds, as though she herself can. “So maybe she’s a little biased.”

“On the other hand, she always knows what’s going on around here.”

“I’m sorry, Misha.” My wife is her old, cold self again, suspicious of everyone and everything. “It’s just that I have the feeling I’m being set up.”

I try to keep it light. “This would be an awful lot of trouble to go to just to set you up, darling.”

A silence while she thinks this over. “I guess you’re right,” she grudges. “But I gotta tell you, honey, it sounds awfully weird.”

It is only after I glumly hang up the phone and return to my unfinished galley proofs that I realize Kimmer may be half right. It does look like a setup. But my wife is not the one being set up.

“Sure I knew about it,” Theophilus Mountain tells me, a broad smile materializing from some unexpected valley in his acres of beard. “You think I wouldn’t have noticed?”

As usual after arguing with my wife, I am feeling logy, my head filled with fuzz rather than thought. I do not quite get Theo’s point.

“You knew Marc copied Chapter Three from… from your brother? You knew it all these years? And you didn’t do anything about it?”

Theo laughs, shifting his round body in his wooden desk chair. He is delighted to be present at the rout of Marc Hadley, one of his many enemies. Most of those Theo despises he hates for their politics; Stuart Land, for example. But the ambitious Marc Hadley carefully cultivates the image of a scholar not driven by politics; Marc he hates for his arrogance. From the day he arrived in Elm Harbor a quarter century ago to teach constitutional law, Marc Hadley has never kowtowed to Theophilus Mountain in the way that the youngsters in his field used to do… and the way nobody does any longer. Nowadays, they kowtow to Marc Hadley instead. Theo has never forgiven Marc for changing the rules.

“I never saw the point,” says Theo. He begins to pace his huge office, located all the way at the end of the second floor, overlooking the main entrance of Oldie. Theo Mountain, say the wits, watches the new faculty come in the door and watches the old ones get carried out; but Theo himself seems eternal. The office he inhabits is eternal, too, a law school legend, an incredible mess, featuring stacks of papers halfway to the ceiling, covering just about every surface. My office is cluttered, true, as many around the building are, but Theo’s is awesome, a masterpiece, a monument to a true genius of disorganization. The only way to sit down is to move some of the junk aside. Theo never seems to care where you put what you move or which stacks you knock over in the process of emptying a chair; he never throws anything away but never looks at anything he keeps. It is said that he has copies of every faculty memo going back to the dawn of the twentieth century. Sometimes I think he might.

“I never saw the point,” he repeats, striding over to his file cabinet and yanking open drawers in apparently random order. “Marc was younger then, and a bigger idiot than he is now, and he was convinced, the way you all are when you first arrive, that he knew pretty much everything there was to know. So one day we had lunch and talked about Cardozo. And it turned out he didn’t know much about Cardozo at all.” Theo has found something to fascinate him in the back of one of the drawers. He leans over and pokes his head in, just like a cartoon character, and I half expect his upper body to disappear, with his feet tumbling in just behind.

“Do you need any help?”

“Are you kidding?” He is among the living again, a thick manila folder clutched in his meaty hands. His laugh makes his beard flutter. “So, anyway,” he resumes, “I told him about this paper my brother had written, arguing, um, that Cardozo’s judicial method was really the model for just about all the important constitutional adjudication since the 1940s.”

“Marc’s theory,” I murmur.

“Perry’s theory,” Theo corrects me with gentle good humor. “Marc asked me if he could see a copy of the paper. Well, my brother was never one for sharing his papers, except with me and Hero, of course. So it wouldn’t have done any good to ask Perry. But I liked Marc, I thought he had some promise, and I loaned him my copy.” He spins the folder across his desktop in my direction, and, even before I open it, I know I am holding in my hand the evidence of Marc Hadley’s plagiarism: Pericles Mountain’s unpublished manuscript on Cardozo, the uncited source for the third chapter of Marc’s book, the single great idea for which he won every prize the legal academy can offer.

I flip through the yellowed pages. I see occasional notes in Theo’s hand, cross-outs, question marks, inserts, coffee stains. “Are you sure…”

“That Marc copied it? Sure I am. You read it, you’ll see for yourself.”

“And you knew at the time? When his book came out?”

“Sure did.”

I ask Kimmer’s question: “So why didn’t you do something about it?”

“Like what?”

“Like… go public.”

Theo frowns briefly, as though he does not know the answer himself. Except that he does. I can read it in his cautious, calculating eyes. Theo has seen it all, yet life never seems to bore him. When he smiles again, his look is so devious it scares me. “Well, I wouldn’t say I did nothing exactly.”

“What would you say you did?”

“I would say I told Marc. ”

“Why would you just tell Marc and not tell anybody…” I begin. Then I stop. I see it. Oh, this is so Theo! Of course he told Marc! He told Marc so that he would have the plagiarism to hold over the head of his young, arrogant colleague for the next couple of decades. He told nobody else because he wanted Marc beholden to him. And because, as I now realize, Theo, my onetime mentor, is the kind of secret, envious hater who would prefer to own the knowledge of Marc’s perfidy, rather than sharing it with the world. If everybody else realized that the great Marc Hadley was a liar and a cheat, that would actually have reduced rather than enhanced Theo’s pleasure.

Besides, by keeping the secret to himself, he could wait until this perfectly delicious moment to tip over Marc Hadley’s house of cards. If, indeed, he was involved in the tipping.

“I didn’t want Marc to get in trouble,” says Theo in the pious tone of a man who has never despised a colleague in his life. His brother’s memory, it seems, mattered to Theo not a smidgen; what he cared about was making Marc suffer. “But I wanted him to know that ideas are not all that easy to disguise. I wanted him to know that I knew. I wanted him not to do it again. And, well, you know what happened, I suppose. Everybody knows.”

I do not see it. Then I do. “His writer’s block.”

“Exactly.” Theo almost cackles with glee. “I guess I scared him into never writing another book.”

Or ordered him not to, so that his arrogant colleague would have to suffer years of listening to people mutter about his wasted potential.

“Why would you do something like that?” The words jump out of me.

“People like Marc Hadley deserve what they get.”

“But why would he imagine he could get away with it?”

“Marc thought he was clever. He asked me, maybe half a year after Perry died, if I remembered his paper on Cardozo. I told him I didn’t remember a word of it, that I never even read it.” Theo’s merry eyes twinkle. “That was a lie.”

I am ready to go. I have had enough of Theo. I suspected his capacity for hate, but never imagined this streak of cruelty. Poor Marc is finished as a judicial nominee: that is the one nugget of actual news in this stream of reminiscence. Dana’s story is right on the money. The allegation of plagiarism is not survivable in today’s climate, even if it turns out not to be true-and, not having read Perry Mountain’s manuscript, I warn myself cautiously, I have no way to be sure. The whole tale could turn out to be fiction. Or a misunderstanding. But I doubt it. The lines of worry in Dahlia Hadley’s face that afternoon at the preschool were too stark; when she said something was eating away at her husband, she spoke the simple truth. Marc was not worried about people discovering that his daughter was sleeping with Lionel Eldridge; he was worried about his own terrible error of two decades back. Sitting in Theo Mountain’s paper-strewn office, I find myself growing lightheaded. Marc is out. Kimmer is in. The President wants quality and diversity, according to Ruthie Silverman, and my wife brings both: unless something pops up in her background check, my wife is going to become a federal judge.

And maybe our marriage will be saved, despite my late father’s machinations.

I hand back Theo’s battered old folder and thank him for his time. Theo snatches it from my hand and buries it afresh in his file cabinet, although not in the same drawer from which he initially pulled it.

At the door, another thought strikes me.

“Theo, don’t you think it’s awfully convenient, all of this coming up at just the right moment to knock Marc out of the box?”

“Yes, I do.” A smile of reminiscence. “I’m reminded of what Mr. Justice Frankfurter supposedly said when he heard the news of Mr. Chief Justice Vinson’s death just before the reargument of Brown v. Board of Education in the Supreme Court: ‘This is the first indication that I have ever had that there is a God.’”

Theo chortles madly. I wait until he settles down and then ask the other question that is burning in my mind: “Theo, you wouldn’t happen to know how the news really got out, would you? I mean, about the.. . alleged plagiarism.”

“Believe me, Talcott, it’s genuine plagiarism.” He smiles at his own turn of a phrase. “What, you think I let the cat out of the bag? Well, you’re wrong. From what I hear, it was a student at UCLA. I told you.”

“But do you believe that story?”

Theo is finally exasperated. “Tal, come on. Sometimes you get actual, genuine good news. Try to appreciate those moments. They don’t come often.”

“I suppose not,” I murmur, shaking his hand as I go, because Theo is of the generation that appreciates such niceties. But my mind is not in this office, or even in this building. My thoughts are back at the cemetery on the day we buried my father, when a sickly old man named Jack Ziegler told me to tell Kimmer not to worry about Marc Hadley. I do not think he has the staying power. Weren’t those the words? A fairly large skeleton is rattling around in his closet. Sooner or later, it is bound to tumble out.

I’ll say.