Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 46

The law school stands at the corner of Town Street and Eastern Avenue. If you follow Town Street away from the university, past the aging sandstone pile shared by the music and fine arts departments, past the low, nondescript building that holds, improbably, the catering, parking, and public relations offices, you come to the eastern edge of the campus, marked by a poorly fenced, bumpy parking lot full of cheery red-and-white University Transit buses, all purchased secondhand from school districts looking to upgrade. Here you cross Monitor Boulevard (named not for the Civil War gunship but for a local kid who had a brief, uninspired professional football career in the sixties), and, suddenly, you are no longer on university property.

The difference is immediately apparent.

On the other side of Monitor from the parking lot is a disused park containing the muddy, grassless remnant of a softball field at one end and, at the other, what might pass for a playground among parents not picky about broken glass, splintered wooden swings, and seesaws missing a crucial bolt or two. Usually a couple of crackheads lounge harmlessly on what is left of the benches, nodding and smiling in their secret dreams. Today the park is deserted. Few students or professors venture out too far to the east, because of the crime rate-or, as Arnie Rosen likes to say, the perceived crime rate. The remnants of a public housing project lie a few more blocks in this direction, aging gray towers with the ubiquitous cream-colored window shades, and public housing, in the minds of most people, signals danger.

One wintry afternoon four or five years ago, I stood at the edge of this park with the Judge, who was in town for some alumni function, and he simply shook his head, wordlessly, as tears welled in his eyes- whether for his lost youth (when the park, if it existed at all, was no doubt vibrant), or the lost lives of those members of the darker nation who suffer here, or some fugitive memory of his Claire, or of Abby, or of his shattered career, I dared not ask. “You know, Talcott,” he pronounced in his preacher’s voice, “we humans are capable of so much joy. But we are born unto trouble…”

“… as the sparks fly upward,” I completed for him.

He smiled a bit, probably thought about hugging me, then thrust his hands more deeply into the pockets of his camel’s hair coat and pressed onward-for the park was, on that snowy day, not our destination, but a way station, a marker on our road. As it is for me today, as I repeat the journey I made with my father, past the park, past an elementary school that looks like a casualty of some Balkan war but is, in fact, still in use. Graffiti mark the walls. So do black burn marks, as though from an explosion in the yard. An armed police officer stands near the front door, scuffing the dirt with his toe as he sneaks a cigarette. Lonely sepia faces challenge me from the barred windows. Are the bars to keep them in or to keep me out? I shake my head, wondering how many of my faculty colleagues would remain so adamantly opposed to voucher programs if their children were required to attend a school like this one. Alas, the education of the darker nation has become a side issue in contemporary liberalism, which has found more fashionable problems about which to obsess.

Before continuing my journey, I turn slowly in a complete circle, looking for any sign that I am being followed. I see nothing suspicious, but, unlike Maxine, I have not been trained in figuring out what to suspect. Somebody is out there. Somebody is always out there. Somebody always will be out there, I remind myself as I begin walking once more. So Jack Ziegler implied: somebody will always be out there, until I dig up what my father buried.

Nice metaphor. Catchy.

A block farther on I reach my goal, which is the Old Town Cemetery. Over the years, the name has given rise to some silly campus rumors, such as the tale that the cemetery was once surrounded by a historical site-the eponymous “old town”-that the university plowed under in its manic, eternal, and ruthless quest for space. The truth is that the cemetery was once known as the Town Street Burial Ground, and then, when a newer cemetery was built at the other end of campus, the Old Town Street Burial Ground, and the name over the years grew clipped, as names will, its several metamorphoses signaling the gradual obscuring of history. Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available.

I step through the single gated opening in the high wall and wave to the sexton, a guileless old man named Samuel, whose principal job seems to be to sit on an overpainted metal bench near the neat little stone cottage just inside the cemetery gates, smiling vacuously at every person who enters the grounds. The cottage is just one room, an office to keep all the records, with an ancient bathroom attached. Now and then Samuel vanishes inside, perhaps to relieve himself, although he never seems to eat or drink. And six nights out of the week, every week out of the year, promptly at half past five, Samuel locks the heavy iron gates and disappears to wherever it is that he lives. (On Wednesdays, for some odd reason, the cemetery is open late.) In my student days, when Samuel had the same job and looked every bit as worn as he does now, the wits used to claim that Samuel locked the gates from the inside, turned his body to vapor, and drifted into the nearest available grave. I knew this to be untrue, because once, as a law student, I was locked inside by accident, walking in the cemetery with my future wife, who sought me out because she was in the process of deciding between two men, neither one of whom happened to be me. She came to me for advice, not particularly interested in whether I found it painful to listen to her troubles. It was May, a few weeks before graduation, the weather balmy, and Kimmer was looking particularly ravishing, as she always does in the spring. We talked for a very long time but did not kiss or hold hands or any of the other things that had been, for the ten sizzling months of our middle year of law school, as natural to us as breathing. When at last we reached the entrance once more, Kimmer had resolved to dump both men and find somebody better, which I hoped was a reference to me-although, as matters turned out, it was not-and she was in a gay mood. Until we discovered that the gate was locked, and no apparition appeared with a key. The sandstone walls of the cemetery are eight feet high, and the front gate is higher still. As Kimmer alternated between giggling and growling, I peered through the bars, hoping to flag down a passerby. Nobody passed. I banged on the door of the cottage. Nobody banged back. Finally, I told Kimmer that we had only one choice. She glared, hands on her hips, and told me she was not about to spend the night with me in the cemetery. I spared a few seconds to wonder if she meant the conjunctive or the disjunctive-with me, just not in the cemetery? in the cemetery, just not with me?-and then I shook my head and told her that when I was an undergraduate some of us used to sneak in and out of the cemetery through a drainage tunnel at the other end. Did you say drainage? she gaped. From a cemetery? I assured her that it was perfectly safe. I asked her to trust me.

Kimmer hesitated, perhaps wondering whether somebody else might be available to trust instead, then said okay.

So we plunged back into the cemetery. It was twilight, but we could see just fine. I led her along the main path, which runs a winding quarter-mile or so to the back wall, where the ground begins to slope downward, toward the Interstate and the river beyond. We passed soaring obelisks and marble angels and grim mausoleums. A tiny animal, probably a squirrel, skittered across the gravel path. Kimmer’s hand finally crept into mine. The temperature was falling, and both of us were wearing only shorts, and I began to wonder whether hanging out at the front gate might not after all have been the better idea. I led her down the hill, circling the headstones, many of them toppled with the heaving of the ground over the years, for this was the oldest section of the cemetery. And there it was, the old drainage tunnel, covered with the same wire mesh I remembered, which was still merely leaning in place, not actually attached. I kicked it aside. Kimmer released my hand. She asked if I seriously expected to get out of the cemetery this way. I said yes. She pointed out that the tunnel was no more than three feet high. I said we would have to crawl. She crossed her arms and stepped back. Uh-uh, mister, no way am I going to crawl through that. We don’t have any idea what could be running out of these graves. No. I spread my arms. I told her we had no choice. I told her it wasn’t bad, the tunnel was always dry, it was just a big metal pipe that came out down under the highway. I told her it was only twenty feet long, that we could make it in three or four minutes. I told her that I had probably done it five times as an undergraduate. She gave me that Kimmer look. And I slept with you for a year? But at least she smiled.

In the end, Kimmer gave in and we crawled through the tunnel. I wanted her to go first, but she flatly refused, suspecting that I just wanted to look at her backside, which was not actually true, not because I would not care to, but because it would be impossible-for one thing that I had omitted, but which Kimmer quickly discovered, was that the tunnel, no more than twenty feet long, was, once you got away from the entrance, pitch-black inside. At first she joked about it, then she got mad, and then, just past the middle of the tunnel, I realized that Kimmer was no longer right behind me. Turning around was impossible. I called her name and heard her curse at me. I backed up until my foot touched her hand. I told her that it was perfectly safe, that we were almost out, that there was light up ahead. She just sobbed. I knew the exit was perhaps ninety seconds away, but ninety seconds, as anybody who has ridden one of those roller-coasters-in-the-dark can affirm, is an eternity when you’re frightened-and my precious Kimmer was terrified. She was stuck there, immobile. She did not respond to reassurance or cajoling. Now I was getting a little scared myself in the hot, dusty darkness. I had no space to turn around, but I did the best I could. I rolled onto my back so that I could look in her direction, then drew my legs up to my chest and shimmied closer. Still lying on my back, I stretched out my hand and caught her wrist. I called her name. She said nothing. I tugged. Kimmer resisted. I tugged harder and, all at once, she came tumbling downward, her body pushing mine, and, suddenly the two of us were sliding along the metal, both screaming, and I was scrabbling for a handhold, any handhold, and my fingers exploded with pain and then I popped neatly out the other end of the tunnel, knocking the mesh away, sprawling on the rocky slope with the cemetery wall up the hill behind me, the highway on its concrete supports looming above me, and the docks and warehouses and oil tanks of industrial Elm Harbor sprawled below. I saw all of this as I lay flat on my back, my feet pointing toward the tunnel, my head tilted so that my chin pointed skyward, my hair full of mud.

Kimmer, incredibly but characteristically, landed on her feet. Her tears were gone, her clothes filthy but not torn, and her expression was more amused than concerned as she crouched next to me.

Are you alive? she asked softly.

I assured her I was okay, although, in actual fact, no part of me was free of aches, and my fingers were swollen and my leg felt wrong. It was plain that I had no hope of standing. Kimmer kissed my forehead, brushed off her clothes, and walked down the hill to a convenience store, where she used a pay phone to call a friend to come pick us up-one of the men she had just decided to dump, as a matter of fact. Her beau helped me down the hill. The two of them drove me over to the university health center, where we learned that I had managed to break two fingers, twist my ankle, and open a messy gash on my leg. In my mind, it was a worthy sacrifice to help Kimmer, who emerged unscathed. In her mind, I was an idiot who lacked the common sense to wait at the front gate, who had to find some spectacularly stupid way to do something simple. We should have broken into the office, Kimmer pointed out as a nurse took my blood pressure. I’m sure they had a phone. She left with her friend while they were stitching me up, promising to be back in thirty minutes in her own car to drive me to my apartment. The two of them looked very cuddly all of a sudden. In the event, she took more than two hours to return, as I sat in the lobby and suffered, not daring to call her, for fear of what I might interrupt, not daring to leave on my own, for fear of making her angry should her excuse turn out to be innocent. Kimmer finally showed up looking radiant and replete, having showered and changed, and she brought me a pair of sunglasses to hide a black eye I did not remember receiving. She made me sit in the back seat of her car, explaining that she thought I should stretch out my injured leg. She took my crutches up front. Driving over to the western end of campus, where I lived in an untidy apartment, she chattered happily about everything except where she had been for the past two hours, or where we had been for the two hours before. Dropping me at my front door, Kimmer thanked me for getting her out of the Burial Ground, brushed soft lips over my cheek, and was gone into the night.

Some metaphors need no interpretation.

I told my father the story of escaping through the tunnel with Kimmer, I have been reminding myself over and over, ever since my meeting with Dean Lynda. I hold that fact in my mind. I told my father the story, I repeat, even though I didn’t. I tell myself again and again, hoping that I will not forget.

I explain to Samuel what I want, taking care to be clear, yet, at the same time, going on at length. He nods vigorously and tries several times to end the conversation, but I am a law professor, and therefore not so easy to shut up. Samuel at last stops trying and just listens, which is fine with me. Today’s is my fourth visit to the Old Town Cemetery in the past seven days. The first came a few hours after Dean Lynda’s ultimatum: the “walk” I was not prepared to explain to Kimmer. Two days later I was in Aspen. The next evening I was home. I have been here twice since. All my visits have had the same structure: a review of the records, followed by a cautious amble around the grounds. Nevertheless, I remind Samuel once more of the reason for my presence. I want him to remember our conversation. I want him to remember what I need. I want it to be the first thing that comes to mind when he thinks about me. Because I will require his help in the days or weeks to come if I am to bring this whole mess to an end, and his help will be useless if he forgets what I am looking for.

So Samuel busies himself at one end of the room and allows me to draw the dusty old registers from the shelves. For the third time since my chat with Uncle Jack, I sit at a hard wooden table that probably stood in this very spot when Lincoln was assassinated. I study the lists of the dead, turning pages two hundred years old to reach pages just filled in last month, adding to the copious (but, I hope, perfectly clear and easy-to-follow) notes on a small pad that I have been hiding in plain sight in the top drawer of the unlocked desk in my office. I sit, probably, for forty-five minutes, most of which Samuel spends watching me with unfocused eyes. Watching me is exactly what I want him to do-watching and remembering, in case he is ever asked. When I am done, I thank the smiling Samuel, who pumps my hand in both of his as though I have just won the grand prize. After extricating myself, I proceed out onto the cemetery grounds, where, for the fourth time, I brave the springlike drizzle to stroll the paths among the headstones, scrutinizing the map I have drawn on my pad, adding notes when necessary to be sure I have followed the proper route. I pass the mausoleum of the Hadley family, which has had a presence in Elm Harbor and around the university for well over a century; Marc is the family’s fourth professor here. I pass a small plot of old stones that was once a little Jim Crow cemetery-within-a-cemetery. The abolitionist town fathers of one hundred fifty years ago voted to allow free blacks to be interred, but not next to everybody else.

From time to time I look over my shoulder, a habit I suspect I will not shake for some while; I never see anyone but the occasional mourner, standing alone in the misty rain. I wonder if all of them are truly mourning, if any one of them might be following me, and how I would know.

I suppose that everybody is mourning somebody.

Several times I pause, making check marks on my pad as I read various tombstones, or noting where the gravel lanes intersect. I copy the names of the dead and the dates of their deaths. I draw squares within squares.

My notes finally completed, I leave the cemetery by the main entrance. None of the mourners stir. I wave farewell to the grinning Samuel on his bench and head back along Town Street toward campus, watching all the while for the invisible shadow I know is there.

Almost ready.