Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 54

You don’t quite realize how busy a family keeps you until you don’t have one any more. On the day of my release, I visit with Bentley for a couple of hours, playing in the back yard of the house on Hobby Hill while Kimmer works at the kitchen table. My bags are neatly packed in the front hall: Kimmer and Mariah did it together, a rare moment of truce as each eagerly anticipated getting what she wanted. The Felsenfelds drop by to say hello, but also, I am sure, to keep things calm. When our neighbors have gone, my wife and I have one last argument, for old times’ sake. I probably start it, but Kimmer certainly finishes it.

We are in the kitchen, chatting, as though this is any other day, when we run out of conversation, and I finally say what every spouse in my position finally must: “I just don’t get it, Kimmer. I really don’t.”

“What don’t you get?” I sense her simmering hostility, which has grown since the first day she visited me in the hospital, perhaps because my approaching departure makes all our decisions suddenly real.

“What you see in him. In Lionel.”

“For one thing,” she says calmly, “he has me doing things that would never even occur to you.”

“Like what?” I ask, stupidly, the wrong answer, blowing my last chance, my very last chance to win her back, but it is probably way too late anyway. Besides, my mind is too busy for caution. I am thinking: Bizarre sexual practices. Barefoot walks in the snow. Drugs.

“Like reading!” she spits out, to my astonishment. “Nellie isn’t like you, Misha. He doesn’t think he’s twice as smart as I am!”

I almost ask her-it is a very near thing, but I restrain myself-why, if I am twice as smart as she is, she earns twice as much money as I do. The truth is, I have never thought I was smarter than Kimmer; but Kimmer has always thought I do. When she first fell in love with me (or whatever it was she fell in), she told me that she admired what she called my brilliance. When I told her that I am not particularly brilliant, she grew irritated and accused me of false modesty.

Besides, she was smart enough to realize that she couldn’t quite hide her affair, and smart enough to fool me into thinking that her paramour was Jerry Nathanson.

“And you really think this, um, relationship is… uh, serious?”

“It’s not a relationship,” Kimmer corrects me with the connoisseur’s precision. “It’s just something that happened. One of those things. He says he loves me, but I think it’s probably over.” Her voice is soft again, complacent, and I have the sense that she does not quite love him back, but sees Nellie instead as a conquest. The great Lionel Eldridge, who can have half the women in the city, winds up with a woman nearly a decade his senior. Yet I know even this is not the entire story. I envision Lionel, smoldering with anger against me for what he perceived as mistreatment in the seminar last year, working at Kimmer’s firm, seeing her every day in her snazzy pinstriped suits, watching her stride confidently through the world where she is the superstar and he is the rookie, the world he is unlikely ever to master, the world Kimmer and I have already conquered. How could he resist the temptation to try? Here is Professor Garland, infuriatingly strict, pointedly unimpressed by Sweet Nellie’s celebrity, and there is Professor Garland’s wife, Kimberly, tall and sexy and seemingly unattainable. I see Lionel brooding at his desk in some quiet cubbyhole, turning the idea over and over in his mind, speculating, plotting, wondering whether my wife might not be the tool through which he could gain a measure of revenge. I imagine his initial overtures, most likely rebuffed, but perhaps not all that forcefully, because Kimmer, as she warned me back when we were courting, is always on the lookout for something new.

Or maybe my theory is too self-centered. Maybe my wife was the aggressor. Maybe there is no theory. Maybe, as Kimmer says, it was just one of those things.

“He’s a married man,” I point out.

“He doesn’t love her,” Kimmer sniffs, her being Lionel’s wife, Pony, formerly a model or an actress or something, and the mother of his two children.

“So, is he leaving her, too?”

“Who knows? It’ll work itself out.”

The argument is inconclusive, because there is no point to concluding it. I return to the yard to play catch with Bentley, and my wife returns to the work she has spread over the kitchen table. In the early evening, my sister arrives in the Navigator to pick me up. Me and my bags. In the hallway, I say goodbye to Bentley. To my surprise, he does not cry, little Garland man that he is, and I wonder what, precisely, his mother told him. He is not pretending to be brave: he seems genuinely unconcerned.

Kimmer does not kiss me or hug me or smile. Standing in the foyer in her blue jeans and dark sweater, not far from the threshold over which I laughingly carried her on the day we moved in, she reminds me calmly that I can see my son any time I like, I only need to call-the real message being that she is in charge of my contact with him and wants me to know it. She has yet to forgive me, although it is not clear precisely for what. Kimmer has not had her hair cut in several weeks, and her Afro has grown in a bit, so that now, a sturdy blockade to any further penetration of the house, anger beaming from her dark, sensual face, she reminds me of one of the black militants from the old days. She should have a fist raised in the air, a placard, a chant: Sufficient power to the appropriate people! Not what any of the marchers ever said, but certainly what most of them actually meant. Or so the Judge used to proclaim, in his furious dismissals of the steaming rhetoric of the radicals of my youth. They don’t really know what they want, he would accuse. They only know they want it now, and they’re willing to use “any means necessary” to get it.

Well, Kimmer certainly knows what she wants, and she is willing to destroy her family to get it. She would probably answer that staying in this marriage a moment longer would have killed her, and, given my antics in recent months, I could scarcely blame her. Perhaps we were ill-matched from the start, just as my family always suspected. The marriage was my idea to begin with: having made so bad a fit with her first husband, Kimmer wanted less, not more. She argued at the time that ours was a “transitional relationship,” a cruel yet convenient phrase left over from the self-indulgent sixties. She insisted that we were not right for each other, that each of us would, in time, meet somebody better. Even when I finally persuaded her to be my wife, she remained pessimistic. “Now you’re stuck with me,” she whispered after the ceremony as we snuggled together in the white limousine. “This was a big mistake,” she told me dozens of times over the years, meaning our decision to marry-usually in the middle of a fight. Yet, whatever might be the virtues of choosing not to marry because you know you and your partner are a poor fit, it is not obvious that they transfer automatically to a marriage almost a decade old, with a child in the middle of it.

We should have tried harder, I realize as my stomach churns. My failings are surely as great as Kimmer’s-but we should have tried harder. I consider saying this, even suggesting that we try again, but the hard set of my wife’s lovely face tells me that she has already locked that proposition out of her mind.

Our marriage is truly over.

“We’d better go,” Mariah whispers, tugging at my arm, when I just stand there staring at my wife, who returns the stare unflinchingly.

“Okay,” I say softly, tearing my gaze away, fighting the hot mist on my eyes, willing myself to act as the Judge would have acted, even though the Judge would never have been in this predicament in the first place.

Wait.

I sense the edge of something: the Judge, who would never have been in this mess, and my wife, defiant in the hall, the images running together, fitting in with that last conversation with Alma, as the final, astonishing piece of the puzzle clicks into place.

Mariah and I drive down Hobby Road, away from the elegant old house where, until the night I was shot, I lived with my family. I do not look into the rearview mirror, because my father would not have done it. I am trying, already, to draw the line he always preached. The process will be as much fun as having an organ removed, but it is never too early to start planning. Yet, through it all, buried in the deepest crevice of my mind, is a tiny exaltation.

I know who Angela’s boyfriend is.

We make the nervous drive over to Darien, and I move into Mariah’s guest house. By the next day, I am a member of her household. For two weeks, I eat healthy meals prepared by her cook, walk the well-tended grounds, and swim in the heated indoor free-form pool, the rest and food and exercise building up my strength. I coo sincerely over the new arrival. I telephone Bentley every morning and every night. I play with my sister’s disorderly children and, in the evenings, listen to her disorderly theories as she flips through the channels looking for another game show. Howard is almost never around, either spending the night in the city or flying off to the other side of the world. So we sit there, Mariah and I, on the imported brushed-leather sofa in the forty-foot family room of the nine-thousand-square-foot manor house. All the furnishings are so perfectly arranged that the children are allowed to visit very little of the first floor. It is like living in a magazine layout, and, indeed, Mariah says sadly that the designer submitted photographs to Architectural Digest, but nothing came of it. Her tone suggests that this is a genuine defeat.

I watch my sister, the best of us all, soldier her way through her loneliness in the midst of all this wealth while the au pair raises the children and the cook prepares the meals and cleans up afterward and the gardener comes by every other day to tend the plants and cut the grass and the cleaning service drops in twice a week so everything sparkles and the accountant calls every few days to discuss a bill that just came in-it occurs to me that Mariah really has nothing to do. She and Howard have purchased every service that middle-class folk like myself assume adults are supposed to perform. Apart from regular breast-feedings of little Mary, shopping and watching television and decorating are all she has left. So I start taking her out: to the movies, to the mall, hobbling on my cane around an art exhibit in the city while we push Mary in a stroller and two or three more of her children gambol in our wake. Mariah is too restless to take much interest. I try to talk to her: about the latest Washington scandal or the new Toni Morrison, because Toni Morrison has been her favorite author ever since The Bluest Eye. I ask after her children, but she shrugs and says they are right there if I want to see how they are doing. I ask how her golf lessons are going, and she shrugs and says it is still way too cold. Recalling what Sally said about how she and Mariah liked to go to clubs together, I offer to take my sister out to listen to some jazz, but she says she is not in the mood. Nothing draws her. She seems too unhappy to bother being depressed.

One afternoon, a couple of my sister’s Fairfield County friends drop by, wealthy white wives she knows from one country club or another, with the coerced skinniness of personal training and the gossipy languor of lives as empty as Mariah’s. Sitting listlessly in the sunroom, with its shiny silver-and-white tiles, sipping lemonade because it is there, they gaze at me in frank curiosity, even a little uneasiness-not, I finally realize, because I have been shot, but because I am a member of the darker nation. It is as though, in order to accept Mariah into their secret circle, they have schooled themselves to forget that she is black, and I am playing the role of the ghost at their elegant little banquet, calling them to remember an inconvenient fact they have cast aside.

I wonder whether their lapse into agnosia counts as racial progress.

Sometimes, late at night, Mariah sits in the library and logs on to AOL-the response time is very fast, for she and Howard have invested in a T-1 line-and chats with friends around the world. I watch as instant messages pop up: in cyberspace, at least, she does not appear to be lonely, and perhaps the very anonymity of the chat room is a part of what attracts her to it. She knows a few conspiracy theorists, it seems, and although she has never told them who she is, they have shared all manner of “information” about the way the Judge “really” died. She shows me a chat room dedicated to nothing else. I try to follow the conversation, which ranges over witnesses I know were not present and evidence I know does not exist. I nod sagely and wish I could see inside her tortured brain. Mariah is pressing, her refusal to face facts intentional. She continues to babble about the autopsy, even though she knows as well as I that two pathologists and a photographic analyst hired by Corcoran amp; Klein agreed with the medical examiner that the specks are only dirt on the lens. Mariah tells me she has e-mailed the photographs to cyberfriends around the world. It occurs to me to ask whether any of those friends are hiding out in Argentina, but she only smiles.

Howard is home for dinner once or twice a week, and as I get to know him, I warm to him. He seems incompetent at dealing with their many children, but his complete devotion to my sister reassures me. After dinner, Howard usually works out in a room set aside for that purpose, full of all the latest equipment, and he invites me to join him. Watching him pump, I realize that Howard Denton is, after all, nothing but a grown-up child with a talent for making money. He talks about his work because he does not know what else one talks about. Mariah is plainly tired of his stories of merger fights; I find them fascinating. Listening, I remember, with more sentiment than I would have guessed, my days as a practicing lawyer. I wonder whether Kimmer and I would have married had I remained in D.C. rather than fleeing to Elm Harbor.

In my plentiful spare time, I hunt through the boxes of notes and documents Mariah has stored in one of the six bedrooms of the main house, the fruits of her many trips to Shepard Street. Almost everything is useless junk, but a couple of items catch and hold my interest. In a file she has labeled UNFINISHED CORRESPONDENCE? I discover handwritten drafts of several letters, including four efforts at a note to Uncle Mal resigning from the firm, dated around the last Thanksgiving of the Judge’s life, eleven months before he died, and a fragment of a note of apology addressed only to “G”- I do not know whether you will believe me when I tell you I am heartily sorry for the pain you have endured because of your simple and unadorned love of -at which point the note simply stops. I show this one to my sister, who, pleased by my interest, explains that it was intended for Gigi Walker, which I do not believe for a second. I do not think Mariah believes it either. If the Judge intended to follow the of by the truth or by justice, the letter could as well be addressed to Greg Haramoto. But when I call his family’s importing firm in Los Angeles, I am told that Greg is on an extended overseas trip and cannot be reached. I ask for his voice mail and his e-mail address. After checking with somebody, the receptionist refuses to give me either.

As we sit up watching Letterman late one night, I tell Mariah what I am thinking and she agrees, reluctantly, to share with me her own speculations: that Wallace Wainwright may have been correct, that our father wanted to get caught at whatever he was up to. Nothing else could explain why he would invite Jack Ziegler, facing trial for murder and extortion, to meet him at the federal courthouse, where, even in the dead of night, witnesses were bound to see him and records were bound to be kept. Maybe he just wanted out at any price. Maybe, says Mariah, he hoped that if he was hanged for meeting with his old roommate nobody would look deeply enough to penetrate to what was really going on. If the second was true, the grand juries that were convened probably shook him severely.

“Suppose he was fixing cases,” says Mariah, sadly.

“Justice Wainwright says he wasn’t,” I point out, the last ray of hope.

“Justice Wainwright isn’t psychic. Suppose Daddy was fixing cases and found a way to hide it from his buddy. Maybe, after the hearings, he went to Jack Ziegler and said he could not continue to do… whatever he was doing… under these conditions, and Jack talked to his partners, and they agreed to let him resign. Or maybe he resigned on his own. Either way, he finally had an out.”

I consider this. “If Greg’s testimony was no surprise, the letter might make sense.”

My sister nods. “If it was intended for Greg, then Daddy was a superb actor. If it was intended for Gigi, well, we’re better off not knowing.”

True enough. But, thinking about it, I am sure Mariah is right about Greg. Then all those long nights of deep depression that Lanie Cross reported, when my father would talk about the wreck of his career, when he asked whatever happened to loyalty, he was not blaming Greg: he was blaming Jack. He allowed Greg to take the fall, in effect, but that, too, was part of the fiction. If Mariah is right, if the Judge was fixing cases for Jack Ziegler and friends after all, then to admit that Greg was telling the truth might have been the signature on his death warrant, or his family’s. But that answer seems insufficiently to capture what must have been the complexity of the moment. The Judge probably wondered whether he should have given it all up, whether he did the right thing when he sabotaged his own nomination to the Supreme Court. Some of his hatred for Greg Haramoto was probably genuine.

Then the baby starts to cry, and Mariah has to run off. In the morning, she will talk of the Judge no more. How he died, she desires passionately to discover. How he lived, she would rather not know.

On the Friday, my wife drives Bentley down for a visit, explaining to me in great detail how to take care of him, the way estranged spouses do. She pecks me on the lips and pats me on the back. She oohs and aahs over little Mary, gives my sister an unwanted hug, then heads back to Elm Harbor until Sunday, perhaps to do something with Lionel, perhaps because she just needs a break. I am careful to walk away from the door, leaning heavily on my cane, before she streaks down the drive. I am relieved to have my son back in my arms at last. But he seems skittish around me, preferring to spend his time with Mariah’s brood. So, instead of hugging him for hours, which is what I would like, I watch him from a distance, in the yard, in the pool, in the basement playroom, and my heart sobs.

On the Monday, with Bentley back in Elm Harbor and Mariah off at some charity event, I borrow my brother-in-law’s Mercedes and drive to Borders in Stamford, where I buy enough books to keep me occupied for a while. Reading is easier than feeling. But I am planning, too. Planning my approach to Angela’s boyfriend. I not only know where he is; I also see the need for extraordinary caution. Even with Colin Scott dead and Foreman dead and Maxine and her employer fooled, there is another enemy out there, the one who hired the men who beat me up.

I ask my sister to try to find out who made the offer to buy the Shepard Street house, but she meets a blank wall. Some corporation, is all the broker will say.

Over breakfast on my ninth day in Darien, Mariah tells me that she will have a second houseguest next week, a divorced woman she knows from Stanford and her sorority, a fellow journalist, a mother of two, who will be leaving her children behind in Philadelphia to make this trip: “And Sherry is a wonderful person,” Mariah enthuses, “intelligent, successful, and really, really gorgeous.” When my sister adds shyly that Sherry will be taking the second bedroom in the guest house, I realize that her old friend’s visit is for my benefit, not Mariah’s, that even though I have been separated from my wife for perhaps a month-depending on whether one counts from Kimmer’s ultimatum or my release from the hospital-my sister is already trying to fix me up with somebody else. I do not know whether to be furious or charmed; I do know that it is time to go.

I tell her so.

Mariah begs me to stay longer, no doubt because I am the living proof, bullet holes and all, of her conspiracy theories. When I insist that I have to get back to work, my sister insists on helping. So she spends three days driving me all over Elm Harbor and its suburbs, looking at rentals, and giggling ostentatiously every time some silly real estate agent sees the baby in her stroller, makes the obvious assumption, and calls her “Mrs. Garland.” The agents giggle right back, even though they do not get the joke. None of the condos we see strikes my fancy. One is too small, another has no view. A big one on the harbor is too expensive, and Mariah, who has been unreasonably generous already, is too wise to offer me a subsidy. One of the agents says he has something in Tyler’s Landing he thinks I would like, but Tyler’s Landing is Eldridge territory, and the look on my face is enough to tell him to suggest another suburb.

Lemaster Carlyle finally resolves my dilemma. He strolls into my office on the third afternoon of my fruitless search, wearing one of his perfect suits, this one a lightweight navy worsted, handmade, featuring the faintest breath of chalk stripes, along with a monogrammed blue shirt, a tie of bright marigold and cobalt blue, and matching braces-an outfit any Wall Street lawyer would be delighted to own. His confirmation hearings are next week. I am in the building for only an hour or so, checking my mail, before Mariah comes to pick me up, so he must have been looking for me. I smile and we shake hands. Lem makes no mention of the events in the cemetery. He comes right to the point. He has heard about my problem, and we can help each other out. He and Julia, it seems, own a condo on the water-in a development just down Harbor Road from Shirley Branch’s, as a matter of fact. Two bedrooms, three baths, a finished basement, fine views, even if not as fine as Shirley’s. It was their first home in Elm Harbor, back when Lem was a promising young professor rather than a middle-aged academic superstar, and when they moved out to Canner’s Point, the market was so dead that nobody made a serious offer to buy the place; they began to rent it out, and have never dropped the habit. Their most recent tenant, a visiting professor of Christian ethics from New Zealand, left early and unexpectedly, with six months’ rent unpaid. They need a tenant, I need a place to live.

“I don’t know how you feel about having a colleague as a landlord,” says Lem, with the good grace not to look embarrassed. “But I suppose we won’t be colleagues very much longer, anyway. Besides, we can offer you a nice deal on the rent.”

I am beyond shame. Losing your wife to a student does that to you. “How nice?” He names a figure, which I recognize as a substantial discount from the going rate. I do not want charity, but I do not have much money. The mortgage payment on the Hobby Hill house is deducted monthly from my paycheck, not Kimmer’s, despite her substantially higher income, because the university’s Own-in-the-City program saved us two and a half points on the interest.

“So, what do you think?” he asks.

I make a lower counteroffer, just for form, and Lem has the further good grace not to display the annoyance he surely feels.

We split the difference, and Lem hands me the key. We are lawyers, of course, one of us on the verge of judicial office and therefore ethically painstaking, so he also hands me a lease to sign. As I scribble, he continues to chatter. He and Julia, he says, want to have me over for dinner as soon as the hearings end. As it is, Julia is already planning to deliver enough casseroles to keep me eating well into the summer.

I thank him.

So now I have a place to live. My sister dutifully exclaims over it, especially the rather distant view of the water, even though she is plainly disappointed that I am leaving her guest house and missing the gorgeous and desperate Sherry. But Mariah is a good sport. We drive over to Hobby Hill to pick up more of my things, mainly books and clothes, but only during the day, when Kimmer is not around.

Don Felsenfeld and Rob Saltpeter help me load the car.

“So now you have your bachelor pad,” says Don, twinkling. But I am thinking of the need to wait, impatiently but necessarily, for the right moment to visit Angela’s boyfriend.

I see Bentley as much as I can, which means as much as Kimmer will let me-which turns out to be quite a lot. She talks about how much she loves our son, how much he needs her with him, but her billable hours matter too. Kimmer has no au pair, and needs none: she has me. When she is running late, she calls me to pretty please pick him up, never asking whether it is convenient. When she has to go out of town unexpectedly, she calls on no more than an hour’s notice to ask if I can take him for a few nights. After all, I have nothing to do all day but recuperate from three bullet wounds, a bruised kidney, two bent ribs, and a broken jaw. Dana Worth murmurs one afternoon over lunch at Cadaver’s-her treat nowadays-that I should fight Kimmer for custody. I am tempted, but the truth remains what it has been all along: custody battles are ruinous to children’s lives, and I love my son too much to tear him in half.

“That’s what she’s counting on,” Dana points out.

“Then I guess she wins this round,” I snap, although my dilemma is hardly Dana’s fault. Yesterday marked Bentley’s birthday, which meant presents from Daddy in the afternoon, more presents from Mommy in the evening. He seemed calm, although confused; weakened by my injuries, I went home and wept.

Dana is consoling, in her way: “See, Misha? That’s what the same-sex-marriage folks have wrong. Why should I want to go through that nonsense?” For Dear Dana is no fan of what she calls the heterosexist lifestyle.

I refuse to let Dana discourage me. My four-year-old son and I stroll on the beach, or what passes for a beach in Elm Harbor, and I cannot believe the change in him. He does seem taller. He walks with an unexpected straightness. His gaze is more direct. And Kimmer is right: he cannot stop talking. Well, he never could, but now, suddenly, he is making sense.

“Do oh Daddy look the seagull, see the seagull Daddy?”

I nod, afraid to speak. My heart seems massive, a hot, painful weight in my chest. A few months ago this was a toddler whose favorite words were Dare you, and we worried about whether he was a little slow, and now he is absorbing language almost faster than the world can teach it.

I spend more time at the soup kitchen. Dee Dee and I compare canes: she can tell from the sound mine makes that it is second-rate. I grow fond of the women I serve. I know that few of them will see another decade, but I begin to admire their feistiness in the face of life’s many disasters, their cleverness in foraging around the edges of the welfare state for the benefit of their children, and, in many, their surprisingly strong faith. Most of the women, I finally see, truly want to love their children but do not know how. I visit Dr. Young to talk about getting some of the women into his Faith Life Skills program. He sighs. The program is nearly out of money and has no more slots available, but he tells me to send a few of them over anyway, and he will see what he can do.

“God will provide,” I remind him, smiling.

“In his own good time, not ours,” he corrects me.

I begin to attend Temple Baptist, and listen with a hidden smile as pudgy Morris Young, who loves ribs and fried fish, preaches on self-restraint. I go to the YMCA with Rob Saltpeter. I can no longer run the floor, and, thanks to several pulled muscles around my ribs, I can shoot only a little, but I can coach and root. Alone in my condo at night, I get in the habit of building a fire and sitting in front of it, reading.

One afternoon, limping back to Oldie from the campus bookstore, I turn in my tracks, feeling somebody’s eyes on me, but I see nothing. The next day, I give Romeo from the soup kitchen twenty dollars to walk through downtown Elm Harbor a couple of blocks behind me, trying to spot a tail. Maybe, he reports when we rejoin. Maybe not.

Nothing to do but go on.

March slips into history. I return to the classroom, hobbled a bit, not able to bounce up and down as I once did, but the students seem to like me better this way. Though I am nervous, there turns out to be no cause. My fifty-seven ad law kids, who have spent the past month being lectured by Arnie Rosen, offer a standing ovation when I walk back in the door. Arnie may be brilliant, but I have been shot, which seems to lend me a special authority. So impressed are they at the sight of a professor with three bullet holes in him that they do not bother to raise any of their usual clever challenges. When I ask questions, I am rewarded by blankly adoring stares, as though they are far too awed to concentrate on the subject matter.

So I set out to cure them of the adoration, by being as strict and demanding as I used to. Eventually, they realize that getting shot rarely turns men into saints, and then we are back to our usual arrangement, in which they do not particularly like me, but work their tails off in my class. Yet I have lost a little of my force, and they seem to sense it. It is like a playlet: You know we know you’re not what you used to be, they are telling me, smiling behind their irritation.

My faculty colleagues are more restrained. They tell me how great it is to see me, in the loud, gentle voices we use to communicate with the hard of hearing, assuring ourselves, through our volume, of our physical superiority. At meetings of the Officers, my colleagues listen to me indulgently, compliment me on my perspicacity, then rush onward to their verdict as though I have not spoken.

I stop attending.

Once or twice I see the great Lionel Eldridge slouching around the halls of Oldie, but always from a distance. He never looks in my direction. I never call his name. Nothing in my years of teaching has prepared me to deal with the situation. What becomes of the paper he owes me? Is there a special rule that applies when you are required to grade a student who has stolen your wife? I consult Dana and Rob, each of whom advises me to hand Lionel off to somebody else.

One evening, just to be on the safe side, I ask Romeo to watch my back again, and this time, having fun, he does it for free. But still nothing to report.

April plods on. Kimmer announces that she is off to visit relatives in Jamaica for a week. I protest about safety, as usual, but she does not share my fear of flying. She does not say whether Lionel is going, and I do not ask. I do not even know if he has actually left his wife: I seem to be out of the loop on the rumors, and I am afraid to ask Dana, who could surely tell me the truth. Either way, I have Bentley for seven days straight. I am excited, but Bentley is uneasy; his new circumstance, living in two houses, his family sundered, is wearing him out. He displays a short temper that has never before been a part of his personality. When I burn the chicken on the third night, he throws his plate to the floor. When I punish him, sending him to his room for a time-out, the tantrum gets worse. He says he hates me. He says he hates Mommy. He says he hates himself. I hug him hard and tell him how much I love him, how much Mommy loves him, but he fights his way free and runs, wailing, to his bed. I am confused and frightened and furious at my wife. This is the moment when good parents call their own parents for help, but I have none to call, and I would no more ask my sister for child-rearing advice than I would swim to Antarctica. In the morning I contact Sara Jacobstein, Rob Saltpeter’s wife, who is a child psychiatrist affiliated with the medical school. Presuming on our friendship, I catch her at home before she leaves for work. She is very patient. She tells me that Bentley’s anxiety is normal, that I have to be firm with him but also loving and supportive, and that I should under no circumstances criticize his mother in front of him. Then she warns me that, sooner rather than later, Kimmer and I must settle on one of our two residences as his home, the other as a place he regularly visits. He will need that structure in the months and years to come, she explains gently. I experience Sara’s words as a physical pain in the vicinity of my heart, and I make no comment: I know what the outcome of any negotiation with Kimmer will be. Sara is above all things a kind woman. Reading my silence correctly, she offers to see Bentley this afternoon, as a courtesy to me, if I think it important.

I decide to wait.

The following morning, Meadows calls to tell me that Sharik Deveaux, street name Conan, confessed killer of Freeman Bishop, was murdered in a jailhouse brawl while awaiting sentencing. The key witness against him, the posse member turned state’s evidence, has disappeared. I hang up the phone and cover my face, wishing I had done more to get Conan released, but there was no time, and my energies were directed elsewhere. I pray for his soul, although, in truth, I have little sympathy to spare just now, especially for a drug dealer with a history of violence. Still, he did not commit the particular crime to which he pled guilty, and he died in that brawl, I am certain, so that nobody would find out the truth. I even know who somehow arranged this final murder.

Colin Scott, reaching out from the grave.

May. June. Final exams, caps and gowns. The graduating class rewards me for my bullet holes, or maybe for losing my wife to our most famous student, by electing me the commencement speaker. I march through the ceremony with the help of a new cane, heavy and dark and quite ornately carved, a gift from Shirley Branch, who brought it back from a March vacation in South Africa with Kwame Kennerly. It looks very smart with my drab academic gown. A few weeks ago, Kwame quit working for the mayor over some matter of high principle-I forget just what-and now Shirley tells me that he has decided to run against his former boss next year.

I am too busy missing Bentley to care.

In my remarks, I tell the students to use their skills for good, not evil, and they grow restless, because it is the same speech they hear every year. So I throw away my text and lean over the lectern and warn them that when lawyers place client service ahead of virtue, people die. They applaud wildly. I tell them that if they decide that their only role is to do what their clients tell them to do, they will be part of the destruction of a great nation, dying already from our stubborn refusal to look at life as more than an opportunity to get what we want. They applaud cautiously. I talk about the proliferation of handguns and the lack of political will to do anything about it. They applaud dutifully. I talk about the proliferation of abortions and the lack of political will to do anything about it. They do not applaud, but many of their parents do. I propose that both are signs of a self-indulgence that is replacing both capitalism and democracy as the nation’s true ideology. Nobody applauds, because nobody thinks I am making any sense. I tell them that they need to find a vision of a greater nation and then to work toward it, not only in their professional lives but in their personal lives. I tell them that the contemporary dichotomy between the public and the private quite overlooks the fact that it is our so-called private lives that teach our children what it means to live rightly-and that living rightly, not using law to force others to live rightly, is the definition of the life well lived. I hear polite coughing. I am boring them. I imagine myself addressing Kimmer, stating my side of our unfinished argument. I paraphrase Emerson: the world is everything that is not me -including not only that which is outside of me, but much that is within me. So much of life today, I point out, seems to involve counseling people to be more of what they already are. But Emerson, I warn them, had it right. Sometimes even the body, its needs and desires at war with the will, is other.

They do not know what I am talking about. They do not want to know. They want to be congratulated on their achievements and sent out into the world to self-indulge. A titter runs along the rows of gowned students and suddenly uneasy parents. The members of the graduating class see now that they made a mistake inviting me to speak, that being shot and nearly killed in the Burial Ground has made me only angrier, not wiser; I am refusing to offer them the comfort that is expected on graduation day.

I try one last time. I select a story from Exodus. I tell them how, when God fed his people in the wilderness, Moses warned them to take only what they needed. It was easy to tell who had taken too much, I remind them, because those who had extra kept it overnight, in defiance of God’s instruction, and the surplus rotted and filled with maggots. I look out over the sea of fresh young faces, excellently educated, ready to file off to staff the mighty law factories of the great cities. A good chunk of them, I remind myself, have never read Exodus, and probably remember Moses as the star of an animated movie. Still, I have to try. Take only what you need, I tell them. Not simply in terms of money-they know that part of God’s law already, although ninety percent of them will ignore it once they enter upon the project of remuneration, as most of us do. Also in terms of what you take from others: emotional energy, for example. Take only what you truly need in love. In family life. In your relations with your colleagues.

They are silent.

And in what you demand of yourself, I add. Take only what you need from yourself. Law is a killing profession. I cite statistics: our absurd rates of suicide, of alcoholism, of clinical depression, of divorce. Because we do not listen to the wisdom of Exodus. Because we demand, even of ourselves, more than what we really need. We look at our bodies, our energies, and we think we own them: we do not recognize, with Emerson, that they are a part of the world to be husbanded with care, to be respected, not to be misused; we think they are ours to do with what we will. And so, thinking we have been liberated, we joyfully pave the paths to our own destruction.

They do not realize that I am finished. Neither do I, until I walk back to my seat. The students applaud, but only because they are expected to. Marching off the platform, I console myself with the thought that they probably would have booed Aristotle, from whom I cribbed my central idea.

Rob Saltpeter tells me later that I was brilliant. Dear Dana Worth kisses my cheek and says it made her sad. Stuart Land barks that it was certainly different. Lem Carlyle, attending his final commencement as a member of the faculty, informs me that it was gutsy, which could mean anything. Arnie Rosen pronounces it a little bit mystical for his taste. Betsy Gucciardini murmurs that it was fascinating, campus-speak for I hated it. Dean Lynda, shaking my hand, says it was just fine-another negative euphemism-but asks if I couldn’t have tried to be a teensy-weensy bit more upbeat. Ben Montoya warns solemnly that Biblical analogies are exclusionary and very often offensive in our increasingly diverse society. Tish Kirschbaum confides that she knows what I meant about abortion, but the way I put it is likely to give comfort to the far right. Shirley Branch suggests that I should have talked explicitly about my subtext, which, she says, is racial subordination. Ethan Brinkley smiles that it reminded him of a chat he once had with the Dalai Lama.

Marc Hadley advises me that I got the quote from Emerson wrong.