Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 64

Among the victims of the hurricane, says the pointedly solemn announcer, was Justice Wallace Warrenton Wainwright of the United States Supreme Court, who drowned off the Island of Martha’s Vineyard after apparently falling into the ocean while walking along the water to get a better look at the storm. Although the hurricane broke up three days ago, his body washed up on the beach just this morning. Wainwright, who was seventy-one, was on the Island to visit friends. Considered the last of the great judicial liberals, Wainwright was probably best known for his stirring defense of…

Kimmer picks up the remote control and shuts off the fifty-three-inch television set that has become, absurdly, an issue between us. She turns to me and smiles. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are, Misha? That could have been you.”

“I suppose.”

“What were you doing out on that beach, anyway?” Maybe she is still thinking I might have tried to kill myself.

“Running away from Justice Wainwright. He was shooting at me.”

“Oh, Misha, don’t be morbid. That’s not the least bit funny.” She hops up to clear away the paper plates off which we have just finished eating carry-out pizza. Kimmer, although shoeless, is still dressed for work, in a cream-colored power suit and pale blue ruffled blouse. She has lost a little weight, maybe intentionally, maybe from stress. She looks more splendid than ever, and more splendidly unattainable. Over in the corner of the family room, Bentley is playing with his computer. When I arrived to pick him up for the weekend an hour ago, he and Kimmer were just sitting down to a double-cheese pizza, and my estranged wife invited me to stay for a while.

“Bemmy zap, Bemmy zap!” our son cries happily. “Tree and six make nine! Nine! Bemmy zap!”

“Bemmy zap,” I agree, still not opening my eyes. On the screen of my imagination, the final scene is played out so many different ways. Maybe I could have put together the energy to plunge into the waves and rescue Wallace Wainwright. Maybe my reserves were too thin or he was too far out. Sometimes I see myself pulling him out of the ocean. Sometimes I see myself dying in the attempt. Sometimes I remember to pray for his soul. Sometimes I am glad he is dead.

“Isn’t our boy gorgeous?” murmurs Kimmer in a stage whisper.

“That he is.”

“Your eyes are closed, silly.”

“You know what? He’s just as gorgeous with my eyes closed.”

But I open them anyway and, for a golden moment, Kimmer and I are together, joined in love and admiration for the one thing in the world about which we both care. Then I recall the expensive leather jacket with the words DUKE UNIVERSITY stitched in blue that I found when I hung my windbreaker in the hall closet, and the gold turns to dross.

“Oh, Misha, by the way. Guess who called here looking for you?”

“Who?”

“John Brown. He said he was returning your call. I guess you forgot to give him your new number, huh?” Standing in the doorway, arms folded across her breasts. She has taken off her jacket. Still smiling. She has plenty to smile about. “Or are you trying to make some kind of statement?”

“I called him from the Vineyard.” I am leaning back on the leather sofa, eyes closed, legs up on the ottoman, the way I used to when I lived here. “I guess I must have given him that number.”

“You should get your new number listed.”

“I like my privacy.”

“I don’t understand why you’re so insistent,” says Kimmer, who could not live five minutes without a telephone. A sudden thought strikes her, and she covers her mouth and giggles. “I mean, unless.. . unless you need so much privacy because… Hey, you’re not hiding some woman in your condo, are you? Shirley Branch? Somebody like that?”

“No woman, Kimmer.” Except you.

“Or maybe Pony Eldridge? You know, the two wronged spouses getting together?”

“Sorry to disappoint you. I’m still a married man.”

Kimmer wisely ignores this dig. “It isn’t Dana, is it? I hear she’s having trouble with Alison. Or vice versa. Anyway, are the two of you gonna do anything after all these years?”

I recycle the old joke: “She’s not into men, and I’m not into white women.”

Kimmer waves this away. She leans in close, her proximity dazzling, then reaches around me, picks up her wineglass, takes a small sip. “Oh, everybody’s into everybody these days,” she assures me with an expert’s authority before padding back into the kitchen. “Ice cream coming,” she calls. “Butter pecan. Want some?”

“Sounds great.”

“Chocolate syrup?”

“Yes, thanks.”

Yes, I could have rescued him. No, I had no energy. Yes, I should have tried. No, I would have failed.

Another shout from the kitchen: “By the way, did you find what you were looking for? On the Vineyard, I mean?”

Good question.

“Misha? Honey?” I remind myself to attach no importance to honey: force of habit, nothing more. Kimmer is probably unaware that she said it.

“Not really,” I call back. “No.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.” A pause. It feels awkward, but I might as well do the polite thing and ask. “Mind if I use the phone?”

“Help yourself.” Her grinning face appears around the doorjamb. “Your name’s still on the bill.” Disappearing again.

I walk into my old study. Kimmer has not converted it to any purpose. A couple of shelves are still in place; the others, along with the desk and the credenza and the chairs, are cluttering the basement of my condo. A few magazines lie here and there, a book or two, but, basically, the cozy room where I spent so many agonizing hours watching Hobby Road for surveillance is empty. The portable phone sits on the floor.

The room feels dead this way. I wonder how Kimmer can stand it. Maybe she just keeps the door closed.

I pick up the phone, push the buttons from memory, and wait patiently for John Brown to answer.

The Oak Bluffs Police found me unconscious on the beach. They were sweeping the waterfront periodically, even in the storm. All I had to do was wait. I could even have fled to the police station in the first place. Only panic caused me to imagine they would close it.

By the time the ambulance arrived, I was already wide awake and sitting up, which is a very good thing, because, while the paramedics were lifting me onto the wheeled stretcher and preparing to insert a tube into my arm, one of the officers wandered over and said to his partner, Some kid lost a bear. I turned my head and saw a water-logged George Jackson nestled under his arm. The storm, passing on toward the Cape, had left George behind like an unwanted complication. I assured the startled cop that the bear was mine. They asked, more out of curiosity than duty, what I was doing out on the beach with a stuffed panda in the middle of a hurricane. Good question, I said, which did not exactly reassure them.

But they let it slide.

So here I am, finally, back in my condo, preparing for the opening of classes in two weeks, when I will once again teach torts to fifty-odd fresh young faces, trying my best not to bully any of them. Bentley races around my relatively cramped space, playing hide-and-seek with Miguel Hadley, whose father dropped him off two hours ago for a play date. Marc lingered for a few minutes, exuding great clouds of his raspberry tobacco, and we agreed it was a shame about Justice Wainwright, and played the old academic game of pretending we had the foggiest idea who the President will pick to replace him. I am grateful to Marc for trying, as the sad summer hurries to its close, to patch things up between us, but sundered friendships, like broken marriages, are often irreparable.

Although August still has a couple of days to run, the afternoon is chilly, for a storm front has moved in, and there are thundershowers. I have no real study in my condo, so I tend to work on my laptop in the kitchen, going back and forth to my bookshelves in the basement as needed. I am sitting at the laptop now, trying to get serious about an article taking a fresh look at the data on the effect of wealth on the outcome in tort cases-my own apology to Avery Knowland, taking the time to see if he might be right.

I stand up and walk to the kitchen window, looking down into my postage-stamp yard, the paved common area beyond it, and then the boardwalk and the beach. I strolled there in the brilliant afternoon sun yesterday, before driving over to Hobby Road to pick up Bentley because I was trying to figure out what to do with the disk that remains nestled safely inside George Jackson. I am dithering still.

John Brown told me that even with the heat, even with the warping, even with the salt water in which the disk has now been soaked, there is probably still a fair bit of recoverable data. There is a need to act swiftly, because heat can “melt” bits of information off the disk, but the ocean water is the real problem: as the salt oxidizes, it could do further damage. He instructed me to rinse the surface with distilled water, which I did. But magnetic media, he assured me, are tougher than most people think. The only way to be sure of getting rid of stored information is to write over it completely, such as by reformatting the disk. And just to be sure, he said, you might want to go over the disk with a powerful magnet, then reformat it again. After all that, he laughed, if you’re really smart, you’ll destroy the disk completely. By cooking it in a microwave oven, say. Or tossing it in the incinerator. Short of steps so extreme, he said, yes, the likelihood is that some data have survived. There are experts who, for a fee, will retrieve whatever is there.

I know what is there. Wainwright said the disk was full of names: names of people now prominent whose cases he and my father fixed.

I could cause a lot of trouble.

I could read the Judge’s tortured ravings and learn the details of his many crimes, I could blackmail corrupt Senators or bring them to justice, I could turn the disk over to the press and allow the media to have their frenzy. The allegations might turn some significant piece of the history of the seventies and eighties upside down. They are unproven, of course, possibly the last, desperate ravings of the Judge’s tortured brain-but none of that has ever stopped journalists from doing as much damage as possible, with the smallest number of apologies, because the people’s right to know equals, down to the last decimal place, the media’s ability to profit from scandal.

I imagine my father on the front pages again, only this time with lots of friends along for the ride. I tremble. Senators, said Wainwright. Governors. Cabinet officers. Yes, I could do a lot of damage.

And perhaps a lot of damage is what my father craved-a final revenge on the world that so rudely spurned him. Perhaps that was the reason for his note and his pawns and the rest of the perilous, puzzling trail that finally led me back to the attic of Vinerd Howse. My father’s cleverness suddenly terrifies me. The world destroyed my father, and I seem to be his chosen instrument to destroy it right back.

I experience a brief, delicious shiver of power, followed at once by a trembling of revulsion. No point in asking, Why me? No point in railing against fate. Or against God. Or against my father. Garland men do none of those things. Garland men bear troubles with a stoicism bordering on self-loathing, driving the women in our lives half crazy with our distance. Garland men make decisions with care, and then we stick to them, as the term implies, decision, cutting away, the elimination of other possibilities, even when the decisions we make are terrible. But the Judge may not have wanted me to decide at all; perhaps he died believing that the decision was made, that I would do what Addison, who had legal problems of his own, could not. Perhaps the Judge believed that I would read the names and set out to destroy, that I would do it not out of anger or a yearning for revenge, or even for the cold intellectual pleasure of seeing the guilty punished, but because my father asked me to.

The guilty should be punished-no question there.

But guilt comes in more than one variety. And so does punishment.

Addison. Now, there is a question nobody has raised, although Nunzio hinted around the edges. Alma said Addison could not be the head of the family. Sally said Addison told her to get the scrapbook Mallory Corcoran said my father thought Addison had betrayed him. And my father’s arrangements involved the younger son, not the older, whom he also loved best among his children. Could the reason be that Addison already knew it all? My brother said the Judge came to him in Chicago a year before he died, trying to get him to read Villard’s report. This, surely, was in reaction to Wainwright’s visit. My father’s immediate idea was to tell his firstborn everything, so that Addison would be his insurance policy if anything went wrong.

Only Addison wouldn’t play. I know he read the report, he knew the car that killed Abby had two people in it, not one. Maybe the Judge told my brother what happened next. Maybe Addison worked it out for himself. Either way, it upset him enough that he refused to listen to any more of the story. He did not want to know what the Judge did for Jack Ziegler in return for the murders of Phil McMichael and Michelle Hoffer. And my father, as he told Uncle Mal, and as Just Alma knew or guessed, took this for a betrayal.

So he went on to his second son. Only, this time, he was more cautious. Worried, perhaps, that I would be as rejecting as Addison, he decided to leave me no choice, to design his arrangements the way he would design one of his chess problems, so that, once he died, events would be set into motion, and I would be able to follow only one path. The path that would lead me to Vinerd Howse, and to the attic, and to George Jackson.

Probably he hoped I would figure it out the first time I saw the note.

Or maybe Addison’s involvement was not limited to telling the Judge he wanted no involvement. After all, somebody had to put the Judge’s files on the disk. My father would not have known how to do it himself; but Addison loves computers. Maybe Addison gave him instructions, maybe Addison did it for him. Either way, my brother would have had at least a rough idea of what the Judge had hidden, and why, even if he did not know where. So, why did he refuse to help Mariah and me in our separate searches? Why, when I finally reached him, did he try to talk me out of going forward?

The same reason he arranged for Sally to remove the scrapbook. Because he was there in the kitchen at Shepard Street the night the Judge first tried to make his deal with the devil. Because he had buried that secret for more than twenty years. And because he was not ready to have it exhumed.

No wonder he never found time to come to the hearings.

I miss Addison. Not the way he is now, but the way he used to be. The way it was before, as the Judge would have said. I seem to miss the same thing in every corner of my life: the way it was before. I experience my family life as an unbroken chain of losses. My brother, my sister, my wife, my mother, my father, all of them gone but Mariah. Morris Young, like the Judge when he was at his best, preaches that we should always be looking forward, not back, and I try. Oh, how I try.

I have lost my wife. My father, for all his insanity, never lost his Claire, not until the day she died. In the last few years, I have been so obsessed with my father-first with living up to his standards, and, recently, with solving the terrifying mystery he thrust upon me-that I have scarcely given my mother a thought. It is time to correct the imbalance. It is time to get to know Claire Garland again, to study her life as painstakingly as I have studied Oliver’s. I have been trying to find a place for my father in the way I remember the past. I must do the same for my wife. And I must spend enough time remembering my mother that she, too, can finally take a proper place in the rooms of my memory. If memory is our contribution to history, then history is the sum of our memories. Like all families, mine has a history. I would like to remember it.

Bentley and Miguel are down in the basement now, whispering together, the way best friends do at that age. I check on the little fire I have going this cold afternoon, then climb the stairs to the second floor, go into my small bedroom, and close the door. I sit on my cheap mattress-and-box-spring bed and stare at the dresser, the only other piece of furniture in the room. From his perch atop the dresser, George Jackson seems to wink at me with dark plastic eyes. The disk, undisturbed, its information leaching away, remains inside him. The diabolical scrapbook is tucked away in a drawer, hidden beneath my underused exercise togs.

I close my eyes and remember Wainwright’s flailing hand. I open them and remember his despairing words, how he wanted to retire and Jack Ziegler and his partners refused to let him step down. Probably Wainwright was the unnamed buyer who tried to purchase the house on Shepard Street, so that he would be able to search it top to bottom. Eventually he would have offered to purchase Vinerd Howse, too. With contents, no doubt.

Contents like Abby’s bear.

A flash of lightning outside reflects in George Jackson’s plastic eyes, making him wink again. He is magical, this ancient toy shedding his stuffing. I am astonished that he survived the storm, but storms are funny that way: sometimes what the riptide draws out bobs to the surface and floats back in on the next crashing wave, other times it is sucked under and disappears. The jetties extending from the sands of the Inkwell probably made his return more likely, turning some of the waves back in; but, the truth is, I got lucky.

Or maybe not. Had George never returned to shore, had the police officer never found him, had I remained unconscious, had a dozen small things been different, I would not now be facing this dilemma. Had the waves carried the bear away, I would not have to worry about what to do. There would be nothing to do, because there would be no disk to do it with.

No arrangements.

Jack Ziegler and his friends or enemies or whoever they are decided after the cemetery that I probably had already found the information my father hid, and I implicitly promised Henderson that I would keep secret what I knew. Now the belief is a fact: the arrangements are mine at last, and I feel the surging stir of temptation that power always brings.

I pick up the bear, slide the disk free, and put George back where he was. Holding the disk by its edges, I walk back down to my living-dining room. Outside the windows, the storm has yet to abate. True, it cannot hold a candle to the one that roared across the Vineyard while I was there, but a storm is a storm, and, despite the fire, the condo is growing colder.

Or maybe I am.

I remember my father’s dream, to gain a measure of fame by creating the first Double Excelsior with the knight, the task that crazy old Karl called impossible. The Double Excelsior, but with black victorious in the end: two lonely pawns, one white and one black, pathetic in their powerlessness, beginning on their home squares and matching each other, move for move, until, on the fifth turn, each reaches the far end of the board and becomes a knight, the final move checkmating the white king. And the problem is not sound if there is any other option: a single line of play is all that is allowed. If the black king can be checkmated more quickly, or if either pawn can at any time make any other move and yet achieve the same result, the problem is cooked, which is to say, worthless.

My father left his Double Excelsior behind him, not on the board but in life, setting in motion his two pawns, one black, one white, matching moves, each stalking the other, one agonizing square at a time, until they reached the far side of their board on a storm-darkened beach in Oak Bluffs, where they faced each other for the final time.

One knight died. The other is left to give mate. Just as my vengeful father wanted. I hold in my hand the tool. I need only pick up the telephone and call Agent Nunzio or the Times or the Post, and the Judge’s Double Excelsior is complete.

Except that the problem is cooked, as the jargon has it, if there is any other possibility. And the difficulty with knights is that they often move… eccentrically.

Impossible, said Karl.

The boys are running around the house again. In a few minutes, I will have to give them a snack, warming one of the countless casseroles that Nina Felsenfeld and Julia Carlyle have delivered. Then the three of us will squeeze into the Camry for the short drive up to the Hadleys’ lovely home on Harbor Peak. I believe I have mentioned that Marc comes from money. Years ago, his Uncle Edmund was one of the founders of a little leveraged-buyout firm called Elm Harbor Partners. Kimmer had no conflict of interest, the Hadley money has long moved on, but I know from Dana, who should never have told me, that Marc once made a telephone call to the old family retainer who was then general counsel of EHP, urging him, as a favor, to ask for Kimberly Madison by name the moment she arrived in town. The request was part of the effort by Stuart Land, then the dean, to keep me from leaving, for I was as dreadfully unhappy during my first year in Elm Harbor as I had been during my final year in Washington. Had Marc not made the call, Kimmer might not have stayed; had she not stayed, she and I would never have married; which helps explain why I have never been able to dislike Marc as much as my wife does.

Marc has been man enough never to mention this favor to me. I do not think Kimmer knows. And I am not about to tell her. Besides, EHP might have asked for Kimmer as a favor to Marc, but it was through her exemplary skills as a lawyer that she earned her way into their-and Jerry Nathanson’s-lasting confidence.

I check my watch and go into the cramped kitchen to warm the boys’ snack. So much to do, so much to do. I want to be a better Christian, to spend time with Morris Young and learn the meaning of the faith I profess. I want to take more walks with Sally, apologize for the family, and help her, if I can, to heal. I want to visit Just Alma, to sit at her feet and listen to stories of the old days, when the family was happy-the way it was before. Then I want to visit Thera, and compare the stories. I want to help my sister out of her ennui. I want to believe in the law school the way Stuart Land does. I want to believe in the law itself the way I used to, before the Judge and his pal Wainwright shattered my faith.

And there is something else. I want to know what happened to Maxine. I want to know why she shot me, whether it was an accident, and, if not, on whose orders she did it. I want her to look me in the eye and tell me she was not working for either Jack Ziegler or the unknown partners with whom he conspired to murder Phil McMichael and his girlfriend and to corrupt the federal court of appeals. Maybe she can even make me believe it. In which case Maxine was working, just as she said, for the good guys-not the great guys, just the good guys, who vowed to destroy whatever my father left, rather than use it. Another faction? Another mob? Another federal agency?

I want to know why, despite my fervent prayers as I lay dying, so I thought, on the beach last week, I never saw her again.

Uncle Jack said some questions have no answers. Perhaps one day soon I will fly out to Aspen again and knock on his door and ask him a few anyway. And, if I do, I suppose I will owe him thanks of some kind for keeping me and my family safe all these months, when we could have been kidnaped, tortured, and murdered. Except that, had he not been who he was and done the things he did, we would never have needed protection in the first place.

The telephone rings, distracting me from my reverie, and I pick it up, reasoning that there is no more bad news to be had. As I should have guessed, it is my sister, calling to tell me about the new evidence she has found down at Shepard Street or on the Internet or floating in a glass bottle someplace: my stubborn mind refuses to focus on her words, which become a stream of noise, unrelated to any part of my reality. I surprise us both by interrupting her.

“I love you, kiddo.”

A pause while Mariah waits for the punch line. Then her cautious yet happy rejoinder: “Well, that’s a good thing, because I love you, too.”

Another pause, as each of us silently dares the other to get mushy. But we are Garlands still, we are at our emotional limit, so conversation turns swiftly to her family. She promises not to try any matchmaking if I will come for her annual Labor Day barbecue. I agree. Five minutes later my sister is gone-but I know she will go on searching. Which is fine with me. Let Mariah continue to try to prove the Judge was murdered; that is her way of coping, and, with her journalistic tenacity, she may yet uncover a further unhappy truth. I admire her search but will not join it. I have long been comfortable living without perfect knowledge. Semiotics has taught me to live with ambiguity in my work; Kimmer has taught me to live with ambiguity in my home; and Morris Young is teaching me to live with ambiguity in my faith. That truth, even moral truth, exists I have no doubt, for I am no relativist; but we weak, fallen humans will never perceive it except imperfectly, a faintly glowing presence toward which we creep through the mists of reason, tradition, and faith.

So much to know, so little time. Wandering back into the living room, I stare at the cracked, warped disk in my hand, wishing I could unlock its secrets by sheer force of will, because knowing precisely what my father included, whether fact or fiction, could help me decide what to do. But I lack the time, or the trust, to do as John Brown recommends and hire somebody to decipher it. I will have to make my decision-my decision -based on the little I already know. To be a man is to act.

I notice that the fire is sputtering. Well, I can’t have that on so chilly an afternoon. Back when Kimmer and I were more or less happy, snuggling in front of the fire was one of our favorite pastimes. If it is as brisk up on Hobby Road as it is down here by the beach, she is surely snuggling away. Just not with me.

I miss what I had. The way it was before.

But I can love a fire anyway.

I throw on another log and watch a few sparks fly. Not enough: the fire needs to be freshened. Seeing no kindling anywhere, I take the disk my father hid in Abigail’s bear and, drawing a line and putting the past behind me, I feed it to the flames.