Emperor of Ocean Park

Stephen L. Carter

Deux fous gagnent toujours, mais trois fous, non!

(Loosely: Two fools always win, but three fools, never!)

- Siegbert Tarrasch

(Note: The chess piece Americans call the bishop, the French call le fou.)

PROLOGUE

THE VINEYARD HOUSE

When my father finally died, he left the Redskins tickets to my brother, the house on Shepard Street to my sister, and the house on the Vineyard to me. The football tickets, of course, were the most valuable item in the estate, but then Addison was always the biggest favorite and the biggest fan, the only one of the children who came close to sharing my father’s obsession, as well as the only one of us actually on speaking terms with my father the last time he drew his will. Addison is a gem, if you don’t mind the religious nonsense, but Mariah and I have not been close in the years since I joined the enemy, as she puts it, which is why my father bequeathed us houses four hundred miles apart. I was glad to have the Vineyard house, a tidy little Victorian on Ocean Park in the town of Oak Bluffs, with lots of frilly carpenter’s Gothic along the sagging porch and a lovely morning view of the white band shell set amidst a vast sea of smooth green grass and outlined against a vaster sea of bright blue water. My parents liked to tell how they bought the house for a song back in the sixties, when Martha’s Vineyard, and the black middle-class colony that summers there, were still smart and secret. Lately, in my father’s oft-repeated view, the Vineyard had tumbled downhill, for it was crowded and noisy and, besides, they let everyone in now, by which he meant black people less well off than we. There were too many new houses going up, he would moan, many of them despoiling the roads and woods near the best beaches. There were even condominiums, of all things, especially near Edgartown, which he could not understand, because the southern part of the Island is what he always called Kennedy country, the land where rich white vacationers and their bratty children congregate, and a part-angry, part-jealous article of my father’s faith held that white people allow the members of what he liked to call the darker nation to swarm and crowd while keeping the open spaces for themselves.

And yet, amidst all the clamor, the Vineyard house is a small marvel. I loved it as a child and love it more now. Every room, every dark wooden stair, every window whispers its secret share of memories. As a child, I broke an ankle and a wrist in a fall from the gabled roof outside the master bedroom; now, more than thirty years after, I no longer recall why I thought it would be fun to climb there. Two summers later, as I wandered the house in postmidnight darkness, searching for a drink of water, an odd mewling sound dropped me into a crouch on the landing, whence, a week or so shy of my tenth birthday, I peered through the balustrade and thus caught my first stimulating glimpse of the primal mystery of the adult world. I saw my brother, Addison, four years older than I, tussling with our cousin Sally, a dark beauty of fifteen, on the threadbare burgundy sofa opposite the television down in the shadowy nook of the stairwell, neither of them quite fully dressed, although I was somehow unable to figure out precisely what articles of clothing were missing. My instinct was to flee. Instead, seized by a weirdly thrilling lethargy, I watched them roll about, their arms and legs intertwined in seemingly random postures-making out, we called it in those simpler days, a phrase pregnant with purposeful ambiguity, perhaps as a protection against the burden of specificity.

My own teen years, like my adulthood dreary and overlong, brought no similar adventures, least of all on the Vineyard; the highlight, I suppose, came near the end of our last summer sojourn as a full family, when I was about thirteen, and Mariah, a rather pudgy fifteen and angry at me for some smart-mouthed crack about her weight, borrowed a box of kitchen matches, then stole a Topps Willie Mays baseball card that I treasured and climbed the dangerous pull-down ladder to the attic, eight rickety wooden slats, most of them loose. When I caught up with her, my sister burned the card before my eyes as I wept helplessly, falling to my knees in the wretched afternoon heat of the dusty, low-ceilinged loft-the two of us already set in our lifelong pattern of animosity. That same summer, my sister Abigail, in those days still known as the baby, even though just a bit more than a year younger than I, made the local paper, the Vineyard Gazette, when she won something like eight different prizes at the county fair on a muggy August night by throwing darts at balloons and baseballs at milk bottles, and so solidified her position as the family’s only potential athlete-none of the rest of us dared try, for our parents always preached brains over brawn.

Four Augusts later, Abby’s boyish laughter was no longer heard along Ocean Park, or anywhere else, her joy in life, and ours in her, having vanished in a confused instant of rain-slicked asphalt and an inexperienced teenager’s fruitless effort to evade an out-of-control sports car, something fancy, seen by several witnesses but never accurately described and therefore never found; for the driver who killed my baby sister a few blocks north of the Washington Cathedral in that first spring of Jimmy Carter’s presidency left the scene long before the police arrived. That Abby had only a learner’s permit, not a license, never became a matter of public knowledge; and the marijuana that was found in her borrowed car was never again mentioned, least of all by the police or even the press, because my father was who he was and had the connections that he did, and, besides, in those days it was not yet our national sport to ravage the reputations of the great. Abby was therefore able to die as innocently as we pretended that she had lived. Addison by that time was on the verge of finishing college and Mariah was about to begin her sophomore year, leaving me in the nervous role of what my mother kept calling her only child. And all that Oak Bluffs summer, as my father, tight-lipped, commuted to the federal courthouse in Washington and my mother shuffled aimlessly from one downstairs room to the next, I made it my task to hunt through the house for memories of Abby-at the bottom of a stack of books on the black metal cart underneath the television, her favorite game of Life; in the back of the glass-fronted cabinet over the sink, a white ceramic mug emblazoned with the legend BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL, purchased to annoy my father; and, hiding in a corner of the airless attic, a stuffed panda named George, after the martyred black militant George Jackson, won at the fair and now leaking from its joints some hideous pink substance-memories, I must confess in my perilous middle age, that have grown ever fainter with the passage of time.

Ah, the Vineyard house! Addison was married in it, twice, once more or less successfully, and I smashed the leaded glass in the double front door, also twice, once more or less intentionally. Every summer of my youth we went there to live, because that is what one does with a summer home. Every winter my father griped about the upkeep and threatened to sell it, because that is what one does when happiness is a questionable investment. And when the cancer that pursued her for six years finally won, my mother died in it, in the smallest bedroom, with the nicest view of Nantucket Sound, because that is what one does if one can choose one’s end.

My father died at his desk. And, at first, only my sister and a few stoned callers to late-night radio shows believed he had been murdered.

PART I

NOWOTNY INTERFERENCE

Nowotny interference -In the composition of chess problems, a theme in which two Black pieces obstruct one another’s ability to protect vital squares.

CHAPTER I

THE LATEST NEWS BY PHONE

(I)

“This is the happiest day of my life,” burbles my wife of nearly nine years on what will shortly become one of the saddest days of mine.

“I see,” I answer, my tone conveying my hurt.

“Oh, Misha, grow up. I’m not comparing it with marrying you.” A pause. “Or with having a baby,” she adds as a footnote.

“I know, I understand.”

Another pause. I hate pauses on the telephone, but, then, I hate the telephone itself, and much else besides. In the background, I hear a laughing male voice. Although it is almost eleven in the morning in the East, it is just nearing eight in San Francisco. But there is no need to be suspicious: she could be calling from a restaurant, a shopping mall, or a conference room.

Or not.

“I thought you would be happy for me,” Kimmer says at last.

“I am happy for you,” I assure her, far too late. “It’s just-”

“Oh, Misha, come on.” She is impatient now. “I’m not your father, okay? I know what I’m getting into. What happened to him is not going to happen to me. What happened to you is not going to happen to our son. Okay? Honey?”

Nothing happened to me, I almost lie, but I refrain, in part because I like the rare and scrumptious taste of Honey. With Kimmer for once so happy, I do not want to cause trouble. I certainly do not want to tell her that the joy I feel at her accomplishment is diminished by my concern over how my father will react. I say softly, “I just worry about you, that’s all.”

“I can take care of myself,” Kimmer assures me, a proposition so utterly true that it is frightening. I marvel at my wife’s capacity to hide good news, at least from her husband. She learned some time yesterday that her years of subtle lobbying and careful political contributions have at last paid off, that she is among the finalists for a vacancy on the federal court of appeals. I try not to wonder how many people she shared her joy with before she got around to calling home.

“I miss you,” I say.

“Well, that’s sweet, but, unfortunately, it’s starting to look like I gotta stay out here till tomorrow.”

“I thought you were coming home tonight.”

“I was, but-well, I just can’t.”

“I see.”

“Oh, Misha, I’m not staying away on purpose. It’s my job. There’s nothing I can do about it.” A few seconds while we think this through together. “I’ll be home as soon as I can, you know that.”

“I know, darling, I know.” I am standing behind my desk and looking down into the courtyard at the students lying on the grass, noses in their casebooks, or playing volleyball, trying to stretch the New England summer as they leap about in the dying October sun. My office is spacious and bright but a bit disorderly, which is also generally the state of my life. “I know,” I say a third time, for we are at that stage in our marriage when we seem to be running out of conversation.

After a suitable period of silence, Kimmer returns to practicalities. “Guess what? The FBI will be starting to talk to my friends soon. My husband too. When Ruthie said that, I’m like, ‘I hope he won’t tell them all my sins.’” A small laugh, wary and confident at the same time. My wife knows she can count on me. And, so knowing, she turns suddenly humble. “I realize they’re thinking about other people,” she continues, “and some of them have awfully good resumes. But Ruthie says I have a really good shot.” Ruthie being Ruth Silverman, our law school classmate, Kimmer’s sometime friend, and now deputy White House counsel.

“You do if they go on merit,” I say loyally.

“You don’t sound like you think I’m gonna get it.”

“I think you should get it.” And this is true. My wife is the second-smartest lawyer I know. She is a partner in the biggest law firm in Elm Harbor, which Kimmer considers a small town and I consider a fair-sized city. Only two other women have risen so high, and nobody else who isn’t white.

“I guess the fix could be in,” she concedes.

“I hope it isn’t. I want you to get what you want. And deserve.” I hesitate, then plunge. “I love you, Kimmer. I always will.”

My wife, reluctant to return this sentiment, strikes out in another direction. “There are maybe four or five finalists. Ruthie says some of them are law professors. She says two or three of them are your colleagues.” This makes me smile, but not with pleasure. Ruthie is far too cagey to have mentioned any names, but Kimmer and I both know perfectly well that two or three colleagues boils down to Marc Hadley, considered by some the most brilliant member of the faculty, even though he has published exactly one book in a quarter-century of law teaching, and that came almost twenty years ago. Marc and I used to be fairly close, and I am not close to many people, especially at the university; but the unexpected death of Judge Julius Krantz four months ago ruined what slight friendship we had, sparking the behind-the-scenes competition that has led us to this moment.

“It’s hard to believe the President would pick another law professor,” I offer, just for something to say. Marc has been lobbying for a judgeship longer than my wife, and helped Ruthie, once a favored student, land her current position.

“The best judges are people who have practiced real law for a while.” My wife speaks as though quoting an official contest rule.

“I tend to agree.”

“Let’s hope the President agrees.”

“Right.” I stretch a creaky arm. My body is aching in just the right places to make it impossible to sit still. After breakfast this morning, I dropped Bentley at his overpriced preschool, then met Rob Saltpeter, another colleague, although not quite a friend, for our occasional game of basketball, not at the university gym, where we might embarrass ourselves in front of the students, but at the YMCA, where everybody else was at least as middle-aged as we.

“Ruthie says they’ll be deciding in the next six to eight weeks,” my wife adds, reinforcing my secret suspicion that she is celebrating far too soon. Kimmer pronounces Ruthie’s name with remarkable affection, given that, just two weeks ago, she derided her old friend to my private ear as Little Miss Judge-Picker. “Just in time for Christmas.”

“Well, I think it’s great news, darling. Maybe when you come home we can-”

“Oh, Misha, honey, I have to go. Jerry’s calling me. Sorry. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Okay. I love you,” I offer again. But I am declaring my affection to empty air.

(II)

Jerry’s calling me. To a meeting? To the telephone? Back to bed? I torture myself with risque speculations until it is time for my eleven o’clock class, then gather my books together and rush off to teach. I am, as you may have gathered, a professor of law. I am in the vicinity of forty years of age and was once, in the mists of history, a practicing lawyer. Nowadays, I earn my bread by writing learned articles too arcane to have any influence and, several mornings a week, trying to stuff some torts (fall term) or administrative law (spring term) into the heads of students too intelligent to content themselves with B’s but too self-absorbed to waste their precious energy on the tedious details one must master to earn A’s. Most of our students crave only the credential we award, not the knowledge we offer; and as generation after generation, each more than the last, views us as a merely vocational school, the connection between the desire for the degree and the desire to understand the law grows more and more attenuated. These are not, perhaps, the happiest thoughts a law professor might endure, but most of us think them at some time or other, and today seems to be my day.

I hurry through my torts class-what new is there to say, really, on the subject of no-fault insurance?-and I get off several nice lines, none of them original, that keep my fifty-three students laughing for much of the hour. At half past twelve, I trudge off to lunch with two of my colleagues, Ethan Brinkley, who is young enough still to be excited about being a tenured professor, and Theo Mountain, who taught constitutional law to my father as well as to me and who, thanks to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and an indefatigable physical constitution, may well teach my grandchildren. Sitting with them in a disintegrating booth at Post (only the uninitiated call it Post’s), a grim deli two blocks from the law school, I listen as Ethan tells a story about something hilarious that Tish Kirschbaum said at a party last weekend at Peter Van Dyke’s house, and I am struck, as so often, by the sense that there is a white law school social circle that whirls around me so fast that I discern it only in tiny glimpses: until Ethan mentioned it, I had no idea that there was a party last weekend at Peter Van Dyke’s house, and I certainly was offered no opportunity to decline to attend. Peter lives two blocks away from me, but stands miles above me in the law school’s hierarchy. Ethan, in theory, stands miles below. But skin color, even on the most liberal of campuses, contrives a hierarchy of its own.

Ethan keeps talking. Theo, his bushy white beard spotted with mustard, laughs in delight; as I try my best to join in, I wonder whether to tell them about Kimmer, just to see the pomposity drain for a splendid moment from their satisfied Caucasian faces. I want to tell somebody. Then it occurs to me that if I spread the news around and Marc subsequently beats out Kimmer for the nomination-as I suspect he will, albeit undeservingly-all the arrogance will come flooding back, only worse.

Besides, Marc probably knows anyway. Ruthie would not tell Kimmer Marc’s name, but I bet she has told Marc Kimmer’s. Or so I assure myself as I walk, alone, back along Town Street to the law school. Lunch is over. Theo, old enough to have a granddaughter at the college when most of us still have children in grade school, is off to a meeting; Ethan, an expert on both terrorism and the law of war, is off to the gym, for he keeps himself athletically taut in case MSNBC or CNN should call. I, with nothing in particular to do, return to the office. Students flurry past, all colors, all styles of dress, and all shambling along in that oddly insolent gait that today’s young people affect, heads down, shoulders hunched, elbows in at the sides, feet hardly leaving the ground, yet managing all the same to convey a sense of energy ready to be unleashed. Marc probably knows anyway. I cannot escape the thought. I pass the granite glory of the Science Quad, into which the university seems to pour all its spare cash nowadays. I pass a gaggle of beggars, all members of the darker nation, to each of whom I give a dollar- paying guilt money, Kimmer calls this habit of mine. I wonder, briefly, how many of them are hustlers, but this is what my father used to call an “unworthy thought”: You are better than such ideas, he would preach to his children, with rare anger, commanding us to patrol our minds.

Marc probably knows, I tell myself once more as I trip up the wide stairs at the main entrance to the law buildings. Ruthie Silverman, I am willing to bet, has told him everything. Theo taught Ruthie, too, and my wife and I were her classmates; but it is Marc Hadley upon whom she, like so many of our students, lavishes her most lasting devotion.

“That’s the problem with students,” I murmur just under my breath as I cross the threshold, for talking to myself, which my wife assures me is a sign of insanity, has been my lifelong habit. “They never stop being grateful.”

Nevertheless, prudence prevails. I decide to keep Kimmer’s news to myself. I keep most things to myself. My world, although occasionally painful, is usually quiet, which is how I like it. That it might suddenly be overtaken by violence and terror is, on this sunny autumn afternoon, quite beyond my imagining.

(III)

In the high-ceilinged lobby, I run into one of my favorite students, Crysta Smallwood, who has a tremendous crush on data. Crysta is a dark, chunky woman of not inconsiderable intellectual gifts who, before law school, majored in French at Pomona and was never called upon to manipulate numbers. Since her arrival in Elm Harbor, the discovery of statistics has made her delightfully crazy. She was in my torts class last fall and has spent most of her time since on her twin loves: our legal-aid clinic, where she helps welfare mothers avoid eviction, and her collection of statistics, by which she hopes to show that the white race is headed for self-destruction, a prospect that gladdens her.

“Hey, Professor Garland?” she calls in her best West Coast slur.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Smallwood,” I answer formally, because I have learned through hard experience not to be too familiar with students. I walk toward the stairs.

“Guess what?” she enthuses, cutting off my escape, heedless of the possibility that I might be headed someplace. Her hair is a very short Afro, one of the last in the school. I am old enough to remember when few black women of her age wore their hair any other way, but nationalism turned out to be less an ideology than a fad. Her eyes are a little too far apart, giving her a mildly unsettling walleyed look when she meets your gaze. She moves very fast for a woman of her bulk, and is consequently not so easy to avoid. “I’ve been looking at those numbers again. On white women?”

“I see.” Trapped, I gaze up at the ceiling, decorated with ornate plaster sculptures: religious symbols, garlands of yew leaves, hints of justice, all repainted so often that they are losing their sharp definition.

“Yeah, and, so, guess what? Their fertility rate-white women?-is so low now that there won’t be any white babies by about 2050.”

“Ah-are you sure about those figures?” Because Crysta, although brilliant, is also completely nuts. As her teacher, I have discovered that her enthusiasm makes her careless, for she often cites data, with great confidence, before taking the time to understand them.

“Maybe 2075?” she proposes, her friendly tone implying that we can negotiate.

“Sounds a little shaky, Ms. Smallwood.”

“It’s because of abortion.” I am on the move again, but Crysta easily keeps stride. “Because they’re killing their babies? That’s the main reason.”

“I really think you should consider another topic for your paper,” I answer, feinting around her to reach the sweeping marble staircase to the faculty offices.

“It’s not just abortion”-her voice carries up the stairwell after me, causing one of my colleagues, nervous little Joe Janowsky, to peer over the marble railing in his thick glasses to see who is shouting-“it’s also interracial marriages, because white women-”

Then I am through the double doors to the corridor and Crysta’s speculations are mercifully inaudible.

I was like her once, I remind myself as I slip into my office. Every bit as certain I was right on subjects I knew nothing about. Which is probably how I got hired in the first place, for I was intellectually bolder when I was intellectually younger.

That, plus the happenstance of being my father’s son, for his influence around the campus faded only slightly after the trauma of his confirmation hearings. Even today, well over a decade after the Judge’s fall, I am buttonholed by students who want to hear from my own mouth that my father is indeed who they have heard he is, and by colleagues who want me to explain to them how it felt to sit there day after miserable day, listening stoically as the Senate methodically destroyed him.

“Like watching somebody in zugzwang, ” I always say, but they are not serious chess players, so they never get it. Although, being professors, they pretend to.

Searching for a distraction, I leaf through my IN box. A memorandum from the provost’s office about parking rates. An invitation to a conference on tort reform in California three months from now, but only if I pay my own way. A postcard from some fellow out in Idaho, my opponent in a postal chess tournament, who has found the one move I hoped he would miss. A reminder from Ben Montoya, the deputy dean, about some big lawyer who is speaking tonight. A moderately threatening letter from the university library about some book I have evidently lost. From the middle of the stack, I pull out the new Harvard Law Review, skim the table of contents, then drop it, fast, after coming across yet another scholarly article explaining why my infamous father is a traitor to his race, for that is the level to which the darker nation has been reduced: being unable to influence the course of a single event in white America, we waste our precious time and intellectual energy maligning each other, as though we best serve the cause of racial progress by kicking other black folks around.

All right, I have done my work for the day.

The telephone rings.

I stare at the instrument, thinking-not for the first time-what a nasty, intrusive, uncivil thing the telephone really is, demanding, irritating, interrupting, invading the mind’s space. I wonder why Alexander Graham Bell is such a hero. His invention destroyed the private realm. The device has no conscience. It rings when we are sleeping, showering, praying, arguing, reading, making love. Or when we just want desperately to be left alone. I think about not answering. I have suffered enough. And not only because my mercurial wife hung up so abruptly. This has been one of those peculiar Thursdays on which the telephone refuses to stop its angry clamor for attention: a frustrated law-review editor demanding that I dispatch an overdue draft of an article, an unhappy student seeking an appointment, American Express looking for last month’s payment, all have had their innings. The dean of the law school, Lynda Wyatt-or Dean Lynda, as she likes to be addressed by everybody, students, faculty, and alumni alike-called just before lunch to assign me to yet another of the ad hoc committees she is always creating. “I only ask because I love you,” she crooned in her motherly way, which is what she says to everybody she dislikes.

The phone keeps ringing. I wait for the voice mail to answer, but the voice mail, like most of the university’s cut-rate technology, operates best when not needed. I decide to ignore it, but then I remember that my conversation with Kimmer ended badly, so perhaps she is calling to make up.

Or to argue some more.

Bracing myself for either alternative, I snatch up the handset, hoping for the voice of my possibly repentant wife, but it is only the great Mallory Corcoran, my father’s law partner and last remaining friend, as well as a Washington fixer of some repute, calling to tell me that the Judge is gone.

CHAPTER 2

A VISIT TO THE COAST

(I)

I arrive in Washington on Friday afternoon, the day after my father’s death, leave my bags at the home of Miles and Vera Madison, my wife’s diffident and proper parents, then go over to the Shepard Street house, only to find that Mariah, in her orderly way, has done most of what needs doing. (By unspoken agreement, we both know the family cannot rely on flighty Addison, who has yet to relay any travel plans.) Long ago, Mariah was a plump, disorderly child, with a terrible inferiority complex about her younger, fair-skinned sister, for an obsession with pigmentation is even now the curse of our race, especially in families like mine. As she grew older, Mariah became a stately, almost regal, beauty, somehow ignored nevertheless by the men of the Gold Coast (as we style our narrow, upper-middle-class strip of the darker nation), perhaps running now to fleshiness, but that is to be expected after bearing five children, according to sour Kimmer, professional lawyer and amateur fitness guru. (Kimmer has borne exactly one, a half-planned accident we named Bentley after his maternal grandmother’s maiden name.) The adult Mariah is also fabulously well organized, the only one of the children who takes after the Judge in that respect, and she does not believe in rest. But moments after I walk through the door of the rambling and ugly Shepard Street house where we both spent our teen years, Mariah dumps the rest of the work on me. She does this, I think, not out of grief or malice or even exhaustion, but out of the same trait that led her to quit journalism for a career of raising her children, a peculiar willed deference to men, inherited from our mother, who required of her two daughters less that they play a role than that they display an attitude: there were tasks unfit for their gender. Kimmer hates this in my sister, and has accused her, once to her face, of wasting the brain that earned her Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year at Stanford. Kimmer tossed out this line at a Christmas party in this very house that we foolishly attended two years ago. Mariah, smiling, responded calmly that her children deserve the best years of her life. Kimmer, who scarcely broke her professional stride when Bentley was born, took this as a personal attack and said so, which gave my sister and me another reason, if one was needed, not to speak to each other.

You should understand that in many ways I love and respect my sister. When we were younger, Mariah was, by common agreement, the most intellectually able of my parents’ four children, and the one most earnestly and touchingly devoted to the impossible work of gaining their approval. Her successes in high school and college warmed my father’s heart. To warm my mother’s, Mariah married once and happily, an earlier fiance who would have been a disaster having conveniently absconded with her best friend, and she produced grandchildren with a regularity and an enthusiasm that delighted my parents. Her husband is white and boring, an investment banker ten years her senior whom she met, she told the family, on a blind date, although sweet Kimmer always insists that it could only have been the personals. And, if I admit the truth, Mariah has always preferred white men, all the way back to her high-school years at Sidwell Friends, when, under the hawklike scrutiny of our brooding father, she began to date.

At Shepard Street, Mariah is greeting callers in the foyer, formal and sober in a midnight blue dress and a single strand of pearls, very much the lady of the house, as my mother might have said. From somewhere in the house wafts my father’s terrible taste in classical music: Puccini with an English-language libretto. The foyer is small and murky and crowded with mismatched pieces of heavy wooden furniture. It opens on the left to the living room, on the right to the dining room, and in the back to a hallway leading to family room and kitchen. A broad but undistinguished staircase strides upward next to the dining-room door, and along the upstairs hall is a gallery where I used to crouch in order to spy on my parents’ dinner parties and poker games, and where Addison once made me hide in a successful effort to prove to me that there is no Santa Claus. Beyond the gallery is the cavernous study where my father died. To my surprise, I see two or three people up there now, leaning on the banister as though it belongs to them. In fact, there are more people in the house than I expect. The entire first floor seems filled with somber suits, a larger slice of financially comfortable African America than most white Americans probably think exists outside the sports and entertainment worlds, and I wonder how many of the guests are happier about my father’s death than their faces attest.

When I step through the front door, my sister offers me not a hug but a distant kiss, one cheek, other cheek, and murmurs, “I’m so glad you’re here,” the way she might say it to one of my father’s law partners or poker buddies. Then, holding my shoulders in something still short of a hug, she looks past me down the walk, eyes tired but bright and mischievous: “Where’s Kimberly?” (Mariah refuses to say Kimmer, which reeks, she once told me, of faux preppiness, although my wife attended Miss Porter’s School and is thus fully qualified as a preppie.)

“On her way back from San Francisco,” I say. “She’s been out there for a few days on business.” Bentley, I add, much too fast, is with our neighbors: I picked him up early from his preschool yesterday and then left him again this morning to make this trip, assuming I would be too busy today to spend much time with him. Kimmer will retrieve him tonight, and they will be down tomorrow on the train. Explaining all these logistical details, knowing already that I am talking too much, I experience a yawning emptiness that I hope my face does not show, for I am missing my wife in ways I am not yet prepared to review for the family.

But I need not have bothered to mask my emotions, for Mariah has plenty of her own to cope with, and makes no effort to hide her pain or her confusion. She has already forgotten asking for my wife. “I don’t understand it,” she says softly, shaking her head, her fingers digging into my upper arms. Actually, I am sure Mariah understands perfectly. Just last year the Judge was in the hospital to repair the imprecise results of his bypass operation of two years before, a fact my sister knows as well as I do; our father’s death, if not precisely awaited, was hardly unexpected.

“It could have happened anytime,” I murmur.

“I wish it hadn’t happened now.”

To that there is little to say, other than to mention God’s will, which, in our family, nobody ever does. I nod and pat her hand, which seems to offend her, so I stop. She closes her tired eyes, gathering her control, then opens them and is all Garland again. She sighs and tosses her head back, as though she still has the long hair she struggled to care for as a teenager, then says unapologetically: “I’m sorry there’s no room for you guys in the house, but I’ve got the kids down in the basement and half the cousins up in the attic.” Mariah shrugs as though to say she has no choice, but I sense her true intention in making these dispositions: she is quietly asserting her dominion and daring me to challenge her.

I do not.

“Fine,” I say, never losing the smile that always seems to confound her.

But, to my surprise, my sister’s face bears no look of triumph. She seems, with this victory, more miserable than ever, for once not sure what to say. I cannot recall when I have seen Mariah less confident; but, then, she loved the Judge best, even though there were times when she couldn’t stand him.

“Hey, kid,” I say softly, kid being what we used to call each other when we were teens and experimented with liking each other. “Hey, come on, it’s going to be okay.”

Mariah nods uncertainly, not reassured by a single word from my mouth. But, since she distrusts me, this is scarcely surprising. She nibbles her lower lip, an act she would never perform in front of one of her children. Then she gets up on her toes and speaks in a high-pitched whisper, her breath tickling my ear: “I need to talk to you about something, Tal. It’s important. Something… something’s not right.” As I incline my puzzled head, Mariah glances from one side of the shadowy foyer to the other, as though afraid of being overheard. I follow her gaze, my eyes, like hers, running over obscure distant relatives and fair-weather friends, including some the family has not seen since my father’s mortifying confirmation fight, and at last settling on the hovering figure of her husband, Howard Denton, looking prosperous and fit and somehow perfectly in place in spite of his whiteness. Howard worships at the shrine of bodybuilding; even in his fifties, his broad shoulders seem to float above his tapered waist. He adores Mariah. He also adores money. Although he sneaks the occasional reverential look in my sister’s direction, Howard is mainly carrying on an animated conversation with a clutch of young men and women I do not quite recognize. From their trim energy and Brooks Brothers attire, and from the fact that one of them is pressing a card into his hand, I suppose business is being done, even here, even now.

The same thing used to happen to my father, even after his fall: he would walk into a room, and suddenly everybody would want something from him. He projected that aura, sending a subliminal message that he was a person around whom and through whom things happened -a person it would benefit you to know. And here is lean Howard, of all people, he of the thinning brown hair and hand-tailored suits and seven-figure income, or maybe it is eight now, able to exercise the same power. So now it is my turn to be offended, less on behalf of the family than on behalf of the race: my vision is suddenly overlaid with bright splotches of red, a thing that happens from time to time when my connection to the darker nation and its oppression is most powerfully stimulated. The room fades around me. Through the red curtain, I still see, albeit dimly, these ambitious black kids in their ambitious little suits, young people not much older than my students, vying for the favor of my brother-in-law because he is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and I suddenly understand the passion of the many black nationalists of the sixties who opposed affirmative action, warning that it would strip the community of the best among its potential leaders, sending them off to the most prestigious colleges, and turning them into… well, into young corporate apparatchiks in Brooks Brothers suits, desperate for the favor of powerful white capitalists. Our leaders, they argued, would be tricked into supporting a new goal. Fancy college degrees and fancier money for the few would supplant justice for the many. And the nationalists were right. I am the few. My wife is the few. My sister is the few. My students are the few. These kids pressing business cards on my brother-in-law are the few. And the world is such a bright, angry red. My legs are stone. My face is stone. I stand very still, letting the redness wash over me, wallowing in it the way a man who has nearly died of thirst might wallow in the shower, absorbing it through every pore, feeling the very cells of my body swell with it, and sensing a near-electric charge in the air, a portent, a symbol of a coming storm, and reliving and reviling in this frozen, furious instant every apple I have ever polished for everybody white who could help me get ahead-

“Leave it alone, kid,” says my conscience, except that it is really Mariah, her voice surprisingly patient, her hand on my arm. “It’s just the way he is.” I look down and see that my fingers have curled into a fist. I know that almost no time has passed-a second, perhaps two. No time ever passes when the red curtain falls across my vision, and I often have the sense that I can reach out my will and freeze those moments for eternity, remain locked forever between this second and the next, living in a world of glorious red fury. I have that sense now. Then I look up and see, through the redness, the pain-no, the neediness -in my sister’s dark brown eyes. What is it that she needs and Howard is not providing? Not for the first time, I wonder what (other than money) she sees in him. It is my wife’s notion that Mariah was running away from something when she chose her mate, but all of my parents’ children were running away, as hard and fast as possible, running from the very same something, or someone, and neither Addison nor I ever married anyone as insipid as Howard.

On the other hand, my sister’s marriage is happy.

Mariah murmurs my name and touches my face and is, for an instant, my sister and not my adversary. The red is gone, the room is back. I almost hug her, which I do not think I have done in ten years, and I even believe that she would let me; but the moment passes. “We can talk later,” she says, and pushes me gently but definitely away. “Go say hello to Sally,” she adds as she turns to greet her next guest. “She’s crying in the kitchen.”

I nod dumbly, still not sure why these moods come over me, trying to remember when last this malady struck. As I turn into the dreary hallway, Mariah is already telling somebody else how good it was of him to come and bestowing a kiss on each cheek. I greet Howard as I pass, but he is too busy collecting business cards to do more than grimace and wave. A quick shimmer of red dances around his head and is gone. I turn away. The numberless cousins, as my father used to call them, seem to pack every square foot of the first floor: numberless simply because the Judge never really bothered to get them straight. Presiding over the cousins, as always, is the ageless Alma, or Aunt Alma, as our parents insisted we call her, although Alma herself, in secret, embracing us in great clouds of sachet, commanded us all to call her “just Alma,” which we often took literally, although not to her face: Mariah, is Just Alma here yet? Or even: Mommy! Daddy! Just Alma is on the phone! Just Alma, who is my father’s second cousin or great-aunt or something, admits to some eighty-one years and has probably lived longer, skinny as a tree branch and loud and fun and raunchy, never quite still, gracefully deporting herself in the jazzy rhythms that have sustained the darker nation ever since its coerced beginnings. As a child, I sought her out at every family gathering, because she was always pulling nickels and dimes out of unexpected pockets and forcing them upon us; I seek her out now because she has been, since our mother died, the family’s gravitational force, drawing us toward her as though she can curve space.

“Tal cott! ” Alma cries when she sees me, leaning on her intricately carved cane, smiling her flirtatious grin. “Getcha self on over here!”

I kiss Alma gently, and she awards me a quick squeeze. I can feel her fragile bones move, and I marvel that the winds of age have not managed to blow Alma away. Her breath smells of cigarettes: Kools, which she has been smoking since some legendary act of protest when she was a high-schooler in Philadelphia almost seven decades ago. She was married for more than half a century to a preacher who was a power in Pennsylvania politics, and who was eulogized by the Vice-President of the United States.

“It’s good to see you, Alma.”

“That’s the problem! All good-lookin men ever wanna do with me is see!” She cackles and slaps my shoulder, fairly hard. Alma, despite her tiny frame, bore six children, all of whom are still living, five of whom are college graduates, four of whom are still in first marriages, three of whom work for the city of Philadelphia, two of whom are doctors, one of whom is gay: there is some sort of numerical principle at work. Together Alma’s children, along with her grands and great-grands, account for the largest subset of the numberless cousins. She lives in a cramped apartment in one of the less desirable neighborhoods of Philadelphia but spends so much time visiting her descendants that she is away more than she is home.

“You’d probably be too much for me, Alma.”

I give her another quick squeeze and prepare to move on. Alma grips my biceps, holding me in place. Her eyes are half covered with thick yellow cataracts, but her gaze is sharp and alive. “You know your daddy loved you very much, don’t you, Talcott?”

“Yes,” I say, although with the Judge love was less knowledge than guess.

“He had plans for you, Talcott.”

“Plans?”

“For the sake of the family. You’re the head of the family now, Talcott.”

“I would think that would be Addison.” Stiffly. I am offended and not sure why.

She shakes her little head. “No, no, no. Not Addison. You. That’s the way your daddy wanted it.”

I purse my lips, trying to figure out if she is serious. I am flattered and worried at the same time. The idea of being the head of the Garland family, whatever it might mean, has an odd appeal, no doubt the expression of some ancient male gene for dominance.

“Okay, Alma.”

She hugs me a little tighter, refusing to be mollified. “Talcott, he had plans for you. He wanted you to be the one who…” Alma blinks and leans away again. “Well, never mind, never mind. He’ll let you know.”

“Who’ll let me know, Alma?”

She chooses to answer a different question. “You have the chance to make everything right, Talcott. You can fix it.”

“Fix what?”

“The family.”

I shake my head. “Alma, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know what I mean, Talcott. Remember the good times we used to have in Oak Bluffs? You kids, your daddy and mommy, me, Uncle Derek-back when Abigail was still with us,” Alma concludes suddenly, surprising me with a small sob.

I take her hand. “I don’t think human beings can fix things like that.”

“Right. But your daddy will let you know what to do when the time comes.”

“My daddy? You mean the Judge?”

“You got some other daddy?”

This is the other thing everybody says about Alma: she is no longer quite all there.

Extricating myself at last, I remember that I am supposed to be looking for Sally. All the crazy Garland women, I am thinking: is it we Garland men who give them their neuroses, or is it just coincidence? I struggle through the throng. I wonder why all these people are here now, why they couldn’t wait for the wake. Maybe Mariah isn’t planning one. A couple of strangers thrust their hands at me. Somebody whispers that the Judge didn’t suffer and we should count our blessings, and I want to spin around and ask, Were you there?… but instead I nod and walk on, as my father would have. Somebody else, another white face, mumbles that the torch has been passed and it is all up to the children now, but neglects to define it. Just outside the kitchen, I frown at the hearty handshake of an elderly Baptist minister, high in the councils of one of the older civil rights organizations, a man who, I am pretty sure, actually testified against my father’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. And now has the temerity to pretend to mourn with us. The handshake seems interminable, his ancient fingertips keep moving on my flesh, and I finally realize that he is trying to impart the secret hailing sign of some fraternity, not knowing, perhaps, that rejecting the overtures of such groups was one of my very few acts of rebellion against my parents’ way of life-the life, I often think, from which Kimmer, my fellow rebel, rescued me. Nor is it my pleasure to enlighten him. I simply want to escape his insincere unctuousness, and I can feel the veil of red about to return. He refuses to let go. He is talking about how close he and my father were in the past. How sorry he is about the way things turned out. I am about to respond with something rather un-Christian, when all at once a whirlwind of small bodies hurricanes past, nearly knocking us both to the floor; the five Denton children, ages four through twelve, are rushing in their leaderless headlong way to trash some other area of the house. They number Malcolm, Marshall, the twins Martin and Martina, and the baby, Marcus. Mariah, I know, is even now hunting desperately for a name for the very obvious sixth little Denton, due in late February or early March, but is at a loss to find a way to honor both our history and her pattern. This latest pregnancy is in any case a scandal, at least within the four walls of my house. A year ago, when she was forty-two, Mariah confided to my astonished wife that she wanted to bear one more child, which Kimmer denounced, to my private ear, as an irresponsible waste and self-indulgence: for Kimmer, like my father, values most those who differ from her least.

(II)

Ours is an old family, which, among people of our color, is a reference less to social than to legal status. Ancestors of ours were free and earning a living when most members of the darker nation were in chains. Not all of our ancestors were free, of course, but some, and the family does not dwell on the others: we have buried that bit of historical memory as effectively as the rest of America has buried the larger crime. And, like good Americans, we not only forgive the crime of chattel slavery but celebrate the criminals. My older brother is named for a particular forebear, Waldo Addison, often viewed as our patriarch, a freed slave who, in freedom, owned slaves of his own until forced to flee northward in the 1830s, after Nat Turner’s rebellion led the Commonwealth of Virginia to rethink the status of the free negroes-small “n”-as they were then called. He stopped briefly in Washington, D.C., where he lived in the mosquito-infested slum known as George Town, more briefly still in Pennsylvania, and at last wound up in Buffalo, where he made the transition from farmer to barge worker. What became of Waldo’s six slaves family history does not reveal. We do, however, know something of the man himself. Grandfather Waldo, as my father liked to call him, became involved in the abolitionist movement. Grandfather Waldo knew Frederick Douglass, my father always said, although it is difficult to imagine that they were friends, or, indeed, that they had much in common, aside from the fact that both had been enslaved. My father liked to speculate about Grandfather Waldo’s possible involvement in the underground railroad-his work on the lakes and canals made it logical, my father would say, bright-eyed with hope. As my father aged, the speculation hardened into fact, and we would sit out on the wraparound porch of the Vineyard house in the evening cool, sipping pink lemonade and swatting away mosquitoes, while he described Waldo’s unlikely exploits as though he had seen them himself: the risks he ran, the schemes he hatched, the credit he deserved. But there was never any evidence. What few facts we have suggest that Grandfather Waldo was a drunken, thieving, self-interested scoundrel. Waldo’s four sons, as far as we know, were all scoundrels too, and his lovely daughter Abigail married another, but it was her no-good husband, a textile worker in Connecticut, who gave us the family name. Abigail’s only son was a preacher, and his eldest son a college professor, and his second son was my father, who has been many things, including, at his highest, a federal judge, the close confidant of two Presidents, and, almost, a Justice of the Supreme Court; and, at his lowest, the unindicted but publicly humiliated target (Mariah, who inclines toward melodrama, says victim) of investigations by every newspaper and television network in the country, to say nothing of two grand juries and three congressional committees.

And now he is dead. Death is an important test for families as old and, I might say, as haughty as ours: repressing our anguish is as natural as driving German cars, participating in the Boule, vacationing in Oak Bluffs, and making money. My father would not have wanted tears. He always preached leaving the past in the past- drawing a line, he called it. You draw a line and you put yourself on one side of the line and the past on the other. My father had many of these little epigrams; in the proper mood, he would recite them in his ponderous way as though expecting us to take notes. My siblings and I eventually learned not to go to him with our problems, for all we would ever receive in return were his stern face and heavy voice as he lectured us on life, or law, or love… especially love, for he and our mother had one of the great marriages, and he imagined himself, in consequence, one of the great experts. Nobody can resist temptation all the time, the Judge warned me once, when he thought, wrongly, that I was contemplating an affair with my future wife’s sister. The trick, Talcott, is to avoid it. Not a particularly profound or original insight, of course, but my father, with his heavy judicial mien, could make the most mundane and obvious points sound like the wisdom of the ages.

Talcott, I should explain, is my given name-not Misha. My parents selected it to honor my mother’s father, whom they expected to leave us money in consequence, which he dutifully did; but I have hated it ever since I was old enough to be teased by schoolmates, a very long time. Although my parents forbade the use of diminutives, friends and siblings mercifully shortened my name to Tal. But my closest comrades call me Misha, which, you will correctly have guessed, is the Anglicized version of a Russian name, the diminutive for Mikhail, which has been, from time to time, one of my other sobriquets. I am not Russian. I speak no Russian. And my parents did not give me a Russian name, for, other than a few dedicated Communists in the thirties and forties, what black parents ever did? But I have my reasons for preferring Misha, even though my father hated it.

Or perhaps because he did.

For my father, like most fathers, had that effect on us too: my siblings and I have all been defined in part by our rebellion against his autocratic rule. And, like most rebels, we often fail to see how much we have come to resemble the very thing we pretend to loathe.

(III)

I need a break.

To please Mariah, I spend a few minutes in the kitchen with the tearful Sally, who was raised by my father’s only brother, my late Uncle Derek, whom the Judge abhorred for his politics. She is a cousin by marriage, not blood: she was the daughter of Derek’s second wife, Thera, and her first husband, but Sally refers to Derek as her father. Sally has become a pudgy, lonely woman, with unhappy doe eyes and wildly styled hair; comforting her now, I see nothing of the daring, aggressive teenager who was, long ago, Addison’s secret lover. These days, Sally works on Capitol Hill for some unknown subcommittee, a job she secured through my father’s waning influence when she could hold no other. Sally, who has had her troubles, focuses every conversation, within seconds of its beginning, on how badly she has been treated by every person she has ever known. She wears dresses in alarming floral patterns, always too tight, and, although she no longer drinks the way she used to, Kimmer reports seeing her slip pills by the handful from the canvas tote bag she carries everywhere. She has the bag with her now. Patting Sally’s broad back, I try to measure her intake of whatever she is hiding by the slurring of her voice. I remind myself that she was once warm and vivacious and funny. I accept a slurpy kiss a little too close to my lips, and at last escape to the foyer. I hear Alma’s wheezy cackle but do not turn. I notice Howard again, still doing business, the red nimbus still flashing from his neck. I need to escape, but Mariah will be furious if I leave the house, and I have never been very good at bearing the fury of women. I yearn for the simple rejuvenating pleasure of chess, perhaps played online, using the laptop I left back at the Madisons’.

But, for now, simple privacy will have to do.

I slip into the small room that was once my father’s study, since converted to a small library, with low cherrywood bookshelves along two walls and, beneath the window, a tiny antique desk with a two-line telephone. The paneling is cherry too, decorated not with self-congratulatory photographs (those are upstairs) but with a handful of small tasteful drawings by unknown artists, along with an original Larry Johnson watercolor-not his best-and a tiny but very nice Miro sketch, a recent gift to the Judge from some conservative millionaire. I wonder, for a greedy moment, which of the children gets the Miro, but I suppose it stays with the house.

“As the rich get richer,” I whisper uncharitably.

I close the door and sit at the desk. On the bookshelves behind the red leather swivel chair are dozens of scrapbooks, some fancy, some cheap, all bulging with photographs, for my mother was a meticulous chronicler of the family’s life. I pull one out at random and discover a spread of Addison’s baby pictures. A second is of Abby. The page to which it falls open displays her around age ten in Little League uniform, the cap tipped back jauntily on her head, a bat on her shoulder: my parents had to threaten to sue, I remember, before she was allowed to play. The old days. My father, no matter what he was doing, never missed a game. The Judge used to talk about those old days, fondly: the way it was before, he would call it, in odd nostalgic moments, meaning, before Abby died. Nevertheless, he drew his line, put the past in the past, and moved on.

I keep leafing through the albums. A third is full of graduation pictures-mine, Mariah’s, Addison’s, from all levels of our education-along with shots of Mariah and Addison receiving various awards. Especially Addison. None of me, but I have never won anything. Forcing a smile, I keep flipping pages. Most of the book is empty. Space for shots of the grandchildren, perhaps. I put the album away. The next one has the most attractive binder, soft old leather stained a dark blue, and is full of newspaper clippings, all of which seem to be about-

Oh, no.

I close the book quickly and close my eyes slowly and see my father rushing out of the house late on a spring evening, commanding my mother to stay put, Claire, just stay put, we have three other children to worry about, I’ll call you from the hospital! And, later still, my mother answering the phone on the kitchen wall, her hand trembling, then moaning in maternal horror and sagging against the counter, before turning businesslike and distant, which both my parents could do at a snap. I was the lone witness to this display. Mariah and Addison were away at college and Abby was out somewhere; at fifteen, Abby seemed always to be out somewhere, quarreling constantly with our parents. My mother made me dress and hurried me over to a neighbor’s house, even though, at close to seventeen years of age, I was more than capable of staying home unguarded. She left me with quick, desperate kisses, vanishing in the other car on unexplained but obviously tragic business. It was after midnight when my father came to pick me up and sat me down in the living room at Shepard Street and told me in a quivering voice, quite far from his usual radio-announcer tone, that Abby was dead.

From the day of her funeral until the day he died, my father hardly mentioned Abby’s name.

But he kept a scrapbook. A decidedly weird scrapbook I open my eyes once more and leaf through the pages.

And notice at once that something is wrong.

Only the first four clippings have anything to do with Abby. The news story of her death. The formal obituary. A follow-up a week later informing readers that the police had no leads. Another article two months further on reporting the same joyless tidings.

My father was angry in those days, I remember. He was angry all the time. And he began to drink. Alone, the way prominent alcoholics do, locked in this very room. Perhaps poring over this very scrapbook.

I turn the page. The next clipping, dated a few months later, records the death of a small child in a hit-and-run accident in Maryland. I shudder. The following page carries another clipping: a young seminary student, also a hit-and-run victim. I turn and turn. The contents chill me. Page after page of newspaper stories about innocent people killed by hit-and-run drivers, all over the United States. Two, almost three years of them. An elderly woman leaving a supermarket in a small town. A police officer directing traffic in a big city. A rich, politically connected college student, her convertible crushed by a tractor-trailer. A news reporter smashed by a station wagon while changing a flat on a busy highway. A high-school football coach, mangled by a taxi. An impoverished mother of six, a famous writer, a bank clerk, a heart surgeon, a wanted burglar, a teenager on her way to a babysitting job, the son of a prominent politician, a potpourri of American tragedy. Some of the stories bear the inky stamps of the various clipping services that used to send you articles from around the country on a subject of your choice, back before online research; many are no more than tiny one-paragraph items from the Post and the old Star; and a few, very few, are marked with faded blue asterisks and, scribbled in the margins, dates, usually much later than the publication dates of the stories themselves. By working backward from other stories in the album, I soon figure out that the asterisks mark the hit-and-runs in which the driver who did the hitting and running was eventually caught. And a few of the articles about arrests are further annotated with brief, angry notes in my father’s crabbed handwriting: I hope they fry the bastard, or You’d better have a good lawyer, my friend, or At least somebody’s parents got justice.

I flip quickly to the back of the book. The collection ends in the very late seventies, about the time the Judge’s drinking stopped. Makes sense. But nothing else does.

This is not the nostalgic scrapbook of a parent who misses a child; this is the product of a mind obsessed. It strikes me as diabolical in the traditional Christian sense, a thing of the devil. The air around the book seems thick with an aura of mental corruption, as though haunted by the spirit of the madman who assembled it… or the spirit that possessed him to do so. I quickly slide the binder back into its place, fearing that somehow it might infect me with its gleeful lunacy. Odd that it should be sitting here this way, mixed in with the happier memories. Insanity of this sort, even if temporary, is precisely what few children want to know about their parents… and what few parents want their children to know about. The Garlands have many little secrets, and this is among them: when Abby died, my father went a little nuts, and then he got better.

I close my eyes again and sink into the chair. He got better. That is the important thing. He got better. The man we are burying next week is not the man who sat here in this ugly little room, drinking himself insensible night after night, flipping through the pages of this sick scrapbook, terrorizing the family not with anger or violence but with the awful silence of emotional destitution.

He got better.

And yet my fanatically private father preserved this album, the record of his short-lived insanity, where any visitor to the house might blunder across it. I can readily believe that the Judge would have created the scrapbook during his madness, but it seems reckless, out of character, to have held on to it in the years since. All other evidence was discarded years ago. There are, for example, no liquor bottles in the house. The book, however, survives, right on the shelf. Fortunately for my father’s reputation, nobody happened upon the book at the time that the Senate Judiciary Committee was holding its hearings on his-

The door to the little room snaps open. Sally is standing there in her unreasonably tight gray dress, her substantial chest heaving, a rapturous yet somehow helpless smile shining through the tears. She looks slightly confused, as though surprised to find me the first place she looks. Addison has called, she finally announces. Her eyes are alight, ecstatic, sharing her joy. He is on his way, Sally adds happily, oblivious to the possibility that others might not be as thrilled as she. He will be here no later than tomorrow. I blink my eyes, struggling for focus. She sounds like a character out of Beckett. I am on my feet, nodding, blocking the bookcase with my body, absurdly worried that she might get a look at the Judge’s mad scrapbook. Addison is coming, she repeats. Transformed by this news, she has achieved a sudden allure. He will be here soon, Sally assures me. Very soon.

From her deliriously fawning tone, she might be announcing the pending arrival of the Messiah. Although, if you ask most of my brother’s many women, they would probably describe him as very much the other thing.

CHAPTER 3

THE WHITE KITCHEN

(I)

The news of the Judge’s death reached us several times in the years before the event actually occurred. It is not that he was ill; he was, as a rule, so vigorous that one tended to forget his wavering health, which is why the heart attack that at last cut him down was, at first, so difficult to credit. It is simply that he led the sort of life that generated rumor. People disliked my father, intensely, and he returned the favor. They spread stories of his death because they prayed the stories were true. To his enemies-they were legion, a fact in which he gloried-my father was a plague, and rumors of a cure always raise hopes in those who suffer, or love those who do. And, in this case, some of those my father plagued were not people but causes, which, in America, can always count their lovers in the millions, unlike individual people, who die unloved every day. Not one of his enemies but hated my father, and not one but spread the stories. Self-styled friends would call. They were always whispering how sorry they were. They had heard, they would say, about my father’s heart attack while promoting his latest book up in Boston. Or his stroke while taping a television interview out in Cincinnati. Except that there would not have been one: he would be alive and well in San Antonio, speaking to the convention of some conservative political action committee-the Rightpacs, Kimmer calls them. But, oh, the gleeful rumors of his demise! My mother hated the rumors, not for the heartache, she said, but for the humiliation-there were standards, after all. But not in the rumor mill. Waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket, just before my son Bentley was born, I was astonished to read on the cover of one of the more imaginative tabloids, just beneath the weekly Whitney Houston story (TALKS CANDIDLY ABOUT HER HEARTBREAK) and just above the latest way to lose as much weight as you want without diet or exercise (A MIRACLE DOCTORS WON’T TELL YOU), the gladsome tidings that the Mafia had put out a contract on my father, because of his cooperation with federal prosecutors-although, when Kimmer made me go back to the store and buy it and I read the whole thing, all one hundred fifty words, I noticed a pointed lack of detail as to what my father could possibly have to cooperate with prosecutors about, or what he might know about the Mafia that would be so dangerous. I called Mrs. Rose, the Judge’s longsuffering assistant, and finally caught up with him on the road in Seattle. He took the opportunity to warn me yet again on the insidiousness of his enemies.

“They will do anything, Talcott, anything to destroy me,” he announced in the oracular tone he tended to adopt when discussing those who disliked him. He repeated the word a third time, in case my hearing was off: “Anything.”

Including, I noted while leafing through the pessimistic pages of The Nation a few years back, accuse him of paranoia. Or was it megalomania? Anyway, my father was sure they were out to get him, and my sister was sure he was right. When the Judge skipped Bentley’s christening three years ago, worried the press might be there, Mariah defended him, pointing out that he had missed half the baptisms of her children-no difficult feat, given the numbers-but by then she and I were barely speaking anyway.

Once a false story of my father’s demise made the real papers-not the supermarket tabloids, but the Washington Post, which killed him on a wintry morning in a commuter plane crash in Virginia, one among a dozen victims, his apparent presence on board noted poignantly, but also coyly: CONTROVERSIAL FORMER JUDGE FEARED DEAD IN CRASH is what the headline said. The irony was plain to the most casual follower of current events, because what people feared was not my father dead but my father alive; and because of the unhappy turning his career took, which was also, my father liked to say, the fault of the Post and “its ilk.” Leftwing muckrakers, my father called them in his well-remunerated speeches to the Rightpacs, who were pleased to hear this angry, articulate black lawyer blaming the media for his resignation from the federal bench not long after the collapse of his anticipated elevation to the Supreme Court, where, his conservative fans loved to remind his liberal critics, he had argued and won two key desegregation cases in the sixties. Oh, but he could be confounding! Which is why Mariah was certain that there were smiles of relief all along the Cambridge-Washington axis (where she picked up that hackneyed phrase I will never know, but I suspect it was from Addison, who could always stand her) when the early editions of the Post carried the crash story and a couple of the more careless news-radio stations repeated it. The plague, it seemed for a glorious instant, was at an end. But my wily father was not on board. Although his name was on the manifest and he had checked in, he had prudently chosen that occasion to argue via long distance with my mother, then busily dying at the Vineyard house, over the cost of some repairs to the gutters, and the discussion grew sufficiently extended that he missed the flight. The airline got its passenger list wrong, this being back in the days when it was still possible to do such a thing. “That’s how much she loved me,” the Judge told us in a drunken ramble the night of Claire Garland’s funeral. He cried, too, which none of us had seen before-only Addison even claimed to have seen him take a drink since the bad period just after Abby died-and Mariah slapped my face when, the very next day, I pointed out to her that, in the six years of my mother’s illness, my father spent as much time on the road as he did at her bedside. “So what?” my sister demanded as I groped for a suitable riposte to a palm across the cheek-a question, once I thought about it, that I was ill-prepared to answer.

And perhaps I deserved the rebuke, for the Judge, despite his coldness toward most of the world, including, usually, his children, was never anything but tender and affectionate with our mother. Even when my father was a practicing lawyer, before the move to government service, he was constantly leaving meetings with clients to take calls from his Claire. Later, on the Securities and Exchange Commission and then on the bench, he would sometimes leave litigants waiting while he chatted with his wife, who seemed to take such treatment as her due. He smiled for her in a natural delight that told the world how grateful he was for the day Claire Morrow said yes; at least until Abby died, after which he did not do much smiling for a while. Once a semblance of family stability was re-established, my parents used to take evening walks along Shepard Street, holding hands.

Of course, my father was on the road constantly. At the time of his death, he liked to call himself just another Washington lawyer, which meant that when he wanted to reach me he would have Mrs. Rose place the call, his own time being too precious, and, when I came on the line, he would invariably put me on the speakerphone, perhaps to leave his hands free for other work. Mrs. Rose told me once that I should not be upset: he put everybody on the speakerphone, treating it as though it had just been invented. Indeed, everything that he was doing was new to him. He was, formally, of counsel to the law firm of Corcoran amp; Klein- of counsel being a term of art covering a multitude of awkward relationships, from the retired partner who no longer does any lawyering to the out-of-work bureaucrat trying to bring in enough business to earn a full partnership to the go-go consultant looking for a respectable place to hang a shingle. In my father’s case, the firm offered a veneer of gentility and a place to take his messages, but little more. He saw few clients. He practiced no law. He wrote books, went on nationwide speaking tours, and, when he needed a rest, showed up on Nightline and Crossfire and Imus to beguile the evil armies of the left. Indeed, he was the perfect talk-show guest: he was willing to say nearly anything about nearly anybody, and he would call anyone who argued with him the most erudite and puzzling names. (The censors would have a terrible time when he used words like wittol and pettifoggery, and he was once bleeped out on one of the radio talk shows for describing a particular candidate’s shift to the right during the Republican presidential primaries as an act of ecdysis.) Oh, yes, people hated him, and he reveled in their enmity.

Mariah, naturally, made more of all this than I did. I have always thought that the far left and far right need each other, desperately, for if either one were to vanish the other would lose its reason to exist, a conviction that has freshened in me from year to year, as each grows ever more vehement in its search for somebody to hate. Now and then, I even wondered aloud to Kimmer-I would say it to no one else-whether my father manufactured half his political views in order to keep his face on television, his enemies at his heels, and his speaking fees in the range of half a million dollars a year. But Mariah, having been in her time both philosophy major and investigative journalist, sees oppositions as real; the Judge and his enemies, she would say, were playing out the great ideological debates of the era. It was the culture war, she would insist, that brought him down. I thought this proposition quite silly, and came to think, after years of reading about it, that the scandal-mongers who drove him from the bench might have had a point; and I made the mistake of saying this, too, on the telephone to Mariah, not long after Bob Woodward published his best-selling book about the case. The book, I told her, was pretty convincing: the Judge was not a victim but a perjurer.

Aghast at this unexpected break in the family ranks, even in private, Mariah swore in my presence for what I am fairly certain was the first time in our mutual lives. I asked her whether she had actually read the book, and she responded that she had no time for such trash, although trash was not the word she actually selected. She had called, you should understand, because she wanted the entire family-that is, the three children-to write a joint letter to the Times as a protest against its favorable review of the Woodward book. She still had friends there who would see that it was published, she said. I declined and told her why. She told me that I had to do it, that it was my duty. I mumbled something about letting sleeping dogs lie. She told me that I never did anything she wanted me to do, dredging up a story I myself had forgotten about some lonely friend of hers she begged me to ask out when I was in college. Mariah said I should, just once, stand up for her. She said she had never done anything to deserve being treated the way I treated her. I thought about my Willie Mays baseball card, but decided not to mention it. Instead, a bit irritated, I am afraid I called her immature-no, tell the truth, the term I used was spoiled brat -and Mariah, after a heavy pause, answered with what I considered an unprovoked assault on my wife, which began, “Speaking of lying down with bratty dogs, how’s your bitch?” My sister can play the dozens with anybody, and certainly with me, having honed her skills during her long and passionate membership in a rather exclusive and notoriously catty black sorority. When I suggested huffily that it was inappropriate for her to talk about Kimmer in those terms-very well, I put it a bit more strongly than that-Mariah asked angrily whether I ever raised the same objection to the things she knew my wife said about her. As I floundered in search of an answer, she added that blood was thicker than water, that this was something I owed to the family. And when I tried to climb up on my pedagogical high horse, proposing that my higher duty was to truth, she asked me why in that case I didn’t just take out a full-page ad in the paper: MY FATHER IS GUILTY AND MY WIFE IS UNFAITHFUL. But that is how badly we always get along. So, when Mariah pulls me aside in the grim family-filled foyer at Shepard Street and whispers that she has to talk to me later on in private, I assume she wants to discuss the remaining details of the funeral, for what else have we two lifelong enemies left to talk about? But I am wrong: what my sister wants to tell me is the name of the man who murdered our father.

(II)

I laugh when Mariah tells me. I confess it freely, if guiltily. It is terrible of me, but I do it anyway. Perhaps it is a matter of exhaustion. We have no time together until after midnight, when we at last sit down at the kitchen table drinking hot cocoa, me still in my tie, my sister, fresh from the shower, in a fluffy blue robe. Howard and the children and some subset of the numberless cousins are asleep, crammed into various corners of the grand old house. The kitchen, which my father recently had redone, is sparkling white; the counters, the appliances, the walls, the curtains, the table, everything the same sheeny white. At night, with all the lights on, the reflections hurt my eyes, lending an air of insanity to what is already surreal.

“What exactly are you laughing at?” Mariah demands, rearing back from the table. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You think Jack Ziegler killed Dad?” I splutter, still not quite able to get my mind around it. “Uncle Jack? What for?”

“You know what for! And don’t call him Uncle Jack!”

I shake my head, trying to be gentle, wishing Addison would arrive after all, because he is far more patient with Mariah than I will ever be. A moment ago, before uttering the name, my sister was nervous, maybe even frightened. Now she is furious. So I guess you could say I have at least improved her mood.

“No, I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t even know what makes you think somebody killed him. He had a heart attack, remember?”

“Why would he suddenly have a heart attack now?”

“That’s how they are. They’re sudden.” My impatience is making me cruel, and I try to force myself to slow down. My sister is no fool, often discerning things that others miss. Mariah was the subject of a small piece in Ebony magazine back in the mid-1980s, when, as a twenty-six-year-old reporter at the New York Times, she achieved a Pulitzer nomination for a series of stories about the diverse lives of children who eat in soup kitchens. But she suddenly quit her job not long after, when the paper began investigating my father in earnest. Although Mariah called it a protest, the truth is that she left the workforce entirely and, together with her very new husband, moved to a lovely old colonial in Darien-the first of three, each larger than the last-promising to devote all her time to her children, and in this way endeared herself to our mother, who believed to the day she died that women belong in the home. Darien is not that far from Elm Harbor, but these days Mariah and I see each other twice a year, if unlucky. It is not so much that we do not love each other, I think, as that we do not quite like each other. I resolve, for perhaps the hundredth time, to do better by my sister. “Besides,” I add, softly, “he wasn’t exactly young.”

“Seventy isn’t old. Not any more.”

“Still, he did have a heart attack. The hospital said so.”

“Oh, Tal,” she sighs, flapping a hand at me and feigning world-weariness, “there are so many drugs that can cause heart attacks. I used to work the police beat, remember? This is my area. And it’s really hard to catch this stuff in the autopsy. I mean, you are really so innocent.”

I decide to give that one a miss, especially since Kimmer is constantly saying the same thing about me, for different reasons. I offer an olive branch: “Okay, okay. So why would Uncle Jack want to kill him?”

“To shut him up,” she says heavily, then stops and draws in her breath so suddenly that I cast a quick look over my shoulder, to see whether Jack Ziegler, the family bogeyman, might be peering in the window. I see only my mother’s collection of crystal paperweights, gathered from countries all over the world, lined up on the sill like shiny eggs with transparent shells, and, in the glass of the window, my own reflection mocking me: an exhausted, sagging Talcott Garland, looking less like a law professor in his unfashionable horn-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair and crooked tie than like a child wishing it would all be over. I turn back to look at my sister. Like Mallory Corcoran, our “Uncle Mal,” the man we call Uncle Jack is not related to us by blood or marriage. The family bestowed upon these white friends of my father honorary titles when they became godparents-Uncle Mal to Mariah, Uncle Jack to Abby-but, unlike Uncle Mal, Jack Ziegler had far more to do with my father’s destruction than with his redemption.

“Shut him up about what?” I ask softly, because it has always been Mariah’s position that my father knew nothing about Uncle Jack’s more questionable activities, that the suggestion of any business connection between the two of them was no more than a white-liberal plot against a brilliant and therefore dangerous black conservative. Maybe that is why Mariah stops: she sees the trap into which her own reasoning leads.

“I don’t know,” she mutters, looking down and clutching her mug with a mother’s fierce protectiveness.

This might be a good moment to let my sister’s fantasy drop, but, having listened this far, I decide that it is my duty to help her see how nutty an idea it is. “Then what makes you think Uncle Jack had anything to do with it?”

“Ever since the hearings, he’s been waiting for the right moment. You know he has, Tal. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it!”

I ask a lawyer’s question. “What would make this the right moment?”

“I don’t know, Tal. But I know I’m right.”

Again: “Do we have any actual evidence?”

She shakes her head. “Not yet. But you could help me, Tal. You’re a lawyer, I’m… I used to be a journalist. We could, you know, investigate it together. Look for proof.”

I frown slightly. Mariah has always been both spontaneous and obsessive, and talking her out of her latest impulse will not be easy. “Well, we would need a reason first.”

“Jack Ziegler is a murderer. How’s that for a reason?”

“Even assuming that’s true…”

“It’s not an assumption.” Her eyes flash with fresh fury. “How can you defend a man like that?”

“I’m not defending anyone.” I do not want to pick a fight, so I answer her challenge with another: “So, do you have a plan in mind? Do you want to call Uncle Mal?”

Mariah is trapped and she knows it. She does not really want an investigation, and knows as well as I do that nothing would change, that the heart attack would still be a heart attack, that she would be made to look a fool. She cannot call Mallory Corcoran, one of the most powerful lawyers in the city, and demand, on nothing but hope, that he shake up the world for her. Mariah refuses to look at me, scowling instead in the direction of the gleaming white SubZero refrigerator, already decorated, through some domestic alchemy, with the inevitable pictures of dogs and trees and ships, crudely drawn in crayon by her younger children-the sort of sentimental bric-a-brac that the Judge would never have tolerated.

“I don’t know,” Mariah mumbles, the lines of exhaustion plain on her stubborn face.

“Well, if-”

“I don’t know what to do.” She shakes her head slowly, her gaze on the white table between us. And this tiny chink in Mariah’s emotional armor offers me a bright, sad insight into the life she leads all day as Howard rides off to far provinces to slay financial dragons for the clients, and the profits, of Goldman Sachs. The pictures on the refrigerator are the fruits of my sister’s frantic efforts yesterday to keep her children busy as she went about the debilitating business of planning, virtually alone, a funeral service for the father she spent four decades trying unsuccessfully to please.

“I’m so tired,” Mariah declares, a rare admission of weakness. I look away for a moment, not wanting her to see how these three simple words have touched me, not even wanting to acknowledge the commonality. The truth is that Mariah and Addison and I always seem to be exhausted. The scandal that destroyed our father’s career somehow energized him for a new one but left his family debilitated. We children have never quite recovered.

“You’ve been working hard.”

“Don’t patronize me, Tal.” Her tone is matter-of-fact, but her eyes flash again, and I know she has been offended by a nuance that was not even there. “You’re not taking me seriously.”

“I am, but…”

“Take me seriously!”

My sister is practicing her best glare. The weariness is gone. The confusion is gone. I remember reading in college that social psychologists believe anger is functional, that it builds self-confidence and even creativity. Well, I don’t know about the creative part, but Mariah, angry at me as usual, is suddenly as confident as ever.

“Okay,” I offer, “okay, I’m sorry.” My sister waits, giving nothing. She wants me to make the move, saying something to show that I am taking her crazy idea seriously. So I formulate a serious question:

“What can I do to help?” Leaving open the matter of what exactly I am offering to help with.

Mariah shakes her head, starts to speak, then shrugs. To my surprise, tears begin a slow course down her cheeks.

“Hey,” I say. I almost reach out to brush them away, then remember the foyer and decide to sit still. “Hey, kid, it’s okay. It is.”

“No, it isn’t okay,” Mariah sobs, making a fist with her dainty hand and striking the table with considerable force. “I don’t think. .. I don’t think it will ever be okay.”

“I miss him too,” I say, which is quite possibly a lie, but is also, I hope, the right thing to say.

Crying openly now, Mariah buries her face in her hands, still shaking her head. And still I dare not touch her.

“It’s okay,” I say again.

My sister lifts her head. In her grief and despair, she has attained a truly haunting beauty, as though pain has freed her from mere mortal concerns.

“Jack Ziegler is a monster,” she says shortly. Well, that at least is true, even if only a fraction of the wicked things the papers say about him ever happened. But it is also true that he has been tried and acquitted at least three times, including once for murder, and, as far as I know, continues to live up in Aspen, Colorado, fabulously wealthy and as safe from the world’s law-enforcement authorities as the Constitution of the United States can make him.

“Mariah,” I say, still softly, “I don’t think anybody in the family has seen Uncle Jack in more than ten years. Not since… well, you know.”

“That’s not true,” she says tonelessly. “Daddy saw him last week. They had dinner.”

For a moment, I can think of nothing to say. I find myself wondering how she can know who the Judge saw and when. I almost embarrass myself by raising this question, but Mariah saves me:

“Daddy told me. I talked to him. To Daddy. He called me two days. .. two days, uh, before…”

She trails off and turns away, because it is not the habit of our family to share our deepest pains, even to each other. She covers her eyes. I consider walking around the table, crouching next to my sister, slipping my arms around her, offering what physical comfort I can, maybe even telling her that the Judge telephoned me, too, although, in good Garland fashion, I was too busy to call him back. I envision the scene, her response, her joy, her fresh tears: Tal, Tal, oh, it’s so good to be friends again! But that is not who I am, still less who Mariah is, so, instead, I sit still, preserving my poker face, wondering whether any reporters have gotten hold of the story, which would only be a fresh disaster. I can see the headlines now:

DISGRACED JUDGE MET WITH ACCUSED MURDERER DAYS BEFORE HIS DEATH. I nearly shudder. The conspiracy theorists, for whom no famous death ever flows from natural causes, have already started to work, granted time on the wilder radio talk shows (“Rats,” Kimmer calls them, who has a way with acronyms) to explain why the heart attack that felled my father is necessarily a lie. I have scarcely noticed their antics, but now, imagining what some of the callers might say if they heard about the Judge’s meeting with Uncle Jack, I begin to understand the strange turnings of my sister’s paranoia. Then Mariah makes it worse.

“That isn’t all,” she goes on in the same flat voice, her eyes on something beyond the room. “I talked to him last night. To Uncle Jack.”

“Last night? He called? Here?” I should be proud of myself, managing to ask three stupid questions where most people could squeeze in only one.

“Yes. And he gave me the creeps.”

Now it is my turn to be set back. Far back. Again, I search for something to say, settling at last on the obvious.

“Okay, so what did he want?”

“He offered his condolences. But mostly he wanted to talk about you.”

“About me? What about me?”

Mariah pauses, and she seems to wrestle with her own instincts. “He said you were the only one Daddy would trust,” she explains at last. “The only one who would know about the arrangements Daddy had made for his death. That was what he kept saying. That he needed to know the arrangements.” The tears are flowing again. “I told him that the funeral was Tuesday, I told him where, but he-he said those weren’t the arrangements he meant. He said he needed to know about the other arrangements. And he said you would probably know. He kept on saying it. Tal, what was he talking about?”

“I don’t have any idea,” I admit. “If he wanted to talk to me, why didn’t he call me?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is too weird.” I remember Just Alma. He had plans for you, Talcott. That’s the way your daddy wanted it. Is this what Alma was talking about? “Just too weird.”

Something in my tone gets a rise out of my sister, as something in my tone often does. “Are you sure you don’t have any idea, Tal? About what Jack Ziegler might have wanted?”

“How would I know?”

“I don’t know how you’d know. That’s what I’m wondering.” As Mariah glares her distrust, I feel, rising between us, the shade of our lifelong argument, Mariah’s sense that I am never there for her, and mine that she is far too demanding. But surely she does not believe that I would somehow be involved with… with somebody like Jack Ziegler…

“Mariah, I’m telling you, I don’t have the slightest idea what this is all about. I don’t even know the last time I heard from… from Jack Ziegler.”

She flips a hand, brushing this away, but makes no verbal response. She is not saying she trusts me; she is signaling a willingness to call a truce.

“So, all he asked about was… arrangements?”

“Pretty much. Oh, and he also said he would probably see us at the funeral.”

“Oh, boy,” I mutter, in an awful stab at sarcasm, wondering if there is some way to keep him out. “We can all look forward to that.”

“He scares me,” says Mariah, her earlier speculations about Uncle Jack evidently off the table for now, although certainly not forgotten. Then she squeezes my fingers. I look down in surprise: we have linked hands, but I cannot remember just when.

“He scares me, too,” I say. Which is, I am pretty sure, the most honest sentence I have uttered all day.

CHAPTER 4

THE CHARMER

(I)

It was the Judge’s occasional hope to die before Richard Nixon, who would then be obliged-so my father reasoned-to attend his funeral, and perhaps even to say a few words. President Nixon, you might say, helped to create my father, discovering him as an unknown trial judge with a moderately conservative bent, inviting him to the White House often, and, at last, appointing him to the United States Court of Appeals, where, a bit over a decade later, Ronald Reagan discovered him all over again, and nearly managed what the newspapers of the moment called a “diversity double” at the Supreme Court: Reagan, struggling against his hard-won image as the savior of the nation’s white males, would appoint the Judge and, at a stroke, double the number of black Justices and, at the same time, become the first President to appoint two Justices who were not white males. Reagan’s grab at history failed, and my father, who like many successful people never quite untangled ambition from principle, refused to forgive him for the sin of giving up on the nomination.

But my father’s attitude toward Nixon was otherwise. The Judge returned Nixon’s favor, still insisting a quarter-century after the only presidential resignation in our history that it was a cabal of vengeful liberals, not Nixon’s own venality, that drove the man from office. The Judge saw in Nixon’s fall remarkable parallels to his own, and loved to point them out to his eager lecture audiences: two enlightened, thoughtful conservatives, one white, one black, each of whom, on the verge of making history, had his career destroyed by the ruthless forces of the left. Or something like that: I heard that particular stump speech only twice, and it turned my stomach both times-not for ideological reasons or because of its patent distortion of history but because of its gruesome, un-Garland-like bath of self-pity.

Alas, my father did not achieve his dream. It was he who attended Nixon’s funeral, not the other way around. The Judge flew off to California, hoping, on what evidence I can scarcely imagine, for an invitation to eulogize his mentor. If you watched the service on television, you know it did not happen. My father’s face was never even visible. He was squeezed into about the fifteenth row, lost among a smattering of former deputy assistant secretaries of no-longer-extant Cabinet departments, some of them convicted felons. Chafing from yet another disappointment, my father hastened home, wondering, no doubt, who of any note would attend his funeral.

Who, indeed? I ponder my father’s morbid question as, tightly clutching the hand of my beautiful wife, I follow the casket down the nave aisle of the Church of Trinity and St. Michael, a drafty granite monstrosity just below Chevy Chase Circle where, nine years ago this December, to the general astonishment of our families and friends, Kimmer and I were married. Most, I might add, are even more astonished that we are married still, for our tumultuous mutuality has been marked by many false beginnings.

Who, indeed? We children are following the casket. Addison, whose creaky eulogy a few minutes ago displayed all the same saccharine religiosity of his radio call-in show, is flanked, in defiance of etiquette, by his girlfriend of the moment. Mariah is ahead of me, her husband, Howard, adoring at her side, some subset of her children trailing in her wake, the rest of them either back at Shepard Street with the au pair or perhaps wandering the church, climbing somewhere they shouldn’t. Then, remembering that Mariah and her offspring are family, I command my musings away from their unexpectedly spiteful path, for, as I believe I have mentioned, the Judge always counseled his children to avoid unworthy thoughts.

Who, indeed? I wonder, stifling a cough from the choking cloud of incense that is still part of the ritual of traditional Episcopal churches, even if most have forgotten why. Who, indeed? The answer, I suspect, would have been a fresh disappointment to my name-conscious father. Because nobody is here-nobody who would have mattered to the Judge. None of the big liberals who loved him when he was young. None of the big conservatives who loved him when he was old. Just bits and pieces of the family, some longtime friends, a few of his law partners, and a handful of nervous journalists, most of them far too young to know why my father’s name was so notorious, but a few who remember and have come to see for themselves that the monster is really gone.

Mallory Corcoran is here, of course, leading a small phalanx of lawyers from the firm, and the Judge’s quiet assistant, Mrs. Rose, who has been with him since he was on the bench, has also come. The Gold Coast has naturally sent a contingent, mostly yellow-skinned men of my father’s generation, expensively dressed, all anxiously checking their Rolexes, probably to be sure the funeral ends before their tee times. A handful of judges who served with my father are present, including, to my astonishment, one who went on to the Supreme Court, although he is seated near the back, as though worried about being seen. A dozen or so of my father’s old law clerks are scattered about the church, most of them looking more embarrassed than unhappy; but I am grateful nevertheless for their loyalty. I spot my friends Dana Worth and Eddie Dozier, who used to be married to each other, back when Dana thought she might be interested in men, primly seated three rows apart, as befits the angrily divorced. Eddie’s face is set in hard, defiant lines, but the usually tough Dana seems a little weepy. We have fallen away from each other, the three of us, since their marriage collapsed. They met while serving together as law clerks for my father in the early 1980s, and they were the first-and will, I suspect, be the last-married couple ever hired to teach at the law school. Dana, tiny and white, and Eddie, broad and black, were an odd couple to begin with, unfashionably defiant in their right politics, and neither of them ever quite mastered the fine academic art of telling people to their faces something other than what you really think.

Off alone in the far rear corner, I note with surprise, sits the one law clerk I was sure would be among the missing: Greg Haramoto, the earnest yet shy young man whose openly reluctant testimony a decade ago did as much as any interest group to sink my father’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Greg was a surprise witness-a surprise to the Judge, at least-and he repeatedly insisted during his riveting four hours before the television cameras that he did not want to be there at all. But he nailed my father to the wall. Sitting in the hearing room in obvious discomfort, blinking too often behind his thick glasses, Greg told the Senators that Jack Ziegler called my father’s chambers after hours so often that he came to recognize his distinctive voice. He said Jack Ziegler and my father met for lunch. He said Jack Ziegler even stopped by the courthouse at least once, late at night. He said the Judge swore him to silence. He said lots of things, and my father unconvincingly denied some and unwillingly recalled others. The security logs for the federal courthouse, in which the guards record everybody who enters and leaves, did much to refresh the Judge’s recollection.

After the hearings, Greg became a wandering nomad of the legal profession. He quit his post with the general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission, and, despite his excellent academic record at Berkeley, no law firm wanted him, because they all worried about whether a man who was willing to crucify his own boss on national television would keep the confidences of unsavory clients; no corporation would hire him, because most of their CEOs were on my father’s side; and no law school could keep him, because he was too shattered to commit serious scholarship. He tried working as a public defender, to bury his own pain beneath the far more significant pains of those from whom life on the bottom has squeezed any vestige of morality, but his soul was never in it, his clients suffered, and his employer invited him to try something else. Greg Haramoto, who once imagined life at the top of the profession, suddenly had trouble landing a job. The last I heard, he was working in his family’s export-import firm in Los Angeles-a comedown, according to Mariah, that serves him right. Yet here is Greg, his earnest eyes shiny with tears, mourning along with the rest of us, saying goodbye to the man he helped to ruin. In his testimony, he insisted over and over that his admiration for my father had never flagged. But, then, it is often surprisingly easy to destroy the things we love.

My eyes continue to roam. I spot another colleague from the law school, the fastidious Lemaster Carlyle, born in Barbados, who has been on the faculty just two years longer than I but stands many tiers higher in reputation. Lem is a tough little spark-plug of a man, whose beautifully tailored suits hide a well-muscled form, and whose flowery and idiomatic language hides a well-muscled mind. He and I are hardly close friends, and he did not know the Judge at all, so I suppose he came out of solidarity, for he believes in race as an utterly mystical yet deeply personal connective tissue. During the battle over my father’s nomination, Lem, despite his assiduously liberal politics, took the Judge’s side quite publicly: “Two blacks on the Supreme Court are better than one,” was his dubious slogan. Although Lem is not a likable man, I loved him for this conviction long before I met him.

Dana, Lemaster, and I are the only representatives of the law school my father so loved. (Eddie decamped for Texas following the divorce.) Dean Lynda was thoughtful enough to send an enormous wreath, and even the students, to my amazement, sent flowers, two neatly segregated arrangements, one from the black students, one from the white. But flowers are not people, and, even adding in poker buddies, journalists, simple sensation-seekers, bits and pieces of Kimmer’s family, and those who remain from the numberless cousins (age and geography have somewhat thinned their ranks, but they are there, gossiping together in the back of the church), I do not think there are two hundred people present in a church built to hold more than thrice that number. And Jack Ziegler, whatever he was really asking about “arrangements,” is not among them.

(II)

In the family, we do not like to talk about Jack Ziegler. Not any more. He was my father’s college roommate as well as Abby’s godfather, but during the last decade of his life, the Judge could not bear the mention of his old friend’s name. Indeed, it has become an article of conservative faith that my father ultimately lost his bid for the Supreme Court because he chose to honor their lifelong acquaintance; or, more precisely, because he had lunch with Jack Ziegler. Twice. That was the sum total of Greg Haramoto’s testimony, that my father and an old friend met for lunch, and that, later on, the old friend got a tour of the courthouse. So they talked on the phone a few times: nothing sinister about that! Certainly that is the way the case is put by the Judge’s partisans, Mariah ever in the lead, for his nomination to the Supreme Court was sailing along back in 1986, the Senate’s liberal Democrats far too intimidated by his skin color and his qualifications to raise any serious fuss, until the story of the lunches came out. And the background of his luncheon partner. The press immediately swirled into one of its ecstasies of condemnation. Jack Ziegler, a disgraced former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, had somehow managed to become a footnote to half the political scandals in the second half of the twentieth century-or so it often seemed. He testified on some peripheral but quite embarrassing matter before Sam Ervin’s Watergate Committee, his name turned up unflatteringly in an appendix to the Church report on wrongdoing by the CIA, and a book or two have hinted at his distant involvement with the Iran-Contra mess, although he was, by that time, long out of the Agency; even the Warren Commission supposedly took his statement, behind closed doors, for he had, in his days in the field, filed a report from Mexico City on the peculiar activities of one Lee Harvey Oswald. But Jack Ziegler stayed mostly in the shadows, until the disaster of my father’s nomination to the Supreme Court made him famous. Still, if the carrion-eating journalists who looked into his relationship with the Judge managed to find a sinister allegation or two, nothing was ever proved except the lunches, at least against my father: thus ran my sister’s position. And the position of the Rightpacs and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. And, for a while, mine as well. (Addison, unable to see a way to squeeze any money from the contretemps, kept his cards tightly to his chest.)

But the daily stream of fresh allegations proved too weighty. Within days of Greg Haramoto’s appearance, the security logs turned up, and my father’s most fervent supporters in the Senate were diving for cover. A few friends urged him to fight, but the Judge, a team player to the end, gamely asked the White House to withdraw his nomination. To his dismay, President Reagan made no effort to dissuade him. And so the seat on the Court for which my father had spent half a lifetime jockeying went instead to a little-known federal judge and former law professor named Antonin Scalia, who was, in the general relief, confirmed unanimously. “And Nino Scalia is doing a hell of a job,” the Judge would sing gleefully in his lectures to the Rightpacs, a remark which, like many of my father’s, always made me wince, especially because whenever he said it-and he said it often-I would be forced to endure the barbs of my liberal colleagues, Theo Mountain very much to the fore, who, unable to hurt my father, decided to prick the son instead.

That, of course, came later. At the time, my father’s fall seemed impossible, so high had he been raised by the brilliance of his mind and the utility of his politics. “He didn’t do anything!” Mariah would cry during the nightly telephone conversations that marked, in that instant of crisis, a brief truce in our running war.

“It’s not about what he did,” I would answer patiently, trying to explain for her lay and partisan ear a judge’s duty to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, only half believing it myself, given some of the characters who have managed to hang on to their seats on the federal bench, including the Supreme Court. “It’s about hiding what he did.”

“That’s ridiculous!” she would shoot back, unable in those days to wrap her voice around the rougher forms of dismissal so characteristic of our country’s increasingly vulgar discourse. “They were out to get him all along, and you know it. ” As though having real enemies was a defense against any charge of wrongdoing. Or as though the fact that Jack Ziegler was about to stand trial for a bewildering variety of offenses at the time of what the press called the secret lunches was a triviality; or as though the fact that my father and Uncle Jack were apparently still in touch when his old roommate was a fugitive from justice was beside the point. After all, Uncle Jack was ultimately acquitted of nearly all the charges, and, if he was truly a fugitive, he was a fugitive only from the justice of liberals who hated him for his perhaps over-enthusiastic prosecution of the Cold War: so quoth the editorial page of the Journal.

And if whispers along the legal grapevine spoke of jury tampering, of bribed or intimidated witnesses, of the felicitous disappearance of crucial pieces of evidence, well, there are always whispers.

(III)

Kimmer, exhausted after taking the red-eye from San Francisco and then collecting our son and training down here, dozes on my shoulder in the limousine as we head for the cemetery out in Northeast Washington, a few blocks north of Catholic University. Bentley snuggles nervously against her other side, his gray suit hanging loosely on his tiny frame, because frugal Kimmer believes in buying children’s clothes two or three sizes ahead. I gaze at my wife’s profile. In her simple black dress, unadorned except by subtle gold earrings and a single strand of pearls, she is arresting. My wife is tall and quite intensely handsome, with a long, thoughtful face, a bold, aggressive chin, engaging brown eyes, a broadly prominent and very kissable nose, and soft, encompassing lips that I adore. Even her steel-rimmed glasses seem sexy: she is constantly slipping them on and off, nibbling on the ends, twirling them as she talks on the phone, all of which I find enthralling. I have loved looking at her since the day we met. She is, by her own description, big-boned, with wide shoulders and broad hips that have finally, after years of sometimes wild fluctuations, settled into a roundness she finds comfortable. Her skin is a shade or so lighter than mine, reflecting her upper-class Jamaican heritage. She wears her dark brown hair in a defiant short Afro, as if to contradict the stern expectations of her clan (where hair is always permed and often colored), and her slow smile and quick temper hint at a passionate core. There is a lushness to Kimmer, but a stolidity as well. She carries herself with a sensual dignity that simultaneously draws you in and sets firm limits. She keeps the world off balance, and is burdened by a raging desire for fairness. Her intellect is quick and wide-ranging. Given the opportunity, Kimmer would be an excellent judge. Nobody really wants to mess with her: not the opposing lawyers she encounters in her work, not the friends she collects with such disturbing ease, and certainly not I.

For example, I have not lately challenged my wife about her frequent trips to San Francisco, where she is ostensibly doing what lawyers call “due diligence,” reviewing the financial records of a software company that her firm’s most important client-a local leveraged-buyout group called EHP, formerly Elm Harbor Partners-plans to acquire. She would shoot me down if I mentioned it: Kimmer goes where EHP sends her, and if EHP wants her in California, well, California, here she comes. It is the strength of her relationship with EHP that earned her the quick partnership she pretends to disdain, for EHP asked for her by name at Newhall amp; Vann almost from the day she walked in the door. And EHP is, formally, the client of Gerald Nathanson, one of her firm’s most influential partners, a very married man with whom my very married wife is, or is not, having an affair.

Maybe the furtive telephone calls and the long, unexplained disappearances from her office are mere coincidences. And maybe my father is about to leap from his casket and do the funky chicken.

Now, as my jealousy flames afresh, Kimmer unexpectedly intertwines her fingers with mine, where they lately have spent little time. I look over at her in surprise and notice the start of a smile on her face, but she never looks in my direction. Bentley is now fast asleep, and Kimmer’s free hand is absently stroking his curly black hair. Bentley sighs. They have something special, these two, some genetically mysterious mother-son connection that excludes me, and always will. In this strange, broken world, men often love their wives as much, or as little, as they do their children, but, for women, biology seems to trump personal choice: they may love their husbands, but their children come first. Were the balance otherwise, I doubt that the human race would have survived. Indeed, I suspect that one reason I have remained true to Kimmer, whatever she has done, is that I know that if we ever parted she would take Bentley with her. Even though I spend far more time with our son than she does, she could not bear to let him go. I steal another glance at Kimmer, then look up at Addison, cuddling shamelessly with his white girlfriend in the opposite seat, wondering, as I have so often, if the mutual passions in their very different natures have ever led to mutual sparks.

Addison is perhaps an inch shorter than I am, and broader through the shoulders, but it is muscle, not fat; although not really an athlete, he has always kept himself in good shape. His face is both friendlier and more handsome than mine, his brows less intrusive, his eyes more evenly set, his demeanor more calm and open. Addison has wit and style and grace, none of which I possess. When we were children, Addison was charming and fun and I was merely a grind, and I always had the sense, at parties, on vacations, in church, that my parents were more excited about introducing my brother to their friends than introducing me. In our school days, I would arrive in each classroom four years after Addison left, and I would achieve better grades, but the teachers would always be persuaded that he possessed the better brain. If I brought home an A, my father would nod, but if Addison brought home a B, he gained a slap on the back for his effort. As a child, I read over and over the story of the prodigal son, and was invariably incensed by it. I argued about it with Sunday-school teachers galore. When we read the parable of the lost sheep, I told my teachers I thought most people would keep the ninety-nine sheep rather than go searching for the missing one. The answer would be an angry glower. Adulthood changed nothing. That I would remain married to the same difficult woman my father accepted as a matter of course, but each time Addison introduced a new and evermore-compliant one, the Judge would smile and put an arm around his shoulders: “So, son, ready to settle down at last?” Any answer my brother offered seemed to satisfy. And my father always seemed a good deal less impressed by my tenure at one of the nation’s best law schools than by Addison’s eerie ability to strike gold wherever he digs.

Nowadays, my older brother has become a type common to the darker nation: smart, ambitious, well educated, utterly dedicated to the romanticism of the long-shattered civil rights movement, living on the fringes of what remains. Racial unity has long ago disappeared, as has the larger nation’s commitment, if it existed, to the basic principles of the movement. Dozens of organizations claim the mantle of Wilkins and King and Hamer, along with an army of academics, a brace of television commentators, and every group of newly anointed victims of oppression, not one of which can resist pointing out the astonishing similarities between its own endeavor and the black freedom struggle. As for Addison, he has played the circuit like the tennis pro my father once hoped he would be: after the University of Pennsylvania, a post at a community-development corporation in Philadelphia, followed by a mid-level staff position for one of the state’s congressmen, a few years in Baltimore at the national office of the NAACP, a high position in the Democratic National Committee, a desk at the Ford Foundation, key advisory spots in three national political campaigns, a semester as a visiting scholar at Amherst, a stint at the ACLU, a couple of years at the Education Department under Clinton, that Ford Foundation desk again, a semester at Berkeley, a year in Italy, six months in South Africa, a year in Atlanta, all three funded by a Guggenheim as he works on his yet unfinished great book on the movement. In unguarded moments, my brother whispers hopefully of the MacArthur award that will certainly never come, and so, forced to earn a living, Addison has transformed himself into a man of the new century, hosting a radio call-in show five nights a week in Chicago, joyfully intimidating guests as he proclaims to the world-or at least to his audience-his own orthodox liberal views on everything from the death penalty to gays in the military, insisting at least twice each night, even now, that George W. Bush was never really elected President, peppering his commentary with mountains of Biblical quotations, some of them accurate, along with alleged gleanings from Mahavira, Chuangtzu, and other sages with whom his listeners are unlikely to be familiar. I suppose one would call the slant of his religiosity New Age, for he mixes in what he finds useful and discards what he dislikes. He lives in a small and aging but nevertheless elegant townhouse in Lincoln Park, sometimes alone, sometimes with any of his several girlfriends, most of them white, waiting for the next big thing to come along to add to his resume. Pressed, he will admit that he was married once or twice, but he invariably adds that he has come to harbor doubts about the institution, and is therefore glad that his didn’t last.

Ah, sweet marriage! My parents always described it as the fundamental institution on which civilization rests. My sister and I, whatever our weaknesses, have tried to behave as though we believe it. But Addison, for all his outward signs of religious fervor, behaves otherwise. His first wife was a schoolteacher in the Philadelphia public schools, a sweet, quiet woman of the darker nation, whose name was Patsy. Patsy and my brother immediately fell to fighting over when they would be able to begin a family. My brother, like many a man not ready to commit himself to the marriage to which he is already committed, had a single, consistent answer: Later. Patsy left him in the third year. Disaster followed. For a while, there was, it seemed, a woman a week, including one horrible Thanksgiving two years after my father’s disgrace when he arrived at Shepard Street with a garishly made-up child who looked about fifteen and dressed like a hooker. (She was, we quickly learned to our relief through smooth questions from my mother, twenty-two and some sort of minor star on the soaps; Sally, late as usual, recognized her at once and went into paroxysms of jealous awe.) Addison and Cali-for that was the unlikely name of his date-stayed at dinner just long enough to be rude, then hurried off, explaining that they had a long drive back to New York, but really, so he told me out in the driveway, to visit other friends in Maryland, two male screenwriters who had built a gorgeous house on the water near Queenstown. That was Addison, at least until recently. He liked to be seen with actresses, models, singers, little mindless wisps of sexuality-but not always. For a while, he set up housekeeping in Brooklyn with a half-mad convicted bomber named Selina Sandoval, who never met a protest she didn’t like, unless it was against abortion. Selina kept guns all over the apartment and saw Addison as fascist but educable, which is roughly the way that Addison sees me. As for Addison, he described his interest in Selina as “research for a novel”-which, like so many of his ideas, has yet to be started. When Selina finally got too crazy and landed back in jail, she was followed by a flight attendant, then a commodities broker, then a moderately famous tennis player, then a waitress at his favorite deli, then one of the stars of the Dance Theater of Harlem, then a police detective, which was my brother’s idea of a joke. Eventually, Addison settled on a second wife, Virginia Shelby, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, an anthropologist, a woman of friendly smile and intimidating intellect, someone at last my father and mother thought good enough, a union that we thought would calm him down. Everybody loved Ginnie, everybody but Addison, who swiftly tired of her nagging him about-what else?-starting a family. He left her a year and a half ago for a twenty-four-year-old production assistant on his radio show. Although it is styled as a trial separation, nobody seriously expects Addison and Ginnie to resume their conjugality, which is why nobody is surprised when he shows up at the funeral with a perfect stranger, a skinny, shamelessly clinging white woman named Beth Olin, who is some sort of minor poet, or maybe a playwright-there isn’t time to find out the details during this brief visit, and we never see her again.

CHAPTER 5

A GRAVESIDE ENCOUNTER

(I)

Kimmer keeps firm hold of my hand as we stand beside the grave, shivering in the chill as Father Bishop pronounces the words of committal. Freeman Bishop, who has been rector of Trinity and St. Michael, it sometimes seems, since before the Deluge, is in the Episcopal tradition of scholarly priests, possessing the deep knowledge of theology and church history that was once the common expectation for clergy of the Anglican communion. My father, however, always spoke ill of the man. The reason was politics. The Episcopal Church has lately been battered by stormy conflicts on everything from the ordination of gays and lesbians to the authority of the Bible. Father Bishop, in the Judge’s view, was on the wrong side of every fight. They don’t understand, my father would moan, referring to those with whom he disagreed, that the church is steward and custodian of moral knowledge, not its originator! They think they’re free to change whatever they want to fit the fashion of the moment! Right or wrong, the Judge was always strident; and, always, he seemed more comfortable mourning the world that had passed away than planning for the one rushing toward him.

As for Freeman Bishop, whatever his complicated politics, he is a man of enormous faith, and a considerable gift for preaching. He puts on a fine show, the Judge used to say, and this is true: with his pleasantly bald brown pate, his thick spectacles (as he likes to call them), and a heavy, rolling voice that seems to roar up like a hurricane from somewhere well down the Atlantic coast-he is actually from Englewood, New Jersey-Father Bishop could easily pass for one of the great preachers of the African American tradition… as long as one does not listen too closely to the content. And, for all the Judge’s disdain for the man, they were, if not exactly friends, at least on relatively warm terms. Recently, my father’s ever-smaller circle of intimates along the Gold Coast even admitted Freeman Bishop to their own most sacred institution, the Friday-night poker game. So, although a couple of well-known conservative preachers called to volunteer their services, there was never really any question about who would officiate at the funeral.

I have always loved cemeteries, especially old ones: their satisfied sense of the past and its connection to the present, their almost supernatural quietude, their stark reassurance that the wheel of history turns indeed. For most of us, cemeteries exude a mystical power, which explains both the hold the vampire myths have on our imagination and the fact that the desecration of gravestones, whenever it happens, will always be the lead story on the local evening news. But I love cemeteries most as places of discovery. Sometimes, visiting a strange city for the first time, I will find the oldest burial ground and walk there, learning the local history by studying family relationships. Sometimes I will stroll for hours to find the grave of a great figure from the past. A year or so before Bentley was born, Kimmer and I both had to be in Europe on business-I was in The Hague for a conference on how the tort law of the European Community should compensate for pain-and-suffering damages, she was in London doing goodness-knows-what for EHP-and we stole a day and a half for a visit to Paris, where neither of us had ever been. Kimmer wanted to see the Louvre and the Left Bank and the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but I had other plans, insisting that we take a taxi all the way out to the grim Montparnasse Cemetery in a furious thunderstorm to look at the grave of Alexander Alekhine, the raving anti-Semite and alcoholic who was chess champion of the world back in the 1930s and possibly the most brilliant player the game has ever known.

More evidence, if my wife needed any, that I am moderately raving myself.

And now another cemetery. The brief graveside ceremony passes in a blur. I find myself unable to concentrate, looking around for the bulldozer that will cover the casket after the last mourner has drifted away, but it is too well hidden. I gaze briefly at the polished marble headstone, where my mother’s name is already carved, and the small marker, off to the side, for Abby. The family plot my father purchased years ago tops a little rise; he always said he bought it for the view. From up here, we can see most of the grounds. The cemetery is wooded and vast, headstones marching away in implausibly straight rows over sloping hills. Even in the sharp autumn sun, there are shadows everywhere. In the middle distance, some of the shadows seem to move-reporters, perhaps. A trick of the light? My fervid imagination? If I am not careful I will catch my sister’s paranoia. I focus on the graveside once more. This is my third burial on the quiet little hill, and the family is smaller each time. First we buried Abby here, then my mother. Now the Judge.

Murdered, I remind myself, glancing over at my sister, who wept throughout the service. A chilly breeze carries a few fresh leaves to the earth: every year, the trees seem to shed them a little bit sooner, but I am watching with the eyes of age. Mariah says the Judge was murdered. We are burying our father next to Abby, and Mariah thinks Abby’s godfather killed him.

Possible. Not possible. True. False.

Insufficient data, I decide, fidgeting with worry.

Kimmer squeezes my hand. Mariah is still sniffling; Howard, straight and strong, cradles his wife as though worried she might float away. They seem to have brought only part of their brood, but I lack the energy to get the count straight. Standing just beyond the Denton children, Addison seems bored, or perhaps he wishes he could say a few words here, too. His girlfriend, or whatever she is this week, has wandered irreverently away, evidently engrossed in a study of the other headstones. Next to Addison, Mallory Corcoran, pale and wide, glances at his watch, making no effort to hide his impatience. But Father Bishop is finished anyway. His bald brown head reflecting the sun, he adjusts his glasses and utters the final words of the final prayer: “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray thee to set thy passion, cross, and death, between thy judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death. Give mercy and grace to the living, pardon and rest to the dead, to thy holy Church peace and concord, and to us sinners everlasting life and glory; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, now and for ever.”

We all recite the Amen. The service is over. The mourners stir, but I stand for a moment, awed by the frightening power of this prayer: between thy judgment and our souls. My father, if all I have tried to believe is true, now knows God’s judgment on his soul. I wonder what that judgment is, what it might be like to leave mortal existence behind and know there are no more second chances, or, perhaps, to find forgiveness after all. To the atheist, the cemetery is a place of the dead, vulgar and absurd, ultimately pointless; to the believer, a place of scary questions and terrifying answers. I gaze at the casket, poised on its runners, surrounded by plastic grass, ready to slide into the ground as soon as we have dispersed.

Give pardon and rest to the dead.

Kimmer squeezes my fingers to snap me back into the secular world of post-funeral handshakes. The leave-taking begins. Friends and cousins and law partners gather round again. A black man who looks to be about a hundred years old throws skinny arms around me, whispering that he is the uncle of somebody else whose name means nothing to me. A tall, striking woman in a veil, another member of the darker nation, replaces him, explaining that she is the sister of some aunt of whom I have never heard. I wish I knew my extended family, but I never will. Still embracing unknown relations, I spot Dana Worth, who waves sadly and then disappears. I suffer a bear hug from a teary Eddie Dozier, Dana’s ex, who then turns to hug Kimmer, who cringes but allows it. I say goodbye and thanks to Uncle Mal and his wife, Edie; to the Madisons, who, as usual, say all the right things; to Cousin Sally and her longtime boyfriend Bud, a onetime boxer of no distinction whose jealous fists sometimes mistake anybody who looks at her too long for one of his opponents. I lose track of the people whose hands I am shaking and begin to get their names wrong, an error my father would never have committed. Head of the family, I remember.

Kimmer slips an unexpected arm around my waist and squeezes, even offering a smile to jolly me from my reverie. She is trying, I realize, to comfort me-not out of a wifely instinct, I know, but out of deliberation. Her other hand clutches Bentley’s tiny one. Our son looks tiny and lost in his long black coat, purchased just yesterday at Nordstrom’s. He is also beginning to yawn.

“Time to go, baby,” says Kimmer, but not to me.

We stroll back toward the cars, bunches of people no longer united in the commemoration of a life; we are individuals again, with jobs and families and joys and pains of our own, and my father, for most of the mourners, is already in the past. Mariah continues to whimper, but seems alone in this activity. A cell phone burrs somewhere, and a dozen hands, including my wife’s, dig into pockets and purses to check. The lucky winner is Howard, who listens briefly, then launches into a quiet dispute over the proper valuation of convertible debentures, and is still blabbering happily as he squeezes into the limousine.

A few more handshakes and hugs and kisses, and then we are alone again. Addison, I notice, is still up at the grave. He is hunched over, hands thrust into his coat despite the warmth of the afternoon, gazing forlornly into the shadows. What is he thinking about? Beth? Ginnie? The unwritten book on the movement? Next week’s lineup of guests? I tell Kimmer I will be right back, release her hand reluctantly, and head back toward my brother. I would like to say that the sight of Addison in his loneliness has touched some wellspring of empathy or even love, but that would be a lie; more likely, I am worried that my brother is experiencing an epiphany, communing with great forces, learning some mystical truth that I am missing. Like when he knew, and I did not, that Santa was a fraud. Tawdry though it may seem, it is the old jealousy, the Why Addison?, that drives me back to his side.

“Hey, Misha,” he murmurs as I reach the top of the hill, as insistent on using my nickname as Mariah is on avoiding it. He does not turn his head but manages nevertheless to reach out and lay his hand on my shoulder. It occurs to me that I have interrupted him at prayer. And that, in his eulogy, he did not mention God once.

“You okay?” I ask, trying to figure out what he is looking at. All I see are trees and headstones.

“I think so. I don’t know. I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

“Oh, you know. What Guru Arjan said about the tortures of death.”

Well, of course. That was my next guess.

A moment passes. I have long admired and envied my big brother, and we have had a lot of fun over the years, but, just now, we have little to say to each other.

“It’s beautiful up here,” says Addison. “I guess I’ll be up here one day. You, too.”

It takes a few seconds for me to understand that he is talking about death. No, not talking about it: worrying about it. My big brother, who was never afraid of anything, and whose charm and grace have carried him effortlessly through his life, is suddenly worried about dying. Did he really rely on my father that heavily? I wonder. Or maybe I am the abnormal one, to watch my father’s casket lowered into the ground and feel no twinge of concern over my own mortality. In either case, my brother wants comfort. Plainly, Beth Olin is not the comforting type. But neither am I.

“Come on,” I whisper, taking his elbow. “We should go.”

He shakes off my arm and points. “You know, Misha, every time I look at Abby’s grave, I still hope we’ll find them.”

“Find who?”

“The folks in the car that killed her.” In my older brother’s voice I hear all my father’s bitter fury. I stare at him for a moment, puzzled.

“Addison-”

“Right,” he says. “You go on, I’ll be down in a minute. Go on.”

I wait a few more seconds, but Addison does not budge, so I turn at last and head back down the path toward the cars. Drawing near, I notice that Kimmer is now on her cell phone, her strong back to me, awkwardly taking notes on a piece of paper she has flattened on top of the limousine. Howard and Mariah are already gone, but a few family loyalists still wait, including Uncle Mal, who should have been back at the office a long time ago. I flush with warmth at his affection for us, until I realize that he, too, is on the phone. I shake my head at the ways of the corporate world. Maybe he and Kimmer are talking to each other.

“Talcott!”

I spin around at the sound of my name, first thinking it is Addison, but he is now on the path, moving in this direction, and he, too, has heard the call and is craning his neck toward a nearby hill.

“Talcott! Talcott, wait!” But faintly, more an echo than a voice.

I turn toward the back of the cemetery, where bare trees cast lengthening shadows in the late-afternoon sunlight. A low mist is gathering, so the vista has lost a bit of its crisp brightness. At first, I see only shadows and more shadows in the direction of the voice. Then two of the shadows detach themselves and turn, wraithlike, into people, two men, both white, striding in my direction.

I recognize one of them, and the autumn sky goes gray.

“Hello, Talcott,” says Jack Ziegler. “Thank you for waiting for me.”

(II)

The first thing I notice about Uncle Jack is that he is ill. Jack Ziegler was never a very large man, but he always seemed a menacing one. I do not know how many people he has killed, although I often fear that it is more than the numbers hinted at in the press. I have not seen him in well over a decade and have not missed him. But the changes in the man! Now he is frail, the suit of fine gray wool and the dark blue scarf hanging loosely on his emaciated frame. The square, strong face I remember from my boyhood, when he would visit us on the Vineyard, armed with expensive gifts, wonderful brainteasers, and terrible jokes, is falling in on itself; the silver hair, still reasonably thick, lies matted on his head; and his pale pink lips tremble when he is not speaking, and sometimes when he is. He approaches in the company of a taller and broader and much younger man, who silently steadies him when he stumbles. A friend, I think, except that the Jack Zieglers of the world have no friends. A bodyguard, then. Or, given Uncle Jack’s physical condition, perhaps a nurse.

“Well, look who’s here,” Addison seethes.

“Let me handle this,” I insist with my usual stupidity. I discipline myself not to speculate about what Mariah suggested as we sat in the kitchen Friday night.

“All yours.”

Before Jack Ziegler quite reaches us, I warn Kimmer to stay down by the car with Bentley, and, for once, she does as I ask without an argument, for no potential judge can be seen even chatting with such a man. Uncle Mal steps forward as though to run the same interference for me that he does for his clients as they leave the grand jury, but I motion him back and tell him I will be fine. Then I turn and hurry up the hill. Mariah, of course, is already gone, which is just as well, for this apparition might push her over the edge. Only Addison remains nearby, just far enough away to be polite, but close enough to be of help if… if what?

“Hello, Uncle Jack,” I say as Abby’s godfather and I arrive, simultaneously, at the grave. Then I wait. He does not extend his hand and I do not offer mine. His bodyguard or whatever stands off to the side and a little bit behind, eyeing my brother uneasily. (I myself am evidently too unthreatening to excite his vigilance.)

“I bring you my condolences, Talcott,” Jack Ziegler murmurs in his peculiar accent, vaguely East European, vaguely Brooklyn, vaguely Harvard, which my father always insisted was manufactured, as phony as Eddie Dozier’s East Texas drawl. As Uncle Jack speaks, his eyes are cast downward, toward the grave. “I am so sorry about the death of your father.”

“Thank you. I’m afraid we missed you at the church-”

“I despise funerals.” Spoken matter-of-factly, like a discussion of weather, or sports, or interstate flight to avoid prosecution. “I have no interest in the celebration of death. I have seen too many good men die.”

Some by your own hand, I am thinking, and I wonder if the other, rarely mentioned rumors are true, if I am talking to a man who murdered his own wife. Again Mariah’s fears assail me. My sister’s chronology possesses a certain mad logic-emphasis on the adjective: my father saw Jack Ziegler, my father called Mariah, my father died a few days later, then Jack Ziegler called Mariah, and now Jack Ziegler is here. I finally shared Mariah’s notion with Kimmer as we lay in bed last night. My wife, head on my shoulder, giggled and said that it sounds to her more like two old friends who see each other all the time. Having no basis, yet, to decide, I say only: “Thank you for coming. Now, if you will excuse me-”

“Wait,” says Jack Ziegler, and, for the first time, he turns his eyes up to meet mine. I take half a step back, for his face, close up, is a horror. His pale, papery skin is ravaged by nameless diseases that seem to me-whatever they are-an appropriate punishment for the life he has chosen to live. But it is his eyes that draw my attention. They are twin coals, hot and alive, burning with a dark, happy madness that should be visited on all murderers at some time before they die.

“Uncle Jack, I’m s-sorry,” I manage. Did I actually stammer? “I have-I have to get going-”

“Talcott, I have traveled thousands of miles to see you. Surely you can spare me five of your valuable minutes.” His voice has a terrible wheeze in it, and it occurs to me that I might be breathing whatever has made him this way. But I stand my ground.

“I understand you’ve been looking for me,” I say at last.

“Yes.” He seems childishly eager now, and he almost smiles, but thinks better of it. “Yes, that is so, I have been looking for you.”

“You knew where to find me.” I was raised to be polite, but seeing Uncle Jack like this, after all these years, brings out in me an irresistible urge to be rude. “You could have called me at home.”

“That would not be-it was not possible. They know, you see, they would consider that, and I thought-I thought perhaps…” He trails off, the dark eyes all at once confused, and I realize that Uncle Jack is frightened of something. I hope it is the specter of prison or of his obviously approaching death that is scaring him, because anything else bad enough to scare Jack Ziegler is… well, something I do not want to meet.

“Okay, okay. You found me.” Perhaps this is forward, but I am not so frightened of him now; on the other hand, I am not very happy about spending time in his company either. I want to flee this sickly scarecrow and retreat to the warmth, such as it is, of my family.

“Your father was a very fine man,” says Uncle Jack, “and a very good friend. We did much together. Not much business, mostly pleasure.”

“I see.”

“The newspapers, you know, they wrote of our business dealings. There were no business dealings. It was nonsense. Trumped-up nonsense.”

“I know,” I lie, for Uncle Jack’s benefit, but he is not interested in my opinions.

“That law clerk of his, perjuring himself that way.” He makes a spitting noise but does not actually spit. “Scum.” He shakes his head in feigned disbelief. “The papers, of course, they loved it. Left-wing bastards. Because they hated your father.”

Not having exchanged a word with Jack Ziegler since well before my father’s hearings, I have never heard his opinions about what happened. Given the tenor of his comments, I doubt he would be interested in mine. I remain silent.

“I hear the fool has never been able to get a job,” says Uncle Jack, without a trace of humor, and I know who has been pulling at least a few of the strings. “I am not surprised.”

“He was doing what he thought was right.”

“He was lying in an effort to destroy a great man, and he is deserving of his fate.”

I cannot take much more of this. As Jack Ziegler continues to rant, Mariah’s nutty speculations of Friday seem… not so nutty. “Uncle Jack…”

“He was a great man, your father,” Jack Ziegler interrupts. “A very great man, a very good friend. But now that he is dead, well.. .” He trails off and raises his hand, palm upmost, and tilts it one way, then the other. “Now I would very much like to be of assistance to you.”

“To me?”

“Correct, Talcott. And to your family, naturally,” he adds softly, rubbing his temples. The skin is so loose it seems to move under his fingers. I imagine it tearing away to leave only an unhappy skull.

I glance over at the cars. Kimmer is impatient. So is Uncle Mal. I look down at my baby sister’s godfather once more. His help is the very last thing I want.

“Well, thank you, but I think we have everything under control.”

“But you will call? If you need anything, you will call? Especially if… an emergency should arise?”

I shrug. “Okay.”

“With your wife, for instance,” he continues. “I understand that she is going to become a judge. I think that is wonderful. I understand that she has always wanted this.”

“It isn’t certain yet,” I answer automatically, surprised that the secret has spread up into the Rocky Mountains, and also not wanting Jack Ziegler anywhere near her nomination. He has already spoiled one judicial career too many. “She isn’t the only candidate.”

“I know this.” The burning eyes are gleeful again. “I understand that a colleague of yours believes the job to be his for the taking. Some would call him the front-runner.”

I am thrown, once more, by the breadth of his knowledge; I choose not to wonder how he knows what he knows. I am glad that Kimmer is not within earshot.

“I suppose so. But, look, I have to-”

“Listen, Talcott. Are you listening?” He has drawn close to me again. “I do not think he has the staying power, this colleague of yours. It is my understanding that a fairly large skeleton is rattling around in his closet. And we all know what that means, eh?” He coughs violently. “Sooner or later, it is bound to tumble out.”

“What kind of skeleton?” I ask, sudden eagerness overwhelming my caution.

“I would not concern myself with such things if I were you. I would not share them with your lovely wife. I would wait patiently for the wheel to turn.”

I am mystified, but not precisely unhappy. If there is information that would kill off Marc Hadley’s chances, I can hardly wait for it to-what did he say?-tumble out. Even though Marc and I were once friends, I cannot resist a rising excitement. Perhaps America’s obsession with the use of scandal to disqualify nominees for the bench is absurd, but this is my wife we are talking about.

Still, what can Jack Ziegler possibly know about Marc Hadley that nobody else does?

“Thank you, Uncle Jack,” I say uncertainly.

“I am always happy to be of assistance to any of Oliver’s children.” His voice has assumed a curiously formal tone. I am chilled once more. Is the skeleton something that he has somehow created? Is a criminal maneuvering to help my wife attain her longed-for seat on the bench? I have to say something, and it is not easy to decide what.

“Uh, Uncle Jack, I… I’m grateful that you would think to help, but…”

His disintegrating eyebrows slowly rise. Otherwise his expression does not change. He knows what I am trying to say but has no intention of making it easy.

“Well, it’s just that I think Kimmer… Kimberly… wants to have the selection go forward so that, um, the better candidate wins. On the merits. She wouldn’t want anybody to… interfere.” And I am suddenly sure, as I say the difficult words, that what I am telling him is true. My smart, ambitious wife never wants to be beholden to anybody, for anything. When we were students, she made a name for herself around the building with her outspoken opposition to affirmative action, which she saw as just another way for white liberals to place black people in their debt.

Maybe she was right.

Uncle Jack, meanwhile, has his answer ready: “Oh, Talcott, Talcott, please have no fear on that account. I am not proposing to. .. interfere.” He chuckles lightly, then coughs. “I am only predicting what is to occur. I have information. I am not going to use it. Nor do you need to do so. Your colleague, your wife’s rival, has many, many enemies. One of them is certain to unlock the door and allow the skeleton to tumble out. The service I am doing for you is simply to let you know. Nothing more.”

I nod. Standing up to Jack Ziegler has drained me.

“And now it is your turn,” he continues. “I think perhaps you, Talcott, might be of assistance to me.”

I close my eyes briefly. What did I expect? He did not travel all this way to tell me that Marc Hadley’s candidacy is going to collapse, or to pay his last respects to my father. He came because he wants something.

“Talcott, you must listen to me. Listen with care. I must ask you one question.”

“Go ahead.” I want suddenly to be free of him. I want to share his odd news with Kimmer, even though he told me not to. I want her to kiss me happily, overjoyed that she seems to be on the verge of getting what she wants.

“Others will ask this of you, some with good motives, some with ill,” he explains unhelpfully in his mysterious accent. “Not all of them will be who they say they are, and not all of them will mean you well.”

I forgot Uncle Jack’s eerie, unfathomable certainty that all the world is conspiring, but he evidently has changed little from the days when he used to drop by the Vineyard house with gifts from foreign ports and complaints about the machinations of the Kennedys, whose irresolution, he used to say, cost us Cuba. None of the children knew what he was talking about, but we loved the passion of his stories.

“Okay,” I say.

“And so I must ask what they will ask,” he continues, the mad eyes sparkling.

“Well, fire away,” I sigh. Over by the limousine, Kimmer is glancing at her watch and raising her hand, beckoning, to urge me to hurry. Maybe she has another telephone meeting coming up. Maybe she, too, is scared of Jack Ziegler, whom she has never quite met. Maybe I need to get this over with. “But I really only have a few minutes to. ..”

“The arrangements, Talcott,” he interrupts in that wheezy whisper. “I must know everything about the arrangements.”

“The arrangements,” I repeat stupidly, aware that my sister is not as crazy as I have been hoping, and that my brother, sensing that something is going on but not sure what, has moved half a step closer to us, in the manner of a protector or a wary parent-very often the same thing.

“Yes, the arrangements.” The hot, joyful lunacy on his face sears my own. “What arrangements did your father make in the event of his death?”

“I’m not sure what you-”

“I believe you know precisely what I mean.” A hint of steel: here, for the first time, is the Jack Ziegler about whom everybody was reporting back in 1986.

“No, I don’t. Mariah told me you called and asked her the same thing. And I have to tell you what I told her. I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

Uncle Jack shakes his sickly head impatiently. “Come, Talcott, we are not children, you and I. I have known you since you were born. I am your sister’s godfather, may she rest in peace.” A gesture toward the plot. “I was your father’s friend. You know what I am asking, I think, you know what it means, and you know why I inquire. I must know the arrangements.”

“I’m still not quite sure what you mean. I’m sorry.”

“Your father’s arrangements, Talcott.” He is exasperated. “Come. The arrangements he worked out with you in the event of his, ah, unexpected demise.”

I do not make Mariah’s mistake: I am sure he does not me an funeral arrangements, not least because the funeral just ended. And then I see what I did not when Mariah grabbed me on Friday night. He is thinking about the will. The disposition of my father’s estate. Which is odd, because, although my father was hardly poor, Jack Ziegler is quite rich; or so say the newspapers.

“You mean the financial arrangements,” I say softly, with the confidence of a lawyer who has worked it all out. “Well, we haven’t had the official reading of the-”

“That is not what I mean at all and you know it,” he hisses, spraying me with his old man’s spittle. “Do not fox with me.”

“I’m not foxing.” Allowing him to see my irritation.

“I understand that your father swore you to secrecy. That was sensible of him. But you surely must see that your vow does not include me.”

I spread my arms wide. “Uncle Jack, look. I’m sorry. I don’t think I can help you. There just aren’t any arrangements that-”

In a movement almost faster than I can follow, his skeletal hand snakes out and grabs my wrist. I shut up. I can feel the heat of his illness, whatever it is, coursing beneath the papery skin, but his strength is amazing. His nails furrow my arm.

“What arrangements?” he demands.

As I stand, mouth open, my wrist still trapped in Uncle Jack’s thin fingers, Addison moves a worried step closer, so does the bodyguard, and I sense more than see the two of them sizing one another up; something primal and male is suddenly in the air, a mutual scenting, as though they are beasts preparing for battle, and I see the first faint tinges of red beginning to blot out the trampled green grass.

“Please take your hand off me,” I say calmly, but the hand is already off, and Uncle Jack is looking down at it as though it betrayed him.

“I am sorry, Talcott,” he murmurs, speaking, it seems, more to the hand than to me, and somehow sounding not so much contrite as cautionary. “I ask what I ask because I must. I do so for your sake. Please understand that. I have nothing to gain, except to protect you, all of you, as I always promised your father I would. He asked me to look after his children if anything happened to him. I agreed to do so. And”-this almost sadly-“I am a man of my word.” He shoves the offending hand into his pocket. The lunatic, gleeful eyes lift slowly to meet mine. Off to the side, Addison relaxes. The wary bodyguard does not.

“Uncle Jack, I… I appreciate that, but, uh, we’re grown-ups now…”

“Even adults may require looking after.” He coughs softly, covering his mouth with his fist. “Talcott, there is not much time. I love you and your brother and your sister as though you were my own. I ask you now for help. So, please, Talcott, for the good of the family we both love, tell me of the arrangements.”

I take a moment to think. I know I must get this precisely right.

“Uncle Jack, look. I appreciate you being here. I’m sure the whole family does. And I know it would mean a lot to my father. Please believe me, I would help you if I could. But I-I just don’t know what you are talking about.” I can feel myself botching it. “If you would just tell me what arrangements you mean.”

“You know what arrangements I mean.” This in a hard tone, with a touch of the fire I saw a minute ago, just enough to remind me that I am dealing with a dangerous man. The day is growing darker and my head is beginning to pound. “You appreciate that I am here? Excellent. Now I would appreciate the information.”

“I don’t have any information!” Finally losing my temper, for nothing causes quite so sharp a red aura as condescension. “I told you, I don’t know what in the world you’re talking about!” I am so loud that heads turn among the mourners who have not yet departed, and the bodyguard looks ready to grab Uncle Jack and make a run for it. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that longsuffering Kimmer is striding heavily toward us. It occurs to me that it would be best to finish this conversation before she arrives. “I’m sorry I raised my voice,” I tell him. “But there is nothing I can do to help you.”

A long silence as the eerily dancing eyes search mine. Then Jack Ziegler shakes his head and purses his thin lips. “I have asked my question,” he whispers, perhaps to himself. “I have delivered my warning. I have done what I came to do.”

“Uncle Jack-”

“Talcott, I must go.” His hot glare fixes briefly on Addison, standing ten paces away, who frowns and turns toward us as though aware of scrutiny. Jack Ziegler crowds closer to me, perhaps afraid of being overheard. Then the skinny hand snakes out again, once more amazing me with its speed, and I take another step back. But he is holding only a small white card. “Beware of the others I have told you about. And when you decide that you would like to talk about… about the arrangements… you must call me. I will come to any place you name, at any time you name. And I will help you in any way that I can.” A pause as he waits, frowning. “I do not usually make such promises, Talcott.”

Now I get it. He expects me to thank him. I hate that.

“I understand,” is all I can bring myself to say. I pluck the card from his fingers.

“I hope so,” he says sadly, “for I would not want to see you harmed.” All at once he smiles, inclining his head toward my advancing wife. “You or your family.”

I cannot believe what I have just heard, and the red is suddenly very sharp and bright. My voice is more gasp than objection: “Are you

… Is that a threat?”

“Of course not, Talcott, of course not.” He is still smiling, except that it is more an ugly rictus than a sign of happiness. “I am warning you of the thoughts of others. For me, a promise is a promise. I promised to protect you, and so I shall.”

“Uncle Jack, I don’t really know what-”

“Enough,” he says sharply. “You must do what you must do. Allow no one to dissuade you.” For a long moment, the dark, demented eyes bore into mine, making me lightheaded, as though part of his insanity is crossing the two feet between us, burrowing down my optic nerve into my brain. And then, very suddenly, Jack Ziegler gives me his back. “Mr. Henderson, we are going,” he snaps at the bodyguard, who favors us with a final suspicious glance before also turning away. Mr. Henderson steadies his master. They walk off along the shadowy path through the marching headstones, turn a corner, and soon are lost in the deeper shadows, as though they are ghosts whose time in the world of the living is done and who therefore must return to the earth.

Still stunned, I feel Addison’s steadying hand on my shoulder. “You did great,” he murmurs, knowing, perhaps, that I doubt it. “He’s a fruitcake.”

“True.” I tap the card against my teeth. “True.”

“You okay?”

“Sure.”

My brother gives me a look, then shrugs. “See you at the house,” he promises, and heads off to look for his weird little poet or whatever she is. I take a step nearer the grave, unable somehow to believe that my father, casket or not, was able to lie quietly through the entire exchange with Uncle Jack. His silence, perhaps, is the best evidence that he is actually dead.

“What was that all about?” asks Kimmer, now at my side.

“I wish I knew,” I say. I consider telling her what Jack Ziegler said about Marc Hadley, but decide to wait; better she be pleasantly surprised than cruelly disappointed.

Kimmer frowns, then kisses me on the cheek, takes my hand again, and leads me down the hill. But as I ride back to Shepard Street in the limousine, clutching my wife’s cold hand, Jack Ziegler’s words run like a mantra through my troubled mind: The others. Beware of the others… I am warning you of the thoughts of others. For me, a promise is a promise.

And the rest of it: I would not want to see you harmed. You or your family.

CHAPTER 6

THE PROBLEMIST

(I)

Although it is no longer our home, Washington is very much Kimmer’s city. With the Congress, the White House, a gaggle of federal regulatory agencies, countless judges, and more lawyers per capita than any locale on the face of the earth, it is a place for those who like to make deals, and making deals is what my wife does best. My wife’s first task when she arrived in the city was to build a base camp, complete with laptop and portable fax machine, in the guest room of her parents’ home, on Sixteenth Street up near the Carter Barron Theatre, a half-mile or so north of Shepard Street. She spent Monday, the day before the funeral, lining up appointments for Wednesday, the day after, one meeting over at the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of a client, the rest in furtherance of her candidacy for the court of appeals. And so this morning she leaves her parents’ house early, for breakfast with another old friend-“the new girls’ network,” she gushes, although some are men. This particular friend is a political reporter at the Post, a woman appropriately named Battle, a buddy from Mount Holyoke, who is said to be connected.

Kimmer has always cultivated the press and is frequently quoted in the pages of our local newspaper, the Clarion, and, now and then, in the Times. I have a different attitude toward journalists, one I have exercised frequently over the past few days. When reporters call me, I have no comment, no matter what the subject. If they persist, I simply hang up. I never talk to reporters, not since the press savaged my father during his hearings. Never. I have a student named Lionel Eldridge, a onetime professional basketball star who, having ruined his knee, now hopes to be a lawyer. Kimmer and I know him and his wife a little bit, because he worked at her firm last summer, a job I helped him to obtain at a time when other firms, vexed by his grades and trying to prove they were not awed by his celebrity, turned him down. Lots of journalists still do stories about “young Mr. Eldridge,” as Theo Mountain likes to call him-I think in jest, for Lionel may be half a century younger than Theo, but he is almost a decade older than the rest of the second-year students. In any event, the media still adore young Mr. Eldridge, and love to chronicle his doings. Once a reporter was foolish enough to call me. She was writing a profile of Sweet Nellie, as he was called in his playing days, and wanted, she said, to capture his eagerness to master this new challenge. She had spoken to Lionel, who had identified me as his favorite professor. I was flattered, I suppose, although I am not in this business to be liked. But still I had no comment. She asked why, and, as she caught me at a weak moment, I told her. “But this is a nice piece I’m writing,” she wailed. “I write sports, for goodness’ sake, not politics.” As though the distinction would reassure me. “I hate sports,” I told her, which was a lie, “and I’m not a nice man,” which is the truth.

Even though my wife keeps telling me otherwise.

But Kimmer thinks her newspaper friend can help her, and perhaps she is right, for my wife has a nose for knowing who might be able to boost her closer to her goal. Later, she will meet with the Democratic Senator from our state, a graduate of the law school, to try to cajole him out of Marc Hadley’s corner and, at minimum, onto the sidelines: a meeting I went hat in hand to Theo Mountain, the Senator’s favorite teacher, to arrange. She is lunching with Ruthie Silverman, who warned her that everything about the process is confidential but at last agreed to see her anyway, for everybody who knows Kimmer develops the habit of doing what she wants. After lunch, my wife will visit the chief lobbyist for the NAACP, an appointment arranged by her father, the Colonel, who is also connected. Then, in the late afternoon, Kimmer and I will join forces, because the great Mallory Corcoran himself has squeezed the two of us into his calendar at four; Kimmer and I will see Uncle Mal together, in the hope that he will agree to put a portion of his considerable influence her way.

Washington, as I said, is Kimmer’s city. It is not, however, mine, and it never will be; it is far too easy to close my eyes and remember all the long, bleak hours of hearings as my father sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee, first confident, next disbelieving, then angry, and finally sullen and defeated. I remember the days when my mother sat behind him, the days when I did. How Mariah was too upset to attend after the scandal broke, and how Addison, often summoned, never showed, to my father’s distress. How the Judge’s distress irritated me when I was so loyal and so ignored and Addison, as usual, so flighty and so loved: the prodigal son indeed. I remember the television lights, after the hearing was moved down the hall to a larger room, and everybody sweating. I had no idea that television lights were so hot. Senate staffers dabbed the members’ foreheads; my father dabbed his own. I remember his grim refusal to accept any coaching from Uncle Mal, from the White House, from anybody who might help. I remember looking up at the Senators and thinking how distant and high and powerful they seemed, but also noticing how they read most of their long, pompous questions from cue cards, and how some of them grew confused if the conversation wandered too far from their briefings. I recall the baize on the tables: until I had the chance to touch it, I never realized it was simply stapled in place, a kind of special effect for the cameras. In reality, the tables were plain wood. I remember the crowds of reporters in the hallways and the entrances, shouting for attention like preschoolers. But most of all, like everybody else, I remember the dreary and repetitive and ultimately necessary questions: When did you last see Jack Ziegler? Did you meet with Jack Ziegler in March of last year? What was the subject matter of the discussion? Were you aware of the pending indictment at that time? On and on and on. And my father’s dreary, monotonous answers, which sounded less and less convincing with every repetition: I don’t know, Senator. No, I did not, Senator. I do not recall, Senator. No, I had no idea, Senator. And, finally, the beginning of the end, which always starts with friends running for cover and with the same signal to the now disgraced nominee, usually spoken by the chairman: Now, Judge, I know you to be a decent man, and I have a great deal of respect for your accomplishments, and I would really like to believe that you are being candid with this committee, but, frankly…

Nomination withdrawn at nominee’s request.

Nominee and family humiliated.

Grand jury convenes.

Fade to black.

Or, as I might have said back in college, during my more overtly nationalist days, to white.

Even now I shudder at the memory. But there is no escaping it, at least not here in Washington. Last night, Kimmer and I sat up with her parents, watching the eleven o’clock news. When the anchorwoman reached the funeral of Oliver Garland, about the third story in, there, suddenly, were scenes not of today’s events but of the humiliation of many years ago, my father seated before the Judiciary Committee, his mouth moving soundlessly as the reporter continued to talk. Cut to footage of Jack Ziegler in handcuffs following one of his many arrests: a nice, if biased, touch. Cut to the Judge giving a fiery speech before one of the Rightpacs as the reporter chattered about his later career. Cut to the rueful face of Greg Haramoto, interviewed outside the church just after the funeral, expressing his sorrow at the passing of “a great man” and extending his condolences to the family-although he made no effort to condole us in person, or by telephone, or even by note. Greg turns out to be the only attendee whose post-funeral comments made the news; but perhaps he was the only one the journalists found worth interviewing. Just as he was, before the Judiciary Committee in 1986, the only witness who mattered.

Even after all these years, knowing that the committee might have been right does nothing to assuage the pain of my father’s disgrace. Strangers accost me at conferences: Aren’t you Oliver Garland’s son? I mutter banalities through thick curtains of red and flee as quickly as I can. So it is just as well that I do not accompany Kimmer on her Washington rounds; my pain would hinder her and, in the end, might injure her. Besides, Bentley and I have made other plans for the day. In a little while, we will head over to Shepard Street and then off with Mariah and her crew for a morning of in-line skating at some suburban rollerdrome. Miles Madison, whose professional life now consists of occasional conversations with the managers of his various properties, has left for the golf course, despite the rainy weather. “If they can’t play golf,” sighs Vera Madison, “they’ll just play cards and drink all day.” My mother-in-law, who always asks me to address her by her first name, has all of Kimmer’s handsomeness and height but is a good deal thinner; my wife’s breadth comes from the Colonel, who has grown buttery since his retirement, and who, on his good days, allows me to call him Mr. Madison. Vera has offered to watch Bentley if I need to talk to my sister. I decline. I am keeping my son very close to me until I figure out what Uncle Jack was talking about. Probably nothing, but still. I have not yet told Kimmer, unsure how she will react, but when I asked her before she left this morning to please be careful, she looked at me hard-Kimmer misses little-and then kissed me lightly on the lips and said, “Oh, I will, Misha, I will.” I was smiling at Kimmer when she walked out into the cold morning drizzle. She was smiling too, probably in anticipation of her day.

Kimmer headed into town in her mother’s midnight-blue Cadillac, so Bentley and I take the rental car-a prosaic white Taurus-for the five-minute drive down Sixteenth Street to Shepard. Our journey takes us through the heart of the Gold Coast, a lovely corner of Northwest Washington where, over the middle decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of lawyers and physicians and businessmen and professors of the darker nation created an idyllic and sheltered community for their families in the midst of racial segregation. The lots tend to be large, the lawns manicured to perfection, and the houses spacious and beautifully furnished; in the white suburbs, they would sell for double or triple their value in the city. On the other hand, the ritzy black enclave of the Gold Coast might be integrating: Jay Rockefeller, for example, now lives on a vast estate that sprawls from just beyond Shepard Street down to Rock Creek Park. Perhaps for aesthetic balance, many rising black professionals who would once have purchased homes here are now busily integrating the suburbs.

Stopping briefly for a red light, I peek at my son in the rearview mirror. Bentley is a good-looking boy. He has my thick black hair, pointy chin, and deep chocolate skin, along with his mother’s huge brown eyes, striking eyebrows, and full lips. He is also a quiet and very serious child, given to shyness around others and introspection when alone. Our son talked late: so late that we consulted pediatricians and even a pediatric neurologist-some friend of some cousin of Kimmer’s-all of whom assured us that, although most children have spoken a few words midway through their second year, and some much earlier, it is neither unusual nor a sign of an impending mental deficiency for a child to start talking later. Just wait it out, everybody told us. And Bentley made us wait. Now, half a year past his third birthday, he has begun to babble in that peculiar mixture of proper English and mysterious prelinguistic code that so many toddlers discover shortly after turning one. He is talking it now, sternly lecturing his new dog, fiery orange and filled with stuffing, a gift from Addison, who never misses a chance to create a fan: “And no and doggie no said no cause Mama red you uh-oh doggie bad okay go home now go no no dare doggie Mama no no said dare okay no no okay dare doggie bad dare you…”

I interrupt this string of gorgeous gibberish:

“You okay, buddy?”

My son shuts up and eyes me warily, his pudgy hands clutching the yet unnamed dog as though he fears it might disappear.

“Dare doggie,” he whispers.

“Right.”

“Dare you!” he bursts out happily, for he adds new words and phrases just about daily. I wonder which television show he picked this line up from. “Dare don’t!”

“Okay, buddy. I love you.”

“Wuv you. Dare you.”

“Dare you, too,” I answer, but this only puzzles him, and his laughter subsides into uneasy silence.

I shake my head. Sometimes Bentley makes us uneasy, too-Kimmer especially. She spoils him hopelessly, unable to bear his unhappiness for an instant, because she has always blamed herself for whatever is wrong with our son, if, indeed, anything is. His first morning outside the womb swung rapidly from exhilarating to terrifying. Laboring in one of the brightly colored birthing rooms at the university hospital’s sparkling maternity wing, pressing down when ordered, holding back on request, working on her breathing, doing all of it exactly right in typically splendid Kimmer fashion, my wife suddenly started to bleed very heavily, even though the baby’s head had hardly crowned. I watched in amazement as the white sheets and green hospital gown turned bright, viscous red. The jolly, encouraging midwife who had been supervising the event all at once lost her jolliness and stopped encouraging. From my coaching perch on a wooden stool, I asked if everything was all right. The midwife hesitated, then offered me a wobbly smile and said that pregnant women can easily afford to lose a lot of blood, because their blood supply doubles. But she also whispered to a second nurse, who hurried from the room. The bleeding continued, a coppery red sea, as the midwife tried to deliver the baby’s head. Her gloved hands slipped and she cursed. Kimmer felt things going awry, then looked down and saw all the blood and screamed in terror, which I had never heard before and have never heard since. I had never seen so much blood either. Our baby’s little head was awash in it. The fetal monitor began braying a series of desperate objections. A doctor I had never seen before materialized to replace the midwife. She took a quick look and barked a series of swift orders; without further conversation, I was pressed physically from the room by two nurses as a phalanx of blue gowns converged on the bed, leaving me all alone in the modern, soulless waiting area to contemplate the possibility that I would lose both wife and son on what should have been the happiest day of my life.

Kimmer, it later turned out, was suffering from abruptio placentae, a premature separation of the uterine lining, similar to a menstrual period, but often deadly when one is carrying a late-term child; more specifically, as we were later told, Kimmer suffered a rupture of the myometrium, which might easily have been fatal, for she could have bled to death and our baby could have asphyxiated. To this day, my wife believes the condition was brought on by her continuing to drink during pregnancy, for she scoffed at claims that her personal habits could possibly do the baby (or fetus, as she called our child growing inside her) any harm. If her fears are true, then I must share the blame, not because I am a drinker-I am not-but because I have never been strong where Kimmer is concerned. After she thrice angrily ignored my nervous entreaties, I gave up trying to stop her. The first few hours of our son’s life were harrowing: there was a chance, the doctors told us, stone-faced, that we might lose him. And Kimmer herself needed treatment for the blood she’d lost. A day or so later, when everybody turned out alive after all, my wife and I knelt in prayer, the last time we have done so outside of a church, thanking a God we have usually ignored.

Bentley, I believe, was God’s answer.

Yet our son’s birth also marks the point from which our marriage began its downhill slide. Today, my wife and I live together on uneasy terms. There are things she does not want to know and things she wants me not to know. If she is out of town, for instance, she calls me, not the other way around. Only in emergencies do I dare break the rules. When Mallory Corcoran called on Thursday afternoon to tell me my father had died, I checked our home answering machine by remote to see whether my wife had called. She had not. I immediately tried her at her hotel in San Francisco. She was out. I called her cell phone. It was turned off. I picked up Bentley from day care, explained to him solemnly what had happened to his grandfather, then returned to our house and tried again. She was still out. I called for hours, until midnight in the West-3 a.m. in Elm Harbor-and Kimmer was always out. Finally, in a burst of dreadful inspiration, I called the hotel again and asked for Gerald Nathanson. Jerry was in his room. He was nervous. The work was still going on, he told me. He did not know where my wife was, but he was sure she was safe. He promised to have her call if he ran into her. She called me ten minutes later. I never asked from where.

(II)

At Shepard street, the door is opened by Cousin Sally, who is skipping work this morning in order to sit in my father’s kitchen torturing my sister with dubious stories from our shared childhoods. Sally smothers me in those powerful arms, which is the way she greets just about everybody, but Addison in particular. Inside the house, smooth jazz is playing: Grover Washington, I think.

Bentley shrieks at his first sight of little Martin and Martina, who are, as usual, hand in hand. Within minutes, my son has joined the younger members of my sister’s posse in some complicated game that has them trooping through the house in a dignified line, led by Marcus, the youngest, touching one and exactly one piece of furniture in each room before proceeding to the next, then reversing course and doing the same backward. I find Mariah and Just Alma in the twin wicker rocking chairs on the back porch. Alma, a Kool protruding jauntily from her mouth, grins in what could be delight, and Mariah allows me to kiss her cheek. Alma seems to be at the tail end of one of her raunchy stories, as well as her energy: she has to be going, she says, explaining for my benefit that one of her granddaughters will be along any minute to drive her back to Philadelphia. As she stands up, Alma pulls one of her famous tricks, squeezing the tip of the cigarette to put it out, then slipping it into the pocket of her cardigan.

I nod at the empty rocker, and Sally, reading my signal, takes Just Alma’s seat. I then walk with Alma into the house. In the foyer, while she hunts for her coat, I ask her casually what she meant when she said the other day that they would let me know about the plans my father had made for me.

Alma’s wise old eyes move in her dark face, but she does not quite look at me. “It ain’t nothin to do with me,” she murmurs after a moment.

I haven’t a clue what she is talking about, and I say so.

“Ain’t no they, ” she explains as I help her into her coat. “Just you and your family.”

“Alma…”

“Your job is to take care of the family.”

The honking of a horn announces the arrival of her granddaughter, who is, like quite a few of the numberless cousins, too young to consider the possibility that one should try to be polite, even the day after a funeral.

“Gotta go,” Alma informs me.

“Alma, wait a second. Wait.”

She is walking away from me, but her voice floats over her shoulder. “If your daddy has plans, he’ll tell you soon enough.”

“How can he possibly…”

We are standing at the open front door. Alma’s huge suitcase is sitting on the floor of the foyer. A brown Dodge Durango is in the driveway, her rude granddaughter a blur behind the windshield. Alma takes my hand, and this time she does look at me.

“Your daddy was smarter than all of them, Talcott. That’s why they were afraid of him.” This is another precious bit of family mythology: that the Judge was denied his seat on the Supreme Court by lesser intellects who were jealous and racist at the same time. “You just wait and see.”

“See what?”

“See how afraid of your father they were. When they come. But don’t let it worry you none.”

“When who comes?”

“They might not come, though. Your father thought they would. But they might be afraid.”

“I’m not following…”

“Like Jack. Jack Ziegler. He was afraid of your father, too.”

It takes me a moment to process this. Somewhere deep in the house, I hear the shrieks of joyful children.

“Alma, I…”

“Gotta go, Talcott.” She has rescued her Kool from her pocket and seems to want to light it. “I just emptied my bladder and I wanna get back to Philly before I gotta do it again.”

“Alma, wait. Please. Wait a second.”

“What is it, Talcott?” The peeved tone of an exhausted but indulgent parent.

“Jack Ziegler-what were you saying about him?”

“He’s just an old man, Talcott, Jack Ziegler is. Don’t let him scare you. He didn’t scare your father none, and he shouldn’t scare you none either.”

(III)

I suggest we go for a walk, but my sister declines. Mariah is lonely, tired, and irritable-not hard to understand, perhaps, when her only grown-up company so far this morning has consisted of the self-centered, confusing Alma and the intermittently reliable Sally. I persuade my sister to come in from the porch. We sit down together in the kitchen. Mariah’s makeup lacks its usual precision, her hair is in curlers, and the house she will formally inherit as soon as the will is admitted to probate is already the worse for wear, with evidence of young inhabitants-everything from tiny shoes to Playmobil sailors-scattered everywhere. Howard is gone, having returned to New York on the first shuttle to repair some collapsing deal, and leaving Sally and me to sit in that remarkably white kitchen listening to Mariah rail against Addison for his insufficiently vigorous defense of the Judge when he spoke at the funeral. And, indeed, I found my brother’s brief reference to the hearings confusing, perhaps because he was trying to please too many constituencies: Some of the attacks on my father were unfair. Some were pretty nasty. But some were thoughtful. Some were respectful. There were issues about which reasonable people could differ. We must never, in our love for Dad, forget that. And, certainly, the Christian in me will not allow me to condemn those who took the other side, because they, too, were doing what they thought was right.

“He can be a real bastard,” my sister informs us, her finger stabbing the air. “All Addison ever thinks about is Addison.” Her tone suggesting that this is news. Sally’s pug mouth twists in a half-grin, half-grimace: she adores my big brother, but also knows him to be a selfish… what-Mariah-said. Sally’s mother, Thera, avoids my father’s side of the family, even skipping the funeral, and I suppose what happened between Addison and her daughter is one of the reasons. Addison himself, along with Beth Olin, the great white poet, left town shortly after the funeral, heading on to Fort Lauderdale, where my brother had a speaking engagement. “Love amongst the Rats,” sniffed Kimmer, when she learned that Beth was going along. “Good riddance,” sniffs Mariah now, who is more like my wife than she will ever admit.

Yet Addison also has another side, the side for which I admire him. At Shepard Street yesterday afternoon, before he left with Beth, my brother took me aside, into the library, the same room where I found the diabolical scrapbook. Some relative murmured condescendingly that the brothers were going off to plan the future of the family. With the door closed behind us, I once more managed to place my body in front of the bookshelf, not wanting Addison to see the worrisome volume. But he wasn’t looking. He surprised me with an earnest bear hug, then let me loose and offered his handsome smile. He told me he had caught snatches of the conversation with Jack Ziegler, and that I had acquitted myself admirably-one of the Judge’s favorite phrases. We both laughed. He asked me what I planned to do about whatever Uncle Jack was looking for, and added, before I could speak, that he would help in any way he could. I had only to call. My heart hammered with sibling love. For so much of my youth, and even my early adulthood, Addison was protector, helper, role model. He cheered when I succeeded and consoled me when I failed. Strong Addison, wise Addison, popular Addison, whose advice at critical turnings of my life was far more helpful than the Judge’s. He was there for the trivial-like when I was trounced in the election for editor in chief of the law review-and for the profound-like when my work kept me from making a planned trip to see my ailing mother, and she died while I was busily writing an article on mass tort litigation. And he urged me, against the wishes of the family, to go ahead and marry Kimmer-a decision, despite its occasional difficulties, that I believe I will never regret.

Looking into his somber, caring eyes yesterday, however, I could think of nothing with which I needed help. I told him the truth: that I had no idea what Uncle Jack was asking about, and therefore had no plans to do anything about it. Addison shifted tracks swiftly, as a good politician should, and said that might be best: Jack Ziegler is crazy as a loon.

(IV)

Mariah, after three cups of coffee, finally announces that it is time to depart. But the intention, as so often, is easier than the act. Last night, my sister’s king-sized family was augmented by the au pair of the moment, a matronly and delightful woman from the Balkans whose name I never do get straight. Even with the au pair’s assistance and Sally’s, it takes an astonishingly long time to get five children dressed to go off to the rink. And Mariah herself must prepare for the day. Waiting, I wander the house with Bentley, who stares around my father’s long study with wide-eyed wonder. It occurs to me that my son has not been in this room in a year. My father loved his privacy, and this was his most private room. I lift Bentley in my arms and point to the signed photographs of my father with the great that line the wall opposite the windows, pronouncing the names carefully for my son, even though he will never remember them: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, then the doorway to the hall and, at the far side, a sharp shift in political emphasis to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush pere et fils, Dan Quayle, Bob Dole, John McCain, Pat Robertson. Bentley giggles and frowns and giggles again, pointing at some of the pictures and ignoring others, but I can find no ideological pattern to his responses.

At the time of his death, my father had at his disposal a formal and suitably impressive corner office right down the hall from Uncle Mal’s, on the tenth floor of a glass-walled building at Seventeenth and Eye, a short walk from the White House, where, despite all that happened, he was still an occasional guest, at least during Republican administrations. In Washington, downtown office buildings are much shorter than in other large cities. The tenth floor is considered fairly posh, and posh was very much my father’s style in the last, tortured years of his life. He seemed determined to earn, all at once, the money denied him during his two decades on the bench. Although he lived so frugally that what he spent it on is anybody’s guess.

The Judge rarely used his corner office downtown. He preferred to work at home, sitting alone in this cavernous study, which he constructed after my mother’s death. To build it, my father simply knocked down the walls that separated the three family bedrooms ranged along the gallery at the top of the curved stair that swept upward from the foyer. This meant that, whenever any of his children visited overnight, we slept on a fold-out sofa down in the musty basement playroom, or in the dilapidated and probably illegal maid’s quarters some earlier owner had shoehorned into one end of the attic. Which is how Kimmer and Bentley and I got into the habit of staying at her parents’ home whenever we were in Washington. The Judge seemed not to mind. He was not the sort of grandfather who doted on his children’s children. He hated to give up, even temporarily, his access to any corner of his house. He would chafe and fume if we came down late any morning from the maid’s room, then run up the stairs for an inspection. He would shush Bentley if his laughter grew too loud. How he put up with Mariah and her enormous brood, I have no idea, for after the death of our mother, he came to like the security of chosen silence. Put simply, my father preferred his privacy. Unlike most of us, my father probably would not much have minded dying alone, which, it seems, is exactly what he did.

I glance down the long room to my father’s large but shabby desk-an antique, he likely would have called it-an old partners desk, with kneeholes on both sides, each surrounded by a surfeit of drawers for all occasions. The wood is dark and pitted and desperately in need of a polishing, but I suppose my fanatically private father never brought anybody up here, so there was nobody to polish it for. Besides, the desktop itself is in perfect order, the pens and blotter and telephone and photographs-only of Claire, not of the children-all arranged with a realistic precision signaling that the office is used, yes, but by an individual of extraordinary self-discipline, which is how my father thought of himself. And, as with all the elements of good character, acting as though you are disciplined is not much different from actually being disciplined.

This is where my father died, sprawling across the desk, found by the housekeeper an hour or so later (a woman we will wind up paying a goodly sum to keep her away from the eager tabloids, Mallory Corcoran’s minions drafting the ironclad contract for her signature, Howard Denton providing the cash). No note clasped in my father’s hand, no finger pointing to a clue, and no evidence of foul play. I wonder what crossed his mind at the end, what fear of judgment or oblivion, what anger at a life’s work left unfinished. Mariah imagines a killer standing over him, hypodermic in hand, but the police found no sign of a struggle, and her determination to show that the Judge was murdered seems to me, at this moment, no more than a mechanism for staving off anguish she would rather not experience. Or am I failing to penetrate to a deeper reality that only my sister so far perceives? I gaze at the desk and see my father, a bulky man, grabbing at his chest, eyes sick with disbelief, an angry old man with a bad heart, dying with none of his family nearby or even forewarned. The housekeeper called 911 and then called the firm, as the Judge had instructed her to do should something like this happen, and, although Mariah has had the carpet shampooed, I still discern faint outlines here and there where the paramedics left dirty footprints.

Across the room from the desk, positioned before one of the three windows looking out on the yard, is the low wooden table, manufactured by Drueke, on which my father used to compose his chess problems. Atop the table is a marble chessboard, the alternating gray and black squares each almost three inches on a side. Wandering over to the windows, I caress the ornately carved Indian box that holds the Judge’s treasured chess set, the lid neatly shut, conveying a sense of abandonment, perhaps even bereavement. Call it anthropomorphism, call it romanticism: I envision the pieces mourning their master, the touch of whose fingers they will never feel again. I was, once upon a time, a serious chess player, having learned the moves from my father, who loved the game but rarely played against an actual opponent, for he was of a different, more exclusive fraternity, the chess problemist. Problemists try to find new and unusual ways to use the fewest possible pieces as they challenge solvers to figure out how white can play and checkmate black in two moves, and so on. Problems were never to my taste; I always preferred to play an actual game, against a flesh-and-blood opponent; but the Judge insisted that the only true chess artist was the composer. A few of his problems were even published in minor magazines here and there, and once, back in the early Reagan years, in what was then known as Chess Life and Review, the leading chess publication in the country, a page that hangs framed, even now, in the upstairs hallway of the Oak Bluffs house.

I open the box and admire the three-inch-high chess pieces stuffed into their two felted compartments, each beautifully stained piece carved of ebony or boxwood, traditional in design but with enough added fillips and whorls to make the set distinctive. I smile a bit, remembering the way we used to come into the study when it was downstairs-before the Judge knocked down the walls to make this one-and find him hunched over the table, a notebook at his side, working out his compositions. It relaxed him, he said; although at times it resembled an obsession, it was better than his drinking.

Then I frown. I sense something peculiar about the set, even as it lies in the box, but I cannot quite work it out.

I glance around at Bentley, who has plucked a volume of C. S. Lewis from my father’s shelf and seated himself in my father’s recliner. The Judge used to quote Lewis by the yard. His grandson has selected a page at random and is running his stubby fingers along the lines of type, his mouth moving as though he can read the words. Well, maybe he can a little, maybe he will surprise us all, as he so often has.

I close the box and put it back on the table. I cross to the desk and settle myself in the executive swivel chair, the oxblood leather old and cracked. I am not sure what I am doing, why I am even in this room, much less why I am sitting at the Judge’s desk. On the credenza behind the desk stands a computer, complete with a printer-scanner-fax machine, nothing but the best, meaning the most expensive, for the Honorable Oliver C. Garland, as much of his mail was still addressed when he died. As usual, the computer is enveloped in a form-fitting green plastic dust cover-a dust cover!-because, although Addison, who loves computers, insisted that the Judge ought to have the latest technology and often went out and purchased it for him, my father hardly ever used it, preferring to compose his speeches and essays and angry letters to the editor, even his books, on yellow legal pads, which Mrs. Rose, his assistant, would later transcribe. Two pads sit on his desk, one of them missing the top few pages, both of them entirely blank.

No clue there, either.

I slide open a file drawer at random and find a few drafts of this and that, along with a scattering of financial records. Leafing through the next drawer, which seems to contain letters, I am startled briefly by a rapping sound behind me. Bentley has crawled into the kneehole on the far side of the desk and is knocking on the wood and giggling. I realize that I am supposed to answer, like at a door.

“Who’s there?” I say, very loud, holding in my hand some mutually flattering correspondence between the Judge and a syndicated columnist sufficiently far to the right that the Heritage Foundation probably would not have him in.

“Knock-knock,” my son says with a laugh, getting the joke backward.

“Who’s there?” I repeat.

“Bemmy. Bemmy dere.” He comes flying out, uncoiling at that remarkable speed that three-year-olds of both sexes seem able to summon at an instant, sprawling cross-legged on the vast Oriental carpet, then rolling to his feet like a paratrooper who has made a perfect landing. “Bemmy dere! Dare you!”

I step deftly around the desk to hug my son, but he shoves happily free of me and tears off toward a little sitting area my father arranged under the largest of the three windows on the long side of the room. From his parents, or at least his father, Bentley has inherited a certain reckless clumsiness. So I am not entirely surprised when, looking back to see whether I am playing, my son smashes into the Judge’s chess table. The marble board lifts, then crashes back onto the glass-topped table. Nothing breaks, but the elegant box tumbles onto its side and the hand-turned pieces patter like rain against window and walls, then drop to the floor. Bentley tumbles backward, landing on his well-padded rump with a surprised grunt.

“Bemmy hurt,” my son announces in wonderment. He sheds no tears, perhaps because he possesses, already at age three, the Garland frugality with displays of emotion. “Bemmy ouch.”

“You’re okay,” I assure him, crouching for a hug he does not seem to want. “You’re just fine, sweetheart.”

“Bemmy ouch,” he reminds me. “Bemmy fine. Bemmy okay.”

“That’s right, you’re okay.”

Bentley climbs to his feet and toddles off in the direction of my father’s desk. I stoop to pick up the scattered chess pieces, setting them not in the box but in the positions from which they would begin a game. I note with irritation that two pawns are missing, one white and one black. I glance around the carpet again but see nothing. Pieces of this size are not easy to miss. I peek under the wooden chairs on either side of the chess table: still nothing.

From out in the hallway, I hear the mischievous chatter of two or three of my sister’s children, fresh from the shower, and, as Bentley rushes out to join them, my mind sparks with unreasoning anger. Why do the pawns number only fourteen instead of sixteen? The answer is infuriatingly obvious. The missing chess pieces are evidence that Mariah’s children have been frolicking in here. My sister, as usual, sets no limits on the freedom of her spoiled little brood. True, the house will soon be hers, but she might wait more than a week before letting her kids turn the room where the Judge died into a playpen-or a pigpen.

Still, having a rambunctious child of my own, I can see why the cavernous room might qualify as an attractive nuisance. Unfortunately, a collectible chess set, like the one my father used to compose his problems, is worth a good deal less with pieces missing. I assume that the missing pieces will turn up, and I catch myself wondering whether Mariah, about to inherit the house and all its contents, might be persuaded to let me have the chess set. I could even return it to the Vineyard, where my father used to work on his compositions in the good old days, sitting alone on the porch in the evening, sipping lemonade, hunched over the board-

Downstairs, the doorbell rings, and I shiver, suddenly certain that somebody has come to the house to deliver more bad news. I am already halfway out the door when Sally’s substantial voice comes blasting up from the foyer:

“Tal, there’s some men here to see you.” A pause. “They’re from the FBI.”

CHAPTER 7

THE ROLLER WOMAN

(I)

“You people work fast,” I tell the two agents as we settle in the living room. I have offered them something to drink, which they have declined. I am more nervous than I want to be, but that is because I am not quite ready to talk to them; I am not quite sure how to handle some of the questions they are sure to ask about my wife. Mariah, in dark slacks and bright red socks, stands in the arched entry to the foyer, watching us carefully. Sally, wearing one of her endless supply of too-tight dresses, peeks around the corner with wide, agitated eyes.

“Just doing our job,” says the tall one, a black man named Foreman. I wonder if he is deliberately misunderstanding me.

“What I mean is, we buried my father yesterday,” I explain. “My wife told me you would be coming by soon, but I would think that this could wait.”

The two men exchange a look. The shorter man, McDermott, has an angry white face, sandy hair, and a large, unsightly birthmark on the back of his hand. He seems old for this work, sixtyish, but I am wary of stereotypes. The taller one is calm and wears glasses. His hands are in constant motion, the hands of a magician. The two agents are seated awkwardly on the cream-colored sofa, as though worried about marring it. Both wear suits far cheaper than anything the mourners who crowded into the foyer last Friday would buy. I am across from them in a creaky rocker. Somewhere in the house, I hear shrieks of joy, and I know that five Dentons, plus one Garland, are off on another destructive rampage.

“We don’t think it can,” McDermott reports, staring me down.

“Well, I think this is inappropriate. I mean, naturally, I’ll be happy to help in any way I can. But surely it doesn’t have to be done today.”

There is an odd moment of silence. I have the slightly scary sense that they know secrets they are contemplating whether to reveal. I remind myself that this is America.

“What did your wife tell you, exactly?” asks McDermott at last.

“Nothing confidential,” I assure them. “She told me that you would be coming by to interview me in connection with… well, her possible nomination.”

“That we would be coming by?” Foreman sounds amused.

“Well, that somebody from the FBI would-”

“What about her nomination?” McDermott interrupts, rudely.

Before I can answer the agent’s question, Sally surprises us all by stepping forward and putting one of her own:

“Have we met before, Agent McDermott?”

He is silent for a beat, as though sorting through the visual memories of a long and distinguished career of performing background checks.

“Not that I recall, Mrs. Stillman,” he says at last. With a twinge of dismay, I note his precision: he knows who in the family has taken whose last name, and who has not. If even a timeserver like McDermott is being this thorough, Kimmer is unlikely to succeed in hiding what she most wishes to. My wife must be longing for the old days, when Washington did not care about adultery.

Once upon a time.

I make myself relax. At least we have never hired an illegal alien, my wife has never committed sexual harassment, and we have had no more trouble with our taxes than any other two-earner professional family.

“Are you sure?” Sally persists.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says shortly, and cuts his eyes toward Foreman, who nods and stands up and walks over to Sally. An appalled Mariah is already pulling at her arm. The three of them have a whispered conversation, but it is obvious that Foreman is indicating, as gently as he can, that the agents would like to talk to me alone.

“Thank you,” Foreman calls after her as Sally stomps across the foyer, half led by Mariah and half leading her. There is no response.

“Now, then,” says McDermott, looking down at his little notebook. He has already dismissed my cousin from his thoughts. I wonder, briefly, why she decided to challenge him.

“Right,” I say, for no reason. I sit back, bewildered. There is something nudging the edge of my consciousness, something to do with Sally’s reaction, but I cannot quite get it. “Right,” I repeat, losing my place.

“You were talking about your wife’s nomination,” Foreman prompts, glancing at his puzzled partner as he speaks.

“Oh, oh, right.” I gather myself. “I know she hasn’t been formally nominated. But the background check comes first, right?”

“Background check?” asks McDermott.

“Concerning her nomination,” I explain, glancing quickly toward the foyer, and also wondering whether I am idiotic or they are. “Uh, her possible nomination.”

They look at each other again. It is Foreman’s turn.

“Mr. Garland, we are not here about your wife.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“We should have made things clear.” He crosses his long legs. “We know about what is going on with your wife, of course, but I’m afraid that’s not the reason for this visit. Believe me, we would not interrupt your bereavement for a background check.”

“Okay. Okay, then, why are you here?” But, even as I speak, I know what is coming, and my heart seems to slow down.

McDermott again: “Yesterday afternoon, in the cemetery, you spoke with one Jack Ziegler. True?”

I like that: One Jack Ziegler. Conveying suspicion, but not actually saying much.

“Well, yes…”

“We need to know what you talked about. That’s why we’re here.” Just like that. He has made his demands and he is finished.

“Why?”

“We can’t tell you that,” says McDermott quickly, as well as rudely.

“We would if we could,” adds Foreman, just as fast, which earns him a dirty look from his partner. “I can say that this is in reference to an ongoing criminal investigation, and please let me assure you that neither you nor any member of your family is in any way a subject of that investigation.”

Because I am my father’s son, I am tempted, for a silly moment, to correct his use of the alleged verb ongo. In the next instant, I am tempted to tell him precisely what Uncle Jack said to me. But discipline holds in the end; one of the terrible things about being a lawyer is that cautious precision is second nature.

Besides, I already mistrust them.

I say: “How do you happen to know that I spoke with Jack Ziegler yesterday?”

“We can’t tell you that,” says McDermott, the broken record, again too fast.

“I would like to think that my government does not spy on funerals.”

“We do what we have to do,” McDermott chirps.

“We don’t spy at all.” Foreman cuts in like a bully at a high-school dance. “In a criminal investigation, as you know, being a lawyer yourself, there are certain exigencies. The methodology is often complex, but, I assure you, we always proceed in accord with pertinent regulations.” He is saying precisely the same thing as McDermott, just using a lot more words to do it. He is probably a lawyer too.

I am running out of ideas. I ask: “Is Jack Ziegler the subject of the investigation? No, never mind,” I add, before McDermott can repeat his line.

“We need your help,” says Foreman. “We need it badly.”

I use one of my father’s most effective tools when he used to lecture: I make them wait. I think about my encounter with Uncle Jack, and try to understand what it is that I am guarding. I think that perhaps I should relate, word for word, what happened. I nearly do. And then, in his impatience, McDermott ruins it.

“We can make you tell us, you know.”

Foreman nearly groans. My head snaps around. I have been angry, on and off, for the last several days, and yesterday I was frightened. I have had enough.

“I beg your pardon.”

“You have to tell us what you know. It’s your legal obligation.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snap, my eyes blazing through suddenly red air into Agent McDermott’s unanticipated umbrage. “That isn’t the law, as I’m sure you know. You can’t coerce somebody into cooperating with your investigation. You can, maybe, punish me if I tell you something that isn’t true, but you can’t make me tell you what you want to know, no matter how badly you need to know it, not unless you convene a grand jury and issue a subpoena. Now, is that what you want to do?”

“We could do that,” says McDermott. I do not understand his fury or, for that matter, his tactics. “We don’t want to, but we could.”

I am not finished. “Federal prosecutors convene grand juries, not FBI agents. And, as I recall, there is a very specific regulation prohibiting you from making threats.”

“We’re not making threats,” Foreman tries, but McDermott will not stop.

“We don’t have time to play games,” McDermott snarls. His voice has taken on a faint accent, probably Southern. “Jack Ziegler is scum. He’s a murderer. He sells arms. He sells drugs. I don’t know what else he sells. I do know nobody’s been able to nail him. Well, this time we’re going to do it. We’re this close, Professor.” He holds up thumb and forefinger a centimeter or so apart. Then he leans toward me. “Now, your wife is up for a judgeship. Great, I hope she gets it. But it’s not going to look very good, is it, when it turns out that her husband refused to cooperate in a criminal investigation of a scumbag like good old Uncle Jack Ziegler. So-are you going to help us or not?”

I glance over at Foreman in disbelief, but his face is professionally blank. Full of fiery indignation, I am about to snap out an answer-goodness knows what I plan to say-when Sally’s stout voice drifts into the room from the foyer:

“I’m leaving, Tal. Gotta go to work. I guess I’ll have to talk to you later.” Judging from her tone, she is still offended at being excluded. But she also wants to talk to me now.

I jump to my feet and excuse myself for a moment, buying time to think. And, if I can, to calm down. I walk Sally to the door. On the front step, she pauses, turns to face me, and asks if I happened to get Agent McDermott’s first name. I confess that he does not seem to have mentioned it, then ask her why she wants to know.

“I just have the feeling I’ve seen him before,” Cousin Sally says, her bold brown eyes holding mine. Except on the subject of Addison, Sally lacks an outlandish imagination, so, if she says she has met him, I am required to take her seriously.

“Where?”

“I don’t know, Tal, but-did you see his hand?”

“The birthmark? Yes.”

“Yeah, and his lip.” I think about it for a few seconds, then nod. There is a small, pale spot on McDermott’s upper lip, a kind of scar, far more prominent when he is angry. “I’ve seen that mark before,” says my cousin, who, thanks to a bad marriage in her past, has a few scars of her own.

“Where?”

“I… I’m not sure.”

“On the Hill? In connection with your work?”

Sally shakes her head. “A long time ago.”

Before I can respond to this, Sally shrugs and smiles and says never mind, more than likely she is mistaken.

I wait a beat, then ask her if she is all right. “I’m fine,” she says, a sad, thoughtful look coming into her eyes. Sally squeezes my hand, and, when she lets go, my anger goes too, just like that, as though she has drawn it out of me.

“Thanks for your help,” I smile.

She smiles back, then turns and heads for her car, carrying one of the oversized totes that always remind Kimmer of a bag lady.

I return to the living room, far calmer than I was a few minutes ago. McDermott and Foreman are both on their feet, alert and impatient, but confident too. Well, why shouldn’t they be confident? They have played the good-cop, bad-cop routine perfectly, and they both know I am beaten. I know it too. I have no idea whether Sally really has seen McDermott before, but I have learned a lot over the years about cutting your losses; one of the things the Judge drummed into our heads was the old rhyme about living to fight another day. I look at the agents steadily and say: “I’m sorry if I seemed uncooperative. That wasn’t my intention. Now, what exactly do you want to know?”

(II)

My sister and I get moving later than we planned, but eventually we arrive at the crowded skating rink, which is across the highway from one of Washington’s countless suburban shopping malls. Marcus has a cold and stays at Shepard Street with the au pair, so we are seven altogether, and can all squeeze into Mariah’s justacquired Lincoln Navigator, that luxurious monster masquerading as a sports-utility vehicle. Everybody skates but me. Mariah’s children, who apparently do this all the time, are quite good, and Bentley, who has never done it before, is eager to try, for his introspective streak does nothing to reduce his childlike bravado. Mariah takes personal charge of him and promises not to leave his side. Mariah takes promises more seriously than anybody I have ever known, so I have no doubts about his safety. Bentley, however, must have a few; just before stepping onto the rink itself, he turns to me, so festooned with pads and helmet that he can scarcely be seen, and whispers, “Dare you?” Smiling, I shake my head and assure my son that Aunt Mariah will take good care of him. Bentley smiles tentatively back at me, then steps out into the rink, holding on to my sister with both hands. The Denton children have long since whirled away, to the beat of a song by Celine Dion or Mariah Carey or some other PG-motion-picture-soundtrack diva.

I lean on the heavy wooden boards that form the sides of the rink, and watch. I am not skating because I do not want to embarrass myself, but also because I want to think. I want to think because I want to make sure that I am not in trouble. I want to make sure that I am not in trouble because I did not tell Foreman and McDermott everything that happened. I did not lie to them, exactly, but I did not reveal the entire conversation with Uncle Jack. I told them about the condolences he offered. I told them he seemed sick. I told them about his repeated demands to know about the arrangements. I told them about his concern that others, who would mean us ill, would ask the same questions. But I did not tell them about his promise to protect me and my family, for fear that it might be misconstrued. I did not tell them what he said about Marc Hadley.

The odd part was that, after I finished my recitation (which they interrupted only now and then, for minor clarifications), the FBI men had just one question, asked with polite emphasis by Agent Foreman: “So, Mr. Garland, what arrangements did your father make?” When I repeated what I had earlier told Uncle Jack, that I did not have the slightest idea what arrangements he was talking about, Foreman walked me, with lawyerlike precision, through a series of possibilities: Were there any special financial arrangements? Burial arrangements? Had my father left any special instructions about what should be done upon his death? Special instructions to open a safe-deposit box, for example? Or an envelope to be sealed until after he died? Did I recall any conversations or communications over the past year in which my father used the word arrangements? (That last question would have left me laughing had their faces, and McDermott’s silky threat about Kimmer, not been so serious.)

I responded to every question with some version of the same hackneyed Washington phrase: I don’t know, Not to my knowledge, I don’t recall, sounding much like my father before the Judiciary Committee, and reminding me yet again just how much I hate the city. Once it became clear that this was the only answer I was prepared to offer, McDermott seemed ready to lose his temper again. But, for once, Foreman got there first. He told me how helpful I had been. He told me how they knew it was a difficult time and they were grateful for my cooperation. He told me that he would personally see to it that none of this created the slightest adverse reflection on my wife’s chances for nomination-another nicely meaningless lawyerly turn of a phrase. And he told me they would see themselves out, which I allowed them to do.

A few minutes after the agents left, I found myself regretting that I had not told them all I knew-and only then did I realize that they had not left me business cards telling me how to get in touch with them if I remembered anything else. This struck me as odd, because the many FBI agents I regularly encounter when my former students go through security checks for government jobs always leave their cards. I worried over this omission, wondering why they were so confident that they had all they needed to know, wondering whether I had, without realizing it, given them the decisive link in their investigation. Then I forgot all about the question, because an impatient Mariah, tapping her foot in the foyer, pointed out that we had to leave, lest we not have time to skate and still get back for my appointment with Mallory Corcoran. On the way to the skating rink, she sat in silence for a while, then asked whether I thought Sally really knew McDermott. I said something inconsequential about how I had no way to tell. Mariah said she did not think Sally was the sort to make stuff up. As it happens, I agree, but I only nodded, humoring my worried sister. Next, I figured, she would be telling me that the FBI killed the Judge. Or a cabal of liberals with strawberry birthmarks on their hands. Or a conspiracy of men with scars on their lips. But she said nothing, just brooded all the rest of the way to the rink, and I apologized telepathically for my unworthy thoughts.

Now, watching my son grow gradually less tentative under my sister’s tutelage, I am impressed by her patience, her maternal thoroughness. She has coaxed him to the point where he is willing to let go of her hand. I smile. Mariah knows how to mother, puts lots of time and thought into it. I wish I knew as much about how to father. Feeling a sudden surge of love for my sister, I try to put her wild theories out of my mind, pondering instead a far more pressing question: how to catch up with the work I am paid for. I must schedule makeup classes for torts and for my seminar, which I am missing for this entire week, and still find time to finish the overdue revised draft of my article on mass tort litigation for the law review, which I originally planned to pursue this past weekend. Maybe if I-

Suddenly, an astonishingly well muscled woman of our nation thwacks against the boards below me, grabs the top of the wall with two gloved hands, and favors me with a sunny smile. She is clad in black spandex and red skates, and she moves with the easy grace of the natural athlete. “Hey, handsome, how come you’re not skating?” she calls, as though we have known each other for years. Her skin is gorgeously brown, her face plain yet roundly pleasant, her mouth full of huge teeth, her head unfortunately topped by a shock of hideously pressed flat curls. Two gold loops, one large, one small, hang from each pierced ear. She is close to six feet tall, and older than I first thought: perhaps in her mid-thirties. “Are you there?” she asks, still smiling, when at first I say nothing. “Hello?” She is, I realize in surprise, flirting with me, not an activity with which I have much recent experience. Her eyes sparkle with secret mischief, and her toothy grin is contagious.

I find myself smiling back, but my throat is dry, and it is an effort for me to say, “I’m afraid I’m not much of a skater.”

“So what?” she laughs, shuffling her feet in place, a fist on each strong hip. “I’ll teach you if you want.” She reaches a hand toward me, palm upward, fingers splayed, and tilts her head to one side as if to stretch her neck. “Come on, handsome, you need to have some fun, I can tell.”

Unexpectedly stirred by her aggressiveness, and, I confess, already having fun, I am about to reply with a remark every bit as flirtatious as hers, when she casts a practiced eye down at my hand, observes my wedding band, loses her smile, says, “Oops, oh, hey, sorry,” spreads her long arms, and skates off, backward. With a last saucy wave, she swirls away and is lost in the crowded rink. To my surprise, I am pierced with a sense of loss so strong that for an instant I forget to watch out for Bentley, who naturally chooses that moment to collide with another skater. He leaves the rink wailing, his lip split bloodily. Mariah, full of apologies, is in tears herself. A couple of her spoiled children laugh at Bentley’s clumsiness, the others sob at all the blood. I hug my son and apply an ice pack helpfully supplied by the management, but he is shaking his head and crying for his mother. I was nowhere near him when the accident happened and could have done nothing to prevent it, but Bentley seems to think I am guilty nevertheless.

Most likely, he is right, for the roller woman cavorts through my dreams for weeks to come.

CHAPTER 8

MORE NEWS BY PHONE

(I)

At twenty minutes of four, I step out of a taxi in front of the building in which, just a week ago, my father had his office. I have traded in my blue jeans for the same charcoal suit I wore to the funeral, the only suit I happen to have brought with me to Washington, and one of only two I happen to own. I am early, so I window-shop. There is a jeweler in the lobby and a dealer in rare books on the corner, and I visit both, happy to be in a city so comfortable with its black middle class that I am not an object of suspicion in either establishment. In the jewelry store, I fight the temptation to buy Kimmer a small but budget-busting present-she has a weakness for diamonds, and I see a pair of earrings I know she would love. On the corner, I talk with the proprietor of the bookshop about a scarce pamphlet for which I have been searching, Bobby Fischer’s self-published account of his mistaken arrest for bank robbery, melodramatically entitled I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse! I leave the owner my card; he promises to see what he can do. When I return to the lobby, Kimmer is already there, pointing at her watch and glaring at me. It is still three minutes of four, but one does not take the slightest chance of keeping Mallory Corcoran waiting. The great Mallory Corcoran does not wait.

Except that he does wait for Kimmer and me. Not only waits, but receives us with all the considerable charm he can muster. He comes out to the reception area himself, wearing no jacket, but, with crisp blue shirt and yellow club tie and yellow braces stretched over his substantial belly, kisses Kimmer’s cheek, shakes my hand formally, and leads us back to the enormous corner office, which, like most offices in the city, has views mainly of buildings across the street, but with a peek at the Washington Monument if you look at just the right angle. His desk is piled high with briefs and memoranda. It is one of the few desks in any law firm in the city with no computer in evidence. He leads us to a leather sofa, faced by two original Eames chairs, one of which he selects for himself. I marvel that it can hold him, but Mallory Corcoran, like many successful litigators, seems to have the trick of adjusting his weight to fit the situation. One of his three secretaries takes drink orders: tea for Uncle Mal and Kimmer, ginger ale for me. A tray of finger sandwiches materializes. We chat about the funeral and the weather and the press and the latest scandal on Capitol Hill. He tells us that a team of paralegals has packed all my father’s personal things and the firm will ship them wherever we specify; he asks if I want to take a last look at Oliver’s office, and I decline, not least because my wife is about to jump out of her skin.

Then we get down to business.

Uncle Mal begins by inviting a senior associate, a nervous woman he introduces as Cassie Meadows, to sit in and take notes. Kimmer is uneasy talking in the presence of a stranger, but Uncle Mal tells us to treat Meadows (as he calls her) like furniture. Not a very nice thing to say, and Meadows, a rail-thin denizen of the paler nation, blushes furiously, but I see his point: with so many people indicted for so many things in Washington these days, and so many indictments resting on vague contradictions in hazily remembered conversations, the great Mallory Corcoran wants a friendly witness in the room.

“Meadows is a hell of a litigator,” he tells us, as though we are about to go into court, “and she knows everybody worth knowing on the Hill.”

“I used to work for Senator Hatch,” she explains.

“And she was a Supreme Court law clerk and the top of her class at Columbia,” he enthuses, playing the usual Washington game of using resume power to bat away questions of trust. If she is this smart, he is saying, you have no business asking why she is sitting in. Then he adds the real point: “And, Kimberly, she’ll be working with me very closely on this matter. Everything I know, she’ll know.” Meaning that Mallory Corcoran, beyond this one meeting with us, will likely be too busy to help my wife out, so that she will be foisted off henceforth on an associate.

Kimmer stops resisting.

Uncle Mal is not the kind of man who is easily pinned down; nevertheless, the meeting goes well. He understands why we are here and he does almost all the talking. He asks Kimmer how her other meetings went, but barely listens to her answers. Kimmer has not had time to tell me much, but I gather she has not, so far, heard the answers she wants. The Senator, who gave her only fifteen minutes (with two aides in the room to prompt him), is firmly in Marc Hadley’s camp and kept telling her there will be other chances down the road; Ruthie Silverman was smooth and evasive; the civil rights lobbyist promised to try, but warned that the administration was unlikely to listen. Mallory Corcoran waves all of this away. What matters is who knows whom. He has his ear firmly to the ground, he says, for he loves cliches, rolling them grandly off his tongue so that his listeners will know he knows they know it is all an act. I wonder whether he will tell us about the skeleton that a cackling Jack Ziegler promised. Instead, Uncle Mal says that Marc Hadley is calling in all his markers, putting on a full-court press, pulling out all the stops-the metaphors go bumping into each other in fine Washington sound-bite fashion-and lots of my colleagues at the law school are helping him. “Probably to get rid of him,” Kimmer mutters, which I think might actually be true, but it is plain that she is upset.

Uncle Mal sees it too. He smiles broadly and shakes his head. Kimmer is not to worry, he says. Meadows can talk to people on the Hill, he explains, and his anorexic associate nods her head to show that she knows this is a command. The rest of it, says Uncle Mal, he will handle himself. Marc and his friends know some people, true, but-he thumps his chest-“Mallory Corcoran probably knows a few more people than Marc Hadley does,” which is exactly what Kimmer wants to hear. He will make a few calls, Uncle Mal assures us, which means he will talk to the President and, more important, the White House Counsel, Ruthie’s boss, who will make the final recommendation, and happens to be a former partner in the firm. Uncle Mal does not promise to lobby for Kimmer’s candidacy, but he does say he will nose around and find out what is going on, which often amounts to the same thing; for, in the mirror maze of the federal appointments process, sometimes what matters most is having the right person ask the right questions. All of this, he says, should be considered his gift to us, because of the respect in which he held my father-which means, of course, that he will expect us to pay him back without hesitation should he ever ask.

Kimmer by this time is beaming-she is no poker player, my brilliant wife-but I know Uncle Mal is not that easy. When he has us sufficiently awed by his munificence, he adjusts his cuffs and then, somehow contriving to look us both in the eye at the same time, folds his hands and asks what is, in contemporary Washington, the one question that really matters: “Is there anything in your background, Kimberly, anything at all, or yours, Talcott, that, were it to become public knowledge, would embarrass the President, or you?” Or me? is the unspoken but clearly implied third term in the series: Embarrass me and you will never, ever be able to count on the firm again.

“Nothing,” says Kimmer, so quickly that we both look at her in astonishment.

“You’re absolutely sure?” asks the great Mallory Corcoran.

“Absolutely.”

She slips off her glasses and offers her most dazzling smile, which turns most men into fawning sycophants, and invariably devastates me, on the rare occasions that she bothers to try. It is wasted. Uncle Mal has weathered smiles from the world’s leading experts. He raises an eyebrow at my wife and then turns to me. Kimmer grabs my hand and shoots me a glance. This seems unwise: does she think he will overlook it?

“Talcott?” he inquires.

“Well,” I begin. Kimmer squeezes desperately. Surely I would not mention, in front of Uncle Mal and this total stranger… surely. ..

“Misha,” she murmurs, casting her eyes toward Meadows, who, obviously bored, is staring into space. She has written perhaps two sentences on her pad.

But my wife has no need to worry, for her infidelities are not on my mind. “Well, there is one thing bothering me,” I admit. Then I tell them about this morning’s visit from the FBI. As I lay out the details, I can feel Kimmer growing distant and annoyed… and worried. She returns my hand.

Uncle Mal interrupts.

“Did they really say that if you didn’t talk to them about Jack Ziegler it could hurt your wife’s chances?”

“Yes.”

“Those bastards,” he says, but softly, leaning back and shaking his head. Then he picks up one of the four telephones scattered around the room and stabs a button with a sausagey finger. “Grace, get me the Attorney General. If he’s not available, the deputy. It’s urgent.” He hangs up. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, oh, yes.” He turns to Meadows. “Get me a copy of the regs governing FBI interviews with witnesses.”

“You mean now?” she asks, startled out of some private reverie.

“No, next week. Of course now. Go.”

She scurries from the room, still clutching her notepad. I see at once-and I assume Meadows does too-that Uncle Mal does not want her to be around for what is coming next. What I do not see is why. Nor is Mallory Corcoran about to enlighten us. Instead, he takes us on a side trip: “Oh, Tal, by the way, I turned on the television the other night, and who do you think I saw? Your brother.” And he is off, describing Addison’s appearance on The News Hour, during which he railed against some recent Republican legislative initiative. Kimmer cringes, worrying now that my brother’s politics will hurt her chances, and Uncle Mal, noticing her discomfort, veers off into a story about my father’s days on the bench, a very funny one about a befuddled litigant, to which I hardly pay any attention, not only because I have heard it many times before, but because I am remembering the business card the FBI agents never gave me. I suddenly know why Uncle Mal sent Meadows away. He has figured out that whatever the Justice Department is about to tell him is going to be awful, and nothing to do with Kimmer and her judicial ambitions. After Mariah’s dispiriting speculations, it scares me in advance.

The phone buzzes. Uncle Mal stops in mid-sentence and picks it up. “Yes? Who? Okay.” He puts his hand over the receiver. “It’s the AG’s deputy.” Then he is lost to us again: “Mort, how the hell are you?.. . I hear that Frank is going to Harvard next year. That’s great… . When are you going to start making an honest living?… Well, you know there’s always a place for you here… What? Los Angeles? Oh, come on, our smog is much better than theirs… Uh-huh… Oh, I know, I know… Well, listen, let me tell you why I called. I am sitting here in my office with a couple of very irate citizens of this fine republic, one of whom rejoices in the name of Talcott Garland, and the other of whom is known as Kimberly Madison… Yes, that Kimberly Madison… No, I know you have nothing to do with picking judges, but that’s not what I’m calling about… Uh-huh.” He puts his hand over the receiver and says to us: “Aren’t there any secrets in this town?” Back to the phone: “Well, listen. It seems that a couple of not very polite FBI guys visited Mr. Garland this morning… No, nothing about that. A criminal investigation. The subject appears to be a certain Jack Ziegler, whose name I assume you have heard… What?… No, no, I’m not representing Mr. Ziegler any longer, you know Brendan Sullivan over at Williams amp; Connolly does that these days… No, Morton, no, not that either

… No, my guy is Talcott Garland… Uh-huh… Morton, listen. Here’s the thing. In the first place, as I suspect you know, my client just buried his father yesterday. So I’d say the timing is a little bit lousy. Second, one of these FBI guys threatened Mr. Garland.” I am shaking my head emphatically, but Uncle Mal, once he gets going, is relentless. “Yes, that’s right… No, not with bodily harm. He said that if Mr. Garland did not tell him exactly what he wanted to know, right then and there, it would hurt Ms. Madison’s chances for the nomination… Yes, I know they’re not supposed to, that’s why I’m calling… Yes… No, I haven’t… Yes, I do, and an apology from your boss would be even better… Yes… Yes, I will… Exactly one hour, though… Okay.”

He hangs up without saying goodbye, which has become a status symbol in our uncivil times: the less you have to worry about offending people, the more powerful you must be.

“Uncle Mal,” I begin, but he rides right over me.

“Right. So this is the thing. These FBI guys seem to have broken lots of rules. So Morton Pearlman is going to talk to his boss, and then we’ll see.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” says Kimmer, nervously.

“Kimberly Kimberly, dear, don’t worry.” He actually pats her hand. “This will not snap back on you, I promise. This is just how the game is played in this town. Take the word of an old hand. You have to let them know they can’t fu-, uh, can’t mess with you, and you have to let them know early. So, this is what I suggest.” He is on his feet now, so we are, too. Outside, it is silvery twilight. “Why don’t you two lovebirds get a bite to eat? Call me right here in, say, an hour. I’ll tell Grace to put you through. I’ll have an answer by then, or I’ll be down at DOJ eating somebody’s lunch.”

During this splendid little speech, he has somehow moved us to the door. I notice Meadows approaching down the hall, a colorful volume of the Code of Federal Regulations in her hand.

“Thank you, Mr. Corcoran,” says Kimmer.

“‘Mal’ is fine,” he says, for about the tenth time.

“Thank you, Uncle Mal,” I add.

This time I get the hug. And a furtive whisper in my ear: “This smells, Tal. It stinks to high Heaven.” I turn in surprise, thinking, for some reason, that he is talking about me, not to me. But I see in his wise, experienced insider’s eyes only warning. “Be very, very careful,” he says. “Something isn’t right.”

(II)

My sister and the terrifying au pair are watching Bentley. Mariah said he can stay with her as late as we need to be out, so worried Kimmer and I, lovebirds or not, walk up to K Street to one of the city’s many steak houses. Our nation’s capital is not noted for the quality of its restaurants, but its chefs do seem to know steak. It is just past five, so we are able to get a quiet corner table without waiting. Kimmer, who has been silent for most of the four blocks we have walked, throws herself into her chair, orders a brandy Alexander before the waiter can get a word out, and favors me with a disapproving glance. I reach for her hand, but she snatches it away.

“What is it?” I ask in frustration.

“Nothing,” she snaps. She looks across the room, then looks back. “I thought you were on my side. I thought you loved me. Then all this bullshit about the FBI. I mean, why the hell did you bring that up?”

Kimmer knows that vulgarity bothers me, which is why she uses it when she is angry; I do not believe she speaks this way to anybody else.

“I thought Uncle Mal could help,” I tell her. “And he is helping.”

“Helping! He picks up the phone and yells at some idiot who works for the Attorney General, and then says I told him to do it, and that’s supposed to help?” She slumps in her chair, yanks off her glasses, closes her eyes for a moment. I glance around nervously, but none of the other diners seem to have noticed her outburst. Kimmer perks up again. “I mean, I thought he was supposed to be some kind of major player. Doesn’t he have more sense than that?”

Now, the truth is that Uncle Mal’s reaction bothered me too. So did his decision to send Meadows out of the room. But I am not sure how to make either of these points to my wife. Goodness knows, nobody in my family ever says anything directly.

“Kimmer, don’t you think the best thing is to get this out in the open-”

“Get what out in the open?”

“Whatever’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on. ”

“How can you say that after Jack Ziegler-”

“Your damn father just won’t leave us alone, will he?”

“What are you talking about?”

She seems almost ready to cry. “Your parents never wanted you to marry me in the first place! You told me that.”

I am stunned. My wife has not mentioned this story in years but, obviously, has not forgotten it. Well, that your in-laws opposed your marriage cannot be easy to forget. “Oh, darling, that was years ago, and they weren’t against it exactly…”

“They said it would be scandalous. You told me.”

And they were right. It was. But this is hardly the time to remind my wife how the two of us gleefully shocked black Washington. “Well, sure, but you have to understand the way they meant it…”

“Your father’s in the grave, and he’s still making trouble.”

“Kimmer!”

She sighs, then puts up her hands in a gesture of truce. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. That wasn’t fair.” She leans forward and sips her drink, closes her eyes for an instant, then takes my hand. Despite my own growing anger, I let her do it. Being touched by her calms me; it has always calmed me, even back when the reason I was nervous around Kimmer was that she was married to somebody else. “But, Misha, look at it from my point of view. You have what you want. You wanted a marriage and a child and tenure at a good law school. Well, guess what? You have all three.” Kimmer begins to massage my fingers, one at a time, which she knows I like. “But what about me? I’m ambitious, okay? That’s my sin. Fine. You’ve known since we were in law school that I wanted to be a judge, right? Well, now I have a chance. I used to think the… Well, okay, what happened with your father made it impossible. And maybe that’s… that’s maybe one reason I haven’t been as good a wife to you as I should.”

She drops her eyes briefly, a gesture so uncharacteristically coy I am sure it is feigned. When Kimmer and I finally married, my father wasn’t even on the bench any more. Sensing that I have not bought her explanation, she tiptoes past it. “And I’m sorry about that. I really am. I want to do better for you, Misha. I really do. I’ve been trying.” Caressing my hand now, as though Jerry Nathanson, probably the most prominent lawyer in Elm Harbor, does not exist. “But, Misha, then he… he dies. And I know you’re aching and I’m sorry for that. I truly am. But, Misha, he’s all over the papers again. Your father. Everybody’s talking about him again. And I’m thinking, Okay, maybe I can still hold it together. So I go over and see the Senator, like a good little girl, and he just sits there with this… this supercilious grin, and I’m like, Why did I bother to come here? Because, you know, the whole thing is like fixed. Fixed so Marc wins, I mean. And then Ruthie won’t tell me squat. And Jack Ziegler at the cemetery, and then this FBI thing. What did those guys want? I mean, it’s like this thing with your father… it’s going to ruin it for me after all.”

There are tears on Kimmer’s cheeks. It has been years since she has opened herself to me this way; what she has said to others I don’t want to know. Her pain is genuine, and I warm to her. Although we were law school classmates, my wife is three years younger than I-she skipped a grade somewhere along the way; I wasted twenty-four months as a graduate student in philosophy and semiotics before turning to law-and there are moments when the three years feels like thirty.

“Kimmer, darling, I had no idea,” I whisper. And this is true. There are depths to my wife I am too often afraid to plumb; and my fears have done as much as her conduct to sour the sweetest parts of our marriage. I squeeze her hands. She squeezes back. As her tears reflect the candlelight, her face grows even more exquisite. “But none of it has to be ruined. The Judge was my father, not yours. And the Judge is not you. There isn’t any… I mean, you don’t have any scandals. They certainly can’t hold your father-in-law against you.”

Kimmer is miserable. “They can so,” she says, all at once childlike. “They can. They will.” A sniff. “They do. ”

“They won’t,” I insist, even though I am afraid she is right. “And you know I’m in your corner.”

“I know you are,” she says bleakly, as though nobody else would be so foolish.

“And Uncle Mal-”

“Oh, Misha, get real. Uncle Mal won’t be able to do anything unless this goes away. You see what I’m saying? It has to go away.”

“What does?”

“This thing with your father. Whatever it is, Misha. I don’t know. The FBI. Jack Ziegler, all of it. It has to go away, and it has to go away fast, or folks will be like, ‘No, uh-uh, not her, she’s married to you-know-whose son.’ So we can’t do anything to keep it alive, Misha. Not me, not you, not Uncle Mal, nobody. We have to let it die, or I don’t have a chance.” Her mysterious, tormented brown eyes burrow into mine. “Do you understand, Misha? It has to die.”

“I understand.” Her fervor, as always, overwhelms my caution. Kimmer has long had a talent for coaxing promises out of me before I know what I am saying.

“You have to let it die.”

“I hear what you’re saying.”

“But do you promise?”

She seems to think I have some choice. I am not sure I really do. Because love is a gift we deliver when we would rather not.

“I promise, darling.”

She slumps back in her chair as though worn out from all this pleading. “Thank you, honey. Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome.” I smile. “I love you.”

“Oh, Misha,” she whispers, shaking her head.

The waiter brings a bottle of wine that I scarcely remember Kimmer ordering. I do not drink, given my father’s history, but the Madisons consider the prudent consumption of high-priced alcohol a part of the sophistication of the palate. She takes a few sips and smiles at me, then leans back in her chair again and looks out over the room. Then she suddenly hops up. I know this routine. She has spotted somebody she knows. Kimmer loves to work a room: that’s why she was president of her graduating class at Mount Holyoke and of our local bar association and might soon be a federal judge. As I watch, she hurries across the restaurant to greet an Asian American couple dining over by the far wall. They shake hands, and they all share a good laugh, and then she is back. The man writes editorials for the Post, she explains. She met him this morning, when she went to see her friend from college. His wife, Kimmer continues, is a producer for one of the Sunday-morning television talk shows. “You never know.” She shrugs. Then she retakes my hand and plays with my fingers in the candlelight until our main course arrives. I would usually be willing to let Kimmer play with my fingers all night, but my brain refuses to cooperate. As I cut into my overpriced steak, a thought occurs to me, prompted by my wife’s table-hopping.

“Darling?”

“Hmmm?”

“Do you remember the last time we saw my father? I mean, both of us, together?”

She nods. “Last year. He was in town for the alumni association or something.” She will not concede he might have wanted to see Bentley, or me, still less her. She shifts in her seat. “About this time.”

“And you said he looked… worried.”

“Yeah, I remember. We’d be sitting at dinner at the Faculty Club or something and you’d ask him a question and he wouldn’t say anything, he’d be looking into the middle of nowhere, and you’d ask again and he’d say, ‘You don’t have to shout.’” Her gaze softens. “Oh, Misha, I’m sorry. That’s not a very happy memory, is it?”

I choose not to go there. “I’ve seen him since then. Once.” When I was in Washington on business and we had dinner. He was distracted then, too. “I just wondered… did it seem to you… when you said he seemed ‘worried,’ did you mean…”

“Just tense, Misha. Stressed.” Taking my hand again. “That’s all.”

I shake my head, wondering why the image of the Judge’s last visit to Elm Harbor leaped so nimbly to mind. Maybe Mariah’s creepy insistence that the causes were not natural is starting to get to me.

The talk turns to other things: gossip about the law school, chitchat about the firm, jockeying our vacation schedules. She tells me what her sister, Lindy, is up to these days, and I recycle old stories about Addison. I tell Kimmer what fun Bentley had on his first day on in-line skates, but not about the woman who flirted with me, or about my temptation to flirt back. Kimmer, perhaps detecting something in my eyes before I glance guiltily away, teases me about the crush everyone once thought I had on Lindy, the more solid and reliable of the Madison sisters, whom my parents fervently hoped I would marry. We banter on, as we used to in the old days, the good days, our courting days, and then, as dessert arrives, Kimmer, who has been watching the time, tells me that an hour has passed. She is all business again. I sigh, but dutifully summon the waiter and ask him where the telephones are, and he produces one with a flourish, plugging it into a jack underneath the table. I wink at my wife.

“You could have used my cell phone,” she says glumly.

“I know, darling, but I’ve always wanted to do this. Just like in the movies.” Her return smile is tight; I realize just how overwrought she is. I pat her hand and push buttons on the phone. Grace picks up and, as promised, puts me right through.

“Talcott,” booms the great Mallory Corcoran, “I am so glad you called. I was just about to send out an all-points bulletin. Look, we have a serious problem. In the first place, Jack Ziegler is not currently under investigation by the Justice Department. They wish they had something on him, because, well, you know, it’s every prosecutor’s dream to put a powerful white guy away”-he barks these words with no sense of irony-“but right now they just don’t. So they are busy frying other fish.”

“I see,” I say, although I do not. Kimmer, reading my face, looks fearful.

“That’s not the problem, though. The problem is this. Morton Pearlman talked to the Attorney General and the AG talked to the director of the Federal Bureau and he talked to his people. And here’s what they tell me. I heard it from the AG himself. The FBI did not know that you talked to Jack Ziegler in the cemetery yesterday, Talcott. There was no surveillance. And nobody from the FBI came to see you today, Talcott. Why would they? Nobody from the FBI has asked you anything about Jack Ziegler at all. And the background check on Kimberly hasn’t really started yet.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish I were. Now, you’re sure they said they were from the Bureau?”

“I’m sure.”

“Did you see their credentials?”

“Of course I saw their credentials.” But, thinking back, I realize that I gave their wallets only a glance: who studies photos and numbers and the rest in any detail?

“I figured you did.” He hesitates, as though uncertain how to share an unpleasant truth. “Listen, Talcott, here’s the thing. Somebody came to see you pretending to be from the Bureau. Well, that happens to be a major felony. That means they have to investigate it. As a courtesy, they are putting it off until tomorrow. But tomorrow morning, a couple of FBI agents, the real kind, want to interview you. Here, at the office, at eleven. I can’t be there, because Edie and I are going to Hawaii for a few days, but Meadows and maybe a couple of my other people will. No charge,” he adds, a considerable relief but also something of an insult. He senses my distress. “Sorry to dump all this on you, Talcott. Really sorry. But after it’s resolved, I will make the calls for Kimberly. I promise.”

After it’s resolved, I am thinking as I hang up the phone. Meaning he will not lift a finger on Kimmer’s behalf until he sees which way the wind is blowing.

“What’s wrong, honey?” my wife asks, clutching my hand as though it can keep her from drowning. “Misha, what is it?”

I look at my wife, my beautiful, brilliant, disloyal, desperately if unhappily ambitious wife. The mother of our child. The only woman I will ever love. I want to make it right. I can’t.

“It’s not going to die,” I tell her.

CHAPTER 9

A PEDAGOGICAL DISAGREEMENT

(I)

The following Tuesday, twelve days after the death of my father, I return to my dreary classroom, populated, it often seems, by undereducated but deeply committed Phi Beta Kappa ideologues-leftists who believe in class warfare but have never opened Das Kapital and certainly have never perused Werner Sombart, hard-line capitalists who accept the inerrancy of the invisible hand but have never studied Adam Smith, third-generation feminists who know that sex roles are a trap but have never read Betty Friedan, social Darwinists who propose leaving the poor to sink or swim but have never heard of Herbert Spencer or William Sumner’s essay on The Challenge of Facts, black separatists who mutter bleakly about institutional racism but are unaware of the work of Carmichael and Hamilton, who invented the term-all of them our students, all of them hopelessly young and hopelessly smart and thus hopelessly sure they alone are right, and nearly all of whom, whatever their espoused differences, will soon be espoused to huge corporate law firms, massive profit factories where they will bill clients at ridiculous rates for two thousand hours of work every year, quickly earning twice as much money as the best of their teachers, and at half the age, sacrificing all on the altar of career, moving relentlessly upward, as ideology and family life collapse equally around them, and at last arriving, a decade or two later, cynical and bitter, at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.

Or maybe I am just measuring their prospects by my own.

My family and I returned to Elm Harbor last Thursday after my brief interview at Corcoran amp; Klein with real agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cassie Meadows surprisingly mature and competent at my side. Kimmer went straight back to work, instantly resuming her manic pace and crazy hours, and has already made another trip to San Francisco, for the greater wealth and glory of EHP. The real FBI has had no success in tracking down the two men who confronted me at Shepard Street, but my wife has persuaded herself that they were reporters, looking for dirt. She does not care whether she persuades me.

Mariah, meanwhile, has a new theory. It is no longer Jack Ziegler who killed the Judge; it is a litigant who blames my father for rejecting some appeal; and she is undaunted by the fact that the Judge left the bench well over a decade ago. “Probably a big corporation,” she insisted last night on the phone, her third call in five days. “You have no idea how amoral they are. Or how long they can hold a grudge.” I wondered what Howard would say to that, but prudently bit my tongue. Mariah added that a friend of hers had agreed to search the Internet for possible hired killers. But when I challenged Mariah gently, she scolded me all over again for never standing by her in the clutch.

“Sisters are just like that,” said Rob Saltpeter, the spindly constitutional-futurist who is my occasional basketball partner, when I related part of the story while we sat in the locker room yesterday morning at the Y, the two of us having been slaughtered by a couple of off-duty cops. His eyes, as always, were serene. “But, the thing is, you have to remember that she would stand by you in the clutch.”

“What makes you say that?”

Rob smiled. At six feet five he has four inches on me, but I probably outweigh him by fifty pounds. Although not, yet, quite fat, I am more than a little bit overweight; he is terribly thin. Neither one of us is an impressive sight in Jockey shorts in a locker room.

“Just a sense that I get.”

“You’ve never even met her.”

“I have two sisters,” objected Rob, whose fundamental warmth is tempered by a zealous certainty that all families are, or should be, like his own.

“Not like Mariah.”

“It doesn’t matter what she’s like. Your obligation to be there for her is exactly the same no matter what. It doesn’t come from her behavior. It doesn’t come from what you think of her. It comes from the fact that you are her brother.”

“I thought we abolished status-based relationships about a century ago,” I teased, a typically silly lawyer’s inside joke. In a status-based relationship, the parties’ obligations are determined by who they are (husband-wife, parent-child, master-servant, and so on), rather than by agreement.

“Man abolished them. God didn’t.”

Nothing much to say to that, and I suppose I agree. Rob is, by his own description, an observant Jew, and he talks about his faith more than any other professor I know, including, to the squirmy chagrin of many students, in the classroom. Perhaps it is this oracular side of Rob Saltpeter that keeps us from becoming closer friends. Or perhaps it is simply that I am not a friendly fellow. To cover an unexpected surge of pain, I asked him for advice.

“Nothing to do but go on,” he shrugged, which is his answer for just about everything.

Well, fine. I am going on. Badly.

And so it is that on this, my first day back in the classroom, I find myself persecuting an unfortunate young man whose sin is to inform us all that the cases I expect my students to master are irrelevant, because the rich guys always win. Now, it is true that some poor fool announces this conclusion every fall, and it is also true that more than a few professors have earned tenure at some very fine law schools by pressing refined, jargon-chunky versions of precisely this thin theory, but I am in no mood for blather. I glare at the cocky student and see, for a horrible moment, the future, or maybe just the enemy: young, white, confident, foolish, skinny, sullen, multiply pierced, bejeweled, dressed in grunge, cornsilk hair in a ponytail, utterly the cynical conformist, although he thinks he is an iconoclast. A few generations ago, he would have been the fellow wearing his letterman’s sweater inside out, to prove to everybody how little it meant to him. When I was in college, he would have been first to the barricades, and he would have made sure everybody saw him there. As he is sure everybody is looking at him now. His elbow is on his chair, his other fist is tucked under his chin, and I read in his posture insolence, challenge, perhaps even the unsubtle racism of the supposedly liberal white student who cannot quite bring himself to believe that his black professor could know more than he. About anything. A light frosty red dances around his face like a halo, and I catch myself thinking, I could break him. I remind myself to be gentle.

“Very interesting, Mr. Knowland,” I smile, taking a few steps down the aisle toward the row in which he sits. I fold my arms. “Now, how does your very interesting thesis relate to the case at hand?”

Still leaning back, he shrugs, barely meeting my gaze. He tells me that my question is beside the point. It is not the legal rules that matter, he explains to the ceiling, but the fact that workers cannot expect justice from the capitalist courts. It is the structure of the society, not the content of the rules, that leads to oppression. He may even be half right, but none of it is remotely relevant, and his terminology seems as outdated as a powdered wig. I pull an old pedagogical trick, inching closer to crowd his field of vision, forcing him to remember which of us is in a position of authority. I ask him whether he recalls that the case at hand involves not an employee suing an employer but one motorist suing another. Mr. Knowland, twisted around in his chair, answers calmly that such details are distractions, a waste of our time. He remains unwilling to look at me. His posture screams disrespect, and everybody knows it. The classroom falls silent; even the usual sounds of pages turning and fingers clacking on laptop keyboards and chairs scraping disappear. The red deepens. I recall that I had to upbraid him three weeks ago for fooling around with his Palm Pilot during class. I was circumspect then, taking care to call him over after the hour ended. Still, he was angry, for he is of the generation that assumes that there are no rules but those each individual wills. Now, through the crimson haze, my student begins to resemble Agent McDermott as he sat, lying through his teeth, in the living room at Shepard Street… and, very suddenly, it is too late to stop. Smiling as insolently as Mr. Knowland, I ask him whether he has undertaken a study of the tort cases, sorting them by the relative wealth of the parties, to learn the truth or falsity of his theory. Glaring, he admits that he has not. I ask him whether he is aware of any such study performed by anybody else. He shrugs. “I will take that as a no,” I say, boring into him now. Standing right in front of his table, I tell him that there is, in fact, a substantial literature on the effect of wealth on the outcome of cases. I ask him if he has read any of it. The antiquated fluorescent lights buzz and hiss uncertainly as we wait for Mr. Knowland’s reply. He looks around the classroom at the pitying faces of his classmates, he looks up at the portraits of prominent white male graduates that line the walls, and at last he looks back at me.

“No,” he says, his voice much smaller.

I nod as though to say I knew it all along. Then I cross the line. As every mildly competent law professor knows, this is the point at which I should segue smoothly back into the discussion of the case, perhaps teasing Mr. Knowland a little by asking another student to act as his co-counsel, in order to help him out of the jam into which he has so foolishly talked himself. Instead, I give him my back and move two paces away from his seat, then whirl and point and ask him whether he often offers opinions that have no basis in fact. His eyes widen, in frustration and childlike hurt. He says nothing, opens his mouth, then shuts it again, because he is trapped: no answer that he can give will help him. He looks away again as his classmates try to decide whether they should laugh. (Some do, some do not.) My head pounds redly and I ask: “Is that what they taught you at-Princeton, wasn’t it?” This time, the students are too shocked to laugh. They do not really like the arrogant Mr. Avery Knowland, but now they like the arrogant Professor Talcott Garland even less. In the abrupt, nervous silence of the high-ceilinged classroom, it strikes me, far too late, that I, a tenured professor at one of the best law schools in the land, am in the process of humiliating a twenty-two-year-old who was, all of five years ago, in high school-the campus equivalent of a sixth-grade bully beating up a kindergartner. It does not matter if Avery Knowland is arrogant or ignorant or even if he is racist. My job is to teach him, not to embarrass him. I am not doing my job.

My rampant demons have chased me even into my classroom.

I soften once more. And try to clean up the mess. Of course, I continue, tweedily pacing the front of the room, lawyers are occasionally called upon to argue what they cannot prove. But-and here I spin and stiletto my finger again toward Mr. Knowland- but, when they offer these unsupported and unsupportable arguments, they must do so with verve. And they must have the confidence, when asked about the factual basis of their claims, to do the courtroom polka, which I demonstrate as I repeat the simple instructions: sidestep, sidestep, sidestep, stay on your toes, and never, ever face the music.

Relieved, jittery laughter from the students.

Except a glaring Avery Knowland.

I am able to finish the class, even to summon a bit of dignity, but I flee to my office the instant noon arrives, furious at myself for allowing my demons to drive me to embarrass a student in class. The incident will reinforce my reputation around the law school- not a nice person, the students tell each other, and Dana Worth, the faculty’s foremost connoisseur of student gossip, cheerfully repeats it to me-and maybe the reputation is the reality.

(II)

My office is on the second floor of the main law school building, called Oldie by most of the faculty and all of the students, not because it is old, although it is, but because it was built with an endowment from and is named for the Oldham family. Merritt Oldham, who grew up with money-his grandfather invented some sort of firing pin during the Civil War and, according to legend, died when the faulty prototype of an improved version caused a gun to explode in his face-was graduated from the law school around the dawn of the twentieth century and went on to Wall Street glory as a founder of the law firm of Grace, Grand, Oldham amp; Fair. When I was a law student, Grace, Grand sat at the top of the New York heap, but it came down hard in the Drexel Burnham scandal in the eighties. Two of its hottest partners went to the penitentiary, three more were forced to resign, and the rest fell to squabbling over the corpse. The firm finally split in two. One half went under within a few years; the other, retaining the Oldham name, is still afloat, but barely, and our students, who memorize the relative rankings in prestige of every Manhattan law firm long before they master even the rudiments of tort law, would sooner go hungry than work there.

The firm may have collapsed, but our building is still Oldie-formally, the Veronica Oldham Law Center. Merritt adored his sainted mother, never married, never had children, and is claimed by our gay students as one of their own, probably with reason, if a fraction of the stories Theo Mountain tells are true. The Law Center sits on a grassy hill at the end of Town Street, looking down over the city. It comprises two square blocks, north and south of Eastern Avenue, joined by a pedestrian bridge. The southern block, with a view toward the main campus, is Oldie, a vaguely Gothic structure with three floors of offices on its east side and six floors of library on the west, joined by a row of classrooms to the south and a high stone wall to the north, all surrounding the lovely flagstone courtyard that is probably the school’s greatest aesthetic attraction. The northern block of the Center, added twenty years ago on the site of an old Roman Catholic church that was devastated by fire and purchased by a clever dean, includes a large, rather spartan dormitory housing nearly half our students, and a low, ugly brick building (formerly the parish school) crammed with offices for all our student organizations except the most prestigious, the law review. This arrangement causes a bit of jealousy, but we have no choice: our alumni, like alumni everywhere, regard change as the enemy of memory, and would never allow us to evict the law review from its traditional warren of rooms on the first floor of the faculty wing.

To reach my office, one climbs the central marble staircase and, at the second floor, turns left, trudges to the end of the dreary corridor with its peeling linoleum floor, turns left again, and counts four doors down on the left. Immediately before my office is a large room housing four faculty secretaries, not including my own, who sits, thanks to some fascinating bit of administrative reasoning, on the third floor in another corner of the building. Beyond my office is the den of Amy Hefferman, the ageless Princess of Procedure, much beloved of the students, who talks every year or so of retirement, then relents when the graduating class votes her commencement speaker; directly across the hall is young Ethan Brinkley, who has the habit, without warning, of dropping by to share implausible stories of his three years as deputy counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; next to him, in a room little larger than Kimmer’s walk-in closet, sits the even younger Matthew Goffe, who teaches a course on corporations, a course on secured transactions, and a course on radical alternatives to the rule of law. Matt is one of our few untenured faculty members and, unless he discontinues his disconcerting habit of signing every student petition and joining every student boycott, is likely to remain in that category. Next along, in the northwest corner of the building, is the vast chamber occupied by Stuart Land, the former dean and, probably, the most widely respected intellect on the faculty, who teaches a little bit of everything, commands the services of two secretaries, and makes the reputation of the law school his special concern. Stuart, say the corridor gossips, has never quite recovered from the palace coup that led to his ouster and Dean Lynda’s elevation, a revolution more about politics than about policies-for Stuart’s unapologetic conservatism left him constantly at war with Theo Mountain and Marc Hadley and Tish Kirschbaum and many other powers on the faculty.

Or so it is rumored.

But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the school. Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni-more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.

The hallways of Oldie are warm and familiar. I like it here.

Most of the time.

Today, however, when I turn the final corner toward my office after my unfortunate class, I encounter an agitated Dana Worth, rapping imperiously on my office door, as though irritated that I am not present to open it. She rattles the knob, pushes, then pulls. Cupping a hand above her eyes, she peers through the frosted glass, even though the darkness within is plainly visible.

I look on in amusement, then concern, for I have not seen Dana this upset since the day she told me she was leaving my friend Eddie. .. and then told me why.

Dana, who teaches contracts and intellectual property, is one of our stars, even though her diminutive stature invariably tempts a few unfortunate first-year students to think they can walk all over her. Dana comes from an old Virginia family that once had lots of money (read slaves) but lost it in what she laughingly calls “the late unpleasantness.” She lives delightfully, even charmingly, in a world centered on herself. (“Your sister died in a car wreck? You know, back at the University of Virginia, I used to date a man who died in a car wreck. He was a McMichael, of the Rappahannock County McMichaels.” Reminded that my father actually knew the senior McMichael, the Senator, knew him quite well once upon a time, Dana would be undeterred: “But not the way I knew his son, I’m willing to bet.”)

Dana, three years older than I am, has survived, even transcended, the minor scandal of the way her marriage broke up. Eddie, whose life around the university was lived largely in his wife’s shadow, left us last year to return to his native Texas, where, he insists, the kind of thing that happened to him in Elm Harbor would not be allowed. (He does not say who would stop it.) His departure reduced the law school’s black faculty by twenty-five percent. Dana left him for a woman named Alison Frye, a nervous, fleshy New Yorker, all carroty hair and burning anger at the world. Alison is a novelist of slight accomplishment and runs a Web site full of airy but erudite social commentary, most with a “new economy” spin. Her courtship of Dana was a more or less public event, at least among the techie crowd. Three years ago, back when their affair was still secret, Alison posted on her site a composition entitled “Dear Dana Worth,” a love letter of sorts, which was downloaded and e-mailed all over the world, and, more important, all over the campus-Dana likes to say that Alison mortified her into falling in love. Many of us have adopted the essay’s title as a teasing nickname, although her husband understandably missed the humor. When Dana and Eddie were married, Kimmer and I hung around with them a lot, for Eddie and I played together as children. Eddie’s parents are old family friends, and he may even be a distant cousin on my mother’s side, although we never quite worked it out.

The end of the Dozier-Worth marriage two years ago soured my friendships with both partners. Eddie has become a stranger, his politics driven even further to the right. As for Dana, I truly like her, but she and I have serious differences on countless matters, the way she treated Eddie chief among them. Misha, please, you have to try to look at it from my point of view, she begged me in that last, hurtful argument before she left him. No, I don’t, I stormed back at her, unable to be charitable. Perhaps I feared I might be seeing in the disintegration of her marriage a prefiguring of the end of my own. Nowadays, Dana and I try to be friends, but, to quote Casey Stengel, sometimes it doesn’t always work.

Watching Dear Dana, I remember her tears at my father’s funeral. She admired the Judge, her onetime boss, perhaps loved him a little, even though he never quite made his peace with the gay rights movement. But, then, neither has Dana, who likes to insist, in her pedantic way, that she is far more interested in her freedom than in her rights. Dana opposes rules to tell property owners whom to rent to or businesses whom to hire, for she is a radical libertarian right down to her pedicured toes. Except on the question of abortion. After the Judge’s funeral, Dana joined the procession to the cemetery in her snazzy gold Lexus with its dual-meaning bumper sticker-ANOTHER LESBIAN FOR LIFE, it proclaims-which tends to confound people.

Dana likes to confound people.

“Dana,” I say softly as she continues banging on the door. “Dana!”

She turns in my direction, one tiny hand to her throat in the familiar gesture of generations of wounded Southern ladies. Her short black hair glistens in the dim light of the hallway. But her face startles me. Dear Dana Worth is always pale, but today her whiteness is unusually… well, unusually white.

“Oh, Misha,” she moans, shaking her head. “Oh, Misha, I’m so sorry.”

“I’m betting this is more bad news,” I say slowly, my speech inhibited by the block of ice that has formed around my heart.

“You don’t know.” Dana is surprised. Panicky. For a moment, she seems to be at a loss, which hardly ever happens. Sufficiently gutsy is Dear Dana that she spends most Sunday mornings at a small, conservative Methodist church twenty road miles and a thousand cultural ones away from the campus. I need to be there, she tells the few colleagues who dare question her.

“What don’t I know?” I ask, a little panicky myself.

“Oh, Misha,” Dana whispers again. Then she gathers herself. She grips my arm as I unlock the door, and we enter my office together. She points to the small, sleek CD player on the shelf above my computer. Kimmer bought it for me on one of her trips. My wife hates to spend money, so, whenever she buys me an expensive gift, I think of it as a second-place trophy, Kimmer’s own version of guilt money. “Does that thing have a radio?” Dana asks.

“Well, yes. I don’t use it much.”

“Turn it on.”

“What?”

“Turn on the news.”

“Why can’t you just tell me…”

Dana’s gray eyes are troubled and sad. One of her great weaknesses has always been an inability to deal with the emotional pain of others. Which means that whatever she wants me to know is going to hurt. “Please. Just turn it on.”

I swallow a retort about how much I hate these games because I can see that she is genuinely upset. I walk over to the CD player, always tuned to our local National Public Radio affiliate, which, when I switch it on, is playing insipid classical music-the Fanfare for the Common Man, I believe. I change to the all-news station, which comes in as clearly in Elm Harbor as it does in New York City. The anchor is waxing mournfully self-righteous about the latest act of racist violence, a black preacher who was tortured to death. My insides churn: stories of this kind are like a blow to my most sensitive parts. I always want to buy a couple of guns, grab my family, and run for the hills. And this time a preacher! I listen to sound clips, voices of national outrage: Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume, the President of the United States. Two children discovered the body in the tall grass behind the swings in a playground earlier today.

I turn to Dana. “Is this what you wanted me to hear?”

She nods and perches on the edge of my desk, her voice faint. “Keep listening.”

I frown. I do not get it. But I listen a bit longer. The man was found with cigarette burns on his arms and legs and several fingernails missing. He was tortured, the announcer explains. Death itself apparently came from a single gunshot to the head, and was probably a blessing. I close my eyes. A horrible story, true, but why does Dana think-

Wait.

The victim’s body was found in a small town near Washington, D.C.

I turn the volume up.

A frightening lassitude begins in my toes and climbs slowly upward, until I am dizzy and swaying on my feet. The air grows heavy and oppressive, my stomach heaves, and my furniture begins to turn a ghastly, asphyxiating red.

Beware of the others… I would not want to see you harmed.

The name of the murdered preacher is Freeman Bishop.

CHAPTER 10

A TRAGIC COINCIDENCE

(I)

“It doesn’t have anything to do with your father,” says Sergeant B. T. Ames, tapping a thick manila folder against the metal table.

“I don’t see how you can be so sure,” replies Mariah, sitting next to me on one of the hard wooden chairs in the small chamber off the police squad room. A single small window at about shoulder height lets in so little light that the day looks gruesome; it is hard for me to remember the bright autumn beauty I left behind just twenty minutes ago when we walked into the building. It is Thursday morning, one week and two days since the Judge’s funeral, and both of us are scared.. . although both our spouses think their spouses are being silly. I think maybe our spouses are right, but Mariah begged me to accompany her. We met at LaGuardia Airport a few hours ago and flew down together on the shuttle. Mariah, who can better afford the expense, rented a car, and we drove out to the Maryland suburbs for this meeting.

“It’s my job to be sure,” the detective deadpans.

“Somebody killed one of them,” Mariah says to the sergeant’s raised eyebrow, “and then somebody killed the other.”

Sergeant Ames smiles, but I can see the exhaustion. Obtaining this interview with a busy Montgomery County detective required Mallory Corcoran to make several calls from Hawaii, urged on by Meadows, who was badgered by me. The sergeant, leaning against the austere metal desk, has made clear that plenty of actual police work awaits; we can have only a few minutes.

We will take whatever time she can give.

“I’ve looked at all the reports on your father,” says Sergeant Ames, waving a sheaf of faxes. “He died of a heart attack.” She raises a large hand to forestall any protest. “I know you doubt it, and you are entitled to your doubts. I happen to think the reports are correct, but it isn’t in my jurisdiction. The Reverend Freeman Bishop is in my jurisdiction. And he was murdered. Maybe he was murdered here, maybe he was murdered someplace else and then dumped here. Either way, Freeman Bishop is my case. Oliver Garland is not my case. And what I am telling you is that the cases do not have anything to do with each other.”

I glance at my sister, but she is looking at the floor. Her designer pantsuit is black, as are her shoes and her scarf, and the choice strikes me as a little melodramatic. Well, that is Mariah’s way. At least she appears relaxed. I am stiff and uncomfortable in the least seedy of my three tweed blazers, this one vaguely brown.

In any event, it now seems to be my turn. I throw what I hope is a congenial smile onto my face.

“I understand your point, Sergeant, but you have to understand ours. Father Bishop was an old friend of the family. He performed our father’s funeral just a week ago. You can see how we’d be a little bit

… shaken up.”

Sergeant Ames puffs out a great gust of air. Then she stands up and walks around the wooden interrogation table to peer out the tiny window, where she blocks what little sunlight the window admits. She is a member of the paler nation, a broad yet graceful woman with a square, angry jaw and curly brown hair. Her size seems mostly muscle, not fat. Her dark blazer and cream-colored slacks are rumpled in the way that police fashions always are. A badge dangles from her breast pocket. Her florid face is chipped, from years of bad weather or years of bad diet or possibly both. She could be thirty. She could be fifty.

“We’re all shaken up, Mr. Garland. Mrs. Denton. This was a brutal crime.” She is still lecturing us from the window, giving us her back. “Kill a man this way, dump him in a public park.” She shakes her head, but the facts don’t change. “I don’t like to have this kind of thing in my town. I grew up here. I have my family here. I like it here. One reason I like it here is that we don’t have these problems.” Racial problems, she means. Or maybe she just means black people: the town, after all, is nearly all white.

“I understand that-” I begin, but Sergeant B. T. Ames (we do not know her first name, only the initials) holds up her hand. First I think she has something to say, but then I realize that she has heard knocking that I missed, because she walks over to the door and opens it. A uniformed officer, also white, gleams at us suspiciously, then whispers to the sergeant and hands her another fax for her collection.

When the door is closed again, Sergeant Ames returns to her window.

“They found his car,” she says.

“Where?” Mariah asks before I have the chance.

“Southwest Washington. Not far from the Navy Yard.”

“What was he doing down there?” Mariah persists. We are both frustrated. All the sergeant has really told us so far is what the newspapers reported: Father Bishop had a vestry meeting scheduled for seven on the night he died. He called to say he would be a little late because he had to visit a member of the parish who was having problems. He left home in his car about six-thirty, and his neighbors swear he was alone. He never made it to the church.

The detective swings toward us, but leans against the wall, crossing her arms. “I’m afraid I have to get back to work,” she says. “Unless you have some information that you think will help us find Father Bishop’s killer.”

I spent my childhood being summarily dismissed, usually by the Judge, and have never been able to bear it as an adult. So I protest-as so often, without first thinking. “We told you we think there’s a connection…”

Sergeant Ames takes a step toward me, her heavy face unwelcoming. She seems to be growing larger, or perhaps I am shrinking. I am suddenly reminded that she is, after all, a police officer. She is not interested in our theories or our meddling.

“Mr. Garland, do you have any evidence of a connection between the murder of Freeman Bishop and the death of your father?”

“Well, that depends on what you mean by evidence-”

“Did anybody tell you that this crime was connected to the death of your father?”

“No, but I-”

“Do you know of your own knowledge who killed Freeman Bishop?”

“Of course not!” I am offended but also a little bit scared, the ambiguous relationship of black males to the nation’s police departments being what it is. I remember that this tiny room is used for the interrogation of suspects. The furniture begins to emit a soft red glow. Mariah puts her hand on my arm, warning me to calm down. And I get the point: we are here, after all, and the sergeant has a job to do.

“Did anybody tell you who killed Freeman Bishop?” Sergeant Ames continues.

“No.” I remember, far too late, what we used to tell clients facing depositions: Keep it simple, say yes or no, and never, ever volunteer anything, no matter how badly you want to explain.

And stay calm.

“Did anybody tell you that he or she knows who killed Freeman Bishop?”

“No.”

“Did anybody tell you that anybody else knows who killed Freeman Bishop?”

“No.”

“Then maybe you don’t have any information for me.”

“Well, I…”

“Wait.” Spoken softly. The detective has taken command with remarkable ease. My intimidated students wouldn’t recognize me, but Avery Knowland, I am sure, would have a grand time watching.

Mariah and I wait as instructed. Sergeant Ames, to my dismay, actually opens her manila folder. She pulls out a sheet of yellow lined paper and reads some handwritten notes, her tongue poking around her mouth as she concentrates. She grabs a ballpoint pen from the table and makes a couple of check marks in the margin. For the first time, I realize that the detective is not just questioning me for show. Mariah recognizes it too; her hand tightens on my arm. Sergeant Ames knows something, or thinks she knows something, that is leading her to ask these questions.

And she is asking only me, not my sister.

When the sergeant speaks again, she is looking at her notes, not at me. “Are you aware of any threats received by Freeman Bishop?”

“No.”

“Are you aware of anybody with a strong dislike for Freeman Bishop?”

“No.” Again I cannot help elaborating: “He was not the sort of man who generated, uh, strong emotions.”

“No enemies of whom you are aware?”

“No.”

“Have you had any recent conversations with Freeman Bishop?”

“Not since the funeral, no.”

“Prior to the murder, but after the funeral, have you had any conversations with any person about Freeman Bishop?”

I hesitate. What is she driving at? What does she think happened? But hesitation in an interrogation is like a red flag to a bull. Sergeant Ames lifts her intense gaze from the manila folder and settles her eyes on me. She does not repeat the question. She waits, terrifying in her patience. As though expecting me to confess. To a conversation? To something more? Does she think that I… surely she doesn’t think…

You’re being ridiculous.

“Not that I can recall,” I say at last.

She gazes at me a moment longer, letting me know that she recognizes the hedge, then looks down at her notes again.

“Have you recently noticed any peculiar behavior by Freeman Bishop?”

“I didn’t know him that well.”

She glances up. “I thought you saw him last week, at your father’s funeral.”

“Well, yes…”

“And did you notice any peculiar behavior?”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

“He seemed the same as always?”

“I guess so.” I am puzzled by her questions now, not scared.

“Did anybody else recently tell you about any peculiar behavior by Freeman Bishop?”

“No.”

“Did anybody tell you anything that could have a bearing on this murder?”

“Don’t hurry. Think hard. Go back a couple of weeks if you have to. Months.”

“The answer is still no, Sergeant. No.”

“You said you think there is a connection between your father’s death and the murder of Freeman Bishop.”

“I… we wondered, yes.”

“Did your father ever talk about Freeman Bishop?”

This one puzzles me again. “I guess. Sure, lots of times.”

“Recently?” All at once her voice grows gentle. “Go back, say, six months from your father’s death?”

“No. Not that I remember.”

“A year. Go back a year.”

“Maybe. I don’t recall.”

“Was it your father’s wish that Freeman Bishop perform his funeral?”

Mariah and I exchange a glance. Something is up. “I don’t think he ever talked about his funeral,” I say, once it becomes clear that Mariah is not going to speak. “Not to me.”

Sergeant Ames turns her attention to the folder once more. I wonder what she could be reading in it. I wonder what she did when she learned that we were coming to see her, where she went for information, what information she found. I wonder where these questions are coming from. I am sorely tempted to violate the rules every lawyer lives by… and just ask.

Instead, I ask something else.

“Do you have any leads?”

“Mr. Garland, you have to understand the way this kind of thing works. The police usually are the ones who ask the questions.”

Pushing my buttons: nothing galls me as much as being patronized.

“Look, Sergeant, I’m sorry. But, you know, this is the man who just did my father’s funeral. Nine years ago he performed my wedding. Now, maybe you can see why I would be a little bit upset.”

“I do understand why you are upset,” Sergeant Ames says sternly, hardly bothering to glance up from her notes. “But I also have a murder to investigate, and as long as you have used your connections to barge in here on a very busy day, I expect you to try to help if you can. Because he did your father’s funeral. Because he did your wedding.”

Mariah tries to fix everything: “How can we be of assistance, Sergeant Ames?”

“Did you hear the questions I asked your brother?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Something registers in the sergeant’s face: why didn’t I think to say ma’am? Because she is white and I am black? Is rudeness the legacy of oppression? Downward, downward, civilization spirals, and all we Americans seem able to do about it is quarrel over the blame.

“Do you have any different answers to offer?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, ma’am.” My sister has never sounded so contrite in her life. The tactic seems to have some effect.

“I want you to look at these,” the detective says, her voice softer. She slides two glossy black-and-white photographs from her folder. “These are, mmm, the least horrible.”

Mariah glances down and then looks away; but I do not want to lose face before the formidable B. T. Ames, so I force myself to stare, and force my protesting mind to process what it is seeing.

To look at the photographs is to realize immediately that whoever tortured Father Bishop did it, at least in part, for the fun of it. One picture is a close-up of a hand. If not for all the blood, you might not notice on first glance that three fingernails are missing. The second shot appears to show the meaty part of Freeman Bishop’s thigh. Bright, almost bubbly circles are burned into his skin. Puckers of pain, like craters on the moon. I count them-five, no, six-and this is just one small area of his body. I try to imagine what kind of person could do this to another. And keep on doing it, because this took a while. And where somebody could do it, to ensure that nobody would hear his screams. I doubt that a gag over his mouth would have been enough.

“It’s different when you see it, isn’t it?” the detective asks.

“Do you-did you-” I am stuttering. This can’t be what Jack Ziegler was talking about. It just can’t. I start over. “Do you have any idea why somebody would do something like this?”

Sergeant Ames answers my question with one of her own. “Do you?” Her eyes are on me once more, watching as I examine the photographs. I sense an uneasy stirring in Mariah next to me, and I am not sure why.

“Do I what?”

“Do you have any idea why somebody might have done this?”

“Of course not!”

My protests do not interest Sergeant Ames. “Do you have any reason to think that Father Bishop had any information that somebody else would want?”

“I don’t know what you mean…”

“Well, he was tortured.” The detective gestures at the photographs in what seems to be exasperation. “Usually, that means somebody wants information.”

“Unless the torturing was just for show,” Mariah interjects quietly.

Sergeant Ames turns toward my sister, her eyes alight with cautious re-evaluation-not of the case, but of Mariah.

“Or the work of a psychopath,” I put in unwisely, not wanting to be left out if the detective is now ready to toss respect around.

“Right,” says Sergeant Ames, her words made all the more scathing by the monotone in which they are delivered. “If it turns out that somebody cut out his liver and ate it with fava beans, I’ll give you a call.”

I bristle at this put-down, but, before I can think of a suitable riposte, the detective is making a little speech. “You’re wondering why I am asking these questions. Let me try to explain what is going on here. You’ve read what was in the papers, I assume. So you know that Father Bishop, may he rest in peace, died of a gunshot wound to the head. Well, that gunshot wound was to the base of the skull, angled slightly upward. No amateur would put a shot there. The amateur takes his cue from the movies and shoots people in the side of the head or maybe the throat. But if you want to be sure, you do the base of the skull. You also know that Father Bishop had cigarette burns on both of his arms and one of his legs and the side of his neck. You know he was missing three fingernails. You know that he was found with his hands tied behind his back. Other things were also done. You don’t need all the details. But this man was tortured. Tortured viciously. The way that drug dealers, for instance, do it when they want something.”

Hearing it put so starkly, and by a police officer, I almost cringe, for all I can think about is my family. The detective, however, has chosen her words with care. Mariah picks up on the little hint before I do, but Phi Beta Kappans tend to figure things out fast. Her head bobs up again.

“I thought it was a hate crime.”

“Well, I can see why you would think that. The newspapers say it was a hate crime and the television says it was a hate crime and the NAACP says it was a hate crime and the governor of this fine state says it was a hate crime and I understand that the President of these wonderful United States even suggested it might be a hate crime. And so do the two busloads of protesters who are arriving this weekend to remind us all about how terribly the people of my town treat black people-never mind that there is absolutely no reason to think that the crime actually occurred here. But you know something? Hate crimes, even murders, tend to be committed by amateurs. This wasn’t.” She is watching our faces again. “Now, you have not heard me say it was a hate crime and you have not heard anybody from the police say it was a hate crime, have you?”

Mariah, the onetime journalist, keeps at it: “So was it a hate crime or wasn’t it?”

Sergeant Ames fixes my sister with a baleful glare, as though she has recognized too late the species she has admitted to the inner sanctum. The detective’s eyes are a flat, obsidian black, daring anybody to tell a lie in her presence. She plainly does not like being interrogated. But when she speaks, her voice is almost mechanical.

“Mrs. Denton, we do not know for sure what kind of crime it was except that it was a nasty one, and the person who did it is running around free. We will find who did it and then we will know what kind of crime it was.”

“Wasn’t there a note?” I ask.

“Evidently, we read the same newspapers, Mr. Garland. I read in one of them that there was a note pinned to Father Bishop’s shirt, and somebody else had an exclusive report that the note was from a white supremacist group that wants to take the blame.”

“In the papers,” murmurs Mariah, the ghost of a smile on her lips. She did not read the detective’s comment quite so contemptuously as I did.

“I am not confirming that,” the sergeant agrees, smiling back. Now that each knows the other’s agenda, they are comfortable together: more evidence, if any is needed, that the world would be better run by women.

“You are not confirming it,” Mariah explains, probably for my benefit, “because, if there was a note and you don’t tell anybody what it says, you can use it to sort the kooks who always call after a crime like this from people who might actually be able to help solve it.”

“That’s one of the reasons, yes.”

I look from one of them to the other. There is something more here, some level of comprehension the two of them have already passed while I am still struggling to manage the first rung. It is rather like watching a chess game between two grandmasters, all the subtle maneuvers that make so little sense to the unschooled mind until, in a sudden flurry, one of them is defeated.

“The other reason,” Mariah suggests in the same quiet tone, “is that the letter could be a fake.”

“I didn’t say that,” the detective interposes immediately, her smile disappearing as though she has belatedly recalled that smiles are banned in this sad little room. I can feel the tension rising once more-and then, suddenly, I see where they are heading.

“Sergeant Ames,” my sister says formally, “we are here because we have families, and we are worried about them.” She rubs her ample belly to underline the point: she means we are worried about our children. “If you can persuade us that there is no relation between what happened to Father Bishop and what happened-what might have happened-to our father, we will go away and never bother you again. I promise you. We won’t blab to the papers. I used to be a journalist, and I was always very good at keeping my mouth shut. I never revealed a source. My brother, as you know, is a lawyer, so he knows how to keep a confidence. I know you feel we used connections to barge in here. I’m sorry about that. But we did it for the sake of our families. And nothing you tell us will go any further than the two of us. I promise you that, too. And if we can ever do anything for you. ..”

She leaves the rest hanging in the air. Oh, but my sister is good! What a reporter she must have been! Without saying a word that can be held against her, Mariah has managed to threaten, indirectly, to make a nuisance of herself if she does not get what she wants. More important, she has also raised the specter of our supposed family influence-all of it, of course, actually the largesse of Mallory Corcoran.

Sergeant Ames gets the message. And is far too experienced to let herself get angry. Instead, she takes a nibble at the bait.

“Father Bishop’s family,” she says, “has not been very cooperative. They seem to think-well, the racial angle is giving them problems.”

“I’ll talk to them,” Mariah says at once, as though she runs the Gold Coast, which our mother once hoped she would. “I was in Jack and Jill with Warner Bishop.”

The detective nods as though she knows all about the various social organizations for the children of middle-class African America. “Warner Bishop seems to think we’re all rednecks out here,” she says.

“I’ll talk to him,” Mariah promises.

Sergeant Ames looks back at me briefly, but she addresses herself to my sister. “I won’t show you the note,” she says. “I can’t do that. I’m sorry. But I can tell you, in the privacy of this room, that there is absolutely no reason for you to worry about the safety of your families. There really is no connection between this crime and your father. But you’re right about the other part. There was a note, and we do think it was a fake. That is, we do not think this was a white supremacist thing.”

She pauses, wanting us to take the next step. I am about to offer another question, but Mariah raises a hand and slips hers in ahead of mine.

“It was drugs, Sergeant, wasn’t it?”

Sergeant Ames looks at her, then looks at me, then looks back at my sister. There is real respect there.

“Yes,” the detective finally says. “Yes, we think it was drugs. Now, this also stays in this office. You cannot even tell Father Bishop’s family, not just yet.” A pause to let this sink in; police detectives can make threats too. “But we are quite confident that you and your father and your families are not involved. We have to wait a day or so for toxicology to be sure, but I already know from other evidence what they’ll tell us: that Father Bishop was a fairly heavy user.”

The detective stops. My jaw does not exactly drop, but I am pretty sure that time stands still and my heart skips a few beats, and lots of other cliches happen at the same time. So it was not simple incompetence that caused Freeman Bishop’s sermons to meander into meaninglessness. I am astonished, and embarrassed, by the depth of my relief.

But Mariah sticks to the problem.

“How does that explain what happened to him?”

Sergeant Ames sighs. She hoped to get away with less, it seems, but now will have to tell us the rest. I am still wondering, however, what her purpose was in interrogating me. Was it just intimidation?

“We don’t publicize this,” she says, “because we are afraid of copycats. But, in the Washington area, I’m including the suburbs, we see a dozen or so of these cases a year. Most of them you never read about or see on television, because the victims are less prominent. The kind of torture Father Bishop suffered-well, it’s horrible, but it’s more common than you might think. In particular, it is used a lot by dealers to make their customers who are behind in their payments tell them where they have money stashed. They torture the information out of them and then shoot them in the back of the head. Or sometimes they get gratuitous about it, torturing for kicks. And we are pretty sure that is what happened here. Even a very tough man would have had a lot of trouble holding out against a fraction of what they did to him, and from what people tell me, Freeman Bishop, may he rest in peace, was not particularly tough. If they wanted information from him, I think they probably got it pretty fast. The rest of what they did to him was for kicks.” A pause to let this sink in. The temperature in the room drops several degrees. “Still, the basic fact remains the same: Freeman Bishop, we are pretty sure, was killed because he used drugs and couldn’t pay for them.”

“Pretty sure?” I ask, just for something to say.

The sergeant glares at me. She would rather I shut up, her eyes say, so that she can pretend that I am not in the room. Mariah is the one she trusts. As far as Sergeant B. T. Ames is concerned, I am furniture.

I see my mistake an eyeblink later, but my sister sees it faster. She is already up on her feet, pulling me to mine, thanking the detective for her time, shaking hands as though closing a sale. Sergeant Ames steps around us and opens the door so that the rest of the squad can hear her dismiss us.

“Look, Mr. Garland. Mrs. Denton. I’m really sorry about your father. I am. But I have a murder on my hands and a lot of work to do. So, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to the job.”

(II)

We drive together to Shepard Street, where Mariah plans to spend the night; I am flying home on the shuttle a bit later this evening, but will return next week for the funeral of the man who, last week, officiated at the Judge’s. The house is eerily silent after the hubbub of a week ago; it sounds like the house of a dead man. Our footsteps echo like gunfire on the parquet of the front hall. Mariah grimaces, explaining that she sent all the Judge’s Oriental carpet runners out for cleaning right after the funeral. She raises her palm in half-apology, then turns on the CD player, but her kind of music this time, not my father’s: Reasons, the long version, by Earth, Wind and Fire, which remains, in my sister’s casual judgment, the single greatest pop recording ever made. The Judge would have been appalled. I remind myself that this is my sister’s house now, that I am a guest, that she can do what she wants.

After Mariah visits the powder room, we find ourselves once again in the absurdly bright kitchen, sitting together at the table, sipping hot chocolate in companionable silence, almost-but not quite-friends again. I loosen my tie. Mariah kicks off her shoes.

“I wish you wouldn’t stay here alone,” I tell her.

“Why, Tal,” laughs my sister, “I didn’t know you cared.”

Most siblings would identify this at once as the moment to say, You know I love you; but most siblings did not grow up in my family.

“I worry about you, that’s all.”

Mariah tilts her head to one side and wrinkles her nose. “You don’t need to worry, Tal, I’m a big girl. I don’t think anybody is going to break into the house tonight and burn me with cigarettes.” Since that is exactly what I am scared of, I say nothing. “Besides,” she adds, “I won’t be alone.”

“You won’t?” This takes me by surprise.

“No. Szusza is bringing the kids down tomorrow.” I assume this is the name of the latest unpronounceable au pair. “Well, some of the kids, anyway,” she corrects herself, but maybe she has trouble keeping track. I would. “And Sally’s staying with me tonight. So don’t worry.”

“Sally?” I didn’t know my sister and our cousin were so close.

“She’s been great, Tal. Really great. She’s coming by right after work. We’re going to start going through Daddy’s papers.” Mariah looks up at me sharply, as though I have objected to this plan. “Look, Tal, somebody has to do it. We have to know what’s here. For all kinds of reasons. There are a lot of records and things that we might need. On the houses and stuff. And, who knows, maybe… maybe we can find some kind of clue.”

“Clue to what?”

Mariah’s russet gaze goes flinty. “Come on, Tal, you know what I’m talking about. You’re the one who had Jack Ziegler screaming at you in the cemetery last week. He thinks there is something somewhere, some kind of… well, I don’t know what.” She closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them again. “I want to find what he is looking for, and I want to find it before he does.”

I think this over. The arrangements. Well, she could be right. The Judge might have left a piece of paper, a diary, something to help us figure out what has Uncle Jack so worried. And what the fake FBI men evidently wanted. And maybe Sergeant B. T. Ames. The arrangements. Maybe a clue will turn up. I doubt it-but Mariah, ex-journalist, just could be right.

“Well, good luck,” is all I can think of to say.

“Thanks. I have a feeling we’ll find it.” She sips her hot chocolate and makes a face: too cold.

“It could even be fun.”

Mariah shrugs, somehow conveying her determination. “I’m not doing it for fun,” she says to her cocoa, unconsciously rubbing her womb again. I find myself wondering what my wife is doing at this instant.

“Have you heard from Addison since the funeral?” I am making conversation.

“Nope. Not a word.” She chuckles derisively. “Same old Addison.”

“He’s not so bad.”

“Oh, he’s great. Can you believe what he said about Daddy? In the eulogy? That maybe there was some reason to think he did something wrong?”

“That’s not exactly what he said,” murmurs Misha the peacemaker, a role into which I somehow stepped while trying to survive in the turbulent household of my adolescence, and one that I have never managed to relinquish.

“That’s the way I heard it. I bet that’s the way it sounded to most of the folks who were there.”

“Well, maybe he did leave it… a little ambiguous.”

“It was a funeral, Tal.” Her eyes are flat. “You don’t do that at a funeral.”

“Oh, I see your point, kiddo.”

Which is not precisely the same as agreeing with it, a nuance my sister catches at once. “You never want to take sides, do you? You like the view from the fence.”

“Mariah, come on,” I say, stung, but I offer no counterargument, not least because I do not have one.

We let the silence envelop us for a while, escaping into our own minds. I am adding up all the hours of work I have waiting for me back home, secretly furious that I allowed Mariah to spook me into this trip. Everything the detective said made sense; and none of my sister’s theories are remotely plausible. I peek at my watch, hoping Mariah doesn’t see, and lift my mug to my lips, only to put it down fast. My hot chocolate tastes as bad as hers.

“Did you believe her?” Mariah asks, as though in contact with my thoughts. “Sergeant Ames, I mean? About Father Bishop?”

“You mean, do I think she was lying?”

“I mean, do you think she was right? Please don’t play word games with me, Tal, I’m not one of your students.”

I have to answer this carefully; I do not want to make my sister my enemy all over again. “I know what you meant,” I say slowly. “I think, if she isn’t right, then the alternative is that he was tortured because of… because of something to do with the Judge. But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why not?” Her question is sharp; again I must pick the right words.

“Well, let’s suppose-let’s suppose that there is some bit of information that the Judge took to his grave with him, information that somebody wanted. I don’t believe this, you understand, it’s just a supposition.”

Mariah gives a small, tight nod. I plunge on.

“Even if it’s true-even if there is some bit of information-well, I doubt that the Judge would have confided anything important in Freeman Bishop. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but, come on.”

“Nobody who knew Daddy would think he would tell Father Bishop anything.”

“Nobody who knew Freeman Bishop would think the Judge would tell him anything.”

My sister rubs her womb again, protecting her baby. “So he wasn’t

… tortured… for information about Daddy, was he?”

“I don’t think so. If I thought anything else, I would grab my family and head for the hills.”

“If your family would go.” Mariah cannot help being mischievous when the subject of Kimmer comes up. I decide to ignore it.

“The point is, kiddo, the reason I think Sergeant Ames is right is that I can’t think of any reason that anybody would have… done those things to him.” I promised to protect you, and so I shall. I can repeat this mantra to myself, but reiteration does not make it feel true. Not completely. What feels true is that somebody is out there-Uncle Jack’s others -playing a very long game, waiting for me to do… well, whatever it is that everybody expects me to do. I sense no danger, but I sense no peace.

Mariah nods. “Neither can I,” she says. She runs a hand over her eyes. “She was really something, that detective. She was one tough lady.”

“Well, you got her to admit that the note was most likely a fake. …”

“Oh, Tal, give it a rest.” Mariah’s voice has gone unexpectedly hard. I have stumbled into her realm of expertise. “I didn’t get her to do anything. Cops don’t ever admit anything they don’t want to. She told us what she wanted us to know, and that’s all.”

“Well, that’s my point.” I am excited now. “She wanted us to hear all that stuff about drugs. Why? I bet the only reason she told us was that she doesn’t believe we’re going to keep it secret. She wants us to spread it around.”

“I never knew you were such a cynic.” Mariah shakes her head as though she has never been one. She shifts in her chair and her finger stabs toward me. “I liked Sergeant Ames.”

“But did you believe her about the drug dealers?”

“Well, they did find his car by the Navy Yard.”

“I bet there’s about a hundred fifty thousand people down in Southwest who don’t do drugs or sell them,” I preach.

“Give it a rest,” Mariah repeats. “Everybody knows Father Bishop does coke. Or he did, anyway. Everybody’s known for years.”

“Everybody knows what?”

“You’re so innocent, Tal. Why are you the last to hear everything?” She laughs. At least we seem on relatively good terms again. “You really don’t know?”

I shake my head.

“Well, it’s an old story. Laurel St. Jacques caught him snorting three or four years ago, right in the sacristy. You remember Laurel, don’t you? She married Andre Conway? I know you must remember Andre.” A devilish smile, reminding me that I am Kimberly Madison’s second husband. Andre was her first.

“I remember Andre,” I say quietly. I also remember-although I never mention it-an irrational fury at Andre after he won the first round in our battle for Kimmer Madison, including a moment, in his apartment, when we nearly came to blows. At that time he was a local news producer named Artis. His new appellation came when he decided to make documentary films. “I even remember he married Laurel.”

“Do you remember that they’re divorced?”

“Rings a bell somewhere.” I hope she is not hinting anything about Andre and my wife. Unbidden, my thoughts lead me down toward their usual obsessive fear: Andre is in Los Angeles these days, and Kimmer is often in San Francisco, and he could fly up to see her…

Oh, stop it!

“I heard there was another woman involved,” says Mariah, her old streak of cruelty unexpectedly manifesting itself.

“There usually is.”

Mariah glances at me, perhaps trying to figure out if I am putting her down with what she disdains as my Ivy League cleverness, as though she has none of her own. I keep my poker face on. “Well, anyway,” she finally continues, “Laurel caught Father Bishop at it a couple of years ago. And, Laurel being Laurel, she naturally told everybody. It’s a wonder he wasn’t fired on the spot. I think Daddy must have been off the vestry by then, or Father Bishop would have been gone. But they decided to keep him around. I guess they all must have felt sorry for him or something. You know us Episcopalians, Tal. We love to feel compassion for people. We’re never happy unless we’re ignoring somebody’s sins to show how tolerant we are,” adds my sister, who converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry Howard and, Kimmer likes to say, has followed the Church’s teaching on birth control ever since.

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, it was quite the little scandal, Tal.” She flaps her hand for emphasis, tosses her head the way she used to when she wore her hair straight and long, then rushes eagerly on, happy for the chance to share gossip I seem to have missed. “Quite a few people left the church over it, as a matter of fact. The Cliftons left. Oh, they were furious! And Bruce and Harriet Yearwood left. Also Mary Raboteau. No, wait, she retired and went to Florida or something. I was thinking of Mrs. Lavelle-she’s the other one who left. And you’d think Gigi Walker would have left, she’s such a bluenose, but, well, I guess she had her reasons to stay.” An odd little laugh. My sister loves being judgmental, even when nobody else in the room knows what she is judging. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it, Tal.”

“No, I missed it.”

“Daddy thought Father Bishop should quit voluntarily, you know, save everybody all the trouble? But he went in front of the congregation and did one of those God-isn’t-finished-with-me-yet sermons, and that was pretty much the end of that. Oh, that reminds me.” My sister is on her feet. “I promised Sergeant Ames that I would call Warner Bishop. Poor guy, he doesn’t have anybody left.” Mariah vanishes into the foyer. A moment later I hear her tread on the stairs, going up to the study to find the Judge’s address book. I am amazed. I assumed that my sister was just talking when she said she would reassure Father Bishop’s family, but I forgot how seriously she takes promises. When we were children, she used to run to our parents to complain whenever I (or, more frequently, Addison) went back on a promise. In the Garland household, promise-breaking was pretty much a court-martial offense. Our mother would punish us, usually confining us to our rooms for a couple of hours, but our father would do something far worse: he would call us into the little downstairs study he used in those days and deliver one of his excruciating lectures, letting the full force of his chilly, dispassionate disapproval wash over us as we stood before his desk at parade rest. Promises are the bricks of life, Talcott, and trust is the mortar. We build nothing in life if we make no promises, and we tear down what others have built if we make them and break them. Something like that. He struggled to make the same point to the Senate Judiciary Committee, explaining his relationship with Jack Ziegler: Friendship is a promise of future loyalty, loyalty no matter what comes. Promises are the bricks of life

… I will never abandon a friend, and I expect that my friends will never abandon me.

That’s a very noble sentiment, Judge, but the fact remains that this particular friend of yours was under indictment for…

With respect, Senator, it isn’t a matter of nobility. It’s a matter of what kind of world you want to build. If you want to build at all-or just to tear down.

Lots of friends did abandon him, of course, once they calculated that the Judge was more likely to wind up in prison than on the Supreme Court.

I go to the sink and wash our cups. When the water stops running, I hear Mariah’s voice drifting down the stairwell. Mariah, who can be warm and vivacious when she chooses, will probably be a considerable comfort to Warner Bishop, Freeman Bishop’s hapless son, now some kind of advertising executive in New York, with whom my sister once put in time in Jack and Jill and all the other youth groups of our set. Homely, chunky, awkward Warner Bishop, who wanted desperately to date Mariah when they were teenagers, but never quite succeeded in drawing her interest. According to Addison, Warner has carried a distant torch for her ever since. Oh, our closed little world!

“Drug dealers,” I mutter. Maybe, maybe not. Whoever it was, I do not even need to close my eyes to see the photos of what they did to Father Bishop. To his hand, to his thigh, and, easily imagined, to other parts of his anatomy that the detective chose, perhaps out of kindness, not to share.

Freeman Bishop, drug user, came to a drug user’s end. How is it that I alone seem not to have known?

Maybe Mariah is right. Or maybe she is nuts. Or maybe I am.

Maybe I should make a peace offering.

Drying my hands on a kitchen towel of hideous red-and-black design, I dither for a moment, wondering if it is time to use the card Jack Ziegler gave me in the cemetery. But it isn’t: after a murder, the last thing I need is to call in a monster for help. And then I know exactly what to give. The memory of my father’s lectures reminded me. I think Mariah’s hunt for a hidden clue will bear no fruit, but I do not want her to think I am her enemy. What I will offer is less a clue than a memento of the man our father was-a memento that might even persuade my sister to abandon her search. I stand up and head down the dark hallway to the claustrophobic first-floor library with its cherry cabinets. After a quick, covetous glance at the Miro, I sit behind the desk and roll the chair over to the bookshelf where my father kept his scrapbooks. I hunt through them for several minutes before giving up in puzzlement.

Mariah moved it, I am thinking. Or somebody else in the endless parade through the house after the funeral: Mariah’s children, Howard Denton, Just Alma, the unpronounceable au pair, Mrs. Rose, Sally, Addison, his little white girlfriend, Uncle Mal, Dana Worth, Eddie Dozier, the woman who cleans the place, one of the numberless cousins, anybody.

The blue album with the newspaper clippings of hit-and-run accidents is gone.

CHAPTER 11

A MODEST PROPOSAL

“Your wife and Marc Hadley are both up for the same judgeship,” Stuart Land informs me as soon as I am seated in his capacious chamber around the corner from mine.

“I think I know that,” I say, counterpunching but remaining respectful.

“In Europe, of course, this situation would be impossible.”

“Which situation?”

“They have a professional judiciary. You rise through the ranks. They consider rather unseemly the American system, under which… amateurs… may be appointed to an appellate court.”

“Well, we’re stuck with our system.” Although I am pretty sure my wife has just been insulted, I force a smile, not wanting to pick a fight with Stuart Land, the great Anglophile. I already have enough enemies around the building. “It’s worked out pretty well so far. No more than one scandal per decade.”

Stuart raises an eyebrow at my levity. Then he shrugs, as if to say responding to such nonsense is beneath his dignity. “Have you heard any news? About who might have the inside track?” Implying that my sources are better than his, which is unlikely. With the Republicans in the White House, Stuart probably could have had his pick of Washington jobs. Stuart Land, Lynda Wyatt’s predecessor as dean, and the man who persuaded me to return to my alma mater to teach, is among the most conservative members of our faculty. In the four years since his fall from power, Stuart has shown no signs of bitterness toward Lynda or Marc Hadley or Ben Montoya or Tish Kirschbaum or any of the several other professors who conspired to oust him. He continues to crisscross the country in search of money for the law school, and our alumni, especially the older, wealthier ones, love him still and continue opening their wallets and checkbooks when Stuart calls. Indeed, many still refer to him as “the Dean,” maybe because it once seemed he would hold the job until he died, and if Lynda is envious of their affection, she hides it well.

It is not possible to get close to Stuart, although the more conservative professors hang around with him, and Lemaster Carlyle, who seems to get along with everybody, is a pal. As for myself, I will confess that I have never quite liked Stuart. But I have always admired him, not least because he was the only member of the faculty actually to testify in favor of my father’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. His integrity, moreover, is beyond question, which is why I was surprised and a little disturbed when he called me up just days after my return from Washington to suggest that I drop by for a chat.

Having nothing better to do at nine in the morning but sit in my office and feel sorry for myself, I agreed.

Stuart Land is a fussy little man whose vested suits with their pinstripes and broad lapels might be described as gangsta-like, except that he is white and crew-cut and somewhere north of sixty. His face is round and utterly without affect, his eyes are pale gray and glittering with fierce intelligence, and the half-glasses always perched on his nose make him look more censorious than professorial. His prim mouth is always ready with a word of sharp, witty disapproval. Nobody takes to him on first meeting, or second, but, somewhere along the way, a certain charisma emerges, and few of our students, even those on the left, manage to leave the law school without sharing in that general warm glow that everybody feels toward him.

This morning, however, Stuart is neither warm nor glowing. He exudes no charisma. He called me because he has a point to make, and, in true Stuart Land fashion, he chooses to make it through a series of gentle, indirect, yet very pointed assaults-the same style he uses in the classroom, and with which I was skewered more than once in the days when he taught me contracts.

“No, Stuart,” I report dutifully. Half my attention is still focused on Washington, where Mariah, unable to reach Warner Bishop, left him a message. I said nothing to her about the missing scrapbook. “We haven’t heard any news.”

“Neither has Marc. I gather he’s quite upset about the whole thing.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Which is vaguely true.

“Marc isn’t a bad fellow, Talcott. You just have to get to know him.”

“I don’t have anything against Marc. I like him.”

Stuart frowns as though suspecting a lie. He drums his fingers. “He hasn’t been the scholar we hoped for when we hired him, of course. That writer’s block. But he really is a fine colleague, Talcott. A wonderful teacher. A brilliant mind. And, you know, when we hired you, Marc was one of your keenest backers.”

“I… had no idea,” I say truthfully. Unlike some law faculties, ours makes a fetish of confidentiality, and talking to people about who voted for or against them is considered to be somewhere between unethical and outrageous. Still, I have heard that Theo Mountain was my biggest booster, and during my first few years on the faculty, he and I were quite close. He was never quite my mentor-I have never really had one-but, until my father’s hard march to the right turned Theo into a carping critic, the two of us spent a lot of time together. Stuart Land, then the dean, was the man who actually persuaded me to quit the practice of law and come up to Elm Harbor to give teaching a try. He caught me at a good time: Kimmer and I were in the midst of one of our many estrangements. That she followed me to this city nine months later, and married me into the bargain, surprised me almost as much as it did our friends and families. And I have always wondered-although both parties deny it-whether Stuart might also have been responsible, somehow, for persuading my wife that the practice of law in Elm Harbor was not the hick job she imagined.

“Marc is a good man,” Stuart repeats. “As your wife is a good woman.”

“Yes,” I murmur, taking mental exception to the comparison as I wait patiently for the rest. Stuart has asked me here for a reason, and I know he is about to tell me what it is. I do not, however, have much energy to spend worrying about Marc Hadley’s feelings just now, even if he did back my appointment. The murder of Father Bishop, hard on the heels of the death of the Judge, has pretty much drained my wellspring of sympathy. Two nights of argument with Kimmer, whose position is still that there is nothing to worry about, exhausted the rest of my emotional self. Yet the main point I made to Stuart is correct: I do kind of like Marc Hadley, who is not much liked around the building. Marc, who has been teaching jurisprudence at the law school for eighteen years, is actually a fairly nice man. His son Miguel is one of Bentley’s best preschool buddies, so we see Marc and his second wife, Dahlia, socially in the way that parents do: in the school parking lot, at birthday parties, on field trips to the fire station around the corner. We are not exactly intimates, Marc and I, but we always used to get along. And although Dear Dana considers Marc “overreputed”-a famous Worthism-he is, in my judgment, every bit as brilliant as his legend insists; it takes only a minute or two in his presence to sense that fantastic brain pulsing forth its great ideas. But if his intellect is one legend, his inability to produce any scholarship is another. His academic standing rests on his single book, published quite early in his career. He has published almost nothing since. He seems to have read every book ever written, on every subject, and is ready with a quotation for any occasion, but Marc himself suffers from one of the great writer’s blocks, a true monster of the species, and there are law reviews everywhere still waiting for articles he promised a decade ago. For a startling moment, I find myself sympathizing after all with Marc, who probably feels he needs the judgeship to prove his career has not been a waste. Then I shrug it off and am ready to fight for my wife again. “Two good people,” I echo, just to show I have not lost my place.

Stuart nods, then leans back in his chair, steepling his long fingers, signaling that he is about to deliver a little sermon. I admire Stuart, but I hate his sermons.

“I don’t like it when members of our faculty compete against one another,” he says sadly, his tone proposing that his opinion matters. “It’s not good for our collegiality. It’s not good for the school.” He points toward his wall of windows, through which one can see spires and towers and the huge, blocky library, the Gothic glory of the campus proper. “We are, first and foremost, a faculty. That’s what it means to be in a university. We are scholars, and those of us who have tenure, what the university calls ‘Permanent Officers,’ are supposed to be leaders in our fields. Not politicians, Talcott, but Officers. Scholars. Every one of us is charged with precisely the same responsibility: to immerse himself in a chosen discipline, and then to teach his students what he happens to discover. Anything that distracts from that task is injurious to our common enterprise. You see that, don’t you?”

I am somewhere between astonished and furious. Stuart is surely not taking the side of the man who orchestrated his own fall from power. I never thought Kimmer would have many supporters on the faculty, but I assumed that Stuart Land would be one.

“Do you see?” he says again. He does not wait to see whether I see. He continues his oration, raising an admonitory forefinger. “You know, Talcott, over my many years on this faculty, I have often been approached by this administration or that one, asking after my interest in some presidential appointment. A judgeship. Associate attorney general. Some post in an agency.” He smiles in soft reminiscence. “Once, during a scandal, the Reagan people asked if I would be willing to come down and clean up a Cabinet department. But every time, Talcott, I have declined. Every single time. You see, it is my experience, my invariant observation, that a professor who is bitten by the political bug ceases to be effective as a scholar. No longer is he studying the world and teaching what he discovers. He is, in effect, running for office, and it affects everything from the subjects he chooses for his writing to the arguments he is willing to press in the classroom. He worries about leaving a paper trail and, if he has one, spends his time cleaning it up. As you can imagine, when two members of the faculty find themselves both bitten by the political bug at the same time, and both in competition for the same single slot on a court, well, the deleterious effects are… oh, geometrically increased. Quadrupled.”

I cannot let this go on any longer. “Stuart, look. I appreciate what you’re saying. But my wife is not a member of the faculty.”

“Well, no, Talcott, you’re right. She isn’t.” Nodding as though he knew this before and I, the slower thinker, have just realized it. “Not formally.”

“Not even informally.”

“Well, your wife may not be faculty, but she’s family. Part of the law school family.”

I almost laugh at that one. In Kimmer’s ideal world, she would not even have to see the law school, much less think of herself as part of it. “Come on, Stuart. No matter what she is, the fact that she is in the running can’t possibly affect how she does her job around the law school if she doesn’t have a job around the law school.” Refusing to fall into Stuart’s cadences, in which the entire faculty is male.

The steely eyes hold mine. “Well, that isn’t quite the end of the matter, Talcott. That your wife is, as you put it, in the running could have an effect on you.”

“On me?”

“Oh, yes, Talcott, of course. Why is that so hard to believe? Your wife wanting to be a judge, you not wanting to spoil her chances-why couldn’t such a situation lead to an excess of caution on your part?”

“An excess of…”

“Have you been yourself lately?” He chuckles to ease the blow. “The Talcott Garland we know and love? I think not.”

Enough is enough. “Stuart, come on. My father just died. And then the preacher who did the funeral…”

“Was murdered. Yes, I know. And I am terribly sorry.” He hunches forward, folds his small hands on the desk. “But, Talcott, listen to me. You’ve been distracted lately. A bit disorganized.” Then, to my surprise, a shrug. “But this is wide of the point…”

“Wide of the point! You just said the competition is affecting how I do my job!”

“And perhaps I was speaking out of school. Maybe it’s none of my business. Maybe I was merely speculating. The truth is, I was not thinking about how you do your job. I was thinking about Marc.”

“What about Marc?” I demand, anger still burning fiercely, even though I am utterly confused. A moment ago Stuart thought I was distracted and disorganized. Now it is none of his business.

“Marc is not doing his job well. I think the competition may be too much for him.”

“Then why are you talking to me instead of to Marc?” Stuart says nothing, but only stares, scarcely blinking. I feel a little heady, an odd deja vu, even though I cannot say what it is I am reexperiencing. I try again. “Did Marc put you up to this? Did he ask you to talk to me? Because if he did…”

“Nobody put me up to anything, Talcott. My only concern is this school.” Talking as though he is still the dean. “And I know that, like me, you want what is best for the school.”

“You’re not suggesting… You don’t think…” I stop, swallow the surging red anger, and try again. “I mean, if you’re suggesting that I should tell my wife to drop out of the process, to give up her chance to be a federal judge, for the good of the law school or the good of Marc Hadley… well, Stuart, I’m sorry, but that isn’t going to happen.”

“It is just possible, Talcott, that the good of the school and the good of Marc Hadley are, in this case, identical.”

“What do you mean by… Oh!” Did I happen to mention that Stuart Land is devious? I should have seen it earlier. Naturally he wants to help Marc obtain his treasured judgeship. Probably Marc could not have been a finalist without his help, for Stuart may be the only member of the faculty whom the administration would trust to vouch for the truth of Marc’s own repeated assertion that he is a political liberal but a judicial reactionary. And why would Stuart assist the ambition of the man most responsible for his downfall? Because, if Marc were to become a judge, Stuart would be rid of him at last; and Dean Lynda, his rival, would lose the cornerstone on which her power base in the faculty is built.

Stuart has a hoary witticism to offer: “Perhaps Marc Hadley’s departure from the law school to join the bench would enhance the quality of both institutions.”

Again I choose my words with care. “I appreciate your point of view, Stuart. I really do. But Kimmer is more deserving of this seat than Marc is. I am not about to suggest to her that she withdraw her name.”

Stuart nods slowly. He even finds a smile somewhere. “Very well. I had to give it a shot. I was fairly sure your answer would be what it was. And I respect you for it. But, you know, Talcott, there will be those around the building who will not.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You have many friends on this faculty, Talcott, but you have.. . well, there are those who are not fond of you. Surely this comes as no surprise.”

The curtain of red finally descends across my eyes. “What are you telling me, Stuart? Just spell it out.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, Talcott, if certain… pressures.. . were brought to bear on you, to try to get you to convince your wife to drop out, to let Marc have the seat. That is a most unfortunate fact, but it is still a fact. I would prefer that the school be otherwise, that we retain our collegiality, but, when the political bug bites one of our own, we behave less like Permanent Officers than like Temporary Schoolchildren.” He waits for me to grin at his small joke, but I do not. “I am afraid, Talcott, that some of the schoolchildren may try to… persuade you.”

“I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this.”

“I will not be a part of it, of course, and I will happily use my influence to protect you. But, Talcott, you have to realize that I, too, have enemies on the faculty. It may be that my influence is less than I might prefer.” He sighs, contriving to suggest that the school would be a better place if he were still at the top of the heap. Perhaps it would. Say what you want about Stuart Land, his only ambitions, ever, have been for the school.

“I understand.”

Stuart hesitates, and I realize he has not quite finished his sermon. “On the other hand, Talcott, if you are determined to go down this path, I think I might be rather helpful to you in Washington.”

“Oh?”

“I believe I might have some influence there, and, if I do, I would gladly use it to help your wife along.”

Which brings us, I see, to the point of the whole meeting. Tired of Stuart’s subtle politicking, I try some directness: “And in return for your help, you want me to do what?”

Stuart frowns and steeples his fingers again. I brace for another speech, but he gets to his feet instead. “Not everything has a quid pro quo, Talcott. Don’t be such a cynic. When you were young and untenured, you were more optimistic. I think the return of that peppy fellow would be a fine thing, for both you and the school.” He picks up the volume of Holmes’s collected papers he was reading when I came in, a signal of dismissal. But, before I have managed to excuse myself, he offers a revision of his point. “Of course, it is possible, Talcott, that you will have the chance later on to do the school a favor in return. If the opportunity arises, I assume you will take it.”

“I… I’m not sure what you mean, Stuart.”

“You’ll be sure when the time comes.”

Out in the hall, I feel a sudden chill. I realize now who it was that Stuart reminded me of during his lecture: Jack Ziegler, back in the cemetery, promising to protect my family, and asking me, in return, to tell him whatever I learn about the arrangements.

I wonder, uneasily, if Stuart is asking for the same thing.

CHAPTER 12

A SPECIAL DELIVERY

(I)

Elm Harbor was founded in 1682, built around a trading post at the mouth of the State River. The original name of the town was Harbor-on-the-Hill, because the flatland near the water is so small and the ground slopes away from the harbor fast; and also because of the influence of John Winthrop’s sermon half a century earlier about the shining city on the hill. The city fathers were dour Congregationalists who came down the coast seeking religious freedom and immediately set about adopting laws to prohibit it to everybody else. So they banned, among other things, blasphemy, popery, exposing one’s ankles in public, idolatry, usury, disobeying one’s father, and doing business on the Sabbath. Although they would have been aghast to think they might be worshiping a graven image, they laid out their city in the shape of a cross, building it around two long avenues, an east-west road known in those days as The East-West Road and now known as Eastern Avenue, and a north-south road called North Road, later changed to The King’s Road, and now King Avenue.

The university opened its doors thirty years later, essentially a finishing school for dour Congregationalist men who wanted to study-along with their Bible-rhetoric, Greek and Latin, mathematics, and astronomy. The original campus was two wooden buildings in the long oval where King Avenue swings in a wide arc to follow the curve of the State River; that precious riverfront property is now owned by the medical school. Over the ensuing three centuries, the campus has spread like an aggressive cancer through the area west of King Avenue, invading one block, metastasizing on the next, demolishing whatever is in its way, or converting it to the university’s purposes. Clapboard homes have come down, along with factories, schools, stores, flophouses, churches, mansions, warehouses, brothels, taverns, tanneries, and blocks upon blocks of tenements. In their place have risen libraries and laboratories and classrooms and offices and dormitories and administration buildings… and open space. Lots and lots of open space. The university likes to describe itself as Elm Harbor’s number one builder of parkland, even if nobody from the city dares tread on any of the school’s beautiful parks. The university has built museums and an aquarium and the region’s leading performing arts center. Its hospital is one of the best in the world. The university invests in the community, providing capital to build new housing and start small businesses. No institution in the area provides more jobs.

Or so say our press releases.

The university also buys up entire streets, closing them to traffic, constructs massive edifices for parking cars, but only the cars of students and faculty, and, with its private security force with full powers of arrest, creates an island of relative tranquillity, surrounded by an almost visible wall to keep the townies out.

Elm Harbor itself is demographically complex. About thirty percent of the residents are black, another twenty percent are Hispanic, and the rest are white-but so diverse! We have Greek Americans and Italian Americans and Irish Americans and German Americans and Russian Americans. The residents whom the Census Bureau arbitrarily labels Hispanic are largely of Puerto Rican descent, but many others trace their families to Central America-as do many of our black residents, who are otherwise about equally divided between West Indians and those whose most distant identifiable roots are in the South. The city is hopelessly sundered along these many lines, as we learn every three years in municipal elections, where the city council is an endlessly bickering rainbow, and as many as five or six different ethnic groups often field mayoral candidates in the Democratic primary. (The local Republican Party is a joke.) Only two things unite the multi-original residents of Elm Harbor: a shared hatred of the university, and a shared dream that their own children will one day attend it.

Kimmer does not like living here, and the university, although an occasional client, is one of the reasons.

And my own view? I am a fan of no city, and Elm Harbor, with its many problems, seems to me no worse than any other. What I have learned over the years from my colleagues-especially the great conservative Stuart Land and the great liberal Theo Mountain-is that those of us who are members of the university community share a special responsibility for improving what Theo likes to call the metropole. The concept of responsibility, I know, is nowadays passe, especially the idea of obligation to those Eleanor Roosevelt used to call less fortunate than ourselves, but the Judge raised his children to it, and none of us can fully escape it. The Judge believed that his social conservatism demanded service: if the role of the state was going to be small, the role of volunteers had to be large. So Mariah holds parties for homeless children, Addison tutors inner-city high-school students… and I serve food.

(II)

The soup kitchen where I sometimes volunteer serves hot lunches to women and children at half past twelve each weekday in the basement of a Congregationalist church a block east of the campus, and it is the perfect place to forget mystery and death, for the difficulties in which its customers find themselves are far more profound than my own. As I sat in my office preparing for my torts class following the baffling conversation with Stuart Land, I felt its call. Trying to explain to my wary students the intricacies of comparative negligence, I knew I was botching it, and sensed Avery Knowland looking daggers any time my back was turned. When the class ended, I dumped the books in my office and rushed out the front door of the building.

The soup kitchen, I decided, is the only place for me just now.

Service, I remind myself as I descend the steps to the church basement. We are all of us called to actual service. Not just giving money, Theo Mountain likes to preach, and not fighting to change the law, either, for Theo considers the law a lost cause. Service to real people, who ache and cry and challenge us.

The manager of the soup kitchen, a seventyish Teutonic widow who insists that we call her Dee Dee, greets me with a scowl as I bound through the door a few minutes shy of opening time. Her cane snapping against the vinyl floor, Dee Dee follows me into the kitchen, where the rest of the staff is slicing several donated pizzas, baked yesterday and now desert-dry. “Setup is at noon,” she scolds me in her elegant voice as I pull on a pair of disposable latex gloves. “We expect everybody here by twelve-fifteen.”

“I had a class, Dee Dee. I’m sorry.”

“A class. ”

“Yes.” Trying to think how my charming brother would handle Dee Dee. Badly, I bet.

Dee Dee, whose real name I have often been told and can never recall, is a small woman with carefully combed white-blond bangs and wide, solid shoulders. She wears floral-print shirtwaists and knee socks and sensible shoes. Her long, waxy face seems carved from some pallid stone, and her amazingly bright blue eyes often trick the uninitiated into thinking she can see. But Dee Dee is quite blind. She is also determined that our guests (as she calls them) will be treated with respect. We have colorful cotton tablecloths, which Dee Dee herself launders twice a week, vases of flowers on the tables, and strict rules that all food must be served from dishes, never from pots just off the stove or pans just out of the oven. Dee Dee insists that our guests say Please and Thank you and that the rest of us say You’re welcome. Volunteers who are rude receive one warning, after which they are not welcome back. Dee Dee has no authority to bar guests for being rude to the volunteers, but her dead-eyed glare, disconcertingly direct, keeps all but the most schizophrenic in line. Dee Dee runs, by her own gleeful admission, a very tight ship. Her blindness does not affect her ability to know at once, as though through some sightless telepathy, which of her volunteers is being careless in measuring portions of lasagna and which of her guests is trying to stuff an extra apple or two inside her sweater.

Or who is late.

Dee Dee puts her large hands on her small hips and leans away, her thin lips turned down as she lets me have it: “Are you saying that your class is more important than feeding these unfortunate women?” Then she smiles and pats my shoulder with amazing accuracy, letting me know that she is mostly joking.

Mostly.

But today of all days, I welcome her wit.

I take my place behind the counter, at the salad station today. A few of the other volunteers say hello. Professor, they call me, a kind of inside joke, although I had the same nickname in high school. Hey, Professor! call volunteers and clients alike. What’s goin on, Pro? I come to the soup kitchen for a million different reasons. One of them, the easiest to see, is service, the simple Christian duty to do for others. Another, always, is the need to be reminded of the diversity of the human race in general and the darker nation in particular: for the students and teachers who represent African America at the university tend to run the gamut mainly from Oak Bluffs to Sag Harbor. And perhaps I have also come here today in part to do penance for my browbeating of poor Avery Knowland, whose insolence is hardly his fault. But even that is still too thin an explanation. This may simply be one of those Tuesdays on which the company of this happy band is preferable to the company of my colleagues, not because of a flaw in my colleagues but because of a flaw in me. There are days when time at the office is like time with the Judge, and the fact that he is dead and buried is irrelevant. At Oldie I am surrounded by people who fondly remember my father as a student: Amy Hefferman, his classmate; Theo Mountain, his teacher; Stuart Land, who was two years behind him in school; a few others. Despite the scandal that wrecked his career, my father’s portrait, like the portraits of all our graduates who have ascended to the bench, hangs on the wall in the vast reading room of the law library, which is one reason I spend little time there. Sometimes I feel suffocated by the role I am required to play: Was Oliver Garland really your father? What did it feel like? As though I am on campus principally to serve as an exhibit. I should never have allowed the Judge to persuade me to undertake the study of law where he had studied law before me; I cannot imagine what possessed me to decide that this was the right place to teach.

Maybe it was the fact that I had no other attractive offers.

Or that my father told me to do it.

I was a dutiful son in most things. My only act of rebellion was to marry Kimberly Madison, with whom I went to law school, when my family preferred her sister, Lindy, with whom I went to college. Kimmer, of course, is well aware of what my parents thought, as she reminded me two weeks ago in the steak house on K Street, and there are moments when the knowledge infuriates her, and other moments when she tells me she wishes I had done what I was expected to do. The trouble is I never loved Lindy, no matter what the Gold Coast seemed to think. And Lindy was never the least bit interested in me. If she had been, I suppose I would have married her, just as my parents wanted, and my life would have been different-not better, just different. I would not have Bentley, for example, which would be inestimably worse. On the other hand, some things would still be the same: the Judge would still be dead of a heart attack, and everybody would still be asking me what arrangements he made, and Freeman Bishop would still have been murdered, and Mariah would still be besotted with crazy theories.

And I would still be emotionally exhausted.

Kimmer and I quarreled yesterday morning, not over what she is or is not doing with Jerry, but over money. We have the same fight every autumn, because autumn seems to be the time when we realize that the budget we so carefully laid out in January has become a bad joke: in that respect, we do about as well, or as badly, as the federal government. Standing in the doorway to the walk-in closet while Kimmer, clad only in bra and half-slip, selected the day’s power suit, I suggested to her that we cut back. She asked where, without turning. I pointed, somewhat gingerly, to her expenditures on clothes and jewelry. Exasperated, she explained that she is a corporate lawyer and must dress the part. So I mentioned the stifling lease payments on her Alpine white BMW M5, in which she zips around the city while I huff along in my boring but reliable Camry. The car, too, turned out to be more or less a requirement of her job. I proposed that we think about moving to a smaller house. Kimmer, shimmying into her skirt, said that our residence is also a part of her professional persona. As I shook my head in defeat, she glanced over her shoulder at me and smiled the way I like best. Then she raised the stakes, reminding me tartly that we now own the house in Oak Bluffs free and clear: we could sell it and fix all our financial woes at once. I unwisely answered in kind, asserting that the Vineyard place is necessary to my persona, and that selling it would be like rejecting my heritage. As it does every year, the argument ended inconclusively.

Rob Saltpeter scolded me yesterday when he and Theo Mountain and I lunched at a place called Cadaver’s, a converted funeral home two blocks from the campus, a little pricey, with waiters who are paid to be weird. Rob proposed that I might have come back too soon, that I need some time to heal. He suggested I take a look at the Book of Job. Theo Mountain, never one to mince words, said it is not just exhaustion, and I didn’t need “to read a bunch of Bible verses.” He said I may be depressed.

And Theo is probably right. I am depressed. And I almost like it. Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it.. . or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster.

“So snap out of it,” I say to the room, startling another volunteer, who is laying out week-old cookies at the station next to mine. I smile apologetically into her perplexity and turn back to my work. Maybe you’re depressed, said Theo, who, it is whispered, has never missed a day of class in fifty years on the faculty. In the peculiar intermingling of old Elm Harbor families, Theo and Dee Dee are distant relatives, and it was Theo who first suggested, at a particularly difficult point in my marriage, that I volunteer at the soup kitchen as a way of raising my spirits. It worked for me, proclaimed Theo, whose wife has been in the ground since I was a student.

Measuring the salad onto small paper plates, I stand a little straighter; and, for a time, through service I manage to forget.

(III)

Dee Dee leads us in a brief prayer and we are open for business. She turns on music: a portable CD player with large, scratchy speakers. For a while she tried to push classical music (her tastes run only as far as the three B’s), but she has yielded to the pressures of time and place and now plays smooth jazz and, occasionally, something harder-edged. We serve a hard, edgy crowd. Nearly all the women are black. Few make much effort with appearances any more. Most arrive with hair mashed and twisted, in unwashed sweatshirts and dirty jeans. There is grime under their cracked, badly painted nails. A handful have white teeth, but most passed long ago from yellow to brown. Several have problems with drugs. A few are quite obviously HIV-positive. The women drag themselves through the line like forgotten spirits shuffling off toward the River Styx. They are neither enthusiastic nor reluctant, neither fatalistic nor indignant. They are, for the most part, utterly without affect. They do not grin, cry, laugh, complain. They are merely present. In college, we would-be revolutionaries pretended that the oppressed would one day rise as a mighty army to smite the capitalists, overthrow the system, and establish a truly just society. Well, here are a couple of dozen of the most oppressed people in America, all lined up for their food, and the greatest passion they are able to summon is for brief but heated argument over who got the larger portion. Half may be dead in two years. If not for the hopeful, innocent beauty of their children, who still return a smile for a smile, I probably could not bear to come at all.

Few of the women want salad, although one of them propositions me quite openly as she passes by (“No salad, but, m mmm -mmmm, I’d sure like to get me a piece of you”). I want to weep.

This is what conservatives have spawned with their welfare cuts and their indifference to the plight of those not like themselves, say my colleagues at the university. This is what liberals have spawned with their fostering of the victim mentality and their indifference to the traditional values of hard work and family, my father used to tell his cheering audiences. In my sour moments, it strikes me that both sides seem much more interested in winning the argument than in alleviating these women’s suffering. Service. Theo Mountain is right. No other answer but that one.

“Talcott?”

I turn around, the cracked wooden salad spoons still in my hands.

“Yes, Dee Dee?”

“Talcott, there’s somebody at the door asking for you.”

“He can’t come in?”

“She doesn’t want to.” A teasing smile dances at the corner of Dee Dee’s lips, and she flashes dimples that must once have been spectacular.

“One minute.”

I return to the kitchen to find somebody to take over my unpopular station. I remove my apron and throw my gloves in the trash. After retrieving my jacket, I follow Dee Dee as she tap-taps her way up the concrete stairs to the entrance, where Romeo, the only other male volunteer, guards the door. Romeo’s skin is the black-brown of a tree trunk on a moonless night. He is a man of no particular age, big in all directions. Although some of his heft is fat, most of it is not. Romeo’s meaty hands are always wandering, the result of some nervous disorder, but a menacing effect. He is often a little slow, but his vaguely Southern patois is never hard to understand. I do not know where Romeo comes from or even his real name. He was once on the street, as he puts it-meaning he dealt drugs-but managed to find Jesus without the inconvenience of first going to prison. His round, clean-shaven face has a battered look. He is far more gentle than he appears; but it is his appearance on which the church relies to scare away anybody who thinks of breaking the women-and-children-only rule.

“She gone, Miss Dee Dee,” he mumbles now, the immense hands rubbing each other furiously. “She say she can’t wait.”

“What did she look like?”

“A white girl,” says Romeo as Dee Dee listens closely to us both. “Clean,” he adds, meaning, Not like the women inside.

“A white woman,” I repeat, wondering who, and also correcting him with the reflex born of life on a politically wary campus.

“Naw, naw,” he disagrees, “a white girl.” But his emphasis carries little information: in Romeo’s typology, one must reach Dee Dee’s age before becoming a woman. Romeo squints, searching for the right adjective. “Sweet,” he says at last.

Sweet is one of Romeo’s several words for attractive. Now I am thinking student, but I am at a loss to understand how one of my students would track me here-or why, having found me, she would not wait for me to come upstairs.

“Did you ever see her before, Romeo?” Dee Dee asks the question that should have occurred to me.

“No, Miss Dee Dee. Oh, yeah!” A sudden light comes into his eyes. One of those huge hands comes swinging up, offering a white legal-sized envelope. “She say somebody pay her to give this to the Pro.” Meaning me.

“What is it?” asks Dee Dee, addressing the question to the Pro.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “Some kind of envelope.” I take it from Romeo, examine the front. My full name and title and my correct law school address are typed neatly on the front. There is no stamp. There is no return address. I heft it, then squeeze it. Something small and hard is inside. Like a tube of lipstick. I frown. Every university in the country has warned its faculty about opening letters from unknown senders, but I have always been nosey.

Besides, you have to die of something.

“Did she say who paid her?” I ask, mostly to play for time.

“No.”

My frown deepens. Somebody paid somebody else to deliver an envelope to me-at the soup kitchen. But how could anybody know I would be at the soup kitchen? I did not know myself until an hour ago. Did I mention it to anybody? I don’t think so. I didn’t even see anybody as I left the building, other than a random student or two. Did somebody follow me? I shake my head. If Romeo doesn’t even know who brought it, I certainly will never figure out who sent it. If the person who delivered it was a female student, well, there are only three thousand of them on the campus, five thousand more at the state university a few miles away.

“Huh,” I say intelligently.

Dee Dee shrugs and wanders back downstairs: she has a lunch to run. So Romeo is my only company as I tear open the letter-from the side, not the flap, because there is no need to take chances-and tip the contents into my palm. A cylinder of paper, perhaps two inches long, spills out. No note, nothing written, just this tiny bundle. Adhesive tape winds around it in a sloppy spiral: somebody went to a lot of trouble to protect whatever the paper covers.

“Open it, Pro,” says Romeo, like a child on Christmas morning.

I peel off the tape as gracefully as I am able, unwrap the paper, and find, inside, the missing white pawn from my father’s hand-turned chess set.

CHAPTER 13

A FAMILIAR FACE

(I)

The weird part is that there is nobody to tell. Walking back to the law school as the early November afternoon turns gray and brisk, I am struck by how… how friendless an existence I have managed to create. I pass the coffeehouses and photocopying shops and trendy little clothing stores that seem to border every campus in America. I pass flurries of undergrads who, despite their proudly proclaimed diversity, look more and more the same. And think more and more the same, too, for the range of acceptable campus opinion, on almost every subject, narrows depressingly with each passing year. I pass the jam-packed satellite lots that represent the university’s passive-aggressive answer to the problem of campus traffic: make parking hopelessly inconvenient, some faceless bureaucrat has decreed, and most students and employees will leave their cars at home. The endless sea of automobiles parked overtime at the meters on Town Street and Eastern Avenue is the rebuttal of the idea, but a university administration is like an ocean liner: it does not turn swiftly or easily, even when there is ice ahead.

Come to think of it, neither do I.

Twice I take the pawn from my pocket and examine it closely, as though it is likely to mutate at any moment. I suppose I should call the FBI or Cassie Meadows to make some kind of official report, but I am oddly reluctant. I do not feel threatened in any way. The pawn is not a warning. It is a message. I would like some time to work out its meaning.

In whom might I confide? Not Addison. He is hunkering down, unreachable. Not Mariah, who is growing ever crazier on the subject of the Judge’s death, and who, were I to call her, would transform the pawn into the symbol of a bullet or a vial of poison.

“Nobody to tell,” I mutter to the air.

I cross the chilly campus, head down, hands in the pocket of my threadbare Burberry raincoat. As I reach the Original Quad, as it is called, where the oldest still-extant university buildings stand, I continue to review my meager options. I could talk to Kimmer, perhaps, when she is back from San Francisco, where she is once more doing due diligence with Gerald Nathanson, but I am supposed to be letting the matter die. Or perhaps I could talk to Dear Dana, who would turn it into a joke, or Rob Saltpeter, who would-

I am being followed.

At first I am not sure. The man in the green windbreaker, with the alarmingly familiar face, shows up just as I pass under one of the four stone arches that mark the boundaries of the Original Quad. I stop to say hello to a political scientist whose daughter attends preschool with Bentley. She says something about the construction of the new art museum on the corner, and we both turn to look, and there he is, a few dozen yards away, on the edge of a crowd of students. He makes no effort to hide, but just returns my scrutiny with a straight and watchful stare.

Even at this distance, I am depressingly sure I know who it is: McDermott, no first name offered, the man who pretended to be an FBI agent just two weeks ago in the living room of my father’s house on Shepard Street.

First, however, I try to persuade myself that I might be mistaken, because, when I point him out to my friend, he has already disappeared, vanishing as neatly as my monthly paycheck. Just nerves, I tell myself when the political scientist has walked on, but then I spot him again as I reach the poured-concrete blandness of the Science Quad. This time he is in front of me, sitting placidly on the steps of the biology building, his windbreaker across his lap as he reads the campus paper. The strawberry birthmark glows from his hand as he turns a page. Okay, he briefly outwitted me. A nice trick, I admit, but I know the campus and he does not. Not sure what instinct is guiding me, but still thinking, probably, about Freeman Bishop, I decide to avoid him. I will take a shortcut back to the law school and call Cassie Meadows, or perhaps get in touch with the FBI directly. A narrow pedestrian mall between the biology building and the computer center connects the Science Quad to the administration buildings, and I turn sharply into the promenade, then dart between two students and hurry into the side entrance of the computer center, waving my faculty-identification card at the pimply guard, who hardly spares a glance from his People magazine. In my own student days, computer science was housed in a dilapidated warehouse on the uneasy border between the campus and the city’s poor, before more enlightened (that is, entrepreneurial) university leadership raised a few tens of millions for this new facility. I glance over my shoulder: no McDermott. But he fooled me before. I rush down a false hallway created by shoulder-height partitions separating banks of terminals until I reach the fire stairs. I run up two floors, out of breath now, and emerge among the faculty offices. The professors I pass are all men, all white, and all either bald or wearing hair down to their shoulders-there seems to be no middle ground. They turn skeptical eyes as I hurry past: computer science is about as dark nation-free a major as the university offers (with the possible exception of Slavic literature), and not one of them imagines for an instant that I belong. I turn a corner and reach the glass-and-steel pedestrian bridge that crosses two stories above Lowe Street (the students call it the Low Road) to the physics department, where I take the elevator to the first floor, and emerge on the steps once more.

McDermott, as I predicted, is gone.

I straighten my coat, hitch up my pants, and lean forward for a moment, sucking deep, grateful gusts of clean autumn air. The muscles around my ribs are broadcasting a steady complaint. My thighs are not happy either. My shirt is drenched. It is hard to believe that I ran the 880 in high school-I ran it badly, but I ran it, driven, absurdly, by the need to compete with my athletic younger sister. What Kimmer keeps telling me is right: I have to get back into shape, and basketball once or twice a month with Rob Saltpeter is not enough. Still, although I cannot imagine what McDermott is doing here on campus, I manage a smile over my small victory as I trot down the steps.

But I have actually won nothing, because, as soon as I leave the Science Quad and hasten along Eastern Avenue toward the law school, where I fully intend to call at least the campus police, McDermott falls into stride next to me.

Not my imagination at all.

“I understand you’ve been looking for me,” he says, and I can hear underneath his monotone the pride of a sixtyish man who easily kept pace with a quarry twenty years his junior.

“No, actually, I haven’t,” I mutter, using my longer legs to stay ahead of him. “It’s the FBI-the real one-that’s looking for you. They want to put you in prison.”

“Yes, I know. I suppose I’m going to have to do something about that.” And what scares me enough to make me stop walking is the seriousness of his tone, suggesting that he believes he can do something about it.

I turn and face him. “Look, Mr. McDermott, or whatever your name is. I don’t want to talk to you. And, just so you know, when I get back to my office, I am going to call the university police and tell them you’re dangerous. Then I’m going to call the FBI and tell them that you’ve been following me.”

He nods soberly.

“That’s fine,” he says, as though giving me permission. “You can do that. But I’m not really following you. I just came to deliver a message.”

“I’m not interested.” I start to turn away. He puts his hand on my arm. I shake it off. But he has my attention again.

“Professor Garland, listen to me-”

“No, you listen to me.” I move a step closer to him. I am at least three inches taller, but he does not seem the least bit intimidated. “You sent me that pawn, didn’t you? You took it from my father’s house and sent it to me. I want to know why.”

“Pawn?”

“You sent me the pawn, and now you’re following me to see what I do with it.” But even as I say the words, the idea sounds implausible. Why would he think I would want, or know what to do with, a pawn from my father’s chess set? I find myself almost persuaded. After all, if he stole the pawn and then had it delivered to me at the soup kitchen, why would he then call attention to himself by showing himself? It sounds like more paranoia, Mariah-style… except that the pawn is really in my pocket and McDermott is really here, in the flesh.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He seems sincere, but he seemed just as sincere when he made me believe he was a timeserver with the FBI. “I know there’s nothing I can do to make you trust me, but I want you to understand that I’m not your enemy.”

“Oh, no, anybody who comes into my house the day after my father’s funeral and lies to me is my new best friend.”

He closes his eyes briefly, huffs out a long breath, regards me again with that eerily empty gaze. “Professor Garland, I freely admit I am not as clever as you are, and you can no doubt stand here scoring points off me all day. Very well. You don’t have to like me, but the fact is, we’re on the same side. We both want the same thing.”

“Good. Because what I want is for you to leave me alone.” I am not usually this silly, or this dismissive, but, having overcome my fear of this man, I am a little bit out of control. I suppose this is what it feels like to be drunk.

He raises a finger into the air, wags it in admonition. “As I said, you are clever. But there is no need for your hostility. We do indeed have a common interest.”

I bristle again. I have never liked being called clever, especially by residents of the paler nation. It never quite means the same thing as intelligent or even bright, but carries instead an intimation of a low animal cunning. Perhaps the semiotician in me overreacts in assuming that conversations are racially charged; but so many conversations are.

“I’m not hostile toward you,” I flip back. “I just don’t like you.”

McDermott shrugs, as though to signal that he has survived the dislike of better men than me. “I didn’t come all this way to argue with you,” he announces. His speech is more fluent than it was at Shepard Street, but his accent is still hard to place. Southern, maybe, with an overlay of… something. “I came to tell you that I am sorry you had to get caught up in all this. I never met your father, but I admired him greatly. So I am sorry that my colleague and I had to come to your house with our deception so soon after you buried your father. But it was… necessary.”

We are blocking the crumbly sidewalk. Students flow past us on either side, their groups breaking up and re-forming as they circumvent the obstacle.

“Necessary for what?”

McDermott puffs out his cheeks, then exhales slowly. His hands are in the pockets of his windbreaker, and he seems more frail than a few minutes ago; it occurs to me that he may be even older than I thought. Which makes it all the more embarrassing that he caught up with me so easily.

“I am a private investigator,” he says at last. “I recover things for people. That is what I do for a living. People lose things, they hire me to get them back.”

“What kind of things?” I interrupt, unwisely.

“Things like… things. ” He waves grandly, as though to encompass the campus in his professional world. “Jewelry, say. Missing persons.

Papers, maybe. That’s what I was doing at your house.” He nods, warming to his theme. “I was looking for papers.”

“Papers.”

McDermott glances down the street toward the law school, then focuses on me once more. “Yes, papers. You see, Professor, your father is… was… a lawyer. One of his clients entrusted him with some papers. Some very, very sensitive papers. Your father promised the client the papers would be safe, that he would arrange to have them returned if anything happened to him. That’s what he said, that he had made arrangements to return them. Then he died. I’m sorry about that. But he died and the papers didn’t come back. So his client hired me to find them. That’s all.”

“Why couldn’t the client just call the firm and ask?”

“I have no idea.” I wait, but that seems to be the entire explanation. The answer seems to satisfy him.

“Is your client aware that you broke the law to try to find the papers?”

“My clients do not inquire into my methods. And I am not admitting that I broke the law.”

“Are the papers valuable?”

“Only to the client.”

“What are they? What’s in them?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

“So who’s the client?”

“I can’t tell you that either.”

“You’re working for Jack Ziegler, aren’t you?”

At last a trace of emotion enters his voice. “Not everything I told you in Washington was untrue. Jack Ziegler is scum. And I don’t work for scum.” And the oddest thing is that, as he says these words, I pick up the faintest whiff, as though by telepathy, of the words any more.

“Okay, so why me? You were looking for papers a client gave to my father. Why not talk to my brother or my sister? Why did you come to me?”

“It was the client’s suggestion,” he says evenly.

“Your client told you to ask me? Why would your client think I would know anything about it?”

“I have no idea, Professor. But I had to give it a try.”

I shake my head. “And why all the lying? Why not just come and tell me what you needed and why?” “Perhaps it was a mistake,” concedes the man whose name certainly is not McDermott. He does not seem even slightly uneasy. He even grins a crooked little grin that he has not shown before, and I see once more the pink scar at the corner of his lips, like a wound from a knife-fight. “Again, I am sorry you were bothered at such a sensitive time. But I promise you this. You and your family are perfectly safe. And you will never see me again.”

Something in his tone strikes me amiss, as though he is conveying a double meaning. Why is he reassuring me when I have not inquired?

“What are we safe from?”

Again, he gives the matter long consideration, as though trying to figure out what he can reveal. He takes refuge in vaguaries: “From whatever might come.”

I do not like this one bit. “And what exactly might come?”

“Anything.” His pale, tired eyes are focused on the middle distance. Then his gaze settles on me once more. “Let me tell you something, Professor. You want to hear about pawns? We are small men, you and I. Great men are contesting, even at this moment, and we are their pawns. Our likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it. I have been manipulated. You have been manipulated.”

“You’re making me nervous,” I confess.

“I’m trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to reassure you. So I suppose I should apologize again.” Once more he flashes the crooked, pink grin. “I am sorry. Truly. I am not your enemy. In fact, we have a common interest, you and I-”

“No, we don’t.” Anger has finally rescued me from my initial intimidation. I remember my script. “We don’t have anything in common. I don’t have any reason to trust you. I don’t even have any reason to talk to you. So, if you’ll excuse me…”

“All right, all right.” He raises both hands in surrender. “But I still have a job to do. I still have to find those papers.”

“Not if I find them first,” I snap, unwisely.

Not-McDermott’s eyes widen with satisfaction, as though he has at last provoked the reaction he sought. “I hope you do find them, Professor. Truly.” A brief nod. “Still, if I could, I would like to ask you one thing.” And I know at once, as he means me to, that this entire visit has been for the purpose of raising this one question, whatever it is.

“I’m not interested in any questions you might have.”

“It’s about your friend Angela.”

I pause for a moment, reviewing my rather short list of acquaintances.

“Off the top of my head, I don’t think I have a friend Angela.” I am still waiting for the question, thinking this is merely the premise; then I realize that the inquiry about Angela was the question.

“Thank you,” says Not-McDermott. “Now I must go. I will not bother you again.”

“Wait a minute-wait.” I put a hand on his arm, registering the sudden alarm in his eyes. Like Dana Worth, he does not like to be touched.

“Yes?” He affects a patient tone, but the irritation is plain in his eyes. Having done what he came to do, the sham FBI agent is in a hurry to be free of me.

Well, I am irritated, too. He lies to me in my father’s house, he shows up in the middle of the campus to ask me about somebody named Angela, and I still know nothing whatsoever about him.

“Look. I answered your question. If you’re so sorry, maybe you can at least answer one for me.”

“What question?”

“What’s your real name?”

The man in the green jacket, the man whose job is finding lost things, the man whose age is no obstacle to keeping up with me, raises his thin eyebrows in surprise. “To tell you the truth,” he says after another commercial break, “I don’t think I have one.”

He wags that finger at me again, then turns away, ducks into a crowd of students, and disappears.

(II)

I am trembling when I reach my office.

I am not particularly macho, but I do not scare easily: Garland men are noted, or maybe despised, for our cool.

McDermott scared me.

The reason, I know, is less the mystery surrounding him or his ability to turn up when least expected than what happened to Freeman Bishop. Sergeant Ames was confident that the murder is not connected in any way to my family, but…

But McDermott is here.

The fear that ripples through me as I sit at my desk, squeezing my hands together and trying to decide which call to place first, is not the physical fear of what might happen to me. I am worried about my wife and my son. The fact that McDermott went out of his way to assure me that my family is safe has only increased the level of my concern. I have, for the moment, put the magical pawn out of my mind. I have a family to protect.

I decide to pick up Bentley early from his preschool, and I call to ask them to get him ready. Under no circumstances, I add, should they allow him to leave with anybody but my wife or myself. The teachers, predictably, are insulted by my reminding them of their own rules, more attentive to their own egos than to the anxiety of a parent.

Still, one call down.

Next, I call one of the FBI agents who interviewed me the day after McDermott’s visit to Shepard Street and told me to get in touch if I heard anything more, a thick, breezy man named Nunzio. I reach his voice mail and leave a message, then call his beeper and his cell phone, both of which he inked onto his card. There is no answer on the cell phone, and I leave my number on the beeper.

Think.

I consider and reject reaching the campus police: what exactly would I ask them to do?

The most sensible remaining option is to call Uncle Mal, but I am reluctant to do it. I have spoken to him twice in the last week, seeking updates on the Bishop investigation, and I have gained the strong impression that he has begun to tolerate me rather than listen to me: he does, after all, have actual paying work to do, and constantly indulging the implausible fears of the son of his dead partner has probably begun to press the limits of his beneficence. The second time I called, he suggested thinly that I might get in touch with Meadows for such “routine matters” as these. His time is tight just now, he said, and he will be handling only issues surrounding my wife’s possible nomination. Perhaps it is just as well. I am tired of asking him for favors: one thing my father drummed into us repeatedly was that we must avoid the mistake of so many members of the darker nation who spend their lives going hat in hand to powerful white folks for help.

Yet I have no alternative.

I have just lifted the receiver to telephone Corcoran amp; Klein when Dorothy Dubcek, my mothering secretary, buzzes me to say that Agent Nunzio is on the phone.

“Just talking to a friend of yours,” he says in his gruff way, not bothering to ask what I called about. “Bonnie Ames.”

I am a moment catching up. I have never been much good with names. Kimmer says I am just unfriendly; Dear Dana says it is genetic, calling it my “social orientation”; and Rob Saltpeter says remembering names is not so important if we honor God in everybody we meet.

Rob’s answer is my favorite, but Kimmer knows me best.

“Bonnie Ames?” I repeat, stupidly.

“Sure, Sergeant Ames. You met her.”

“Oh! Sure.” A pause as each of us waits for the other. I blink first. “So, uh, what were you talking to her about?”

He lapses into cop-speak: “She informed me that they have apprehended a suspect.”

“What?”

“In the murder of Freeman Bishop.”

“Oh! Who was it?”

“Some drug dealer.”

“You’re kidding.” Soothing relief unexpectedly flows through me at the realization that it was not after all McDermott who did the deed; a moment later, a shuddery wave of shame replaces it. Still: it was not McDermott.

“The Bureau does not allow kidding.”

“Very funny.”

“She wants you to call her. Wants to give you the details herself.” He rattles off her number, which I already have. “What did you beep me about?”

The brusque change of subject sets me back for an instant. The urgency of my original call suddenly seems less-but not to Agent Nunzio. Once I tell him that I saw McDermott, he zips through a series of questions, nailing down everything from the color of the fake agent’s shoes to the direction he took when he left. He is unsatisfied by my answers. He asks me if I really think McDermott traveled all the way to Elm Harbor just to ask me if I have a friend named Angela. I tell him it certainly seems that way. He asks me if I can think of any reason McDermott would think I have a friend named Angela, and I admit I am aware of none. He asks me if in fact I have a friend named Angela, and I tell him I cannot think of one. He asks me to call him if I happen to remember one, and I tell him I will.

“It could be important,” Nunzio warns me.

“I figured that out for myself.”

“I don’t want you to worry, Professor Garland,” he adds, unexpectedly expansive. “If McDermott is really some kind of private investigator, I’m sure we’ll track him down, and we’ll track his client down too. Those guys are a nuisance, but I’m sure he’s harmless.”

“How do you know that?” I ask, my earlier nervousness sharpening my tone. I am not reassured by the fact that McDermott said roughly the same thing: You and your family are perfectly safe… from whatever might come. I have the sense that everybody else shares some crucial bit of knowledge that I have been denied. Yet the fact that Freeman Bishop’s murderer is under arrest makes me feel safer… safer for my family. A little bit, anyway. “If you haven’t found him, how do you know he’s harmless?”

“Because we see this type all the time. They lie to get information, they follow people, they weasel this and that. But that’s all they do.” A hesitation. “Unless, of course, you have some kind of evidence to the contrary. About McDermott, I mean.”

“No.”

“You’ve told me everything?”

“Yes.” As I did in my meeting with Sergeant Ames, I have the sense of being under interrogation, but I have no idea for what.

“Well, then, it’s like I said.” Winding up. “You have nothing to worry about. You can go on with… well, whatever you’re doing.”

“Agent Nunzio…”

“Fred is fine.”

“Fred. Fred, look. You’re down in Washington. I’m up here. McDermott is here. I would be lying if I didn’t admit, that, uh…”

“You’re worried.”

“Yes.”

“I understand. But my resources are a little bit limited. And, well, it’s not as if this McDermott character has threatened you… .”

“No, he just dropped by to impersonate an FBI agent.”

I can almost hear him thinking, not only logistics, but politics: who owes what to whom and for what.

“Tell you what. I really don’t think you should be worried. I want to emphasize that. But, if it will make you feel better, I’ll make a couple of calls. We don’t have much of an office up there, but I’ll see what I can do. Maybe have the police take some extra cruises by your house till we track McDermott down.”

I know I am being mollified, and I also know there is little reason to worry, but I am grateful all the same.

“I’d appreciate it.”

“My pleasure, Professor.” A pause. “Oh, and I hope things work out for your wife.”

Only after we have hung up does it occur to me that I did not tell him about the pawn. But, then, perhaps I never meant to.

(III)

Which leaves me Bonnie Ames.

Having acquired a first name, the sergeant is less daunting. Still, once I track her down, she is so brusque that I marvel she asked me to call in the first place. Either she is still feeling Uncle Mal’s pressure or she is feeding a need to gloat over just how far wrong our suspicions were. The arrests in the “torture slaying” (as the reporters are calling it) of Father Freeman Bishop were made early this morning, she says: no Klansmen, no skinheads, no neo-Nazis, and no fake FBI agents either, but a Landover, Maryland, crack dealer, a small-timer-a nobody, the sergeant calls him-a twenty-two-year-old named Sharik Deveaux, street name Conan, and a member of his crew. Even as I listen to her account, I am skimming the story on the USA Today Web site. Sergeant Ames takes particular pleasure in informing me that Conan is black, which I already guessed. “So, no possible racial motive”-as though it was I, rather than the media, who proposed one. Mr. Deveaux, the detective continues, admits selling the precious little rocks to Father Bishop on a regular basis. Naturally, he denies the murder. But the other gangbanger-the sergeant’s word-says he helped Conan dispose of the body once the ugly deed was done, and somebody else heard Conan bragging about it. “And he has a history of this kind of thing,” she adds without elaboration.

For the barest instant, I see it happening: Freeman Bishop, bound or gagged or in some manner restrained as the two of them burn and cut and stab his twisting, helpless form, his desperate pain the very purpose of the exercise, his faith finally tested on the wretched rack of swiftly nearing oblivion: Between thy judgment and our souls. At that instant when the end is inexorable, we all of us, believers and agnostics, sinners and saints, discover what we truly embrace, what we truly know, what we truly are. What would I, with my shaky and intermittent faith, at that instant become? Better to suppress those thoughts.

“Is this going to stand up in court?” I ask timidly.

Sergeant Ames is more amused than annoyed. The case is overwhelming, she assures me, but it will never come to that. Sooner or later, she says, Deveaux will allow his lawyer to persuade him to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty.

“Does Maryland execute murderers?”

“Not often. But Mr. Deveaux was stupid enough to kill Father Bishop in Virginia. He just rolled into town to dump the body.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to ask him that. And don’t even think about actually trying.”

“What sentence would he get? If he pleads guilty, I mean?”

“Life without parole is the best he can hope for. If he wants a trial down in Virginia? Something like this? They’ll probably give him the needle.”

Her casual confidence is chilling. “And you’re sure he did it? You’re very sure?”

“No, down here we try to arrest people at random. Especially for murder. We worry later on about making the evidence stick. Isn’t that what they teach up in the Ivy League?”

“I didn’t mean any disrespect…”

“He did it, Mr. Garland. He did it.”

“Thank you for…”

“I have to run. Say hello to your sister for me.”

I call Mariah to share my relief that the killing of Freeman Bishop had nothing to do with the Judge, and the housekeeper (not to be confused with either the au pair or the cook) tells me that my sister is back down in Washington. I call her cell phone and leave a message. I try Shepard Street, but there is no answer. Maybe it is just as well that I cannot reach her: she would likely tell me that the arrest is a setup, part of the conspiracy. So I try Addison in Chicago and, to my surprise, actually reach him at his townhouse in Lincoln Park. He is more saddened than delighted by the news. He whispers something I do not quite follow about the Hindu god Varuna, drops in a quotation from Eusebius, and warns me to take no pleasure in the pains of others, even those who sin. When it is finally my turn to speak, I assure him that I am taking no pleasure in any of this, but Addison tells me he has no more time to talk just now, because he has to catch a plane, which is probably a lie. I suspect, on no evidence other than history, that there is a woman in his bed. Maybe Beth Olin, although two weeks would be a long time for my brother to stick with the same girlfriend.

“We should get together soon,” he murmurs so solemnly that I almost think he means it. “Call me next time you’re in the Midwest.”

“You never return my calls.” The plaintive younger brother.

“My people must misplace the messages. I’m sorry, Misha.” My people. If only Kimmer could hear that one.

“Actually, there are a few things I’d like to talk to you about,” I persist.

“Right, right. Listen, my brother, I’m kind of in a hurry. I’ll call you later.”

Then Addison is gone-perhaps his people have arrived to take him to the airport. I have no opportunity to mention that most of the messages I leave are at his home.

CHAPTER 14

VARIOUS FREEDOMS OF SPEECH

(I)

After lunch on Tuesdays, I meet with the members of my seminar on Legal Regulation of Institutional Structure. The seminar covers everything from securities regulation to canon law to the rules that govern student-council elections, always playing the semiotic game, trying to figure out not what each rule means, but what it signifies, and how that signal is related to the purpose of the institution. The course draws some of the brightest students in the law school, and probably I enjoy it more than any other class I teach. This afternoon features a delightful, good-natured clash between two of my favorites, brilliant if slightly addled Crysta Smallwood, still struggling to figure out when the paler nation race is going to expire, and the equally talented Victor Mendez, whose father, a Cuban emigre, is a power in Republican politics, which probably puts him to the left of Victor himself. I play referee as Victor and Crysta contend across the seminar table over the question of whether sexual harassment represents a failing of institutions or of individuals. When I finally call time as the class ends at four, I award the round to Crysta on points. Crysta grins. The dozen other students laugh and pound her on the back. I remind them that we will not meet next week because I will be in Washington at a conference, and admonish them to turn in the first drafts of their term papers to my secretary before I return. With students of this caliber, there is no whimper of complaint.

Oh, but there are days when I love teaching!

I trip happily up the stairs to Dorothy Dubcek’s office, where I collect messages and faxes, then bounce down to my own little corner of the law school. Outside my office, I trumpet a cheery hello to aging Amy Hefferman, my Oldie neighbor, who was in law school with my father. She blinks her tired eyes and tells me that Dean Lynda is looking for me, and I nod as though impressed. Safely inside, I toss everything onto my desk while I check my voice mail. Nothing important. A reporter, with a question, miraculously, about tort law, not the Judge. American Express-I am late again. And one of Lynda Wyatt’s assistants: the Dean, as Amy mentioned, wants to speak to me, presumably about Kimmer’s competition with Marc Hadley. No thanks. Instead, I call the day-care center to make sure Bentley is okay, and the head teacher’s irritation blasts through the telephone. I smile at her annoyance: as long as she is angry, my son is doing fine.

My mood surprises me. I should, by rights, be dispirited. It is one week since my encounter with Not-McDermott, one week since the delivery of the pawn to me at the soup kitchen, one week since the arrest of Sharik Deveaux. Five days ago Kimmer came home from San Francisco and lovingly calmed me down. I am jumping at shadows, she murmured, kissing me gently. I have to look at things rationally, she said, cooking me a nice dinner. If the pawn was really a message and not somebody’s tasteless joke, then whoever sent it will tell me sooner or later what it means, she whispered, head on my shoulder, as we sat up together and watched an old movie. What is there to be afraid of? she asked me softly as we lay in the darkness of our bedroom, surprisingly comfortable together. The murderer is in jail, and McDermott, who has come and gone, has been declared harmless by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Day after day Kimmer has repeated the same arguments. She has been both comforting and persuasive. I have gone from frightened to worried to merely concerned. I have been trying to reach serene. I have been trying not to suspect that the real reason my wife wants me to relax is in order to keep her potential judgeship on track.

Nothing can quite drag me down. The weather has turned fair: temperatures in the fifties, and here it is the middle of a New England autumn. My mood has lifted along with the temperature. Today, for the first time since the death of the Judge, I am actually feeling like a law professor. I am enjoying the classroom; and so, it seems, are my students. (Except for Avery Knowland, whose attendance at my torts class has grown spotty and who has largely ceased to participate. I need to do something about him.) I remember that I chose this profession more than it chose me, and that I have been reasonably successful at it.

I am actually humming a bit of Ellington as I turn to the message slips and discover that one of my favorite people in the world, John Brown, has been trying to get in touch with me. John, a college classmate who now teaches engineering out at Ohio State, is the steadiest man I know. I call him back at once, hoping to hear the details of the visit he and his wife and children will be making to Elm Harbor in a few weeks. We exchange a few pleasantries, he tells me how much his family is looking forward to their stay with us, and then he discloses the reason for his call: an FBI agent dropped in yesterday, doing a background check for a possible “high-ranking federal appointment” for my wife. John wants to know what it is all about, and why he and his wife, Janice, have to be the last to know.

The only trouble is, Mallory Corcoran has assured me that the background check has not yet begun. The day that has been so peaceful and bright begins to turn dreary once more.

“John, listen. This is important. Please tell me that the agent who interviewed you was not named McDermott.”

My old friend laughs. “Not to worry, Misha. It wasn’t Mcanything. I’m pretty sure he said his name was Foreman.”

I try not to alarm him. I tease out a few details, suppressing the hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I cannot lie to John. I tell him that the man called Foreman is not really with the FBI, that he is some kind of private investigator, and that he is breaking the law by pretending otherwise. I tell him that the real FBI will probably want to talk to him, because they are looking for Foreman. I wait for John to turn chilly on me, but instead he asks if I am in some kind of trouble. I tell him I doubt it. I promise to explain what I can when he and his wife come visit. When we finally hang up, I put my face in my hands, feeling the weight of depression pressing down on my shoulders. I sit shaking my head, wondering how I could have been stupid enough to think it was all over.

And that is where Mariah tracks me down, still at my desk, to tell me the exciting news about the way the Judge was murdered.

(II)

“Bullet fragments,” I repeat, making sure I have heard my sister correctly.

“That’s right, Tal.”

“In the Judge’s head.”

“Right.”

“Fragments that the autopsy somehow overlooked.” I am clicking frantically with my mouse, trying to find the Web site Mariah is describing over the telephone with such gusto. This is the last thing I need. There are about eleven hundred things I would rather be doing just now, but, as Rob Saltpeter likes to say, obligation to family is nonrefundable.

“On purpose, Tal.” Mariah is suddenly impatient. “Not by accident. They didn’t want us to know. They didn’t want anybody to know.”

“They in this case being…”

“I don’t know. That’s why I think we need some help.”

“So why wasn’t there any blood in the house?” I am proud of myself for asking a reasonably intelligent question. The quarrel with Mariah has at least distracted me from the possibility that McDermott and Foreman are still on the loose.

“They cleaned it up.”

Of course.

“Or moved the body,” I suggest facetiously, but Mariah takes it at face value.

“Exactly! There’s lots of possibilities.”

The university loves investing in its science departments, but the law school’s cut-rate technology includes ancient computers, and the download of the supposed photographs of my father’s autopsy is taking forever. I need to hurry, because it is almost time to pick up Bentley from his preschool. I mentioned this to Mariah, who told me that her news would only take a minute. Still waiting for the computer, I stand up and stretch. For the past two weeks, I have been listening to my big sister’s ever-wilder theories about what actually happened. Despite an unambiguous autopsy result, Mariah continues to insist that so many powerful people wanted the Judge out of the way that some combination of them is bound to have brought him down. She has been reading up on drugs that can cause heart attacks. For a few days it was potassium-chloride poisoning: the medical examiner did not search properly for needle marks. Then it was prussic acid: the ME did not do an oxygen-saturation test. Each time it turns out that she is wrong, my sister comes up with something else. And, when pressed, she almost always concedes that her source is some Internet site. I remember something that Addison, proprietor of several sites, likes to say about the Web: One-third retail, one-third porn, and one-third lies, all of our baser nature in one quick stop.

“What kind of help do you think we need?” I ask her now.

“There are lots of people who want to help,” Mariah proclaims happily, if cryptically. “Lots and lots of people.” I grimace, wondering what has been going through her head as she sits all day with all those children in her palace, as Kimmer calls it, in Darien. Mariah has probably received the same bizarre calls I have, a variety of hard-right organizations dedicated to demonstrating conspiracies whenever they lose, and, certainly, when one of their most valuable assets is so prosaically struck down. Real men are murdered. Heart attacks are for wimps.

“What exactly do they want to do, kiddo?”

“Well, for one thing, they are going to run newspaper ads calling for an investigation.”

“Great. When do they plan to go public with that brilliant idea?” Hoping that I can get Uncle Mal or some other of my father’s wiser Washington acquaintances to prevent it.

“Don’t take that tone, Tal. Wait until you see the pictures.” A beat. “Have you looked at them yet?”

“In a minute.” I return to my chair. “When is the announcement, Mariah?”

“Soon,” she murmurs, no longer sure I am an ally.

“Mariah, you know… Okay, hold on.” The download is at last complete, four rather gory photographs, and I see no reason to think that any one of them is authentic. Three of the four do not show the face of the corpse, but the build does not resemble the Judge. Nor does the skin color, in every case too dark. The one that clearly is my father is sufficiently grainy that it is not clear why it is even there, which conspiracy it is supposed to prove. I frown and lean closer, pushing my glasses up onto my nose with a finger. One of the nonfacial shots does indeed show the black specks that Mariah called to tell me about. I suppose they could be bullet fragments, if I knew how bullet fragments look. Only… wait…

“Mariah.”

“Hmmm?”

“Mariah, I think… couldn’t that just be dirt on the lens?”

“See? That’s the same thing the medical examiner said.”

I remind myself that Mariah is my big sister and I love her. “Mariah, kiddo, please tell me you didn’t ask the ME about this.”

“Oh, no, Tal, of course not.”

“Good.”

“I didn’t have to ask. Her statement is in this morning’s paper.”

Oh, great. In the newspaper. The Judge must be spinning in his grave. I wonder if Kimmer has heard. “Well, if the ME says it was just dust…”

“You can’t believe her. ”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing, she’s a Democrat.”

The thing is, Mariah isn’t joking.

So, glancing at my watch, I say what I know she wants me to say. “I’ll call Uncle Mal and ask him to look into it.” Not telling her that the great Mallory Corcoran hardly ever takes my calls any more, which means that I will be kicked down the ladder to Cassie Meadows. Or that Meadows herself is probably tired of me too, and will likely spend no more than one phone call on the matter.

I am hoping that is all it is worth.

(III)

To my surprise, not only is Meadows free to talk, but she has good news: the FBI has tracked down the mysterious McDermott. He is, indeed, a private investigator, based down in South Carolina. He has been bothering people who knew my father, especially around Washington, asking about a woman named Angela. He is well known to his local sheriff, who considers him persistent and perhaps a bit underhanded, but certainly not dangerous. He even has a real name, but the Bureau would not tell Meadows what it is.

“Why wouldn’t they tell you?”

She hesitates, wanting to be a Washington player like Mallory Corcoran, and thus loath to admit that she is outside certain circles of knowledge. “They said we didn’t need to know,” she finally confesses.

“Did they say why?”

Another pause. “I didn’t ask, to tell you the truth. Maybe I should have pressed…”

“It doesn’t matter.” I sketch for her the substance of John Brown’s call. “Did they tell you anything about Foreman?”

“Foreman works for him. He’s some kind of private investigator too, and, yes, Mr. Garland, he is also considered harmless.”

At last I allow myself a ripple of relief. “Anything else?”

“Only that the two of them have fled the jurisdiction. Left the United States. They apparently heard the FBI was looking for them and headed for Canada.”

“Canada? What is the FBI after them for, that they would go to Canada?”

“That’s what they told me.”

Puzzled but relieved, I remember why I called in the first place. I tell Meadows about Mariah and her bullet fragments. Meadows laughs.

“What’s funny?” I glance at my watch, worry about my son waiting.

“I’ll add it to the file.”

“What file?”

“Mr. Corcoran had me open a file for stuff like this. We’ve got every nutty letter, every Internet posting, every right-wing pamphlet, every wild talk-show host’s theory about your father. It’s a very thick file, Mr. Garland.” Another chuckle. “We already have lots of alleged autopsy photographs in there.”

“So what’s the funny part?”

“Oh, well. I have a whole subfile full of e-mails from your sister.” Meadows lowers her voice. “I haven’t even bothered Mr. Corcoran with them.”

“You’ve… heard from Mariah?”

“Would you believe twice a week?” Another laugh, except that this one is humorless. “I guess she figures, you know, being as how she’s Mr. Corcoran’s goddaughter and all…” Meadows trails off, then adopts a more serious tone: “Somebody has to do something about her, Mr. Garland. My friends on the Hill tell me that if she doesn’t cut this stuff out… well, your wife won’t stand a chance.”

CHAPTER 15

TWO ENCOUNTERS

(I)

Bentley! Home! Two of my favorite words!

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

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

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

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

I wonder whether I will ever escape him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ah… I think so.”

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

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

Dahlia is a wise woman.

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

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

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

“Hmmm? Oh, fine, fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I know her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry, Dahlia.”

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

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

“I’m sorry.” Just something to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(II)

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

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

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

Kimmer thinks they are interfering busybodies.

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

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

“Bentley’s doing great,” I answer.

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

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

Bentley giggles and hugs Don’s bony leg.

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

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

“I suppose.”

“Nina’s cooking for you.”

“She’s sweet.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, it’s been nice.”

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

“I guess it could be.”

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

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

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

“I never thought there were.”

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

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

“Uh, Don, look-”

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

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

“I’m sorry if we disturbed you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 16

THE THREE FOOLS

(I)

We take formal possession of the Vineyard house in the middle of the week after Thanksgiving, driving Kimmer’s sleek BMW up to Massachusetts, then down the Cape to Woods Hole, and crossing on the auto ferry. The ferry, my father used to say, is two of the Island’s blessings: one because the trip over the water is so pleasant and restful that you arrive on Martha’s Vineyard in the mood to relax, and the other because the Steamship Authority, which operates the ferry service, holds a monopoly on the franchise and runs only a limited number of ships, which means that only a limited number of cars, and thus of people, can get to the Island, especially in the high season of July and August. Whenever one of the children, usually Addison, whispered that this joy smacked of elitism, the Judge would respond happily with one of his favorite bons mots, quite possibly original with him: “Being part of the elite is the reward for working hard and living right.” (Implying, of course, that if you are not part of the elite you either did not work hard or did not live right.)

I have always loved the crossing, and today’s journey is no different. As the Cape falls farther and farther behind, I can feel my fears and confusions fading with it, receding in importance as the Vineyard looms ever larger off the starboard bow, first a distant gray-green shimmer, next a dreamlike vision of trees and beaches, now near enough to make out the individual houses, all gray-brown and weathered and beautiful. I gulp down its image like an alcoholic tumbling gratefully off the wagon as the ferry thrums steadily across the waves, a few dozen automobiles waiting in the hold to explode onto the Island in a noxious rush of joy. (In season there would be a hundred or more.) Bentley and I stand at the rail, my son calling to the gulls that soar in the salty autumn air, seeming to hang motionless as they match their speed to the speed of the boat, hoping to gorge on what we wastrel humans toss aside. A chilly, distant sun beams its indifference across the water. My son stretches his pudgy hands over the side and, rather than frustrating him, I hook a prudent finger in his belt and try to convince myself that he is indeed all of three years old, with four swimming toward us fast, no longer a baby, yet the last child I will ever father as well as the first. For Kimmer is through with pregnancy: she has made that icily clear, even as so much in our marriage remains hotly confused. Part of it, I know, is fear, after our near miss with Bentley; but fear is not the entire explanation. A new child would be a fresh commitment to a marriage about which Kimmer remains unsure. To my desire for a large family, she answers correctly that she, not I, must carry the baby-except that Kimmer always says fetus, and is at pains to make everybody else say it too. My wife, who is never political except when she is, can sniff out an anti-abortion plot before it is hatched. This past March, Dear Dana Worth, who loves children but will never bear one, gave Bentley for his third birthday Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, one of her favorites, she told us, when she was a child. Kimmer thanked Dana, leafed through the book in horror, and put it away in the attic without ever troubling to read it to our son. She forbade me to read it to him either. “An anti-choice tract,” she huffed, and, when I asked what she was talking about, she smiled dismissively and quoted the book’s recurring tag line, A person’s a person, no matter how small. “What else could it be about?” she demanded.

My turn to smile now. No matter what faces me in the rest of the world, I am revived by my sojourns on the Vineyard. And I am determined to make this one peaceful. Last week I had a fight with Mariah, our worst yet. Spurred on by Meadows, I made the long drive to Darien and took my sister to lunch. I tried to suggest, as gently as I could, that maybe she could tone down her constant invention of new conspiracies. I told her about the possible judgeship, told her that her conduct was hurting Kimmer’s chances, but did not tell her my source. She shot back that the whole thing-offering my wife a shot at the bench, threatening to take it back if Mariah kept speaking out-was itself a conspiracy, a way of shutting us up. I told her that seemed a little farfetched, we had words, and, suddenly, it was the terrible days after the Woodward book all over again. Only worse this time, because the Judge is not around to draw us back together by the force of his will.

And so I ache instead. Unable to concentrate in the classroom, I have asked for a few weeks’ leave from the law school, and Dean Lynda has happily granted it, both because she dislikes me and because she knows it will put me in her debt. Stuart Land has agreed to cover my torts class until I get back, and has already called three times, distressed by the disorganization of my lesson plan and my office, and offering to repair both. I have politely declined, not wanting anybody probing the shadowy nooks of my life.

Earlier this month, I attended Freeman Bishop’s funeral, my second funeral at Trinity and St. Michael within two weeks. Some visiting priest, a member of the paler nation, performed the service, and few mourners attended. I noticed a face or two that I remembered from the Judge’s service, and I strained unsuccessfully to call names into my tortured mind. Mariah skipped the service. Sergeant Ames was there, however, perhaps expecting more bad guys to show up. I chatted with her briefly before she slipped out a side door, and I learned only that Conan was still negotiating his plea bargain, which I already knew from the Washington Post’s Web site.

Then, last week, came our usual tense Thanksgiving with Kimmer’s parents, still waiting impatiently for me to tame their incorrigible daughter; evidently they do not realize that Kimmer is not quite tamable. Vera and the Colonel glared down the table at me as Kimmer and her childless sister Lindy gossiped and Bentley made a mess. If my wife does not become a judge, I suspect that my in-laws will somehow heap the blame on me.

But mostly I have been looking forward, with growing eagerness, to today’s journey.

The ferry at last!

Now, turning my face into the sea breeze as the ship breasts the surging waves, rushing me toward the island I love, I am able to smile at Kimmer’s eccentricity-and even at Kimmer herself, who is huddled near the snack bar, carrying on a conversation of vital importance on her cell phone. Perhaps the colloquy concerns her work, perhaps it concerns her candidacy, perhaps it concerns something more intimate. For once I refuse to care. Ever since I shared the news of trepidation in the Hadley household, Kimmer has turned loving and warm, as though to compensate for other behavior, a stark metamorphosis that I have seen before, and which, unlike Gregor Samsa’s, can reverse itself in an instant; but I am determined to enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

So, finally, here we are on the ferry, the day I have been awaiting. Kimmer has stolen forty-eight hours from the demands of litigating for her clients’ advancement (and lobbying for her own) to cross with me the threshold of the house that now is ours, and for that small act of theft, I am grateful. She might have forced me to go with only Bentley, or even alone. The fact that she did not I take as a signal of continuing armistice. Nearing the glory of the Vineyard, I find myself believing, against every objective indicator, in the possibility of happiness. Even with my wife. Which is why, I suppose, fidelity in a sad marriage can fairly be described as an act of faith: faith in life’s endless possibilities, which is another way, I am sure Rob Saltpeter would insist, of describing God’s bounty. And so I smile as I stand at the rail, my finger tucked into my son’s belt as he leans into the spray and calls to the gulls and laughs and laughs, and, as I glance around the deck at my fellow passengers, each, I am sure, as joyful as I as we rush on toward our island, my heart bursts with love: love for my child, love for my wife, love for the very idea of family, love for-

And suddenly she is there.

Right here, on the deck, long and nicely muscled, in jeans and a bomber jacket, not twenty paces away-the woman from the rollerdrome. It is not remotely possible, it is far too great a coincidence, I must be mistaken, my sullen libido is playing tricks on me… yet I know it is she. The roller woman. The woman who, a long month ago, flirted with me until she spied my wedding ring. The woman who haunted my dreams for the next couple of weeks. She is toward the prow, standing a little apart from the crowd, her face turned into the wind, so I see only a piece of her dark brown profile, but the smooth, broadly set jaw and the mass of impossible curls cannot belong to anyone else. A flamboyant purple overnight bag is slung over one shoulder and she is clutching a book: something genuine, hardcover, thick, the title in some other language, which my distant eye identifies tentatively as French. An edition of Moliere, perhaps. Student or teacher? I wonder, suspecting that the answer is neither, for the text feels like a stage prop. I am thrilled to see her. I am appalled. I continue to stand at the rail, gazing in astonishment at this improbable apparition, far too shy to-

“I would kill to have her body,” says Kimmer. So distracted have I been that I am not sure how long my wife has been next to me, but the wicked bemusement in her voice hurts as much as ever. On the other hand, I am guilty as charged. “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”

“Who?” I venture, careful not to turn around too suddenly, lest my wife conclude that I am actually staring where she thinks. I still have tight hold of Bentley’s belt, and he is still hanging over the rail, hypnotized by the wake. The roller woman might be carved from stone.

“That giant nzinga over there,” answers my learned Kimmer, who likes to pepper her conversation with the occasional Afrocentric non sequitur. She points with one hand, holds my arm with the other. The cellular phone is nowhere to be seen. “The one you can’t seem to take your eyes off of.” Kimmer laughs as I twist slowly back in her direction, then barks softly like a dog. “Down, boy,” she says, not kindly. No peace treaty after all.

“Kimmer, I-”

“Hey, she’s looking this way. Misha, she’s looking. She’s looking at you. Turn around and wave.” She grabs my shoulders and tries physically to make me do it, but I resist.

“Kimmer, come on.”

“Hurry up, honey, you’ll miss your chance.” Teasing, but also making her ancient point, that I should have affairs to balance hers; that I should fall in love with somebody else and leave, sparing her the necessity of hurting me any longer; that my constancy in the face of her dalliances marks not Christian virtue but secular wimpiness. We have argued this out so many times that she need raise only a hint of the long-standing quarrel to bring all the torment rushing back to my heart.

“Cut it out,” I hiss, allowing an edge to come into my tone.

“Misha, go on!” my wife laughs, ignoring whatever I am feeling. “Go say hello, fast!” Then she stops pushing. Her hands fall from my shoulders. “Too late,” she murmurs in mock sadness. “She’s gone.”

I cannot help myself. I do turn back now. The roller woman is gone. In her place are two plump white girls, stuffing Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups into their mouths and dropping the wrappers into the sea. The gulls hover nearby, either protesting the pollution or hoping for a bite. The roller woman has vanished as silently as she materialized; had Kimmer not confirmed the evidence of my eyes, I might decide the roller woman was never there at all.

“I just thought she was somebody I knew,” I say, knowing how lame it must sound.

“Or somebody you’d like to know,” my wife suggests. It occurs to me, against all evidence of our recent years together, that Kimmer is jealous.

“I’m a one-woman man,” I remind her, trying to keep it light.

“Yeah, but which one?”

I turn in her direction again. She likes to goad me into these arguments, and, although I try to keep my temper, she often succeeds. As she succeeds now: “Kimmer, I’ve told you before that really I don’t appreciate jokes about… about my fidelity.”

“Aw, honey, I’m only kidding.” A playful kiss on my nose. “Although, you know, it’s okay with me if you decide you want somebody else…”

“I don’t want somebody else…”

“That’s not how it looked to me a few minutes ago.”

“Kimmer, I love you. Only you.”

My wife shakes her head and smiles sadly. “Well, then, you’re crazy or stupid…”

“That’s entirely uncalled for,” I say in the most wretched Garland tone.

“… or maybe just some kind of masochist who gets his kicks from having a woman treat him like…”

This nonsense might go on forever, except that Bentley rescues us. Having spent a good twenty minutes simply watching the water go past, he has at last worked out what is happening. Grabbing both his mother’s hand and my own, he swings around until his back is to the rail. When he is sure he has our full attention, he smiles up at us and proclaims with great glee, “I’m on boat.”

The fight goes out of both of us, and we are, for an instant, united in pure and strong parental love for our son.

Then the moment passes, and we are competitors once more. And Kimmer, as usual, beats me to the punch. “Yes, you are on a boat, honeybunch, yes, you are,” she murmurs, gathering a proud, wriggling Bentley to her breast. “Yes, you are, baby, you’re on a boat, that’s very good; now let’s go inside and get warm. Mommy will get you a Coke.”

“Hot chockut, Mommy, hot chockut!”

“Hot chocolate! Great idea, baby, great idea!”

Without a further word to her husband, my wife, the prospective judge, carries our son into the cabin. I watch her go, reading questionable messages in the sway of her hips and the set of her back. As so often happens at these moments of marital frustration, something primitive and ugly twists and furrows within me. A terrible red heat rises inside my head, a kind of indigestion of the brain; as always, a brisk but patient stroll helps me to wrestle my demons down. I make two complete circuits of the deck and one of the indoor seating down below before I feel sufficiently calm to join my family in the canteen; in all that walking, I see no sign of the roller woman. And this bothers me, not simply because I miss her already, but also because I am convinced that her presence on board is no accident. She is here for the same reason she was at the rollerdrome, because she was sent -and not by God either.

(II)

Ocean Park is a broad but irregular expanse of grass fronting on Seaview Avenue, the busy street one crosses to reach the rickety wooden stairways leading down to the slowly eroding beach known, unofficially, as the Inkwell, in whose gentle waters, for generations, the darker nation has frolicked. The house where I spent the summers of my youth is on the opposite side, where the neat Victorians are small and cramped together and too expensive. At one end of the park, to the right as one faces the water from our front porch, a line of fine old houses, all of them much larger than ours and topped with brightly colored turrets and fancy weather vanes, dominates the horizon. At the other end, to the left, just beyond the line of sight from our porch, stands the Steamship Authority dock, where some of the ferries unload in summer; during the off-months, all the ferries tie up a few miles up the coast in Vineyard Haven. A bit closer in are a lovely weather-beaten Episcopal church, its doors open in summer to the sea and so to every Sunday storm, and the city police station, which looks out on a tiny plaza featuring an aging bronze statue bearing a plaque that commemorates, for some arcane reason of Yankee logic, Confederate war dead. The statue guards the top of Lake Avenue, the narrow, crowded street leading down to the Flying Horses carousel, which is all that matters to Bentley.

Like many homes in Oak Bluffs, my family’s summer place has a name, emblazoned on a faded wooden sign hanging from one of the posts along the front porch. Ours, unfortunately, is called VINERD HOWSE, a phrase selected by my sister Abby when she was small, quite by accident-she wrote it on a picture of the house she drew in the kitchen with crayons from the Crayola 64 box one rainy Oak Bluffs afternoon-and it was my unemotive father who surprised us a week later with the plaque. After Abby died, the family never had the heart to change the name. When we climb out of the white BMW on this bright fall day, however, the first thing my darling Kimmer says is that the time has come to get rid of it. As she pulls a sleeping Bentley from his car seat, I ask her which she means: the plaque or the name. “Either,” my wife tells me, still showing me her back. “Or both.”

My father once proposed changing the name to The Three Fools, one of his many obscure chess puns, but my mother put her foot down; my father, in all the years I remember, never acted against her wishes. Addison insists that it was Claire Garland who made the decision that it was time to end the confirmation battle, when the Judge was prepared to fight to the bitter end. Mariah whispers that it was Claire who argued that he should resign from the bench after the humiliation of the hearings, so that he could speak out publicly and clear his name. And all of us know that it was after Claire’s death that my father’s speeches became as wild and nasty as most people surely remember. Small surprise, then, that even after my mother died, my father honored her memory-and Abby’s too-by retaining the sobriquet Vinerd Howse. But now that Vinerd Howse is mine, or, rather, ours, my wife has other ideas.

I stand for a long moment in the narrow front yard, the key dangling from limp fingers, remembering the glorious Martha’s Vineyard summers of my childhood, when friends and family swirled constantly in and out of the double front doors with their tiny panes of glass, some rose, some azure, some clear, held fast in frames of involute leading; remembering the many sad and lonely visits to this house through those endless months when my mother sat dying, often alone, in the front bedroom on the first floor; and remembering, too, how easy it became to avoid coming back here once the Judge began his tumble toward megalomania. As Kimmer fusses with Bentley and I stare at the summer home of my youth, I find that I have difficulty recalling precisely why I was so filled with joy when I learned that the Judge left me this cramped and unhappy shell. With my parents both dead, the house should by rights be dead as well, quiet and neutral; instead, it seems almost a live thing, fiendishly sentient, brooding malevolently on the family’s misfortunes as it awaits the new owners. Quite suddenly I am paralyzed with some emotion far more primal than terror, a clear and utterly persuasive knowledge, shivering through me from some unnatural source, that everything is about to go wretchedly wrong: I fear that my legs will not move me to the porch, or my hands will not work the key, or the key will break off in the lock. In that terrible moment, I want to reject this scary inheritance and all its ghosts, to grab my family and hurry back to the mainland.

As usual, it is worldly Kimmer who restores me to my senses.

“Can you hurry up and open the door?” she demands sweetly. “Sorry, but I have to piss in the worst way.”

“No need to be vulgar.”

“There is if nothing else will get you moving.”

She is correct, after a fashion, and I am being foolish. I smile at her and she almost smiles back before she catches herself. I heft the heavy suitcase in my left hand and bounce the key in my right. Then I stride boldly up the steps, heedless of the demons who caper in the shadows of memory. Drawing a breath, I dismiss them like a veteran exorcist and rattle the key into the lock. Only as the lock begins to turn do I notice that one of the tiny panes of colored glass is missing-not broken, just not there, so that through the space defined by the narrow gray leading I can see into the darkness of the house. I frown, pushing the door wide open, and, standing frozen on the threshold of the house I have loved for thirty years, I realize that the goblins have not all retreated. I try to swallow but cannot seem to gather any moisture in my throat. My limbs refuse to move me forward. Through a slowly descending curtain of the deepest angry red, I see my handsome wife brushing past me with a whispered, “Sorry, but I gotta go,” and I feel her transferring Bentley’s hand to mine.

Kimmer is three steps into the house before she, too, stops and stands perfectly still.

“Oh, no,” she whispers. “Oh Misha oh no.”

The house is a disaster. Furniture is upended, books are strewn over the floor, cabinet doors broken, rugs sliced to ribbons. My father’s papers are everywhere, the breeze from the open front door ruffling their edges. I peek into the kitchen. A few of the dishes are smashed on the floor, but the mess is not as bad, and most of the plates are simply stacked on the counter. While Kimmer waits in the front room with Bentley, I force myself to go upstairs. I discover that the four bedrooms are barely disturbed. As though there was no need to bother, I am thinking as I stand in the window of the master suite, telephone in hand, talking to the police dispatcher. As I explain what has happened, I look down at the BMW, parked illegally along the split-rail fence that guards the south side of Ocean Avenue, doors still open, baggage not yet unloaded. Something isn’t right. They did not wreck the second floor. The thought keeps swirling through my mind. They left the second floor alone. As though ransacking the first floor was enough. As though-as though-

As though they found what they were looking for.

Now more puzzled than frightened, I go back downstairs to join my wife and son, who, wide-eyed, are hugging each other in the living room. The police, arriving in minutes from their quaint headquarters a block away, quickly pronounce the destruction the work of local vandals, teenagers who, unfortunately, spend much of the winter trashing the homes of the summer people. Not all the Vineyard’s teenagers are vandals, or even very many: just enough to annoy. The very kind officers apologize to us on behalf of the Island and assure us that they will do their best, but they also warn us not to expect to catch the people who did it: vandalisms are nearly impossible to solve.

Vandals. Kimmer eagerly accepts this explanation, and I am quite sure the insurance company will too. And, more important, the White House. Kimmer promises to make plenty of trouble for the alarm company, and I have no doubt she will keep her word. Vandals, my wife and I agree over pizza and root beer at a nearby restaurant a couple of hours later, after the man who looks after the house in the off-season has dropped by to inspect the damage.

“I’ll make some calls,” he told us when he finished tut-tutting his way around the place.

Vandals. Of course they were vandals. The kind of vandals who destroy one floor of the house and ignore the other. The kind of vandals who steal neither stereo nor television. The kind of vandals who know how to circumvent my late paranoid father’s state-of-the-art alarm system. And the kind of vandals who are in direct contact with the spirits of the departed. For I do not tell either my wife or the friendly police officers about the note I found upstairs while waiting, sealed in a plain white envelope left on top of the dresser in the master bedroom, my correct title and full name typed neatly on the outside, the perplexing message on the inside written in the crabbed, spiky hand I remember from my childhood, when we would proudly leave copies of our school essays on the Judge’s desk and wait for him to return them, a day or so later, with his comments inked redly in the margins, demonstrating what idiots our teachers were to award us A’s.

The note on the dresser is from my father.

CHAPTER 17

THE BRASS RING

(I)

Many years ago, when as a child I first visited the town of Oak Bluffs, I at once became entranced by the grand old wooden building at the foot of Circuit Avenue housing the Flying Horses, which bills itself as the oldest carousel in America, having been in continuous operation now since 1876. The idea was to make riding a game. You sat astride your horse while leaning, each time around, toward a stationary wooden arm that dispensed tiny rings. As you passed, you would grab the ring on the end of the arm, and a new one would snap into its place. Nearly all of the rings were made of steel, but the last one in the arm was made of brass. A rider lucky enough to catch the brass ring won a free ride. During that first delirious summer, I would stay aboard the carousel for hours, spending my quarters one by one, forsaking even the beach to fill my days mastering the tricks of the older children (including how to catch two or sometimes three rings at once on my stubby brown fingers), paying for turn after turn, trying, almost always in vain, to grab the brass ring and earn a free ride.

As a child, I imagined that the Flying Horses was the only carousel in the world with the marvelous idea of awarding a free turn to the lucky rider who caught the brass ring. As I grew older, I learned that this was not so, that the idea of winning a prize for catching a brass ring was in fact rather ubiquitous, if not actually mundane. Intellectually, I have long ago made my peace with this development. Emotionally, I continue to feel that the brass ring on the Flying Horses in Oak Bluffs is the only one that really counts. Perhaps the reason is that our summer house on Ocean Park was little more than a child’s hop-skip-and-jump from the carousel. I grew up with the Flying Horses around the corner, and with a child’s freedom to visit whenever I pleased; and, having learned its lessons, I have been stretching for that brass ring ever since.

Of course, the Flying Horses of today are not the Flying Horses of my youth. The organ music, for example, now comes from compact discs, and the crowds push and jostle so that it is no longer possible to imagine riding all day. A couple of the wooden steeds have lost their genuine horsehair tails. But, then, so much of the Vineyard seems to need a coat of paint, the scrub of a brush, the whisk of a broom. The Island is neither as tidy nor as friendly as it once was. And it is all so sudden, so sudden. Blink once and a dusty road where you used to play tag is paved and clogged with traffic. Blink twice and the vacant lot where you had your ball games has a gigantic house on it. Blink again and the vast, dreamy beaches of your youth have lost half or more of their sand to the sea. Blink a fourth time and the pharmacy where your mother used to buy Coricidin when you were sick is a boutique. The Judge blamed the changes on demographics-the new people was his term for everybody who discovered the Island later than we did. I try to be wary of such generalizing sentiments, however, not least so that I do not sound too much like my father. So I look around and try to tell myself that little, after all, has really changed. And if a few more candy wrappers than I remember from my youth seem to be blowing along the streets, I like to think it is only because the new people have not yet learned how to love an island-not because they do not care.

Ordinarily, on the third afternoon of a Vineyard sojourn, I would be at the Flying Horses with my son. But our sojourns are usually in the summer. Now it is autumn, and the carousel is closed for the season. Fortunately, the Island offers other diversions. Yesterday, as a hastily assembled clean-up crew tried to put Vinerd Howse back in some kind of order, the three of us journeyed up-Island-that is, to the westernmost end-and spent a marvelous afternoon walking the breathtaking ancient cliffs at Gay Head in the chilly November air, picnicking in our down parkas at the perfect pebbly beach in the fishing village of Menemsha, and driving the wooded back roads of Chilmark, near the sprawling property once owned by Jacqueline Onassis, pretending not to be on the lookout for the rich and famous. We had dinner at a fancy restaurant on the water in Edgartown, where Bentley charmed the waitresses with his patter. How many demons we exorcised I am not sure, but I saw no sign of the roller woman, who might be a phantom after all, and Kimmer did not mention the judgeship once and talked on her cell phone only twice. And she kissed me quite carefully this morning when Bentley and I dropped her at the airport for her flight back to the mainland in one of the little turboprops that serve the Island. Bentley and I are staying on because… well, because we need to. Kimmer has work to do, I have a week or so of leave left, and Bentley needs some rest and recreation. And there is another reason as well. In Oak Bluffs, unlike Elm Harbor, I will never be tempted for a moment to let my precious son out of my sight.

Right now my son and I are preparing to go to the playground; or, more precisely, Bentley is ready, waiting for me.

I am less ready.

I am sitting at the table in our newly cleaned kitchen (full of plastic plates and cups from one of the Island’s two A amp;Ps), the note from my father flattened on the surface, willing its secrets to reveal themselves. In the next room, Bentley is watching the Disney Channel and occasionally waddling to the door of the kitchen and calling, “Dada, paygrown now. You say paygrown!” in the plaintive, self-righteous tone that makes busy parents writhe with guilt. To which I respond with the familiar “Yes, okay, just a minute, sweetheart,” which every busy parent uses with equal embarrassment.

Last night, as my family slept uneasily, Kimmer curled protectively around our son, I wandered Vinerd Howse from the foyer to the attic crawl space, searching for something, but I do not know what. I need to know what is going on. I need a clue.

Unfortunately, the most obvious clue, my father’s note, remains gibberish: My son, There is so much I wish I could share with you. Alas, at the present moment, I cannot. I have asked a good friend to deliver this note should anything befall me; if you are reading my words, one must assume that something has. I apologize for the complexity of this method of contact, but there are others who would also like to know that which is for your eyes only. So, know this much: Angela’s boyfriend, despite his deteriorating condition, is in possession of that which I want you to know. You are in no danger, neither you nor your family, but you have little time. You are unlikely to be the only one who is searching for the arrangements that Angela’s boyfriend alone can reveal. And you may not be the only one who knows who Angela’s boyfriend is. Excelsior, my son! Excelsior! It begins! Sincerely,

Your Father

The handwriting is unmistakably the Judge’s, as is the flowery, overwrought, self-important prose, even the formality of the signature. Quite unexpectedly, my fury at my father threatens suddenly to overwhelm me. If you want to tell me, tell me! I rage against him in my tortured mind, a tone I would never have selected in life. But don’t play these games! Jack Ziegler in the cemetery demanded to know about the arrangements. Now, at last, I know for certain that my father actually made some. But I do not know what they are, and this hint, this clue, this post-mortem letter from my paranoid father, whatever it is supposed to be, lends me no assistance at all.

Excelsior? Angela’s boyfriend, despite his deteriorating condition? What is all this?

One point is clear: Not-McDermott’s mission in Elm Harbor was neither to apologize nor to reassure but, as I suspected, to see whether I know an Angela or not-which means that he and, presumably, Foreman are somehow privy to the contents of this letter. I wonder if the letter was the reason for the destruction of the first floor, except that I cannot quite fathom why they would break into the house, find the letter, and then leave it behind.

Or, for that matter, how the letter got here in the first place. Presumably McDermott, if he was even here, would not have dropped it off. The Judge wrote that he asked a good friend to deliver it should anything befall him. But what good friend would break into Vinerd Howse to drop it off? Why not mail it to my house or bring it by my office? Why not deliver it to…

… to the soup kitchen?

Can the pawn be connected to the letter? Did my father arrange that delivery as well? I try to remember whether I ever mentioned to my father that I volunteer at the soup kitchen, but my mind offers every answer I could want: yes, I told him; no, I did not tell him; yes, I hinted at it; no, I kept it secret. I shake my head in rich red anger. If he wanted me to have the pawn, wouldn’t he have delivered pawn and letter together?

Not that it matters. For my father’s note is actually no help at all.

I have a terrible memory for names, but it is good enough for me to be sure that I do not know an Angela, and I have no idea who her boyfriend could possibly be.

(II)

“Paygrown now now now!” Bentley calls. “Dare you!”

“One minute!” I shout back, still puzzling over the letter. How am I to locate Angela’s boyfriend, who is in deteriorating condition? Does that mean that the man I should be talking to is sick? Perhaps dying? Is that why I have little time? I know who the others are, who would also like to know, having met a pair of them, but I do not understand why the Judge is at such pains to assure me that my family is in no danger, the fourth such reassurance I have received in the past month: first Jack Ziegler, then McDermott, next Agent Nunzio, now my late father.

I shake my head.

I try to think of famous Angelas: Lansbury? Bassett? I do not know enough about them to know if they even have husbands, still less boyfriends-and, anyway, my father did not exactly run with the Hollywood crowd. I have already had my secretary search the student directory at the law school: three Angelas, one black, two white, none of whom I have ever had in class or have any reason to think my father knew. Maybe there is a way to put together a list of all the Angelas my father might have met, but not without involving somebody official-Uncle Mal, for instance-or somebody who knows lots of the Judge’s friends-Mariah, for instance-and I cannot quite imagine sharing the note with either of them.

Not yet.

Little time.

I almost smile. The phrase explains nothing about Angela’s boyfriend, but a good deal about the Judge. He used those words often in his speeches, in trying to explain to his friends in the Rightpacs why they needed… well, racial diversity. The median American, he loved to tell his eager audiences, is socially conservative. The median black American, the Judge would add, is even more conservative. Look at the data on any question, he would rumble. School prayer? Black Americans favor it more than whites do. Abortion? Black Americans are more pro-life than whites. Vouchers? Black Americans support them more strongly than whites. Gay rights? Black Americans are more skeptical than whites. The applause would roll across his (overwhelmingly white) audience. Then he would hit them with the big windup: Conservatives are the last people who can afford to be racist. Because the future of conservatism is black America! They would go wild for him. I never saw it in person, but I saw it, often, on C-SPAN. And whichever Rightpac he was speaking to would march out to try to recruit black members, because, he would insist, there is little time… and, almost always, the recruitment effort would fail… quite abysmally. Because there were a few little details the Judge always left out. Like the fact that it was conservatives who fought against just about every civil rights law ever proposed. Like the fact that many of the wealthy men who paid for his expensive speeches would not have him in their clubs. Like the fact that it was the great conservative hero Ronald Reagan who kicked off his campaign by talking about states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a location with a certain wicked resonance for the darker nation, and who, as President, backed tax exemptions for the South’s many segregation academies. The Judge was surely right to insist that the time has come for black Americans to stop trusting white liberals, who are far more comfortable telling us what we need than asking us what we want, but he never did come up with a particularly persuasive reason for us to start trusting white conservatives instead.

My father trusted them, however, and they trusted him right back. I wander into the dining room, where the long wooden table could easily seat fourteen or more and, during my childhood, often did. On the long wall of the room is a crumbling brick fireplace which has been unusable for as long as I can remember. Above the hearth hangs an enlarged version of my father’s treasured Newsweek cover the week after his nomination was announced. THE CONSERVATIVE HOUR, reads the caption, and, in smaller type, A New Direction on the Court? Well, yes, the answer might be-yes, there was a new direction on the Court, but my father was not destined to be one of its leaders. I examine the picture. The Judge looks bold, handsome, smart, ready for anything. He looks alive. In those days, for some reason, the press decided to like him; but you should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun. And suddenly, instead of fame, you have infamy; instead of a life of public service, you have a life of private bitterness; and you turn your house into a museum of what might have been. Again I recall my father’s nostalgic phrase: the way it was before. My family’s habit of living in the past seems to me pathological, even dangerous. If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future? There is no going back, and the Judge, of all people, should have known better than to change his vacation home, his hideaway, his place of respite, into a shrine to his shattered dreams. Kimmer, I know, is waiting for a suitable moment to let me know that it is time to remove this and the other selfcongratulatory emblems scattered around Vinerd Howse, to bury them in the attic with my old baseball-card collection and Abby’s stuffed animals-

“Paygrown now!” Bentley announces from the doorway to the kitchen, stomping his foot. I look up at him, ready to be angry, and smile instead. He is wearing his midnight-blue parka and has even pulled his sneakers onto the wrong feet. He is dragging my wind-breaker behind him. Oh, how I love this child!

“Okay, sweetheart.” I fold my father’s letter, return it to the envelope, and slip it into my pocket. “Paygrown now.”

Bentley jumps up and down. “Paygrown! Dare you! Wuv you!”

“Wuv you, too.” I hug him and kneel down to fix his shoes, and, of course, the phone immediately starts to ring.

Don’t answer it, Bentley tells me with his earnest, judgmental brown eyes, for he does not yet know how to say the words. Please, Daddy, don’t answer it. And at first, I consider ignoring the phone. After all, it is most likely Cassie Meadows calling from Washington, or Mariah calling from Darien, or Not-McDermott calling from Canada. On the other hand, it might be Kimmer with good news, or Kimmer with bad, Kimmer to say she loves me, or Kimmer to say she doesn’t.

It might be Kimmer.

“Just one quick minute,” I say to my son, who eyes me with the sort of hopeless disappointment that some psychiatrist in his future will doubtless unearth. “It’s probably Mommy.”

Only it isn’t.

(III)

“ Talcott? Hi, it’s Lynda Wyatt.”

The Dean. Great.

“Hi, Lynda, how are you?” I am deflating fast, and I know my voice betrays my disappointment.

“I’m fine, Talcott. But how are you?”

“I’m just fine, Lynda, thanks.”

“I hope that you’re having lots of fun on the Vineyard. I love it up there in the fall, but Heaven knows when Norm and I will have a chance to get to our place.” Serving to remind me that she and her husband own a huge, modern house on the pond in West Tisbury, the up-Island town where many artists and writers spend their summers. Actually, I know about the house only by the tales my law school colleagues tell, because, in all the years that Lynda Wyatt and I have both been vacationing on the Island, she has invited my family to her house exactly never. (I have reciprocated just as often, so perhaps the fault is mine.)

“We’re having some fun,” I concede, smiling desperately at my son. Bentley, glaring, toddles to a corner of the kitchen and sits on the floor.

“Well, that’s great, just great. I hope you’re getting some rest, too.”

“Some,” I say. “So, what’s up?” I am rushing her, I am probably being rude, but I figure I have lots of excuses.

“Well, Talcott, I’m actually calling for two reasons. First of all-and I wouldn’t make anything important of this”-meaning, of course, that she thinks it very important indeed-“first of all, I received the strangest call from one of our graduates who is a trustee of the university. Cameron Knowland. You must know Cameron?”

“No.”

“Well, he has been a great friend of this school, Tal, a great friend. In fact, Cameron and his wife just pledged three million toward our new law library. Anyway, he says that his son got kind of a rough going-over in your class. Said you made fun of him or something.”

I am already steaming.

“I assume you told Cameron to butt out.”

Lynda Wyatt’s voice is amiable. “What I told him, Tal, was that it was probably blown out of proportion, that all first-year students complain. I told him that you weren’t the type to abuse a student in class.”

“I see.” I grip the telephone but sway on my feet. I am appalled by the weakness of this defense of a professor from the dean of the law school. I am growing hotter and the kitchen is growing redder. Bentley is watching me closely, a hand to his ear as he holds an imaginary receiver of his own. He is mouthing occasional words, too.

“I think it would be helpful,” Dean Lynda continues soberly, “if you were to give Cameron a call. Just to reassure him.”

“Reassure him of what?”

“Oh, Tal, you know how these alumni are.” Offering me her charming side. “They need to be stroked all the time. I’m not trying to interfere with how you run your classroom”-meaning she is trying to do exactly that-“but I’m just saying that Cameron Knowland is concerned. As a father. Think of how you would feel if you heard that one of Bentley’s teachers was beating up on him.”

Red, red, red.

“I didn’t beat up on Avery Knowland-”

“Then tell his father that, Tal. That’s all I’m asking. Calm him down. As one father to another. For the good of the school.”

For the three million dollars, she means. She seems to assume I care. In my current state, however, I would not object if the library sank into the earth. Gerald Nathanson is often there: it is quieter than his office, he says, and he can get more work done. Another reason I stay out of the place is to avoid running into him.

“I’ll think about it,” I mutter, not sure what I will do the next time I see young Avery Knowland’s insolent face.

“Thank you, Tal,” says my dean, knowing at once that this is as much as she will be able to get. “The school appreciates all that you do for us.” For us -as though I am an outsider. Which I pretty much am. “And Cameron’s a nice guy, Tal. You never know when you’ll need a friend.”

“I told you I’ll think about it.” Letting some ice slip into my voice. I am recalling what Stuart Land said to me about pressures being brought to bear, and I wonder if this call is a part of it. Which leads me to be ruder still: “You said there were two things.”

“Yes.” A pause. “Well.” Another. I imagine that she is leading up to a comment of some kind about the competition between Marc and Kimmer, along the lines of what Stuart attempted. Except that Lynda is unlikely to back down.

I am right… but Lynda is more subtle than I am.

“Tal, I also had a call from another one of our graduates. Morton Pearlman. Do you know Mort?”

“I’ve heard the name.”

“Well, he was four or five years ahead of you. Anyway, he works for the Attorney General these days. He called to see… he wanted to know… if you’re doing okay.”

“If I’m doing okay? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Again Dean Lynda hesitates, and it occurs to me that she is trying to be kind, in the manner of a physician looking for the words to explain what the tests uncovered. “He said that you’ve been… well

… that the FBI and various other agencies have received a lot of calls on your behalf recently. Most of them, I gather, at your behest. Calls about… oh, things related to your father. Questions about the autopsy, about that priest who got killed by the drug dealer, all sorts of things.”

In the ensuing pause, I almost burst out that it was my sister, not me, who wanted those calls made, and sometimes who actually made them. But I am lawyer enough to wait for the rest. So I say only, “I see.”

“Do you? I can’t make any sense of it at all.” Her voice is growing harder. “Now, we’ve known each other a long time, Tal, and I’m sure you have a good reason for just about everything you do.” I register, with dismay, just about. “But I have a feeling that what Mort was trying to ask, in a nice way, was whether you might need a little rest.”

“Wait a minute. Wait. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States thinks I’m crazy? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Calm down, Tal, okay? I’m only the messenger here. I don’t know what you’re up to, and I don’t want to know. I’m just repeating what Mort asked me. And I probably shouldn’t even be telling you, because he said it was confidential.”

I unclench my fist, make myself speak slowly and clearly. I am not worried, now, about Kimmer and her judgeship. That can wait. I am worried about whether the FBI plans to stop taking my concerns seriously. “Lynda. This is important. What did you tell him?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What did you tell Morton Pearlman? When he implied that I needed a rest?”

“I told him I was sure you were fine, that I knew you were a little upset, and that you were away from the school for a few weeks.”

“You didn’t say that.”

“I did. What did you expect me to say? I didn’t want to mess anything up for you, but… well… Tal, I’m worried about you.”

“Worried about me? Why are you worried about me?”

“I think maybe… Tal, look. If you want to rest for a couple of more weeks before you come back, I’m sure it would be no problem.”

For a moment I can think of nothing to say. The implications of her machinations briefly overwhelm me. Put simply, if Morton Pearlman can be persuaded that Kimberly Madison’s husband is a nutcase, then there is no way that she gets the seat on the court of appeals. Tagging me with that label, and thus helping Marc achieve his lifelong goal, is evidently Dean Lynda’s purpose. And although I am impressed by the elegance with which she is trying to do it, I am infuriated that she would use the complications of my father’s death this way-and that she would hold me in such low regard as to think she could get away with it. Well, Stuart tried to warn me.

“No, Lynda, but thank you. I’ll be back next week, as planned.”

“Tal, you really don’t have to rush. You really should take as much rest as you need.”

I wish I were more political. I wish I were smooth, like Kimmer: then I could find the words to defuse the situation. But I am neither political nor smooth. I am just angry, and I am one of those strange people who sometimes, in anger, allow the truth to slip out.

“Lynda, look. I appreciate your call. I understand why you don’t want me to come back just yet. But I’ll be back next week.”

Her tone goes frosty at once. “Talcott, I value your friendship, but I resent your tone and your implication. I am trying to help you with a difficult situation…”

“Lynda,” I begin, wanting to make clear that we are not and have never been friends, and then I make myself stop, rubbing my temples and closing my eyes, because the world is bright red and I am probably shouting and my son, alarmed as he stands in the doorway, is shrinking back. I smile at him, with difficulty, and blow a kiss, then continue in what I hope is a more reasonable tone. “Lynda, thank you. Really. I appreciate your concern. But it’s about time for me to get back to Elm Harbor anyway-”

“Your students are really enjoying Stuart Land,” she interrupts cruelly.

I force myself to respond with grace. “Well, that’s all the more reason for me to get back. They might forget about me.”

“Oh, well, we wouldn’t want that, would we?” She is furious. I am amazed. I am the one who should be enraged. I say nothing; even after all these years of living with mercurial Kimberly Madison-or perhaps because of them-I lack the confidence to deal with female anger. “Anyway,” the Dean concludes, “we all look forward to having you back among us.”

“Thank you,” I lie.

(IV)

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I am saying to Bentley as we sit in the booth, waiting for our cheeseburgers.

“Paygrown,” moans my son. “Go paygrown.”

“It’s too late, buddy,” I murmur, tousling his hair. He shrinks away. “See? It’s dark outside.”

“You say paygrown! Dare you!”

“I know, I know. I’m really sorry. Daddy got busy.”

“Daddy say pay grown.”

His tone is understandably accusatory, for I have committed one of those parental sins that children, in the innocence of their youthful integrity, find it all but impossible to forgive: I broke my promise to him. We never made it to the playground. Because, after my tussle with Dean Lynda, when I should have gathered up my son and rushed out the door, if only to remind myself of what really matters, I made the mistake of checking my office voice mail. I found two frantic messages from a lawyer at a New York firm that recently retained me as a consultant, to help some greedy corporation craft a constitutional argument to challenge new federal regulations concerning the disposal of toxic waste: not precisely the side of the angels, but law professors desperate to augment academic salaries take what work we can get. I sent a draft of the brief last week, and now, according to her message, one of the partners at the firm had a few questions. I decided to take a quick minute to call her back, forgetting that lawyers, particularly those at large law firms, prefer talking on the phone to any other activity. Her list of questions was about seven miles long, and some of them were genuinely tough ones. I was tied up for the next ninety minutes (two hours of billable time for both the lawyer and myself-her rates are higher, but I have no overhead), plying my poor son with cookies and fruit to keep him relatively quiet, watching the light fade from the November sky, promising myself every five minutes that I would be done in five more.

Telling myself lies.

When I informed Bentley that it was too late to swing by the playground, he literally fell to the floor in tears. Nothing theatrical or manipulative, nothing fake. He simply put a hand over his face and crumpled, like hope dying.

My efforts to comfort him were unavailing.

And so I pulled the other sad, spoiling trick of the contemporary parent: I bribed him. We bundled into our parkas and walked the two blocks from Vinerd Howse to Circuit Avenue, the commercial heart of Oak Bluffs, a few hundred yards of restaurants, boutiques, and shops offering the various knickknacks that one finds in any resort town. In the summer, we might have stopped in at Mad Martha’s ice-cream parlor for vanilla malts or strawberry cones, but the local outlet is closed for the season. Instead, we made our way down to Murdick’s candy shop-my son’s second-favorite place on the Island, ranking just behind the incomparable Flying Horses-to buy some of the cranberry fudge that is a specialty of the house. Then we meandered back up the street. I bought the local paper, the Vineyard Gazette, at the Corner Store, and we stopped in for dinner at Linda Jean’s, a quietly popular restaurant of unassuming decor and remarkably inexpensive food, and, at one time, my father’s favorite place to eat. In the summer, he used to drop in just about daily for a warm lobster roll, but only on the off-hours, never when Linda Jean’s was crowded, because, after his fall, the Judge worried constantly about being recognized.

Some years ago, on the tenth anniversary of my father’s humiliation, Time did a story about his life since leaving the bench. The two-page spread revisited his angry books, quoted some of his stump speeches, and, in the interest of journalistic balance, gave some of his old enemies the chance to take fresh shots at him. Jack Ziegler’s name was mentioned three times, Addison’s twice, mine once, Mariah’s not at all, although her husband’s was, which seemed to displease her. A sidebar summarized the post-hearing life of Greg Haramoto, who, like my father, refused to be interviewed. But the main theme of the story was that, despite the frenetic activity that marked his days, my father was far lonelier than even many of his friends realized. The magazine noted that he was spending more and more time “at his summer home in Oak Bluffs,” nearly always by himself, and although Time made the house sound far grander than it is (“a five-bedroom cottage on the water”) and also got its name wrong (“known to friends and family as simply ‘The Vineyard House’”), the article caught the tenor of his life exactly. The piece was titled, with faint, depressing irony, “The Emperor of Ocean Park.” I was aghast and Mariah was furious. Addison, of course, could not be reached. As for my father, he shrugged it off, or pretended to: “The media,” he said to me at Shepard Street, “are all run by liberals. White liberals. Of course they are out to destroy me, because I know them for what they are. You see, Talcott, white liberals disapprove of black people they cannot control. My very existence is an affront to them.” And returned to the reassuring pages of his National Review.

As to my father’s fear of being recognized, it was, I confess, no small concern. In the wake of his failed confirmation, he was occasionally accosted by strangers in airports or hotel lobbies or even on the street. Some of them wanted to tell him they were for him all along, some of them wanted to tell him the opposite, and I think he despised both kinds equally; for my father, whose income in his last years derived principally from public appearances, was forever a private man. He invited no one to share his life. A few years ago, when the Judge stayed a weekend with us in Elm Harbor, a lone protester somehow spotted him and spent the better part of two days patrolling the sidewalk in front of our house, his placard proclaiming to the world that JUDGE GARLEN SHOUD BE IN JAIL. I tried to cajole the man into leaving us alone. I even tried to bribe him. He refused to leave. The police told us they could do nothing as long as he remained off our property and did not block access, and my father stood in the window of my study, glaring his hatred and muttering that if this were an abortion clinic the protester would already have been arrested-not an accurate statement of the law but, certainly, an accurate statement of the Judge’s desire to be left alone. Which helps explain why, in Oak Bluffs, he would take his public meals only at the slack hours. Linda Jean’s has long been a favorite hangout of celebrity-watchers, especially during the summer: Spike Lee often stops in for breakfast, Bill Clinton used to drop by for brunch after church on Sunday, and, in the old days, there was always the chance that Jackie O would wander past the window, eating an ice-cream cone. Once my wife spotted Ellen Holly, the pioneering black actress who appeared for many years on the soap opera One Life to Live, and, in the best Kimmer Madison manner, popped over to her table for an introduction and a chat.

But the best thing of all about Linda Jean’s is that it is open year-round, which many of the Island’s trendier restaurants are not.

“Hey, buddy,” I say now to my beautiful son. He eyes me uncomfortably. Nibbling his cranberry fudge, he seems content, even if not yet ready to forgive. The doggie my brother gave him is on the seat next to him, a paper napkin tucked daintily into the ribbon around its neck. Have I always, I wonder, loved my son so much, yet felt such pure and piercing unhappiness?

“You say,” Bentley whispers. His big brown eyes are sleepy. Not only did I break my promise, but I forgot his nap, and I am feeding him too late. I am quite sure there must be good fathers in the world; if I could meet one, maybe he could show me how to do it right.

“I’m sorry,” I begin, marveling at how craven parenting has become in our strange new century. I do not recall my parents ever apologizing for failing to take me someplace I expected to go. Kimmer and I seem to do it all the time. So do most of our friends. “Sorry, sweetheart.”

“Dare Mommy,” he replies-perhaps a hope, perhaps a preference, perhaps a threat. “Mommy kiss. Dare you!”

My heart twists and my face burns, for he has learned how to use what few words he knows to skewer his guilt-ridden parents, but I am saved from having to answer my son’s riposte by the arrival of our cheeseburgers and lemonade. Bentley digs in eagerly, whatever he was trying to say quite forgotten, and, in my considerable relief, I take far too large a bite of my burger and begin at once to cough. Bentley laughs. Gazing at his smiling, ketchup-smeared face, I find myself wishing that Kimmer were here to see her son, to laugh along with us, the old Kimmer, the loving, gentle Kimmer, the witty Kimmer, the fun Kimmer, the Kimmer who still, now and then, wanders by for a visit; and, if my wife’s becoming Judge Madison will make it easier for that Kimmer to pop in, then it is my duty to do everything I can to help her achieve her goal. All the more reason not to let Marc and Lynda win.

Duty. So old-fashioned a word. Yet I know I must do my duty, not just to my wife but to my son. And to that increasingly arcane concept known as family.

I love my family.

Love is an activity, not a feeling-didn’t one of the great theologians say that? Or maybe it was the Judge, who never ceased to stress duty rather than choice as the foundation of a civilized morality. I do not remember who coined the phrase, but I am beginning to understand what it means. True love is not the helpless desire to possess the cherished object of one’s fervent affection; true love is the disciplined generosity we require of ourselves for the sake of another when we would rather be selfish; that, at least, is how I have taught myself to love my wife.

I wink at Bentley again and he grins back, chewing thoughtfully on a french fry. I unfold the Vineyard Gazette- and nearly choke again: PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR DROWNS AT MENEMSHA BEACH, the headline blares. Police Consider Death “Suspicious,” the next line informs us. Staring up at me from the right-hand side of the page is a very bad photograph of a man the newspaper identifies as one Colin Scott; but I knew him somewhat better as Special Agent McDermott.

PART II

TURTON DOUBLING

Turton doubling -In the composition of chess problems, a theme in which one White piece withdraws, allowing a second White piece to move in front of it, so that the two of them can attack the Black king together along the same line.

CHAPTER 18

MORE NEWS BY PHONE

(I)

“You know, he really was from South Carolina,” says Cassie Meadows. “And Scott really was his name.”

“Oh, so now they’re willing to tell us his name? Nice of them.”

“I’m not sure why they wouldn’t tell us before.”

“Well, now that he’s dead, they don’t have a choice, do they? I mean, his name was all over the papers up there.” It is Monday, four days since I opened the Gazette and saw the picture of Colin Scott, three days since I hopped the first ferry of the morning and rushed home to a frantic Kimmer. The three of us stood in the driveway hugging for so long I actually believed that my wife wanted a full explanation; but I was wrong. She was just happy, she said, to have her family back. The rest would have to wait. “I don’t get the idea the FBI is actually being all that helpful on this,” I tell Meadows bitterly.

“Mr. Corcoran thinks the Bureau is doing all it can.”

“I see,” I mutter, although I do not. I am standing in my study, gazing out the window as I love to, wishing the late November sky would clear sufficiently to spill a bit of sunshine on Hobby Road. I draw in a breath, let it out, concentrate on not placing blame. Yet. “So, if the FBI is being so helpful, have they explained what Scott was doing out in that boat?”

“Oh, he was keeping an eye on you, no question about that. He’d been following you for weeks, it sounds like.”

“Swell.”

Meadows laughs, but gently. “I don’t think you have to worry about him any more, Mr. Garland. If you see what I mean.”

I make a small sound of assent.

“The Bureau doesn’t think his friends had anything to do with it,” she continues, her tone conversational. She seems amused by the whole thing. “They were just fishing buddies from Charleston. One of them-let me check my notes-yep, ran a filling station. It seems Mr. Scott spun them some story about fishing in New England out of season, said he knew where they could get a boat… Anyway, they went to the Island with him. They told the police that Scott had been drinking, and when he fell overboard and they couldn’t find him, they kind of panicked. So they returned the boat and ran off.”

“But they came back.”

“Later, when they were a little less drunk. But I don’t think that was until after they saw the story in the paper.”

“So, did either one of them meet the description of… of Agent Foreman?”

“I’m afraid not.” She actually laughs. “His friends were both white.”

“Huh.” I remind myself of a tiny bit of wisdom from my own days of practicing law, that there are times when the story that sounds too good to be true is the story that is true.

Meadows is still disgorging facts. “So, anyway, the Bureau raided Scott’s office down in Charleston. And guess what? They found his diaries and some files, and it looks like he told you the truth. Somebody did hire him to recover papers that your father supposedly had in his possession when he died. Unfortunately, the diary doesn’t say who hired him to do it, or what the papers were exactly.”

“How convenient,” I mutter, suddenly quite lonely. Bentley is back at his preschool, Kimmer is back in San Francisco with Jerry Nathanson, and I have yet to venture back into the classroom. But for my wife’s possible judgeship, I would be tempted to take Dean Lynda up on her manipulative offer after all, and forgo a few more weeks. Of course, if Kimmer were not a candidate, the offer would never have been made.

“Hmmm?”

“If he wouldn’t trust the name of the client to paper…”

“Oh. Oh, I see.” Enthusiastic. “You’re thinking about Jack Ziegler, I guess.”

“That would be correct.”

“Well, Mr. Garland, you shouldn’t worry about Mr. Ziegler. Mr. Corcoran told me you would probably think Mr. Ziegler had something to do with… with hiring Mr. Scott. Mr. Corcoran asked me to tell you that he spoke to Mr. Ziegler, and that Mr. Ziegler denied hiring Mr. Scott, and Mr. Corcoran says he is inclined to believe him.” I almost smile at the way Meadows is tripping over the need to call everybody “Mr.,” but Uncle Mal runs a very old-fashioned law firm. I wonder how long he will be able to get away with insisting on these little formalities, whether the new breed of lawyers-the ones who skip ties because their dot-com clients do-will put up with the Corcoran amp; Klein style. “He also asked me to tell you that he defended Mr. Ziegler in his perjury trial in ’83 and can usually tell if he is lying or not.”

“How does he know he can tell?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Never mind. Look. Could I speak to Mr. Corcoran myself?”

“He’s in Brussels. But whatever you need, you can get through me.”

I wonder whether Uncle Mal is avoiding me intentionally, foisting me off on Meadows in order to get rid of me, or if I am simply being my usual hypersensitive self.

“But, hey, I have some good news for you,” says Meadows suddenly, ever chipper.

“I could use some.”

“Mr. Corcoran says that the background check on your wife has started. In fact, the Bureau will be sending a couple of agents to interview her in the next few days. And to talk to you, too.”

“She’s out of town.” I am being quarrelsome for the sake of being quarrelsome. By rights I should be happy for Kimmer.

“Oh, I think the Bureau will be able to track her down.” Meadows seems to be waiting for me to say something- thank you, perhaps-but I am in one of my bright red moods and am having trouble with good manners. “Anyway, Mr. Corcoran just wanted you to know that,” she concludes, deflated.

Despite my efforts to restrain it, Garland breeding asserts itself at last: “That’s great news, Ms. Meadows. Thank you.” Or maybe I am just being polite because it has occurred to me that I need more of her help.

“I had nothing to do with it. And, please, call me Cassie.”

“Okay, Cassie.”

“You’re certainly an interesting client,” she adds, and I can tell she is leading up to a hurried goodbye, to get back to serious work. “It’s been an experience.”

“Wait.”

“Hmmm?”

I take a moment to select the right words. “Cassie, look, there’s something I was wondering.”

“Why am I not surprised?” She is trying, I know, to stay friendly, but her sarcasm cuts near the bone. I hate seeming needy.

“Because you’re good at your job,” I murmur, stroking her a little.

It does no good. “What is it you want to know, Misha?” Very businesslike. She has no reason to take me too seriously, for there is plenty I have yet to unveil. I have not quite told everything to anybody. Not Kimmer, not Meadows, not Uncle Mal. So Meadows knows nothing of Angela’s boyfriend, let alone the peculiar repetition of the word Excelsior. The trouble is, I have to talk to somebody.

“Well… you remember that Colin Scott said he was looking for some papers that a client left with the… with my father?”

“Sure.” I have the impression that Cassie Meadows’s attention is on something else, work for a paying client, no doubt.

“And you told me the FBI thinks it’s true?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“Well, did you ever find out who?”

“Sorry?”

“Did you ever find out which client left the papers?”

“Oh. Oh, well.” I have the sense that I have touched upon a delicate matter. “Well, Msha, I can assure you, the firm is going through its records with some care.” I wonder if she is the one who has been assigned to go through the records. So boring and thankless a task for a fast-track lawyer would certainly explain her irritation. “The process is pretty much complete. We haven’t found any indication of anyone who might have given your father any papers. But you have to understand, your father was an extremely busy man who did not generally have, uh, the kind of relationship with the firm’s clients that would lead to their entrusting him, and him alone, with sensitive documents.” Her uneasiness, even across the telephone line, is contagious. I get the message, the one I half expected: as far as Corcoran amp; Klein knows, the Judge didn’t have any clients. And I remember, suddenly and sadly, the moment at the funeral when Mallory Corcoran’s turn to speak came round. Standing before the thin congregation, his voice cracked and teary, he kept referring to the Judge’s greatness, repeating the word until I began to wonder whether he meant to imply that the greatness expired long ago, perhaps because the increasing wildness of my father’s politics had become more and more an embarrassment for a firm that once thought his name would positively glow from a letterhead already bright with former Senators and Cabinet officers.

No clients, I register. The Judge had no clients. I make a little mental note, a knot in my memory handkerchief, and then I make another decision.

“Does the firm happen to have any clients with ‘Excelsior’ in the name?” I ask Cassie Meadows.

“Why do you ask?”

“Call it a hunch.”

“Hold on,” she says. I hear the sound of a keyboard tapping and a mouse clicking, and then that distinctive blunk! sound that Windows generates (unless you know how to change it) when it cannot find what you are looking for. “Nope.” She pauses, clicks again, types, waits. Another blunk! “Not even in the confidential files.”

“Well, it was just a hunch.”

“Sure. The name just popped into your head.”

“No, no, just something… something somebody mentioned about my dad.” I never lie well, least of all when I have no time to think.

“Okay, if you say so.”

Great. Now, where I was worried about generating irritation, I have created actual skepticism, if not distrust. Still, there is nowhere to go but forward, as the Judge loved to say. “I have one last favor to ask.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“I’m serious this time.”

“Okay, Misha, okay.” Somewhere during the past few minutes, Meadows began using my nickname, but she never quite asked permission. Perhaps Professor Garland is a bit too formal, but even Mallory Corcoran, who has known me all my life, calls me Talcott. I have not corrected her, because contemporary norms of conversation do not provide any tools for asking someone to be more formal in addressing you, rather than less. “One last favor.” She laughs briefly, high-pitched, reedy. “So, who do I pry information out of this time? The White House Situation Room? The CIA?”

“No information. I have to be in Washington the end of the week for a conference on tort reform. I’d like to come by the firm and take a look at my father’s old office.”

“There’s no point, Misha. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but the room is completely empty. There’s not even any furniture. I think one of the partners is getting ready to move in.”

“I just need two minutes. But if you think it’s going to be a problem, I can call Uncle Mal.” Using the nickname to remind her that I have some clout with her boss.

“No,” she says at once, “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Just call me in the morning whatever day you want to come up.”

I tell her I will. Then, because I can tell she is getting worried, I assure her that I am through asking favors. This is probably a lie, and Meadows probably knows it. If only the dead bodies that are starting to pile up were not so conveniently and swiftly explained away, I might even leave her alone. Or maybe not. There is, after all, still the Judge’s cryptic note to decipher, but I have yet to mention it to Meadows or Uncle Mal. “I’ll try to behave,” I promise her.

Meadows laughs.

After hanging up, I sit irresolutely, wondering how much I really want to know. But after what happened on the Vineyard the only reasonable answer is everything I can. So I call my basketball buddy Rob Saltpeter and ask him to try to set up an appointment for me when I am in Washington at the end of the week. His contacts, in this case, are better then mine.

“Sure, Misha,” says Rob. “Whatever will help.” But I detect in his voice, as in those of most of my friends lately, an emotion I have not previously encountered.

Doubt.

(II)

A gray autumn dusk is falling, and I am standing at the kitchen window, watching my son at play. A little while ago, it finally occurred to me to try to reach Just Alma, down in Philadelphia, who predicted, in her confusing way, that people would be coming after me. But nobody seems to know how to reach her. Even Mariah, who keeps in touch with everybody, has only a street address, not a telephone number. I wonder, briefly, whether our mad aunt even has a telephone. Finally, I try one of her children, a social worker, who tells me that his mother always goes to the islands from December to March. He refuses, rudely, to give me a number for her, but does agree to pass along the message that I would like to speak to her. If he hears from her, that is; he assures me gleefully that he may not.

I shake my head at the incivility of the world, even though I have shown the capacity to be a bit uncivil myself. In the old days, if I came upon my wife’s address book sitting open on the little table in the front hall, I might begin flipping through it without troubling to obtain her permission, pausing here and there to ask myself whether a particular underlined name was a contact, related to her career… or whether it was something else. I might even scribble down a few. Recently, Kimmer has become “teched-up,” abandoning her address book for a Visor Edge, and thus, intentionally or not, rendering her telephone list impervious to the scrutiny of her husband, who is irretrievably analog. (My wife sometimes accuses me, gently, of possessing “analog morality.”)

Kimmer, whether she admits it or not, is a considerable star at the firm, and in the city’s legal community. She works much longer hours than I do, but also brings in two-thirds of our family’s income, which gives her a built-in advantage whenever I point out that her extravagant spending-clothing and jewelry and the car, mainly, but also fancy gifts for relatives back home-dents our already battered family fisc. She seems to think I should be quiet and uncomplaining as long as the money rolls in. Kimmer loves the practice of law, but our conversations about her job rarely extend any longer beyond I have to stay late tonight or I have a filing due. It pains me to realize how little I know of Kimmer’s working life, and how much her excitement over what she does for a living has become an additional barrier between us. Perhaps that is one reason I am so suspicious of Jerry Nathanson, one of the leading lawyers in the city and generally considered above reproach: when my wife speaks of her work with him, her eyes sparkle and her breath quickens. I wonder whether she displays as much emotion when, at the office, she speaks of me.

Bentley, chasing a pigeon, stumbles over a tree branch. I stand very still, fighting the impulse to rush out the door to comfort him, and, sure enough, he comes up laughing. I smile, too. Back in September, over Kimmer’s strenuous objections, I began allowing him to venture alone into the back yard. Bentley was delighted. His mother, not yet over the pain of nearly losing him the night he was born, points out that he could fall and injure himself, but I have always believed in letting children explore, another hard lesson from the Judge, who preached that a few fractures and bruises are a small price to pay for a sense of wonder and independence. One of my father’s favorite applause lines was that the purpose of the state is not to create a society that is risk-free. His corporate audiences loved it because it implied less regulation of their products. His religious audiences loved it because it implied the fragility of our material lives. His college audiences loved it because it implied considerable freedom in their personal habits. None of his audiences quite realized, I suspect, how important a catharsis it was for my father to believe what he was telling them. And all of it, like his hard-edged conservatism itself, went back to the death of Abby.

Before Abby was killed, my father was already a favorite of conservatives, but only because he was, as somebody once said, to his fury, a “reasonable Negro”-the kind of black man you might be willing to negotiate with. In the sixties, the Judge was not yet the dour, distracted, somehow depressing man you no doubt remember from his regrettable confirmation hearings. Even after Abby’s death, I have often thought, his career might not have taken the bizarre direction that it did, had he only experienced the emotional satisfaction of seeing her murderer-that was always the Judge’s word for the hit-and-run driver, and, by his lights, a fair one-seeing her murderer caught and punished. But the police never found a suspect. My father being who he was, my parents were regularly briefed by a senior detective: a few leads, he would tell them month after grueling month, but nothing concrete. The law had been the anchor of my father’s faith, as it was for so many civil rights lawyers of the fifties and sixties, and the inability of the vast machinery of American justice to find a sports car that killed one little girl first bewildered him, then angered him. He badgered journalists, belittled the police, and, at the recommendation of friends, hired a private investigator, an expensive one from Potomac, whose supposed leads the police scornfully dismissed, to my father’s fury. He bearded friends in the White House, friends on Capitol Hill, even friends in the District Building, the shabby brown structure housing what there was in those days of the city’s government, and received in response only pitying condolences. He posted ever-larger rewards, but all the calls were from cranks. According to Addison, the Judge even consulted a psychic or two-“but not the right ones,” adds my brother, the radio talk-show king, who no doubt could have provided better names.

As his ideas evaporated and his wrath mounted, my father spent more and more time locked in his study at Shepard Street. (This was before he knocked down the walls upstairs.) I would listen fretfully at the closed door, soon joined by Mariah, home for the summer from Stanford, neither of us sure whether there was something we should be doing. We would hear him muttering to himself, possibly weeping, certainly drinking. He passed the midnight hours on the phone with his few remaining friends, who began to avoid his calls. He ate little. He fell behind in his judicial work. He stopped playing poker with his cronies. My mother soldiered on in the manner of her class, hosting her parties, often alone, and representing the family at a variety of functions, always alone, but we children were terrified.

When the time came for our annual trek to Oak Bluffs, Mariah, with a summer job in Washington, stayed behind, leaving me alone to suffer through what I truly thought was my father’s madness. I worried that it might be contagious, or hereditary. My mother offered endless tearful hugs and desperate reassurances, but no explanations. September arrived. Mariah returned to Stanford and I began my final year of high school. The house on Shepard Street became a single vast silence. The family spiraled downhill, and nobody talked about it. I stopped inviting schoolmates home. I was too embarrassed. Some nights, I myself stayed away. To my chagrin, my parents scarcely noticed. A year passed, a year and a half. I made my own escape to college. Now my parents had only each other for comfort, and their marriage-so my brother later assured me-came as close as it ever would to sundering. I spent most of my vacations away from Washington. I had no sense of being missed. And then, quite suddenly, the sea of melancholy in which the Judge was drowning dried up. I never quite understood why. All I knew was that the will of which he had preached throughout our several childhoods reasserted itself: he drew a line, as Addison later explained it, and placed Abby and the mystery of her death on the side marked Past. He came roaring out of his study like a recently uncaged animal, alive once more to life and its possibilities. He began to laugh and joke. He reawakened to his old goal of being the fastest writer on the court of appeals. He stopped his frightening new habit of drinking, and resumed his boring old one of interfering in his children’s lives. He seemed himself once more, and would not admit his momentary weakness had ever existed. So, when his old friend Oz McMichael, the cantankerous Virginia moderate who sat in the Senate forever, lost his own son to a hit-and-run driver, and dared suggest that my father join his support group of parents whose children had been killed the same way, the Judge curtly refused, and-this is still according to Addison-stopped speaking to the man altogether.

A support group, I am thinking, gazing at my contemplative, and now sleepy, little boy. Maybe, now that Scott is gone, I need to overcome my family’s prejudice against counseling and get some. Last summer I gave it a try, pouring out my marital woes to a pastor-not my own, which would have been too risky, but a gentle man named Morris Young whom I met through my work in the community.

And Morris Young helped. A little.

Maybe, I am thinking now, maybe if I promise to stop tracking down the various mysteries my father left behind, Kimmer and I can go to counseling together, and make the marriage work. It will be easier, of course, if the President picks her for the court of appeals, but, I admit glumly, that prospect seems to fade with every online crank who spreads a theory just crazy enough to keep the story alive.

(III)

Mariah calls while Bentley is in the bathtub. I am doing the nighttime duty with our boy because Kimmer, who usually draws sustenance from caring for him, is away. Not that I mind spending this time with him. Oh, no! Ever since our return from the Vineyard, I have hardly been able to bear having Bentley out of my sight-although life and work make it necessary. Still, I could listen to his Dare you for hours on end, even as my heart twists with the hopeless pain of the failed desire to give him a normal childhood… whatever counts as normal these days. Two parents who actually love each other might be an interesting and radical beginning, but the mere suggestion that the traditional household might turn out to be good for children offends so many different constituencies that hardly anybody is willing to raise it any longer. Which further suggests, as George Orwell knew, that within a generation or two nobody will think it either. What survives is only what we are able to communicate. Moral knowledge that remains secret eventually ceases to be knowledge.

Although it may still be moral.

When the telephone rings, Bentley is performing a delicate experiment in which he stuffs into his bright red plastic boat as many little Playmobil characters as it will hold and waits to see if it will sink. Sometimes it sinks. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes he can pile on fifteen soldiers and the boat remains comfortably afloat. Sometimes fewer than a dozen will sink it. Bentley frowns, trying to reason out a principle. I do not see one either, which pleases me: No matter how much of the universe the physical scientists are able to explain, some events remain chaotic, even random. The sinking or floating of Bentley’s red boat seems to be one of them.

We live so much of our lives in chaos. Human history can be viewed as an endless search for greater order: everything from language to religion to law to science tries to impose a framework on chaotic existence. The existentialists, sometimes wrongly described as disbelieving in an underlying order, saw the risks and the foolishness of the obsession with creating one. Hitler showed the risk, as did any number of populist tyrants before him. I teach my students that law, too, shows the risk, when we try to regulate a phenomenon-human behavior-that we do not even understand. I am not arguing against law, I add as they scribble in furious confusion, but against the Panglossian assumption that we can ever do law particularly well. The darkness in which we live dooms us to do it badly.

Which is why, weighing up the balance of my life, I would rather be bathing my son at this moment than finishing any of the pointless work piled up in my small study down on the first floor. On my desk is the edited version of the overdue manuscript on mass tort litigation that I am publishing in the school’s snooty law review. I sometimes wish I had the courage of my colleagues Lem Carlyle and Rob Saltpeter, two of our genuine superstars, who announced in a joint letter to the American Lawyer three years ago that they would no longer write for student-edited law reviews because they were tired of kids two or three years out of college purporting to know the law-to say nothing of how to write-better than their professors. As nearly all the nation’s law reviews are edited by students, this means, in practice, that Lem and Rob, if they want to be taken seriously as scholars, are forced to write books, which neither one of them seems to have any trouble getting done. But most of us labor on in the trenches, filling the pages of the nation’s law reviews with ideas that, to paraphrase what someone wrote about the great eighteenth-century chess theorist Francois-Andre Philidor, move at dizzying speed from being too far in advance of their time to be taken seriously to being too outmoded to matter.

Yes, there are days when I love being a law professor; but there are days when I hate it, too.

(IV)

Bentley’s head jerks up furiously at the sound of the telephone, for he knows that it commonly presages a parental abandonment. I carry the portable into the bathroom whenever he is in the tub, a habit I picked up from Kimmer, who does not want to miss the chance that a client might call, allowing her to dry Bentley and dress him for bed with the handset cocked in her neck, talking away, able to bill an hour or two while doing her maternal duties.

I try to compromise, picking up the receiver with one hand, piling Playmobil men and women onto the red boat with the other.

“Did I wake you?” Mariah begins, which has been her idea of a joke ever since the early days of my marriage to Kimmer, when calling after the dinner hour was always a risk: the chances were excellent that we were already in bed, although never asleep.

“No, no, I’m sitting here with Bentley. He’s in the tub.”

“Give him my love.”

“Auntie Mariah says she loves you.”

My son ignores me, shoving aside the Playmobil boat, plunging his face into the water, and blowing bubbles to the surface.

“He says he loves you, too.”

“So how are you guys doing?”

“Oh, great, we’re great,” I enthuse, knowing Mariah did not call to chitchat. We have made peace from our fight of a few weeks ago, but I pay tribute in the form of listening whenever she wants to talk. I carry the portable phone over to the sink and fill a paper cup with water. This could take a while.

“Anyway, Tal, I’m in Washington, and I found something that might interest you.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

We share a laugh, small and strained, like the forced hysterics that paper over pain. Early in her seventh month of pregnancy, my sister has made the round trip between Washington and Darien three times in the five weeks since we buried the Judge. After years of moody silence toward me, Mariah now phones every three or four days, probably because nobody else will listen to the theories she revises so fast that they now and then seem to switch identities in the middle of a sentence. Her husband is too busy, our big brother is too hard to track down, and her friends… well, her friends, I suspect, are not taking her calls. As for myself, I do not mind the calls, as long as she talks only to me; if I can keep her speculations within reasonable bounds, or keep her from voicing them aloud, I can help Kimmer and my big sister at the same time.

Besides, Mariah could be on to something; Colin Scott, after all, did not go off to Canada; he followed my family to the Vineyard, and died there. Or maybe I am simply joining my sister in her headlong rush toward the far reaches of fantasy.

This evening’s call is typical. Mariah is down at Shepard Street again, and was apparently awake for half the night, going through the papers in the attic. Her obsession ever since the night she and Sally began the search, after our meeting with Sergeant Ames. Mariah sits for hours on end, surrounded by mountains of contracts, letters, check stubs, drafts of essays and speeches, menus, folded press clippings tearing along their ancient creases, diagrams of chess positions, notes for the Judge’s books, recipes, unframed awards and commendations, bills from the man who boards the window of Vinerd Howse every winter, condolence cards, Playbills from forgotten Broadway shows, deeds, drafts of long-forgotten opinions from his days on the bench, printed instructions from a long-vanished game called Totopoly, unused yellow legal pads, photographs of our mother, hardcover editions of Trollope, memoranda from various assistants, outdated maps of the Vineyard, credit card receipts, pocket diaries, and newspapers and magazines galore: back issues of the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the National Review, a handful of yellowing front pages from the Vineyard Gazette, even, astonishingly, two or three tattered copies of Soldier of Fortune. And, amidst it all, a grim sentinel guarding the debris, sits my big sister. Patiently examining the bits, one by one. Looking for a pattern. A clue. An answer. Hoping to finding something the police missed. And Mallory Corcoran’s minions, who spent an afternoon in the house three days after the funeral, hunting for any confidential papers that belonged at the firm. Mariah believes she can outsearch them all. Real investigative journalism, I suppose, is like that: the sifting of details to find more details to find a muddle, and then discerning in the muddle an outline, and finally rendering the outline clear for one’s readers.

I have lately seen the low-ceilinged attic of the house on Shepard Street, its dreary, dusty shadows lighted by the single skylight. I dropped in while Kimmer and Bentley and I were in D.C. for our miserable Thanksgiving. You have to climb a narrow staircase behind the bathroom to get up to what the Judge called the garret, but Mariah climbs it regularly, and scarcely a corner has been spared her researches. I have stood there, hunched over, letting my gaze wander across the stacks and sprays and crosses of papers, some lying underneath glass paperweights borrowed from our mother’s collection downstairs, some shoved up against the single gabled window, some connected by pins and colored yarn-red for this, green for that. It is not right to call her creation a shambles. Mariah has explained the system to me, or tried to, during our late-night calls, and she has described for me the little black composition book where she has sketched her theories and drawn her connections. My ledger, she called it in one late-night call. Next to my family, the most precious thing I own. Looking around at the chaos that Mariah thinks is orderly, I worry. Surely Arthur Bremer’s apartment once looked as the attic now does. And John Hinckley’s. And Squeaky Fromme’s. I have had a few chats with Howard, who tells me that he is starting to worry about his wife, that he never sees her, she is down in Washington nearly every weekend. She often takes the children, too, sometimes bundling all five of them, along with the au pair of the moment-she fires them fast-into the Navigator for the rumble down the New Jersey Turnpike. Marshall and Malcolm are old enough to help a little with the sorting, but the twins only play, and Marcus, soon to relinquish his role as the baby, naps in my sister’s old bedroom on the second floor, watched over by the au pair, who rarely speaks English, at least to me.

Usually, when Mariah calls after a few days in the attic, we fight. The conversation always begins the same way. She whispers unhappily of her discoveries, always things I would rather not know-an ancient love letter to the Judge from a woman whose name neither of us quite recognizes, an award from his college fraternity for victory in a drinking contest, a note in his appointment book to meet some Senator whose politics make her ill. My sister sets great store by such artifacts. She believes that she is reconstructing our father, that she will learn from his simulacrum a deeper truth he kept hidden from us. That his shade lives on amidst the flotsam and jetsam of his written life, and that it will finally speak. I try to tell her that these are just worthless scraps of paper, that we should discard them, but I am speaking to a woman whose five-million-dollar home is decorated almost entirely with photographs of her unprepossessing children, and whose sentimentality, as Kimmer once observed, would lead her to save her children’s soiled diapers if she could only think of a way to do it neatly. I gently suggest to my stubborn sister that we did not understand our father when he was alive, and we will not understand him any better now that he is dead, but Mariah, alone among the children of Claire and Oliver Garland, has never conceded that there are things beyond her understanding, which is doubtless why she was the only one of us to earn straight A’s in college. I try to tell her that we certainly will not come to know the Judge through his papers, but Mariah remains a journalist at her core, with a master’s degree in history, and my words are a challenge to her faith. So, in the end, unable to bear another dramatic reading from a request for a zoning variance to enable installation of a nonconforming septic system at Vinerd Howse, I always tell her that I have problems of my own, and she snaps back that blood is thicker than water, which was one of our mother’s favorite phrases, and which Mariah repeats often, even if she claimed as a child to hate it. My sister and I are talking more often than in the past, but, truce or no truce, we get along as badly as we ever did.

Consequently, when she tells me that she has found something we need to talk about, I brace myself for the worst-meaning the most useless, boring, trivial. Or the scariest-more talk of bullet fragments, which, lately, she has not mentioned. Or the most likely-she has heard about the death of McDermott/Scott, and wants to explain how it fits into the conspiracy.

What actually comes out of her mouth, therefore, takes me by surprise.

“Tal, did you know Daddy owned a gun?”

“A gun?”

“Yes, a gun. As in a handgun. I found it last night, in the bedroom, in the back of a drawer. I was just looking for papers, and I found this gun. It was in a box, with… well, with some bullets. But that’s not why I called.” She pauses, presumably for dramatic effect, but there is no need: she has my full attention. “Tal, I had somebody look at it this afternoon. An expert? It’s been fired, Tal. Recently.”

CHAPTER 19

TWO TALES ARE TOLD

(I)

“The District of Columbia probably has the strictest gun law in the country,” Lemaster Carlyle assures me. “It’s pretty much impossible to obtain a permit there.” Pause. “On the other hand, Virginia is right across the river, and it is one of the easiest places in the civilized world to purchase a legal handgun. People buy them there and take them everywhere.”

“Huh,” is my thoughtful contribution.

“So, if a relative of mine who lived in D.C. died and left a gun behind”-in his teasing Barbadian lilt, he is tossing my transparent hypothetical back at me-“my guess would be that he purchased it in Virginia and simply ignored the District’s laws. Plenty of people do.”

I nod slowly, my half-finished grilled-chicken sandwich, the specialty of the house at Post, gone cold and chewy. Lemaster is a former prosecutor and knows about these things, but his information dovetails with my intuition. Once again, my father seems to have lived on the edge of the law. I would rather uncover fewer of these distressing tidbits of information, but I cannot seem to stop looking for them.

“You have to turn the gun in, of course.”

“What?”

“The gun. It is still unregistered and unlicensed. Nobody can legally possess it. It has to be turned in.”

“Oh.” Lemaster Carlyle is a person of sufficient integrity that I suspect this would be his advice even had he not spent three years as an Assistant United States Attorney before turning to the academic world. I watch him pick at his shrimp salad. He never seems to eat very much, never seems to gain an ounce of weight. His suits always fit perfectly. He is a small man with a huge mind, a few years older than I, a Harvard Law School graduate who was also in his day a divinity student before joining our ranks. His smooth, lean face, at once playful and wise, is a rich West Indian purple-black. His perfect wife, Julia, is as small and dark and cute as Lemaster himself. They live in one of our tonier suburbs with their four perfect children. He stands miles above me in the school’s unwritten hierarchy, and is adored by everybody in the building, and most alumni as well, for he is also a nearly perfect politician. Although he calls himself a progressive, Lem has voted Republican the last few elections, citing the Democratic Party’s opposition to school vouchers, which he sees as the only hope for the children of the inner city. He was cofounder and, for all I know, sole member of a forgotten organization called Liberals for Bush. His pithy, closely reasoned op-eds dot the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. He seems to be on television every five minutes. He is also said to be restless. Many of our colleagues are begging him to wait patiently to succeed Lynda Wyatt, becoming our first black dean, but the rumor mill reports that Lem has grown as bored with the academy as he has with most things he has conquered, and will soon be leaving us for a full-time position at one of the television networks. At the Judge’s funeral, people made a great fuss over him. I often wish I could like Lemaster more, and envy him less.

“And if the person who found the gun didn’t turn it in?” I press.

He sips his water-nobody claims ever to have seen him drink anything else-and shakes his slender head. His small eyes smile at me above a thin mustache. “Finding it is not a crime. Possessing it is a crime.”

So I will advise my sister to turn it in. Case closed.

Except that Lemaster Carlyle levers it back open. “This relative of yours, Talcott-do you know why he thought he needed a gun?”

“No.”

“Most people buy them for self-protection, even people who buy them illegally. But some of course are purchased in order to commit crimes.”

“Okay.”

He dabs at his lips with the paper napkin, then folds it carefully before depositing it on the table, next to his plate. He has eaten perhaps four bites. “If it were a relative of mine, I would not be interested in where he got the gun, or what could happen to me for possessing it. I would be interested in learning why he bought it in the first place.”

(II)

Back inside oldie, heading for the central staircase, I pretend to myself for a silly moment that I want to put all of this behind me. But I am no longer chasing the truth; the truth seems to be chasing me. Why did my father want a gun? To protect himself or to commit a crime, Lemaster Carlyle suggested. Neither one is happy news. What was my father involved in? I think of Jack Ziegler in the cemetery. I think of McDermott-Scott, deemed harmless by his local sheriff, but dead nevertheless, the circumstances suspicious. My shoulders sag. Kimmer’s judgeship seems miles and miles distant. I am struck by a sudden urge to rush upstairs to visit Theo Mountain, for I need to be cheered up, but I have to avoid making my onetime mentor my full-time crutch.

I pass a knot of students: Crysta Smallwood arguing heatedly with several other women of color, as they nowadays style themselves. A few words float outward from their confab: dialectical interstices and outsider position and reconstructed other. I long for the days when students argued over the rules of civil procedure or the statute of limitations, back when the nation’s leading law schools thought their job was teaching law.

Nearing my office, I notice Arnold Rosen, one of the faculty’s great liberal hard-liners, gliding toward me in his powered wheelchair. He smiles his thin, superior smile, and I smile back reluctantly, for we are not close. I admire Arnie’s mind and his determination to stick to his principles, but I am not sure that he admires anything in me, especially given that I am the son of the great conservative hero. Arnie came to us from Harvard about a decade ago, Stuart Land’s masterful recruiting coup, and is said to be Lem Carlyle’s only competitor to succeed Dean Lynda when she one day steps down.

A flick of his finger on a control rod slows the chair. His pale eyes are distant and judgmental as he looks up at me. “Good afternoon, Talcott.”

“Hi, Arnie.” My key is in my hand, signaling, I hope, that I do not really feel much like talking just now.

“I don’t think I’ve had the chance to tell you how sorry I am about your father.”

“Thank you,” I mutter, too tired to be annoyed by his hypocrisy. Arnie teaches legal ethics and a variety of commercial law courses and is a prodigious scholar, but saves his real enthusiasm for the three great causes of the contemporary left: abortion, gay rights, and a very strict separation of church and state. A few months ago, my former student Shirley Branch, the first black woman we have ever hired, gave a paper at the semi-weekly faculty lunch arguing that the form of separation we intellectuals today take for granted is too strict, that its application would have harmed, for example, the civil rights movement. Arnie disagreed, suggesting that Shirley’s notion would lead us back to the days of America as a Christian nation. The two of them went at it quite heatedly, until Rob Saltpeter, the moderator, defused the situation with a wry observation: The trouble with America is not that it is a Christian nation but that too often it isn’t.

Rob, like Lem, has style.

“You know, Talcott,” Arnie murmurs, smiling up at me, “one of our colleagues came to talk to me about you the other day.”

“About me? What about me?”

“Well, it was peculiar. He thought you might have violated a rule of ethics. I set him straight, I assure you.”

I sway on my feet. “What rule? What are you talking about?”

“You’re doing some consulting work for a corporation. Something to do with toxic torts, correct?”

“Uh… yes. Yes, I am. So?”

“Well, our colleague asked me if it was proper for you to continue to write in the area when you were getting paid as an advocate to take a particular view.”

“What!”

“You see the problem, I’m sure. Legal scholarship is supposed to be objective. That’s our myth and we cling to it. We have to, or we’re in the wrong business. That’s why the school frowns on professors’ doing too much consulting work.”

“I understand that, but-”

Arnie circles his chair backward an inch or two, waves a hand in dismissal. “Not to worry, Talcott. It’s a common misconception. There is no rule against it-there aren’t really any ethical rules about legal scholarship-and, besides-”

“And, besides, I would never slant my scholarship for the sake of a fee!”

“Well, that’s what I said, too.” Nodding his head. “But our colleague seemed pretty sure. I have the impression we haven’t heard the end of this.”

I make a small sound. Disbelief, maybe, or simply anger. Is this more of the pressure Stuart mentioned?

“Arnie, listen. Who was it that came to you? Who brought this up?”

His hand flaps again. “Ah, Talcott, I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”

“You can’t? Why not?”

“Attorney-client privilege.” Still smiling, he sails off down the hall.

CHAPTER 20

THE HALLS OF JUSTICE

(I)

“Misha, it is so good to see you.” A hug, because I am a man and he is a man. Male judges nowadays are afraid to hug their female clerks, or so my father used to say. But some of his facts he made up. “Come in, come in.”

Wallace Warrenton Wainwright steps to one side, beckoning me to join him in his inner office. The chubby black messenger who walked me in from the clerk’s office has vanished. As the door to the anteroom closes, it is just me and Wallace Wainwright. He is a tall man, at least five inches over six feet, with shoulders more thick than muscular, thinning brown-white hair, and a pale, studied asceticism about his friendly face. He seems too happy to be as smart as he is. He looks less like a judge than a friar-Franciscan, to be sure-and if you sat next to him on an airplane, you would never take Wallace Wainwright for an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. But that is how history will record him. Outside this spacious room, computers buzz and bleep, printers zip, law clerks rush about, telephones softly burr-the sounds, as Justice Wainwright would surely describe the tumult, of justice being done. And maybe, from time to time, the Court has done justice, but a good deal less than most people seem to assume, for it has been, for most of its history, a follower, not an agent, of change. We law professors like to speak and write as though the past is otherwise, as though the Justices have lately abandoned a traditional role of protecting the weak against the strong.

We speak and write nonsense.

Like every other social institution, the Court has mainly been the ally of the insiders, a proposition that should come as no surprise, because only the insiders become the Presidents who nominate the Justices, the Senators who confirm them-or the candidates from whom the nominees are chosen in the first place. Liberals point to Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade as though they have identified the Court’s appropriate role in the nation’s governance, whereas all they have really identified is a peculiar epoch in history, during which the Justices set about trying to change America rather than trying to keep it the same. The epoch died, and the Court swiftly faded as an engine of social evolution, which probably would have made the Framers of the Constitution very happy. After all, Madison and Hamilton were insiders too.

Justice Wainwright-Mr. Justice Wainwright, they would have said in the grand old sexist tradition-is very much an insider, for he knows everybody. Everybody, that is, who matters in Washington. Small wonder that he, alone among the Justices, attended my father’s funeral. He attends every wedding in town, so why not every burial? As I look around the room at his grand blue carpet and grander wooden desk, my eyes light upon his ego wall, a montage of photographs of the Justice with everybody from Mkhail Gorbachev to Bob Dylan to the Pope. There is a photograph of a stern Wainwright in Marine dress uniform, and another frame holds his decorations. There is a photograph of a smiling Wainwright with a clutch of babies in his lap: grandchildren, I suppose. The remaining walls are lined with solid wooden bookshelves holding the hundreds of cream-colored volumes of the United States Reports, the official record of the decisions of the Supreme Court, even though, in this digital age, no lawyer under the age of thirty opens the books any more, for everything in the books is also online (or so, unfortunately, young lawyers believe). I shake my head, trying and failing to envision my father in this magnificent office, had things gone otherwise. A wave of fatalism sweeps over me, the sense that nothing anybody could have done would have changed the inevitable outcome.

Nothing.

Wallace Wainwright, with his fine political eye, notices my uneasiness, puts a hand on my elbow, and directs me to a plush blue sofa. He perches on a hard wooden chair standing catercorner to it. Over his shoulder, through the high window, is a view of the Capitol building, its massive dome dull gray in the unkempt drizzle that is so predictable a part of a Washington December. Despite the weather, I revel in the delicious independence of the truant. I am playing hooky this wet afternoon from the conference on tort reform that is paying the expenses for my visit to the city; I am insufficiently grand to be missed. Yet, now that I am seated in Wainwright’s chambers, the appointment arranged by Rob Saltpeter, who clerked for Wainwright years ago, I try to figure out how to begin. I fidget like a nervous first-year student forced unwillingly to recite a case.

Wallace Wainwright waits. And waits. He can afford to wait, or not to wait, as he likes. He knows who he is. He sits at the summit of the legal world and has nobody left to impress. His suit is mousy and shapeless and brown, more what you find in the secondhand shops down in Southeast than what you expect a Supreme Court Justice to wear. His old narrow tie is askew. His blue shirt is poorly pressed and unevenly tucked. Despite his impressive name, Wallace Wainwright comes, as the Judge used to say in some astonishment, from no particular background. The Wainwright family, again according to my father, was Tennessee trailer trash. Wallace, the middle brother among five, lied and cajoled and borrowed his way through UT, attended Vanderbilt’s law school on a scholarship, and, in his early years of law practice, sent half his paycheck home, sometimes more if somebody from his vastly extended family needed surgery or the down payment for a car. Yet nowadays he lives in a small but pricey row house in Georgetown, with a huge country place for the weekends, twenty-five acres with horses for his daughters to ride, out near the town of Washington, sometimes called “Little Washington,” in the middle of the Virginia hunt country. My father used to shake his head, bemused that his onetime colleague married rather well.

Associate Justice Wallace Warrenton Wainwright, the intellectual giant.

The man of the people.

The darling of the legal academy.

The last of the great liberal judges.

And the closest thing my father had to a friend when they sat together on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is the real reason I have come. Despite their marked ideological differences, the two men were united in the belief that their minds were greater than those of the other judges on the court, a condescension not infrequently reflected in their dissenting opinions. It occurs to me that a court can be a little like a law school, or at least like mine. There are tiers, at least in the minds of those who assign themselves to the highest one. Judges Garland and Wainwright believed themselves to occupy a tier of their own, much to the resentment, so I have heard from Eddie Dozier, of the rest of the court. Although my father was perhaps a decade older than Wainwright, they used to pal around outside the courthouse too, playing golf and poker and fishing a bit, back before scandal destroyed my father’s career. Even afterward, Wainwright tried to keep in touch, but eventually-so Addison has told me-the strain on my father was too much. The Judge was sitting still, even tumbling downward, and his old friend Wallace was still climbing the ladder. When the Democrats recaptured the White House, everybody knew that Wainwright would fill the first vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Everybody was right.

We sit in silence a moment longer, as I try to force myself to press forward. But the depression that has characterized the past couple of months has seized me once more, slowing my reason, increasing my doubts and fears. This morning I dropped by Corcoran amp; Klein, where Meadows, as promised, let me look around my father’s empty corner office just down the hall from Uncle Mal’s. Mrs. Rose, who was the Judge’s assistant forever, is long gone, retired and moved to Phoenix. The room itself was truly empty: after the new carpet, repainting, and drapes, not even the Judge’s ghost would be hanging around. But the inspection was just for show. I really dropped in to buy Cassie Meadows a cup of coffee so that I could have her undivided attention and watch her spontaneous reaction when I asked her whether my father had left behind one of those if-anything-should-happen-to-me notes.

Meadows never flinched. She thought it over, tapping a long finger against nearly invisible lips. “If he did, I wouldn’t be privy to it. That kind of thing would be more Mr. Corcoran’s department than mine.”

The response I expected. I knew the answer to my next question before I asked it: No, Mr. Corcoran isn’t in. He’s away in Europe for a few weeks.

(II)

“It’s good of you to see me,” I begin, feeling awkward and childish in the face of this physical, human reminder of all my ambitious father sought to attain… and failed to achieve.

“Nonsense,” Wallace Wainwright huffs, with a surreptitious look at his watch-a Timex for the man of the people-before settling in his uncomfortable chair, crossing his bony legs, folding his large hands on his knee, which he at once begins to jiggle. “I’m just sorry we haven’t had the chance to sit down in so long.”

“It has been a long time,” I agree.

“How’s your lovely wife?” the Justice asks, even though I am fairly sure he has never laid eyes on Kimmer in his life. He is famous for a twisted, kindly smile, and he displays it now. Learned articles have been written on its significance. “I understand you have a couple of children now. Or is it just the one?”

“Just Bentley. He’s three.”

“A wonderful age,” he says, filling the time with these irrelevancies. I do not know whether he is trying to put me at my ease or to put me off. “I remember when mine were three. Well, not all at once,” he adds pedantically. “But I remember each of them.”

“You have three children? Is that what I remember?”

“Four,” he corrects me gently, ending my effort to show that I, too, am a social being. “All girls,” he muses. “An intriguing variety of ages.”

Still he waits.

Nowhere to go but forward.

“Mr. Justice, I wanted to talk to you, if you are willing, about my father.” He raises his eyebrows in gentle inquisition, and waits some more. “About those last couple of years he spent on the bench. Before… well, before what happened.”

“Of course, Misha, of course.” Charming as ever. Years ago, honoring his friendship with my father, I invited Wainwright to call me by my nickname, and he has never stopped. “Those were difficult years. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for you, and I am so sorry about it all.”

“Thank you, Mr. Justice. I know what your friendship meant to the

… to my father.”

Justice Wainwright smiles again. “Oh, well, he was a very special man. He meant a great deal to me. A giant, an absolute giant. The finest judicial craftsman it has ever been my privilege to know. I suppose you would have to say he was my mentor on the bench. Yes. What happened… well, it does nothing to alter my admiration for him.” A pause, now that he has made his little speech. “Yes. So. What would you like to know?”

Here goes. “Well, I was wondering… not about the days after what happened, but the days before. When he was nominated in the first place. Around then. What was going on. Including what was, or wasn’t, going on with Jack Ziegler.”

“You know, it’s interesting. Interesting. Nobody has asked me about any of this, not even when the Congress”- the is his affectation, as are the studied repetitions and pauses that give him time to think-“was doing all those investigations. A few reporters, I guess, who somehow wangled my home number. Reporters. Of course I didn’t talk to them.” Like most judges, Wallace Wainwright regards journalists in the way that the human body probably views the E. coli bacterium: you know you need a little of it for everything to work right, but you still kind of keep hoping somebody will kill it off. “There’s been a great silence about your father, Misha. A silence. Yes. I mean about what it was like in the courthouse in those days. And maybe that’s best.”

I hesitate. Is he warning me away or drawing me in? I do not know. I cannot read the signs. So I press my own agenda instead. “That’s what I want to know, I guess. What it was like in the courthouse. What my father was like in those days.”

“What it was like.” Repeating my line, repeating his, the Justice recrosses his long legs and leans back in his chair. He is looking now not at me but at the ceiling, where, perhaps, he is reading the waves and currents of memory. “Well. Yes. You have to remember that, at the time all of this happened, your father was a nominee for the Supreme Court.”

“I know that.”

He catches my impatience and patiently corrects it. “Well, you know and you don’t know. You have to have a sense of what a court is like when one of the judges is headed for the high bench-or when everybody thinks he is headed that way, anyway. I’ve been through that several times. Several times. I was there for Bob Bork. For Oliver Garland. For Doug Ginsburg.” A wry smile. “Of course, when I list the names that way, I guess you could say the odds are not very good from the D.C. Circuit.”

I smile back.

“But, still, even though none of those nominees… ah, none of them prevailed… even so, at the time of the announcement, the atmosphere was, well, special.”

“Special how?” I prompt.

“Well,” says the Justice again. “Well, now, at first, when Reagan announced that he was nominating your father? Nobody was entirely surprised, but, still, there was this… this excitement around the place. Your dad, well, he was always an impressive figure, but, after the news was out, he kind of… when he walked down the hall, into the courtroom, wherever, it was kind of… well, breathtaking, I suppose. Breathtaking. I mean that literally. It was as though he was incandescent, burning the oxygen right out of the air. I don’t know what the word is. Magic, maybe. People did not exactly fawn over him. No. Come to think of it, it was just the opposite. People drew back a little bit, grew… mmmm, let’s say diffident, as though he was being elevated to some higher plane of existence, and the rest of us mortals were no longer fit company. No longer fit. Not a king, but.. . a crown prince! That’s the analogy. There was this… this glow. Incandescent,” he repeats.

I nod, hoping he will get to the point. Wainwright’s judicial opinions have this same scattered quality, full of weak allusions and awkward metaphors. Law professors reward him for this literary confusion by referring to his writing as stylish. But perhaps my own tendency to drabness makes me envious.

“Well. Your father handled it all beautifully. We might have been diffident, the other judges, and, especially, the law clerks, but your father was as friendly as always.” Another smile, soft, reminiscing, and I wonder whether he is teasing, for the Judge was many things, some of them admirable, but none of them friendly. “You know, now that I think about it, I suppose your father had a lot of time to prepare himself, to think about how he would behave if lightning struck. You might remember that it was not exactly a surprise. Your dad was one of the finalists, it was in all the papers, and, besides, people were talking about your dad even back in ’80, right after the election. Yes. Right after the election. Come to think of it, when Reagan was elected, some right-winger or other-excuse me, no offense to your father-but somebody from one of those terribly conservative think tanks was quoted in the newspaper about your father as the possible successor to Justice Marshall. He said something offensive, something like, ‘I hope Thurgood is keeping Oliver’s seat warm.’ Words to that effect.”

I have forgotten the atmosphere of the time, but Justice Wainwright’s tale brings it tumbling back. I even remember, for the first time in years, the quote he mentioned. I was outraged by it, and so was nearly everybody else I knew, including my father. Outraged by the presumption, for instance, that there could be only one black Justice at a time. And by the presumption that the speaker was on a first-name basis with both my father and the great Thurgood Marshall. And then the racist choice-there is no other way to put it-to call both jurists by their first names. I cannot recall any similar quote along the lines of “I hope Lewis is keeping Bob’s seat warm”-not when the Justice and the potential nominee were both white. My father, for a strange, shining, sacrificial moment, pondered removing himself from all consideration as a future member of the Court, out of respect for Justice Marshall, before flaring ambition triumphed once more.

“I remember,” is all I say now.

“It was a terrible thing to say, Misha, a terrible thing, and your father was furious. But, well, this Court… there’s been a circus atmosphere around the nominations for decades. Longer. It goes back at least to Brandeis. Maybe even to Salmon Chase, or Roger Taney. Of course you know the storms their nominations caused! Well, this is getting far afield, and I know I’m boring you. You didn’t want to know about the mood around the courthouse. You know it already. You wanted to know… well, about your dad around this time, right?”

“Yes. Whatever you feel you can share.”

“Mmmm.” Wainwright has unveiled a different nervous gesture. He is worrying his retreating hair with one hand, drumming the fingers of the other on the arm of the chair. Doing both at once is actually a rather impressive display of coordination, like the juggler who also dances on a ball. “I’ll tell you, Misha, your father, as I said… he was incandescent. But not always. Even before the scandal broke, there were times, when I would catch Oliver at an unguarded moment, when he seemed… strained, I suppose, is the word. Worried about something. Yes. We would meet in the judges’ elevator and he would look tense and I would ask him what was wrong. I would remind him he should be walking on air. Yes. And he would shrug and mutter about how anything can come out in these hearings. ‘Look at Fortas,’ he said one night when we went down to the garage together. ‘The man takes perfectly legal money from a foundation and they destroy him for it.’” Wainwright twists his mouth in prim distaste. “Not that the problem with Fortas was legality, of course. He took money from… well, a shady character.” Then he sits up straight. “I guess I see the comparison.”

I am stunned. “You’re not saying… my father didn’t…”

“Take money? Oh, no, no, nothing like that. I’m sorry, Misha, I didn’t mean to leave that impression.” Wainwright actually laughs. “Your father taking money. That’s a real joke. I know there were some nasty rumors about that, but I knew your father as well as anybody, I sat with him on, literally, hundreds of cases over the years. I would have known. We all would have known. No chance. None. What a silly idea. I am only trying to explain that your father was nervous, that he thought something would come out, something perfectly innocent that would be distorted into something completely different.”

“Did you have any idea, at the time, what that something might be?”

“No, no. How could I? Your father was-what’s the old phrase?-oh, yes, a man of transparent rectitude. An impeccable resume, a wonderful marriage, fine children. An exemplary career. Nobody would have imagined that scandal could attach itself to such a man. Your father was a great man, Misha, no matter what happened. You have to bear his greatness in mind.”

He is trying to reassure me, I know, but I find his cockiness off-putting. On the day of the funeral, Mallory Corcoran, too, spoke of my father’s greatness, and I sensed he meant the past tense. I wonder now whether Wallace Wainwright means the same thing. For a difficult moment, it bothers me, Wainwright’s smugness. Bothers me, I know full well, because he is white and untouchable. Was the Judge this smug? Would he have been as smug had he been confirmed? Yes, I suppose he was, and, yes, I suppose he would have been, except that he would have behaved even worse. But it would have been different. And not because he is-was-my father. After all the painful centuries, there is still a gap, a gulf, a yawning chasm between the smugness of a successful white man and the smugness of a successful black man. I suppose that white folk must find the first far easier to bear. Not black folk, however. Not this one, at least.

Yet I must press on to my point. I am not here to judge Wallace Wainwright. I am here to gather information. I am here because of the arrangements. Because there is little time. Because I have to know.

(III)

“Justice Wainwright, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to ask you about what happened… um, after the scandal broke.”

“By all means.” He settles his hands over his knee, looking for all the world like an alert schoolboy. But his generosity seems forced, as though I am opening a wound, and perhaps I am.

“Do you remember the security logs from the hearings? How they registered all those visits from Jack Ziegler?”

He nods slowly. “I wish I didn’t. It was a sad moment.”

If it was sad for you, I almost say, think of how it felt for us. Until the logs showed up, I suppose I mostly believed my father’s denials, under oath, of Jack Ziegler’s visits. I was quite ready to accept that Greg Haramoto was, whether out of bizarre mental illness or sheer perversity, a perjurer. Even after the Democrats sprung the logs, when my mother would no longer speak to us on the question, Mariah and I would sit around for hours in the evening, arguing over whether (as my sister proposed) the records might somehow have been forged.

I can say little of this to Wallace Wainwright. “Yes, it was. A very sad moment. But let me ask you a question. Do you believe my father was lying when he said he had not met Jack Ziegler at the courthouse?”

Wainwright is definitely nervous now; this is territory he would rather not cover; and it occurs to me, too late, how much he is like me, for I, too, hate to deliver unpleasant news in person. Waiting, I notice, to my surprise, a photograph I had overlooked before: Wainwright and my father, standing in a small boat, displaying the fish they have caught. That he would keep this picture hanging, in the Supreme Court yet, touches me deeply. I realize with a surge of warmth that his affection for my father is not feigned; that Wallace Wainwright never cut him off as other friends did; and that he came to the funeral because we were burying a man he admired. He will not, of his own free will, say a bad word about my father. So, even before the Justice speaks, I know roughly what he is going to say. “Misha, you have to understand, your father was in a difficult position. A difficult position. Yes. Obviously, he did not attach much attention to the courthouse visits. Forgive me. It was the first time I ever saw Oliver overwhelmed. He was not quite able to believe people were making such an issue over the matter. For him-for your father-the visits were simply acts of friendship, occasions to offer comfort to his college buddy who had gotten himself into trouble. You remember what your father used to say about friendship? Something to do with bricks…”

I have the words ready: “Friendship is a promise of future loyalty, loyalty no matter what comes. Promises are the bricks of life and trust is the mortar.”

“Yes, that’s it. Bricks and mortar.” The twisted smile again, giving him the cherubic look his fans adore. “So you see the point. To your father, it was all so terribly unfair. On television, before the nation, in the scrutiny of the media, the visits looked sinister. To your father, they were innocent gestures of friendship. Innocent. Yes. I think he simply decided there was no sensible way of explaining them-that is, nothing that would make sense in that hearing room. So of course he denied the meetings. You’re a semiotician. You know what I’m trying to say. Yes. Your father did not mean that there were no meetings. He was denying the meetings as his critics were constructing them, not as he himself understood them. Had the question been, ‘And did you, out of loyalty and friendship, meet with Jack Ziegler and encourage him to keep his spirits up in his time of travail?’-something more like that-well, then, I think perhaps Oliver would have given a more acceptable answer.” He notices something in my face. “I’m sorry, Misha, I know this is not exactly the answer you wanted.”

“I just want to understand. You’re saying my father lied. When you cut away all the underbrush, that’s it, right? He lied under oath?”

Wainwright sighs. “Yes, Misha. I’m sorry. I do think your father lied.”

“So Jack Ziegler was in the courthouse on… well, however many occasions it was.”

“Three, I believe.” Greg Haramoto only knew of one visit. The courthouse logs told the nation about the others.

“I think that’s right. Three meetings, all after hours.”

“Yes. After hours.”

My turn to see something in his face. He drops his eyes briefly. I have no idea what could be troubling him. And then I do. “You knew,” I say softly, wonderingly.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Oh, no. You knew. You… you saw them in the hallway or something. Maybe you dropped by my father’s chambers after hours, and there was Jack Ziegler. But somehow… somehow you knew, didn’t you? You knew my father was meeting with Jack Ziegler.”

He looks off toward the far window, as though the view of the Library of Congress down the hill will rescue him from the dilemma into which he has talked himself. “This is off the record. You’re not writing a memoir or an essay for The Atlantic or something like that, are you?”

“It’s off the record,” I agree. I would agree to almost anything to get him to keep talking.

“I’ll deny it if you quote me.”

“I understand.”

Wallace Wainwright sighs. “Yes, Misha, I knew,” he says to the wall. “I saw them together, as you say. Not in the hallway. In the elevator. The private elevator for judges. Late one night. It must have been, oh, ten o’clock. Maybe later. I didn’t notice the time, because I didn’t attach so much… so much importance to it when it happened. Anyway, you will recall that my chambers and your father’s were on the same floor. I rang for the elevator, and, when it arrived, there was your father and a man I did not recognize at first. Both of them seemed surprised to see me. In retrospect, I suppose your father thought all the other judges had left the building, so that taking the private elevator was a good way to whisk Mr. Ziegler in while minimizing the chances that anybody would see. I don’t know. Anyway, they were, as I say, quite surprised. Quite surprised. But Oliver was never caught up short. He introduced us. He described his companion as his college roommate, I believe, and at first I attached no significance to the name.”

“At first?”

“Perhaps I was a little slow that night. It hit me a couple of days later. That the man in the elevator was not just a Jack Ziegler-he was the Jack Ziegler. An accused murderer, extortionist, I don’t know what else. Right in the courthouse, with a federal judge. Which left me, to say the least, uneasy. As well as unsure what to do. Quite unsure. Perhaps I should have talked to your father directly. Perhaps I should have raised the matter with the chief judge. In the event, I did not acquit myself admirably. I said nothing to anybody. I suppose I thought your father had his reasons. After all, I respected him, I considered him a man of enormous integrity. I still do.”

“Even though he lied under oath.”

“That was a terrible, terrible mistake on his part, Misha. To be perfectly honest with you, I considered it disqualifying. Lying under oath! I told you before that I understood it, but I do not want you to think for a moment that I approved of it. Not at all. Your father was right to withdraw. It was an honorable thing to do. Or would have been, that is, if your father had only shown… well, some contrition. Contrition. Yes. Your father… I know, Misha, that this is hard for you. But the fact is that he never seemed to accept that he had done anything wrong, either by bringing a man about to stand trial for murder into the courthouse or by lying about it under oath. Unfortunately, like a lot of defeated nominees, all your father could think about was the motives of the people who had ferreted out the visits in the first place. And now I have to apologize again. You have come seeking assurance and I have made a speech, and a painful one at that.”

“No, that’s okay. I know my father lied.” A pause. “But there is one thing I don’t understand. If you knew about Jack Ziegler from way back when it happened, why didn’t you speak to anyone about it when the issue arose during the confirmation hearings?”

He answers so quickly I know he has anticipated me. “Nobody ever asked. The FBI never came around and interviewed the other judges, you know.”

“You could have volunteered the information. You would have spared Greg Haramoto so much anguish.”

“Oh, Misha, really! One judge ratting on another. Unthinkable. It simply isn’t done. Nor is it in the spirit of the Constitution. The legislative branch passes upon the fitness of the nominees for the judiciary. It would not have been right for me, as a member of the third branch, to try to influence a confirmation hearing in any respect.”

I like Wallace Wainwright, maybe because my father did, but his cocksureness astounds me, as much in person as in his opinions, where the implication, often, is that a law must be unconstitutional because he happens not to like it.

“I appreciate that,” I say after a moment, not at all sure that I do. I wonder whether Wainwright stayed out of my father’s mess precisely to protect his own chances. I do not know whether it is unthinkable for one judge to rat on another, but it surely would not help either one of them get to the Supreme Court. “However, I need to understand something else.”

“Of course,” says Wainwright, struggling against his impatience.

“When my father… when he met with Jack Ziegler. That was in the evening.”

“Yes. Fairly late, as I said.”

“That wasn’t unusual, was it? For my father to be at the courthouse so late?”

“Unusual?” He smiles. “No, Misha, not at all. I worked long hours, too, but nothing like Oliver. You have to remember the kind of man your father was. The kind of judge. He was-you know the old phrase-a demon for details. I remember one oral argument, an appeal of some kind of criminal conviction, in which the lawyer for the convicted man made the mistake of playing to your father’s vanity, quoting some dissenting opinion your father wrote in his early days on the bench. Your father asked him, ‘Counsel, do you know how many times that issue has come before this court since I wrote those words?’ The poor man didn’t know. Your father said, ‘Seventeen times. Do you know how many times the court has rejected that approach? Seventeen times. And do you know how many of those opinions I wrote?’ Oh, the wretched lawyer! He did what every first-year law student learns never to do: he guessed. He said, ‘Seventeen, Your Honor?’ Walking right into the trap, you see. Your father said, ‘None. I adhere to the views you quoted,’ and the entire courtroom bursts out laughing. But not the lawyer and not your father. He was not making a joke, he was teaching a lesson. And he couldn’t resist adding a second punch line. ‘My views don’t matter, counsel. In a federal appellate court, you have to cite the law of the circuit, not the views of the individual judges. Perhaps you remember that from law school.’”

I close my eyes briefly. I can easily imagine the Judge using his wit so nastily, because he did it all the time.

Wainwright isn’t finished.

“But, Misha, most of the time, your father’s penchant for details didn’t hurt anybody that way. For instance, whenever a case came before us involving, say, an EPA standard, he would insist on reading the entire rulemaking record himself, instead of leaving it to his law clerks, as most of us would. And we’re talking rulemaking records that could run to more than twenty thousand pages. He would say, ‘If I can read Trollope I can read this.’ Or say there was a case in which one of the parties was obviously a dummy corporation, registered in, say, the Cayman Islands or Netherlands Antilles? Your father would demand that the corporation file-under seal, of course-a list of its actual owners, not just the shells within shells where they were hidden. Or a public interest group? He would require a list of donors.”

I am, in spite of my mission, fascinated. “He could do that?”

“Well, not by himself. It would take an order from the panel hearing the case. Since the panel had three judges, two would have to agree to the request. But it was unanimous, at least in every case I can remember. A matter of intrajudicial courtesy, I suppose.”

“And would the corporations or whatever turn over the records?”

“What else was there to do? Appeal to the Supreme Court? Even assuming that the Justices paid any attention to a request for a stay-which is very unlikely-and assuming they granted it-which is even more unlikely-what would a corporation really have accomplished by the appeal? I’ll tell you. It would have pissed off at least one judge, and maybe two or three. Even if the stay was granted, so the documents or whatever didn’t have to be disclosed, the corporation would still have to go back to the same panel of three judges to have the case heard. So who wants to argue in front of three judges you’ve just made very angry by appealing what seemed to them a pretty innocuous order?” He chuckles softly in delighted reminiscence. “Oh, but he was fun on the bench, your father! And such a fine judge. Such a fine judge.”

But I know what he is really thinking, as I am: Such a waste. Such a waste. Looking at Wainwright’s sad face, I am tempted, for a moment, to ask him if he ever heard my father mention the word Excelsior, or perhaps a woman named Angela, who might have a boyfriend. I wonder if he knew my father owned a gun. Or why he would want one. I cannot quite bring myself to raise these questions, however, perhaps because I would feel too much like… well, the unnamed reporter in Citizen Kane, tracking down “Rosebud.” So I skip to the single question I am really here to ask.

“Justice Wainwright”-I notice that, despite our long family friendship, he has not invited me to call him anything else-“this is. .. this isn’t easy.” He makes a magnanimous gesture. I continue. “A few minutes ago, you made a comment about… uh, money…”

“Let me anticipate you, Misha. You’re wondering the same thing the press wondered for a couple of years after the hearings, if there was anything other than friendship between your father and Jack Ziegler, right? The same thing all those congressional committees wanted to know. You’re asking whether I think your father did little favors on the bench for his old roommate. You’re asking, money aside, if he was a corrupt judge.”

Now that the words have been spoken, they seem less frightening. I can handle the answer. “Yes, sir. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m wondering.”

Justice Wainwright frowns, drums his fingers on the table. He does not so much drop his eyes as cast them toward the right-hand wall, his ego wall, where that photograph of him and the Judge on a fishing trip continues to surprise me, for one would think that a political animal like Wallace Wainwright would have removed it long ago. Then I remember how he offered my father a character reference once the hearings took their painful turn, was willing, even, to testify in person to the Judge’s honesty, no matter what the damage to his own career. My father, although grateful, turned him down flat. But my affection for Wallace Wainwright surges afresh at the recollection.

The Justice continues to ponder. I allow the moment to spin out. His balding head at last swivels in my direction once more, and a smile twitches at the corners of his mouth. “No, Misha. The answer is no. All those investigators, all those committees, all those journalists, none of them ever turned up anything. You have to remember that. They turned up nothing. Not one single thing. The reason is that there was nothing to turn up. Your father was a man of enormous integrity, Misha, as I told you. You mustn’t lose sight of that, no matter what he might have done.” I realize he is referring to his political views, his later career on the speaking circuit, not the scandal. “Please don’t think for a moment that your father was doing anything contrary to judicial ethics. Please don’t think of him as corrupt. Put that right out of your head. Your father would no more have sold his vote on a case than… than”-a pause while he searches for just the right simile, then a mischievous grin to tell me he has found it-“why, than I would,” he finishes with a self-deprecating smile, realizing, perhaps, that he has played perfectly into his own image as moderately egomaniacal.

I am almost done. One last bit of confusion to clear up.

“So, if my father was a man of such integrity and such intelligence”-I hesitate here: did Wainwright actually say at any point that my father was smart? I cannot recall, and, when white intellectuals speak of black ones, the question is of no small importance-“if he was so honest and so smart, then why did he bring Jack Ziegler into the courthouse? He could have met with him anywhere. At home. At a golf resort. In a parking lot. Why take the risk?”

Wainwright’s eyes grow soft and distant, and the sad little smile returns. When at last he speaks, I at first think he is answering a different question from the one I asked, before I realize that he needs to sketch the preamble.

“You know, Misha, I never raised the question of Jack Ziegler with your father. But he raised it with me. We had dinner together, it must have been six or eight months after he… resigned from the bench. Yes. He was, at that point, not yet the… um, angry polemicist he would soon become. He was still in despair. Confused, I think. Yes. Confused. He still could not see how things had turned around on him so swiftly. And he asked me-the only time he ever wanted my advice!-he asked me what I would have done in his place. About Jack Ziegler. I told him I did not know how I would have handled the questions. I guess I was trying to be political. Then I saw I had misunderstood him. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Not the hearing. Earlier. If he was your friend. Would you have abandoned him?’ I realized he was talking about the courthouse visits. And I wondered the same thing you did. I told him that, if I felt I had to meet with a friend who was in trouble, and if there was even a whiff of scandal about the friend, I would do it someplace private. Your father nodded. He seemed very sad. But this is what he said, Misha: ‘I had no choice.’ Something like that. I asked him what he meant, why he had to bring Jack Ziegler into his chambers, but he just shook his head and went on to another subject.” A pause before he tells me the final piece of the truth. “He wasn’t himself that night, Misha. He probably didn’t know what he was saying.” Wainwright stops abruptly. I wonder whether he was about to tell me that my father had started drinking again. He folds his hands over his mouth, then opens them and smiles sadly. “Remember his greatness, Misha. That’s what I try to do.”

Suddenly, unaccountably, I am furious. At the Judge for his cryptic note, at Uncle Mal for not taking my calls, at the late Colin Scott for harassing me, at Lynda Wyatt and Marc Hadley and Cameron Knowland and everybody else who has brought me to this moment. But, just now, I am mostly angry at Wallace Warrenton Wainwright.

“I want to remember my father as he actually was,” I say calmly. I do not add: I just have to find out who he was first.

Ten minutes later, I leave the building by the main entrance, descending the steep marble stairs past shivering knots of tourists waiting for a peek inside the temple of our national oracle. Yes, Associate Justice Wallace Wainwright is an egomaniac, but it is that very ego on which I am counting. If Wainwright is willing to put my father in his own lofty company, then he surely believes what he says.

Bottom line: the Judge did not sell his vote to Jack Ziegler and his friends.

So what was he doing? I know what Wainwright was trying to tell me at the end, even if he could not quite say the words: he thinks the Judge brought Uncle Jack into his chambers because he wanted someone to see them together. He wanted, in short, to get caught. But, if the Justice is right, what did my father want to get caught at?

CHAPTER 21

A TRIP AROUND THE CIRCLE

The tort-reform conference is at the Washington Hilton Hotel and Towers, located on Connecticut Avenue, a few blocks north of Dupont Circle. Following my meeting with Justice Wainwright, I do not return to the hotel directly; I am searching, desperately, for distractions. Instead, I have the taxi drop me on Eye Street to see the bookseller I visited the last time I was in the city; not only does the man remember me, but he assures me that he is on the track of the Fischer pamphlet I asked about. We chat about a few other matters, then I stroll a few blocks up to L Street for a quick swing through Brooks Brothers, in an unsuccessful search for the perfect tie to wear with a yellow silk blazer that Kimmer bought me on her last trip to San Francisco-another second-place trophy to add to my collection. I buy a couple of pairs of socks, then flag down a taxi to return to the hotel to catch the late-afternoon panels.

As the taxi driver goes around the block and heads north on Twentieth Street, I lean back and try to relax. Despite the tension in my muscles, I even manage to doze a bit, required in these tense days to grab a nap where I can.

Then the taxi turns right onto New Hampshire Avenue, and the driver suddenly says: “None my business, sir, but you know car behind is following us?”

Fully awake, I spin in my seat.

“What car?”

“Little green car. There. You see?”

I see it. It is two or three cars behind us, some cookie-cutter American sedan.

“How do you know it’s following us?”

“After I pick you up, I go around block to point taxi right way.” To charge a higher fare, he means; in Washington, where there are no meters, all that matters in adding up the fare is how many fare zones the cab crosses, and drivers often choose one street rather than another to cross a zonal line. “Green car go around block also. I turn another right, he turn another right. I turn right again, he turn right again. In my country, I often see cars do this. Cars of secret police.”

Great.

I think fast. I am not sure who might be following me now that Scott is dead, but, being back in Washington, I cannot quite clear from my mind’s eye the photographs of what somebody did to Freeman Bishop. Conan or no Conan, arrest or no arrest, I feel a chill.

Think!

In about thirty seconds, my taxi will hit the nerve-blasting confusion of Dupont Circle, which only the most foolish out-of-towners and the most experienced Washington drivers ever dare, because you must change lanes rapidly and efficiently, depending on which of the many intersecting streets you plan to take, and, at the same time, steer counterclockwise around a circle rather than straight, all the while avoiding other motorists just as bewildered as you are, to say nothing of pedestrians darting from one misshapen concrete island to the next. I am still looking back at the green car. The driver is a gray smear in the window; there seems to be a passenger too, but it is hard to tell.

Probably my cabbie is mistaken.

But maybe he isn’t. Maybe somebody wants to see where I am headed. Barely plausible, I know, but the green car is there just the same. And, no matter who it is, I find that I don’t like it one bit.

“When you get to Dupont Circle, get in the lane for Massachusetts Avenue.”

“Which way?”

“Uh, southbound, or east, whatever it is-toward the Capitol.”

“You say Washington Hilton. On Connecticut Avenue.” We are stopped at the last traffic light before the Circle. The green sedan is now just two cars back. The passenger seat is definitely occupied.

“How much is the fare to the Hilton?”

He names a figure.

I pore through my thin wallet, select a twenty-dollar bill, and, with a grimace, drop it over the seat. He understands at once that he is to keep the change.

“Turn on Massachusetts, then take the first right, behind that gray building. The one at the corner.” I point. I know the building well, having once practiced law in a firm there, back in the days when Kimmer and I were fooling around behind her first husband’s back, pretending to keep secret what everybody knew. The driver says nothing. He is wondering, no doubt, why I am running away from the green car. As a matter of fact, I am wondering too. But I lay my plans anyway, just in case I turn out to be sane. “Keep the change,” I tell him. No response. “When you hit Massachusetts, go as fast as you can,” I continue. “Then turn onto Eighteenth, also very, very fast.” The driver’s wary eyes meet mine in the mirror. He does not like this. He associates cars that follow other cars with the police. In his country, wherever that is, the police are the bad guys. Here in America…?

“Listen,” I say, adding another twenty from my dwindling supply of cash. “I am not a criminal, and the people in that car are not the police, okay?”

The driver shrugs. He will not make any commitment that he cannot deny later. But he does not offer to return my money.

The light changes, and the taxi surges forward so suddenly that I will probably be in the emergency room later tonight, being treated for whiplash. Crouching, I look back. As my driver weaves through traffic, the green car follows. I look forward. My driver is not in the Massachusetts Avenue lane! He has decided not to cooperate! I am trying to come up with another argument to offer when, without warning, the taxi bumps over the curb into the lane for Massachusetts Avenue before several startled, honking motorists. A clutch of pedestrians scurries for cover. As the green car falls farther behind, I wonder fleetingly what my driver did for a living that caused him to flee to America, bringing along such detailed knowledge of how the police of his country conduct surveillance.

And of how to escape it.

Probably better that I not know.

We fly through the complicated intersection and turn hard onto Massachusetts. The green car is stuck at a light, and in the wrong lane. Its passenger door whips open, just as we swing around the corner behind the gray building.

“Slow down for a second,” I tell the driver as soon as the green car is out of sight. I know it will catch up momentarily, the passenger, who can slide between stopped cars, even faster. I have only seconds. I slip the driver another bill, a ten: I have no more twenties.

He is shaking his head, but he slows. I push open the door and climb, crouching, from the still-rolling car. “Now go!” I call, slamming the door.

I do not need to tell him twice.

As the taxi squeals around the next corner, I am already darting into the narrow alley separating the back of my former office building from an old townhouse next door, home to some private institute or other. The alley dead-ends at the building’s service entrance. Cameras of doubtful working order guard the scene. I crouch behind a drab green Dumpster just as my pursuer, now on foot, hurries by. My eyes widen, and I fight down a sudden trembling in my extremities. I wait, instinct telling me that we are not through yet. I check my watch. Three minutes pass. Four. The alley stinks of old garbage and recent urine. I notice for the first time that I have company: a homeless man, his possessions heaped around him in plastic bags, is fast asleep near the loading dock of the office building. I keep watching the street. The green car finally slithers past, moving slowly, the invisible driver probably checking hedges and doorways-and alleys. I wonder why they are not chasing the taxi. They must have seen me get out. I sink farther back into the shadows. The green car is gone. I still wait. A flurry atop the Dumpster draws my attention, but it is only a mangy black cat, gnawing on something foul. I am not superstitious. At least I don’t think I am. I wait. The homeless man mutters and snores, a fibrous alcoholic sound I remember from the days when the Judge used to lock the door of his study. Ten minutes pass. More. Sure enough, the passenger from the car passes me again, having evidently walked all the way around the block. The green car reappears. The door swings open. They appear to argue. The passenger points down the street, vaguely in the direction of my hideout, then shrugs and climbs in. The car drives away. Still I wait. I remain crouched in the alley for close to half an hour before I slide out and join the stream of pedestrians. Then I sneak back in and stuff my other ten-dollar bill into the homeless man’s pocket.

More guilt money.

Back on the sidewalk, I cross Massachusetts Avenue and mosey into Dupont Circle, pausing at the stone chess tables, pretending to watch the games, but really craning my neck to see whether I spot the green car or its furtive passenger. I drift from one table to the next, glancing at the positions on the boards. The players are a true rainbow, a random mix of ages, races, languages. Few of them seem very strong, but, on the other hand, I am not giving their games much of my attention. A crazy old man yells at a younger woman who just defeated him. The woman, who looks about as healthy as my customers at the soup kitchen, wears a hairnet and glasses repaired at the temple with a Band-Aid. She points a quivering finger at her vanquished opponent. He slaps it aside, baring brownish teeth. The kibitzers take sides. Other games lose their audiences. The crowd around the stone table grows raucous. Lawyers with cell phones at their hips jostle with slender bicycle messengers as everybody seeks a better view of the hoped-for tussle. I lose myself inside the throng, trying to peek in every direction at once. I cannot remember when my senses have been so open, so absorbent. I am not even scared. I am exhilarated. Every color of every branch of every tree is so crisp and clear I can almost breathe its hue. I feel as though I can examine the face of every one of the hundreds of pedestrians who walk through the park every minute. Another half-hour elapses. No sign of the green car, no sign of the passenger. Forty-five minutes. Eventually, I slip away and walk north, toward the Hilton.

Then I change my mind. There is another stop I want to make first, for I have a new question to ask, and I know where to ask it. I look for a bank, find a cash machine, and withdraw another hundred dollars from our dwindling checking account. I will explain it to Kimmer somehow. I find a public telephone and make a quick call. Then I hail another cab and give the driver instructions.

We pass the Hilton and then cut east on Columbia Road, passing through the loud, colorful, ethnically complicated neighborhood of Adams-Morgan, where, following law school, I lived for several years in a tiny walkup apartment with my books and my chess set and an unadorned mattress on the floor, my diet consisting almost entirely of apple juice and Jamaican meat patties from a shop down the block, until, at Kimmer’s urging, I moved to far more expensive quarters in a dreadfully modern building much further up Connecticut Avenue. Sitting in the back of my fourth taxi of the day, I shake my head ruefully, for she was still married to Andre Conway when she began complaining about how I lived. The cab passes my old building, and I soften with sentimentality. We hit Sixteenth Street, where we turn north toward the heart of the Gold Coast. Along the way, I remain alert for any sign of the green car or the passenger who searched for me on foot.

A very familiar passenger. The passenger of my dreams.

The roller woman.

CHAPTER 22

CONVERSATION WITH A COLONEL

(I)

Vera and the colonel were surprised to hear from me, not least because, despite ten years of entreaties, I hardly ever just drop in when I happen to be in the District on business. Their modest house on Sixteenth Street is set in the middle of the Gold Coast; the Judge’s larger place, Mariah’s now, lies on the border with the paler nation, as did his public career.

My in-laws welcome me effusively, banishing the dogs to the yard because they know I suffer from allergies, a fact that Kimmer’s father holds against me, for he thinks it betrays a fundamental lack of toughness. From the number of hugs we exchange, I almost believe they are happy to see me. Then I remember the chilly Thanksgiving dinner two weeks ago in this very house; I remind myself of the tendency of Madison moods to swing, usually without warning. They lead me into the small family room at the back of the house, a converted sun porch, the decor a suffocating mix of cheap souvenirs from ports around the world and photographs and citations from the Colonel’s days as a leader of men, as he likes to describe himself. Vera serves cheese and crackers and asks us what we want to drink. The Colonel scowls at the platter and sends her back to the kitchen for a bowl of nuts.

The shelves sport a whole series of pictures of Kimmer and her sister, Lindy-Marilyn at birth-from infancy to the present, and you can see, even in the early teen years, a hint of smoky challenge in the way the fleshier Kimmer glares at the camera, whereas willowy Lindy is, early on, more remote, less giving. The Madisons, like the rest of our set, were always puzzled at my apparent preference for Kimmer. Her parents certainly remember that I dated both their daughters, albeit not at the same time. What they do not realize is that only Kimmer dated me back.

Vera returns with the nuts and our drinks.

We sit surrounded by bric-a-brac and chintz, the Madisons as nervous as I, pretending that we are having a grand time, that we do this every day. The Colonel is drinking Scotch straight. A cigar smolders in an ashtray pilfered from a cruise line, for the Madisons seem to be off sailing somewhere every five minutes. Vera sips white wine. I stick with my usual ginger ale. I am never sure how to begin a conversation with my in-laws, whose skeptical eyes and querulous manner often make me wonder whether they blame me for ruining Kimmer’s marriage to Andre Conway, Perhaps they believe that, if not for the nefarious and wily Talcott Garland, their daughter would have been a faithful wife, and they would have a son-in-law who makes films and is always on television rather than one who professes law and is always in his office. They ask a question or two about Kimmer, just for form, but the subject is awkward and we hastily move on. The Colonel asks how Elm Harbor is doing these days, for he has heard that speculators are buying up the broken neighborhoods, and is wondering if he should get in on it; Miles Madison owns empty houses, to hear him tell it, in half the cities on the East Coast, waiting for real estate to take off. Some places it has. Kimmer is always at pains to explain that, since her father has no tenants in the dying areas where he buys, he is not a slumlord.

When we have exhausted the subject of Elm Harbor real estate, Vera, perfect hostess, makes polite inquiries about the law school-she has, of course, seen Lemaster Carlyle on television quite often, and asks what he is like, and I burn a bit but answer as politely. Then my in-laws grow effusive as they ask about the marvelous Bentley, for Lindy, the darling of the Gold Coast in her youth, made a single bad marriage and has yet to give them any grandchildren. Now she is just another unmarried black woman in her forties hoping for lightning to strike, a pattern all too common in the darker nation as intermarriage, violence, prison, drugs, and disease combine to decimate the pool of eligible males.

Then it is time to get down to business, and Vera can tell whom my business is with. “I’ll leave you men alone,” she murmurs and withdraws. She always defers to her husband, although, in other respects, she is like her daughter: no shrinking violet, few skills of self-effacement.

“So, Talcott,” says the Colonel expansively, waving the Cuban cigar in his stout hand. He has offered me one, but I have declined. Unlike Andre, I neither smoke, drink, nor curse; the Colonel, accordingly, considers me less manly. His smooth, hairless dome glistens. “What can I do for you?”

I hesitate for a moment, my mind spinning back absurdly to my flight around Dupont Circle an hour ago. I wonder, for a silly moment, if the roller woman might be lurking in the bushes outside the window, perhaps holding a directional microphone that can pick up voices from vibrations in the pane. I force my concentration back into the room, meet the Colonel’s challenging stare.

“My father owned a gun,” I tell him flatly. His yellowing eyes widen slightly, the intricate motions of his cigar hand grow more extravagant, but he shows no other reaction. So I continue. “I checked

… I hear it’s easy to buy them in Virginia.”

“It is. I’ve bought a few.”

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t believe he bought it there.”

“You don’t.”

“I just can’t imagine my father sneaking over the Memorial Bridge in the dead of night with an illegal handgun hidden in the trunk. It just… wouldn’t have been his kind of thing.”

A faint smile creases his pudgy face. He finishes his drink, glances around for his wife to fix him another, then remembers she has left the room and goes to the wet bar to get his own. He waves the ginger ale bottle vaguely in my direction, but I shake my head. “You’re probably right,” he murmurs as he returns to his lounger.

“It’s not that he wouldn’t have kept an illegal handgun. It’s more that he wouldn’t have taken the chance of getting caught.”

“Mmmm.”

“On the other hand, you have quite a collection of guns down in the basement.”

“It’s not a bad one,” agrees my host, who has failed many times to get me interested in his hobby.

“Well, this is what I was thinking. If my father wanted a gun, I guess I could see him borrowing one from you.”

The smile broadens. “I could see that, too.”

I finally exhale. “So I guess what I was wondering was… when exactly he asked you for a gun, and why he said he wanted one.”

The Colonel shifts comfortably in his seat. He inhales, blows a few rings, but not at me. “I would say it was… oh, a year ago. Maybe a little more. Say, October a year ago, because we were just back from… from…” He turns his head slightly, shouts: “Vera! Where did we go last October?”

“St. Lucia!” she shouts from the next room, over the television. Vera’s Jamaican accent has grown faint over the years; the Colonel’s is all but impossible to detect.

“No, not this October. Last October.”

“South Pacific!”

“Thanks, doll.” He grins sheepishly. “Old gray cells aren’t what they were. Yes, just back from the South Pacific. Seems to me we invited you folks to come…”

“No.”

“No? Maybe it was Marilyn. But I could have sworn we called Kimberly, Weren’t you on leave from the law school or something? We thought you’d have free time.” He sees the answer the same time I do: they invited Kimmer, and she declined without troubling to mention it to me. Maybe even lied to her parents and said I was the one who said no. Being cooped up on a ship for two weeks with her father, her mother, and her husband would be my wife’s notion of hell on earth. He rushes on to cover his faux pas. “Well, we were back, oh, say four, five days when Oliver called. Came over at night, sat right where you’re sitting, asked could he speak to me alone. He wasn’t the sort to mince words”-looking right at me, as though implying that I am-“and he told me what he wanted.”

“What did he say exactly?”

“Said he was getting a little worried about safety at his age, and could I help.”

“Safety? His own safety?”

The Colonel nods, blows more rings. I am being brusque, in my half-remembered litigation mode, but it comes back to you, like riding a bicycle. Kimmer’s father does not seem to mind being interrogated. He is having fun. His tiny eyes gleam. “That was my impression. He was kind of-” Suddenly he spins in his chair, the light selecting a different angle to reflect off his bald head. “Vera! Hey, Vera!”

She is in the room at once, hands folded at her waist. Probably she has been listening from the alcove.

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Damn cigar’s no good. Be a doll, go down to my desk, get me another.”

“Of course, dear.” She heads for the basement stairs at once, and I am reminded, for the thousandth time, just what Kimmer was rebelling against. But I also know that there is nothing wrong with the cigar, that the Colonel is just sending her away.

“What a doll,” he murmurs, watching her go. “You’re a doll!” he calls, but she is out of earshot, which is what he is waiting for. He leans toward me, and suddenly is all business. “Look, Talcott, I don’t know exactly what the hell was going on. I never saw your father scared in my life, and I’ve known him-sorry, I knew him-for twenty years. But he was white as a sheet, if you’ll excuse the expression. He wouldn’t tell me why he wanted the gun, just that he wanted it fast.”

“You gave it to him? No questions asked?”

“I asked lots of questions, I just didn’t get any answers.” A guffaw. He has dealt with pipsqueaks before. Then the serious tone again. “Look, Talcott. I saw him before we left on our cruise and he was fine. Then I saw him when we came back and he was… oh, hell, he was terrified, Talcott, okay?”

I try to picture the Judge terrified. I draw a blank.

Miles Madison is still talking, his voice low and sure. “So whatever happened to scare him, it happened while we were away. I’m talking about last October, just about a year before he died, and it spooked the hell out of him. If you find out what happened, you’ll know why he wanted a gun.” His head jerks, for he is preternaturally alert, as he must have been in his days in the infantry. “Vera! Thanks for the cigar, doll!”

“The one you have looks just fine to me,” she points out as she empties the ashtray into a wastebasket decorated with a map of the Caribbean.

He grins sheepishly up at her. “Damn imports. No quality control.” He turns back to look at me, winks. “Talcott and I were just making a friendly wager on a game of pool.”

But nobody beats the Colonel at pool. He cheats.

(II)

Vera and the colonel wind up giving me dinner. I want to escape, but declining their hospitality would be rude. By the time I return to the Hilton, almost four hours have slipped past. It is nearly eight, and the streets of Washington are full pre-winter dark. I have missed the final day of the conference, but I am sure I was not missed.

The lobby is crowded with citizens of the darker nation, most of them in evening attire: black tuxes with bright and distinctive cummerbunds for the men, glittering gowns of various lengths for the women. They glide up and down the escalators, striking poses for the absent cameras. The beautiful people! Nobody seems an ounce overweight. Every patent-leather shoe is perfectly shined. Every hair on every head appears to be perfectly in place. Every nose is in the air. My parents’ kind of crowd. And the Madisons’.

I wonder what event they are attending. In my plain gray suit, sweaty from my brief run, sweatier still from my long walk, I feel out of place, as though I exist on a level far below the paradise inhabited by this radiant throng. From the skeptical looks they cast my way, some of the well-to-do folk gathered in the lobby have the same thought: that this disheveled man slinking along in the gray suit is not, as my mother used to say in the old days, our kind of Negro. Although the absurd American system of racial counting would consider all of these glitterati black, most of them are of hues pale enough to have passed the paper-bag test that so justifiably enraged Mariah back in college, when she flunked it, even though it is, supposedly, no longer in use: If your skin is any darker than this paper bag, you can’t join our sorority. Oh, but we are sick people! A buried sentiment catches me by surprise, welling up from some putrefying source deep inside me, a wave of cold, brutal hatred for my parents’ way of life, for their exclusive little circle and its usually cruel snap judgments about everybody on the outside. And hatred for myself, too, for all the times I actually answered their snide little questions about where this friend of mine went to school, who that one’s parents were, and, sometimes, where the parents were educated. Addison, as he grew, began to talk back to our mother and father; Mariah and I never did; and perhaps he preserved an independence of being that my sister and I lost. The lobby reels redly about me for a moment, and I find myself wondering, as I did in my nationalistic college days, who the real enemy is, for those of us who considered ourselves the radical vanguard of the battle for a better future used to sit up half the night cursing the black bourgeoisie. E. Franklin Frazier was right: I see my father and his cold intellectual amusement at “the other Negroes,” I see my mother and her elite sororities and social clubs as living a dark imitation of white society, ultimately mimicking, in their desperate quest for status, even the racial attitudes of the larger world. So stunned am I by the visions pulsing angrily through my mind that I am, briefly, unable to move or speak or do anything but watch these beautiful people swirl around me.

And then the part of me that lapped up the Judge’s occasionally pompous wisdom reasserts itself. These thoughts, I remind myself, are unworthy, a distraction, and not entirely fair; besides, I have more immediate worries. So I wrestle the visions down.

For now.

I edge through the lobby, sucking in my belly, my eyes on the elevators, but I also find myself checking the exultant swarm, almost automatically, for any sign of the roller woman-or, for that matter, for the late Colin Scott’s partner, the missing Foreman. I wonder why the roller woman was following me. I wonder why she searched for me so hard, and why I decided at once to run away. I was tempted, quite seriously, to leap from my concealment and confront her, for I was unable then, and am unable now, to believe that the roller woman could have meant me any harm. Perhaps I am kidding myself. I keep seeing her face, not suffused with the concentrated anger of this afternoon’s failed search, but alight with the flirtatious, toothy grin of our first meeting. I shake my head. Trying to figure it out is like chewing on cotton.

Like trying to figure out why the Judge was scared enough to get a gun.

Off toward the gift shop, I spy two law professors from the symposium, members of the paler nation, looking rather lost in flannels and tweeds as they watch the dark conclave with apprehensive eyes. They wave to me as though relieved to come across a friendly face in a lobby that suddenly resembles the Essence fashion show, and I smile back but decide not to go over to join them for the usual evening round of postconference academic gossip, which would feel, somehow, like rejecting my own. I decide instead to head upstairs to play chess on my laptop until I get sleepy, which is how I spend most evenings when I am away from home, and many when I am not. I weave through the happy multitude, trying not to bump into anybody and intermittently succeeding, now and then nodding at a vaguely familiar face. I have nearly reached the elevator bank when a pleasantly round shape, draped in an outrageously tight purple gown, detaches itself from a circle of laughing friends and strides purposefully in my direction.

“Tal! I had no idea you were in town!”

I stare in disbelief as Sarah Catherine Stillman nee Garland materializes before me.

“Sally?” I manage. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” Cousin Sally giggles and pats my cheek and takes my hand in both of hers. Her palm is moist. Her eyes are slightly wild from whatever substance she is abusing this week. She is wearing her hair in long, beaded braids now, some of which are black, some of which are light brown, most of which are quite fake. “I’m here for the fundraiser. The real question, sweetie, is, what are you doing here? And where the hell’s your tux?” Tapping my wool jacket with feigned disapproval.

“Uh, I’m not here for the fund-raiser. I’m here for the tort-reform conference.” I am babbling but seem unable to stop. “It’s just a bunch of law professors. I delivered a paper yesterday.” I wave vaguely toward the stairway down to the room where we have been meeting. I am sure she has no clue what I am talking about.

Sally is peering at me closely. Her eyes shine wetly “Are you all right, Talcott? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine. Listen, Sally, it’s nice to see you, but I really have to go.”

I wait for what seems an eternity but is probably two seconds, and then she answers me, ignoring my brisk effort to escape as she conveys her own message: “I’m so glad I ran into you, Tal. I’ve been thinking about calling you.” Sally gets up on her toes-no easy trick in heels that high-to whisper in my ear: “Tal, listen. I need to talk to you about where I saw Agent McDermott before.”

After the events of the past several hours, it takes me an awkward moment to recall that McDermott was the name used by the late Colin Scott; that Sally told me on the day I met him that she thought she knew him.

All at once I am tired of theories. My father is dead but leaving me notes, my wife is doing goodness-knows-what, and I am being followed by a mysterious woman who was on the Vineyard when Scott/McDermott drowned. The human mind, especially when under stress, can assimilate only so much information. And I am beyond my capacity.

“I appreciate it, Sally, but I don’t think this is the time or the place-”

She cuts me off, her wine-soaked breath tickling the side of my face.

“I saw him in the house, Tal. On Shepard Street. Years ago.” A pause. “He knew your father.”

CHAPTER 23

THE AMBIGUOUS FIGURE

(I)

“It was summer,” Sally begins, sipping a bottle of beer from the mini-bar. I would rather have given her plain water, or maybe coffee, but standing up to tough women has never been my forte. “Maybe a year or two after Abby died. Mariah was in college. I think maybe you were, too, but I can’t remember. But I know where I saw him. I’m sure of that part.”

I wait for my cousin to get the story out. She is lounging on one of the two double beds in my hotel room. I am seated at the tiny desk, the chair turned in her direction. We have ordered food from room service, because Sally told me she has not eaten all day. I would rather not have this meeting in my room-she has a certain reputation, after all-but one look at her in the lobby made clear that she was in no shape to sit in a public place. Still, I tried a variety of excuses to avoid talking to her at all. Sally blew each of them away. A pile of work awaiting me? Oh, this won’t take too long. Her children? Oh, they’re with my mom for a couple of days. And the ever-jealous Bud? Oh, he’s not around so much any more. So we came up here, where my stout, showy, overdressed cousin, the hem of whose flaming purple gown is several inches too short, immediately kicked off her shoes and demanded a drink.

If I am going to hear the story, this is the only way.

“I was at your house,” she says. “On Shepard Street. It was nighttime. I guess I was sort of asleep. Until… until the sound of an argument woke me up.”

“Where was I?”

“I think you were probably on the Vineyard. You and your mom. Maybe Mariah. But not your father. And not Addison. That’s why I was over at your house. I was, um, sort of with Addison.” Sally is a very dark woman, but she blushes anyway. Lying on the bed, she twists physically away, as though it is easier to tell her story if she can pretend she is alone. And she at once launches a digression, in which Misha is the villain: “I know what I used to do with Addison was wrong, Tal, so I don’t need you to tell me that. It’s over, okay? It’s been over like forever. I know you never approved. You always let me know. Oh, you never said a word, but you’ve always been, in the family, I mean, sort of like your father-you have all these rules and things, and when somebody doesn’t follow them, you don’t get mad, you get this disapproving look. Like everybody’s morally smaller than you are. I hate that look. Everybody hates it, Tal. Your brother, your sister, everybody.” I almost speak up, but remind myself that Sally is probably on something, that she certainly is not herself: knowledge that does nothing to reduce the sting of her words.

“My dad hated it, too,” she is saying. “Your Uncle Derek, I mean”-as though I have some question about who her father is, or was. “He hated it when Uncle Oliver would look at him that way, and Uncle Oliver looked at him that way a lot. Because he hated my dad’s, you know, his politics. He thought my dad was a Communist.”

I venture my second interruption: “Sally, your dad was a Communist.”

“I know, I know, but, what’s that old joke? He made it sound so dirty.” She laughs screechily as she repeats this line, although it cannot possibly be the whole joke, and then, suddenly, she is weeping. Whatever drug she is using, it seems to cause severe mood swings. Or perhaps there is no drug and she is simply unhappy. Either way, I decide to let her cry. There are no words of comfort I can offer, really, and putting my arms around her on the bed is out of the question.

“See, Tal,” she resumes after a couple of minutes, “you think the world is made up of simple moral rules. You think there are just two kinds of people in the world, people who obey the rules and people who break them. You think you’re so different from Uncle Oliver, but you’re just like him. In some good ways, sure, but in some of the worst ways, too. You look down your nose at people you think are your moral inferiors. People like your brother. People like me.”

Now I remember why Kimmer and I never socialize with Sally: you have to fight through ten minutes of her verbal abuse before you can have anything resembling a normal conversation. So I grit my teeth and keep silent, reminding myself that she is not a well woman.

Besides, what she says about me is probably right.

“So, anyway, that’s why I didn’t tell you before. About McDermott, I mean. I sort of pretended I didn’t remember, but that wasn’t true. I knew who McDermott was the minute I saw him. I probably should have said something, but I knew I would have to tell you why I was in the house that night, and I didn’t want to see that disapproving look.” She turns toward me long enough to glare, and I ponder the way belief in right and wrong can interfere with the project of human communication. “See, Tal, that’s why we always had to sneak around, because people like you and Uncle Oliver…”

She stops. A shudder runs through her. Another sob? No, a memory, a recollection she prefers to hold at bay.

“It’s ancient history,” I murmur, trying to divert her. If Sally is seeking an apology, she is out of luck, for I cannot pretend there was nothing wrong with what she and Addison did.

Sally knows what I am thinking. “Even Mariah’s not as bad as you are, Tal. You know what? When Mariah is in D.C., she always calls me up. We have some good times…”

“She told me you’ve been helping her go through the Judge’s papers.”

Sally snickers. “Is that what she told you? Well, yeah, we do that sometimes, but that’s not what I mean. I mean we have good times. We talk. She listens to me, Tal. We go to the clubs. You know. Your sister likes to get down sometimes. Not like you. And she isn’t judging me all the time like you are. She takes people just the way they are. So that’s why I didn’t tell you, Talcott. Because of the way you are. Because it involves Addison, too. I mean, me and Addison. You’re just like your father,” she repeats. I am playing catch-up, stuck on the image of my sister in a club-the kind of club that Sally likes- getting down. You would not think, to look at Mariah, that she was the partying type; sole black member of the yacht club is more her style. My cousin, on the other hand, is a party and a half all by herself.

“You could never understand about Addison,” Sally continues, her voice excited and angry and full of life’s broken promises. “You could never understand what we had. Okay, it was wrong. But it was special” -as though I have disputed her. “We were lovers, Tal. It wasn’t just sex, it was love. Now, is that crude enough for you?”

She is up on her elbow, eyes aglow with belligerence. Her mood is swinging, all right, and she is saying anything that comes to mind.

“I’m not judging you, Sally,” I lie carefully, my tone as neutral as I can make it. “I just want to know what you remember about McDermott.”

“You are judging me.”

“I’m just glad it’s over,” I assure her. But I marvel at how a civilized world can make a virtue of having no judgment, teach it to kids, preach it from the pulpit.

“You know something, Tal? You’re a fake. Misha. Mikhail. A fake.” A harsher laugh. “My dad gave you that nickname, in case you forgot, and you still treat his daughter like trash.” My cousin flops back onto the bed, her braids settling around her head like an ebon halo. The tirade seems to be over.

The room-service waiter wisely chooses that moment to arrive. When Sally makes no effort to get up from the bed, I sign the bill in the corridor, blocking the waiter’s view of the room, and roll the cart in myself.

We eat in silence for a few minutes: mushroom soup and a club sandwich for me, shrimp cocktail and filet mignon for Sally. Having shared a healthy repast with my in-laws just an hour ago, I should not be eating again so soon, but I tend to find the self all too easy to indulge, which perhaps explains my burgeoning waistline. In short, I eat too much; when I am nervous or stressed, my will to resist is weaker still. I am, unfortunately, like Mark Twain, who once said that he ate more on some occasions than others, but never less. Sally and I sit facing each other on the two beds with the table between us. She eats fast and without any finesse, simply fulfilling a bodily desire. The food seems to revive her, or maybe the drug, if there is one, has worn off; whatever the reason, when she next opens her mouth, she is her old flirty self.

“I’m sorry I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, Tal, but men don’t buy me dinner very often any more, so I figured, what the hell, make the most of it.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Of course, sometimes a man expects something in return.”

“All I expect is to hear about Mr. McDermott.” Giving her my best stone face.

“Sure that’s all you want?” Coy, as if the intimacy of sharing a secret dinner with a man in a hotel room has given her permission to misbehave. “Most men have other things in mind.”

“I’m not most men.”

“Come on, Tal, don’t you ever relax and have fun?”

“Only on Tuesdays and alternate Saturdays.”

This, at least, brings a genuine smile. “Okay, Tal,” she says. “Let’s be friends.”

“Okay.”

“Look, I’m sorry for what I said before.” Although she does not sound very sorry. She curls her solid legs underneath her. “I just can’t seem to help myself tonight. I guess that’s my flaw, I always say what I’m thinking. At least, when I’m with a man.”

“That’s not necessarily a flaw.” Not liking, however, her use of the word with.

“Well, no, not if the man I’m with happens to like what I’m thinking.” A pause as she contemplates a punch line. “And if he doesn’t? To hell with him.”

Again she laughs, a light, trilling sound: there is nothing hateful in her words. Sally does not dislike men, even though she has not been well treated by them. She is amused by them. By us. It occurs to me that Sally, when she is not being melancholy, can probably be a lot of fun. I begin to see why Addison, and so many other men, have found my plump cousin attractive. Last year, I saw an exhibit at the university museum of some of those drawings that used to be popular early in the twentieth century, the ones that look like smiling dogs until you invert them, when they turn into angry cats, or change from a beautiful woman to an unhappy sultan, and so on. “Ambiguous Figures,” the exhibit was called. Sally is like one of those ambiguous figures: at first glance she seems wild, overweight, hopeless, pill-popping, pathetic; catch her from another angle and she is bold, bright, sexy, scathingly witty. I am catching her, at this moment, from that second angle, which means that I need, quickly, to bring some discipline to our conversation.

“About McDermott-”

“Yes, sir!” She snaps off a mock salute. “At your service, sir!”

And then she tells me the story.

(II)

We have finished dessert -the fruit cup for me, tiramisu for Sally. I have rolled the room-service cart back into the hallway. Sally is lounging on the bed, weight on her elbow, one toe touching the carpet. I am at the desk once more, my hands folded in my lap, as I wait for her to begin.

“I was at the house on Shepard Street, like I said. I don’t know if you remember or not, but in those days, Dad and Mom and I lived down in Southeast. He used to work for that little private library. You remember.”

Indeed I do: Were you aware, Judge Garland, that the library where your brother worked was a known Communist front? And, inevitably: No, Senator, I was not aware. My brother and I did not have much to do with each other. Then the switch to maudlin mode: That must have been a source of some pain, Judge. My father at his coldest, yet his most disarming: I loved my brother, Senator, but our differences were pretty strong. Communism is a terrible, terrible thing-at least as bad as racism. Maybe worse in some ways. I could not be a part of his world. He could not be a part of mine. I suppose I wasn’t the best brother in the world, and if I hurt my brother, I’m very sorry. Each of us thought the other was pretty dangerous, I guess. But I admit I don’t think about it much. Absolutely destroying this line of questioning.

“I remember,” I say softly.

“Well, anyway, in those days, I used to take a bus-was it the S4?-up to your house. You know, to see Addison? I mean, if he happened to be in town? I never went when your parents were there, or when you and Mariah were there either. I sort of only went to meet Addison alone.” A small, sheepish grin. “The truth is, I never told my folks where I was going either. Dad was just as bad as Uncle Oliver-that disapproving look, I mean. Maybe all the guys in your family have that frown. I mean, except Addison.”

I consider suggesting that we were disapproving because there was something to be disapproving of, that a sexual relationship between first cousins is incest. But Sally would probably remind me that she and Addison are not blood relations. Or perhaps she would cite Eleanor and FDR at me; and I would answer that they were actually first cousins once removed, contrary to popular understanding, which means that their family relationship was distant indeed, their last common ancestor something like five generations back; and Sally would accuse me of patronizing her; and the conversation would spiral downhill from there.

Besides, she has already admitted that what they did was wrong.

I say: “If I could just hear about McDermott…”

“You’re so damn single-minded.” She laughs and lies down on the bed again, this time with her heavy knees in the air. “The thing is, Tal, you have to understand, I would never have been in that house if I knew your father was going to be there. I was supposed to meet Addison, and we were supposed to be alone. Your father-well, he was supposed to be away.” She closes her eyes, frowns. “Not on the Vineyard, though. I think-I think he was supposed to be at some judges’ convention.”

“Probably the Judicial Conference,” I murmur.

“Huh?”

“The Judicial Conference. Federal judges’ group. Meets during the summer. He was probably there.”

She shakes her head. “Maybe he was supposed to be there, maybe he told Aunt Claire he would be there, but where he was, was in D.C.”

I bite my tongue. If Sally is telling the truth, she has caught the Judge lying to my mother, which, I would have sworn until this moment, never happened once.

“Anyway, I didn’t know your father was around. I was supposed to see Addison. We were both just out of college, both in town for the summer, and he was living at home. So was I. And he called me up and said everybody was away for a few days, so we could… we could spend some time together if I wanted. Well, I wanted.”

As I nod and offer no comment, I see something behind Sally’s words: Addison was the pursuer. He was a year younger than his cousin, but, from the start, even on the Vineyard, my brother was the seducer, not, as family folklore has it, the other way around; and a part of her hates him for it.

“So, anyway,” Sally is saying, “I told my folks I was going out with some girlfriends or something and not to wait up for me, then I hopped on, let’s see, must have been the 30 bus, or the 32, and then got on the S4”-wanting me to know, from all this, how hard she worked to see her love-“and, well, anyway, I got to Shepard Street and went up to the house, and Addison was there…”

Pausing to see if I have any reaction. When I do not, she resumes.

“Anyway, after a while, I fell asleep. I don’t know how late it was. I know it was dark when these voices woke me up. Not loud. Kind of whispery. But still angry. I mean, they were arguing, and maybe they were trying to argue quietly, but I still heard them. I realized there was somebody else in the house, and I sort of got scared. So I turned to wake up Addison, but he wasn’t there. So I figured it must be Addison arguing with somebody. I thought it must be Uncle Oliver, which would probably mean we were caught, which would mean we were seriously up the creek. So I put my clothes on. I figured I would sneak out the back door. I’ve snuck out of a lot of back doors in my life, haven’t I?” Another one of her mirthless laughs. There is no point in responding; the question is clearly rhetorical, and we both know what the answer is.

“Addison’s bedroom was on the third floor,” she continues, rolling onto her side, facing me now, except that her eyes are still closed. “At the end of that long hallway. The old servants’ quarters, I guess. You know, low ceiling, gables, the Nathaniel Hawthorne thing.” Actually, I know perfectly well what the house looks like, having grown up in it, but I have no intention of breaking the flow, now that she is telling the story. “The argument was way down in the foyer, two floors away, but I heard it anyway. I think it was some trick of the ducts or something.”

Now it is my turn to smile in memory. The Shepard Street house has old-fashioned heating grates, metal screens covering what are basically holes in the wall with chutes behind them, left over, I suspect, from the days when the whole house was heated by a single stove. We had radiators, of course, but they were added sometime after the house was built. The ducts themselves were never removed. My parents never realized that sounds from the first floor, especially the foyer, routinely found their way to the top floor, where Addison and I slept. Perhaps there was some common vent: I never figured out how all the old ductwork ran. In any event, my brother and I were always able to hear what was going on down there.

“So, anyway,” Sally resumes, “I got dressed and went on downstairs. I planned to sneak out, but first I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Down the back stairs, I mean. The servants’ stairs.”

We both laugh, although nothing is funny. I glance at the digital clock on the nightstand. It is close to ten.

“So I went down to the second floor and then went out into the hall. You remember there’s this long landing that runs all around the foyer, what do they call it?”

“The gallery.”

“Oh, right. And the gallery has this, um, this balustrade, I think is the word, and the, uh, the wooden posts-what are they called? Spindles? Dowels? Whatever they are, the posts that hold the balustrade? They’re very wide. Almost wide enough to hide behind.”

“Especially for a child.” I smile briefly, remembering how, when we were children, Addison and Mariah and Abby and I loved to play hide-and-seek, and I used to hide up in the gallery there all the time. One of the things I quickly discovered was that, if the lights were on in the foyer and off in the hall, and the one who was it was down in the foyer, he-or she-couldn’t see me hiding in the gallery.

“Well,” says Sally tartly, “I was never that tiny, but I could hide up there anyway. Or I did that night.” She stirs: the memory is starting to bother her. Maybe her moral sense has kicked to life. But she does not stop talking. “Anyway, the only light that was on was in your father’s study. That’s the part I remember best. It was so dark in the foyer, like Uncle Oliver was… oh, like he was doing something that needed the darkness. I know that sounds crazy, Tal, but that’s the way it felt. And the voices I heard were from inside the study. I couldn’t make out what your father was saying, I think because he was trying to keep his voice down, but the other man was yelling: ‘That’s not how the game is played.’ Something like that.”

“He said ‘the game’?”

“That’s what I said he said.” She pouts, not as prettily as she probably thinks, and continues. “Well, anyway, the other man, the man who was yelling, came out into the hallway, and he was pointing at your father, shaking his finger like he was angry or something. That’s how I saw the birthmark, when his hand moved into the light. It was McDermott. Whatever his name is in real life. Was.”

So Sally knows he is dead. Which means Mariah probably knows. Which means that everybody knows. Maybe that is why Sally has chosen to break her silence. I say, “His name was Colin Scott.”

“Fine, Colin Scott. The same man who was in the living room the week after your father died, okay? He was right there in the foyer, talking to your father, twenty years ago. I swear he was. And he was saying something like, ‘There are rules for this kind of thing.’ Something like that. And then I heard Uncle Oliver’s voice. You know, his lecturing tone: ‘There are no rules where a’-and then he said some word I couldn’t quite understand-‘is involved.’ He sort of dropped his voice on that word I missed. Not because he thought anybody was listening. It was sort of like a hiss. But I kind of heard it, Tal, and I think-I think it sounded like dollar. Like ‘There are no rules where a dollar is involved.’”

“They were arguing about money?”

“I don’t know. I might not have it exactly right. But it sounded like that. And the other man, he was shaking his head, like No. And then Uncle Oliver came into the light, and his face, his face was wild, it was scary. I figured he had been drinking.”

“It’s possible, I guess.” I cannot, at the moment, imagine why McDermott/Scott and my father would have been arguing about money. “He drank a lot after Abby died.”

“I know, Tal. I remember. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.” I wonder how we got off on this tangent.

“My family had problems, too.”

I only nod. Garlands do not talk about growing up, or about anything else that it is impossible to change. But Sally is undeterred.

“Nobody’s childhood is what they want, you know? We don’t choose our parents. We don’t choose our parents’ problems either. Once you recognize that, you’re halfway home.” A New Age feel-good comment, possessing no meaning I am able to identify.

“I just want to hear the story, Sally. I just want to know what happened with my father and… and the man he was arguing with.”

Sally gives me a long look, provocative and disconcerting. I do not want this woman in my head. I do not even want her in my room. But I have to have the rest.

“Well, so, anyway, now they were staring at each other, like they were gonna have a fight or something. And then Uncle Oliver said, pretty loud, he almost shouted, ‘I’m sick of following the rules.’ The other man just shook his head. I think he wanted Uncle Oliver to be quiet. And he said something like, ‘That’s not the way it’s done.’ And then your father, his voice got real soft and cold, and he said, ‘You’d do it for Jack.’”

“Meaning Jack Ziegler.”

“I think so. I don’t know for sure. He didn’t say the whole name, but I think that’s who he meant.”

I rub a hand across my face. A few moments ago the room was too small. Now the walls seem to be receding, or maybe I am shrinking. I feel lost and giddy: this is a little too much, a little too fast. I rally, asking a lawyer’s question to gain time.

“You’re sure it was the same man? The same man who came to the house the day after the funeral?”

To my relief, my skepticism sparks no explosion. “I’m sure, Tal.” She relaxes again, shifting her position on the bed. I can see she is about done. Still, like a good witness, she recites her reasons. “I remember his voice. It was so cold and so angry. I remember the birthmark on his hand from when he was shaking his finger at Uncle Oliver. I remember the big white scar on his lip. And I remember something else. I was uncomfortable kneeling on the ground up there, so I moved around, and one of the floorboards creaked? And that other man, McDermott, his head whipped around and he looked straight up at where I was hiding. His eyes were like, I don’t know, some hunting animal. I was sure he was gonna see me. I was scared, Tal.” She yawns, then shivers. “It was the same man, Tal. I’d swear on a stack of Bibles.”

I take this in phlegmatically, calculating the possibilities of error, of wishful thinking, of false memories. Or of simple lying.

“‘No rules where a dollar is concerned’? That’s what he said?”

“That’s what he said,” Sally confirms. Her confidence in her recollection is growing with each passing second. Lawyers often see this in witnesses. Sometimes it means they really do have it right; sometimes it means they have become comfortable with a version manufactured on the spot.

Sally yawns again. I can tell she is fading.

“So, what happened next?”

“Hmm? What?”

“After the argument you heard.”

“Oh. Well, that was about it. McDermott or Scott or whatever his name was, well, he stopped looking up at the gallery and looked back at your father and put a finger to his lips, and they whispered together a few minutes, and then they both nodded and shook hands. They… they didn’t seem mad any more. Then Uncle Oliver walked him across the foyer and opened the door, and I went down the back stairs, and I guess your father went back into his study.” She yawns again.

I sit silently for a couple of minutes. Sally’s forearm is across her eyes. I have no reason to think she is making any of this up. Sally is not a liar; as she told me, she says whatever is on her mind. So Scott knew my father, knew him more than twenty years ago, visited our house one summer night when the Judge lied to my mother and said he was going to the Judicial Conference, argued with him in the foyer about dollars and rules and what he would do for Jack Ziegler. I find my irritation rising-not at my father, but at Sally, for holding this back. Not telling me earlier because she was worried about my disapproval. I glance at her now. My irritation melts away. She has had a rough life, has Sally, yet she somehow manages to find the energy for a smile or two. As she is smiling now, with her eyes closed, yet aware, I am sure, of my scrutiny. I do not like the way my feelings toward her are running. The Judge’s words come drifting back: Nobody can resist temptation all the time. The trick is to avoid it.

Avoid it. Right. I have to think about easing Sally out of here. Her gown is badly rumpled, her expensively braided hair a brown wreck. She will be quite a sight going back downstairs. I find myself hoping that anyone who notices her will think she is sneaking out of somebody else’s room.

And then I realize that a piece of the story is missing.

“So where was Addison?” I ask. No response. Louder: “Sally?”

“Mmmm?”

“Addison, Sally. Where was my brother when all this was happening?”

“Hmm? Addison?” She snickers. “See, well, that’s the thing.” She turns onto her other side, facing away from me. Her voice is slow. The drug? The drink? Exhaustion? All of them, I suspect. “That’s the thing,” she says again. “You know how the servants’ stairs go down to that little hall behind the kitchen, right? Well, when I got down there, the kitchen was dark, but I was scared to turn on a light, because I didn’t want Uncle Oliver, you know, to catch me. I was gonna go out through the mudroom? Well, I took about two steps, and then I bumped my shin on a stool, and I guess I was a little too loud or something, because the next thing I know, there’s this hand over my mouth, I try to scream, I try to bite, I try to kick, I’m scared to death, and of course it’s your damn brother.” She stops for a moment. Shakes her head. “Addison,” she mutters. “Addison, Addison, Addison.” Her mantra. “Addison.” Then nothing.

“Sally? Sally, what about Addison? What happened in the kitchen?”

“Hmmm? Kitchen?”

“Of my father’s house. When Addison put his hand over your mouth.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Well. He told me to hush, and I asked him was he in the kitchen the whole time, and he asked me what whole time, and I said all the time your father was arguing with that white guy, and he said what white guy, and I said the guy who was talking to Uncle Oliver, and he said he didn’t know what I was talking about, and I tried to argue with him, but then he said we had to get out of there, fast. So we went on out the kitchen door, and, well, that was the end of that.”

I have the sense that I am missing something here.

“Sally, listen. Wake up. Sally, did you believe him? Did you believe Addison? About not hearing anything?”

Another snicker. “Believe Addison? Are you shitting me? That nigger never told the truth about anything in his life.” Sally’s speech is growing less cultured as fatigue claims her. “He would say any damn thing to get… to get what he wants. To get over.” A small giggle.

“Sally. Sally, listen. Please. This is important, okay? Do you think Addison heard the argument?”

“Of course he did.” A barking cackle. Sally possesses a remarkable repertoire of laughing sounds.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.” Another yawn, longer. She has very little left. “He told me when I called to tell him what… that the same man was in your house the day after the funeral.”

What!

“When was that?”

“Oh, I dunno.” Sleepy. “A week later. Maybe two.”

Of course.

He heard. And never said anything. Keeping his cards, as always, close to his chest. My family! All we know how to do is keep secrets! Addison heard the argument between my father and Colin Scott at Shepard Street twenty years ago; he knew it was the same man who pretended to be Special Agent McDermott because Sally, his former lover, told him a week or so after the funeral. And he never told me. I will bet he never told Mariah, either, who would have added that information to her conspiracy theory, and immediately blabbed it to me.

“Sally?”

Only snoring.

I sigh and settle in the chair. Exhausted, I immediately doze, a terrifying dream of perdition.

My eyes snap open. A moment’s disorientation, and then everything comes flooding back in. I am still chewing on cotton, my cousin is still asleep on the bed, and it is now well past eleven.

“Sally, hey, wake up. Sally, you’ve got to go. Sally!”

More snoring. The hard, alcoholic kind. The kind I used to hear coming from the Judge’s study at night in those terrible days after Abby died; maybe the kind that Addison heard when he got back to the house after seeing Sally home on the night Colin Scott fought with my father. Or maybe he just walked her to the S4 bus.

My brother, the late-night talk king. Oh, Sally has his number all right. Do anything, say anything.

“Sally? Sally, wake up. Come on, Sally!”

I stand up and cross to the bed. Asleep, breathing through her slightly open mouth, her small fists curled near her throat, Sally Stillman has a vulnerable look; it is easy, now, to see the cute teenager she once was, back when I spied her with Addison at Vinerd Howse. I touch Sally’s bare shoulder, my fingers lingering a few seconds longer than they should. Her flesh is warm and dangerously alive.

“Hey, Sally, come on.”

She mutters something and curls away from my hand. I doubt that I can wake her, not without physically shaking her, which I am not about to do. The events of the last few weeks have left me emotionally sick, and what I want to do most is snuggle close to Sally’s ample body, wrap my arms around her, and lose myself in her warmth.

I am so, so tired. Of so, so much. Of worrying about conspiracies, of running from phantoms, of fighting with my wife. So tired. And so lonely.

I decide to let Sally stay. Even if I could wake her, I can hardly send her home like this. Which means she will have to stay here in my hotel room and sleep it off.

For her own good.

Temptation. The trick is to avoid it.

“It’s not that easy, Dad,” I mutter, sitting gingerly on the edge of the rumpled bed where my cousin slumbers on, oblivious to my distress. I remind myself that I am a married man, but the room feels so terribly small, the bed so terribly large. My throat is dry. My fingers, without my quite willing it, reach toward Sally’s round, inviting shoulder once more.

Then they fall back.

Avoid it.

I go to the closet for an extra blanket, which I drape over Sally’s somnolent form. I remove my tie, slip out of my shoes, and return to the desk chair to keep vigil.

What a mess.

CHAPTER 24

THE DIAGNOSIS

(I)

If you drive along Seventh Street near Howard University, you discover a little college town of remarkable complexity, buried in the heart of Washington, D.C. It is only a couple of blocks long, so it is easy to miss, but it is there. It features fast-food outlets instead of delis, Southern-style kitchens rather than pizza parlors, but you also find the usual scattering of small office buildings, apartment houses, and photocopying outlets. To be sure, this particular little college town also includes an unhealthy proportion of boarded-up windows, empty, weed-choked lots, and warehouses surrounded by razor wire. But, if one wants to look beyond the expensive brochures my own university sends out, Elm Harbor has many of the same sordid features; and if we disguise them better, it is only because we have that much more money with which to purchase camouflage.

It is to the tiny Seventh Street corridor that I go on the last day of the conference, to have lunch, as Kimmer teased me when I told her, with another woman. The woman in question is Lanie Cross-formally, Dr. Melanie Cross, F.A.C.O.G., but she always asked the Garland children to call her Lanie, much to my parents’ chagrin. She and her late husband, Leander Cross, a prominent surgeon of the darker nation, were, in my childhood, perhaps the leading hosts of the Gold Coast party circuit, a circuit my parents traveled often, because it was, in those days, what one did: glittering dinner at one house on the Friday, champagne brunch at another on the Sunday, caterers, cooks, even temporary butlers at the ready as the best of black Washington charged about in mad imitation of white people’s foolishness. Yet it was not, really, so mad. In the old days, my mother used to say, there were only a hundred black people who mattered in America, and they all knew each other. A bit of snobbery, but also an intriguing proposition. The social scene, so inexplicably wasteful and pretentious to its critics, refreshed and reinforced those who whirled through it, strengthening them to face another day, another week, another month, another year of expending their prodigious talents in a nation unprepared to reward them for their abilities.

As a child, I loved to come downstairs early Saturday morning when my parents had entertained the night before. I would wander through the not-yet-cleaned first-floor rooms, sniffing the glasses, handling the place cards, looking for fresh scratches on the huge polished rosewood table in the dining room. Sometimes, as my parents slept off their partying, my siblings and I would play, sitting around the table, raising our glasses in toasts we imagined were clever, trying through this little drama to figure out exactly what all those adults did so long into the night that kept them laughing raucously and shouting each other’s names with such glee as we crouched in the stairwell, listening and trying to learn. More than thirty years have passed since those days, and I wonder still what the secret was, for the unspoken magic of integration is the way it has made the spirit of those long, happy nights disappear. True, there is still entertainment, and there are even still parties, but something of their character has been lost, their role in bolstering community has grown less certain, perhaps because community itself is beginning to die. Kimmer and I live in an otherwise all-white neighborhood, and few of the friends of my adolescence live anywhere near the Gold Coast, unless one counts the fancier suburbs of Washington itself.

Lanie Cross is a connection to that earlier era. She lives, in a sense, between the two worlds, then and now. Perhaps it is her age. Her husband was of my father’s generation, but Lanie herself was something around fifteen years younger-nobody mentions that they married when she was his student at Howard-which puts her, today, in her late fifties. She is a tall, handsome woman, with long bones in every part of her body, from her legs to her cheeks, and skin that maintains its smooth brown beauty even as it begins to wrinkle around her face. Her gray eyes flash playfully with energy and intelligence. When I was a kid, all the boys had crushes on her.

Like all her working days, this one is busy, and when I hunt down her office in one of those whitewashed, blocky, low-rise professional buildings, her stern but polite receptionist, another woman of years, a West Indian, commands me to wait. I sit on a hard wooden bench amidst her patients, women running in age from early teen years to significantly older than I. All are of the darker nation. Most seem, from their manner or their dress, comfortably middle-class, for Lanie Cross maintains a clientele from the old days. But a few display outward signs of impoverishment, and a couple seem little more than an economic rung or two above the patrons of the soup kitchen. Lanie, by reputation, treats all of them the same, and my affection for her is such that I would like to believe it is true.

Lanie was surprised to hear from me when I called a week ago, the way anybody would be at sudden protestations of friendship from an individual with whom she has not exchanged a word in probably five years except for a token hug at the funeral. I reached her at home, having obtained the unpublished number from gregarious Mariah, and I heard a child crying in the background. Lanie told me that her daughter and son-in-law were visiting, and I tried, and failed, to remember how many children she had. (The number turned out to be three, all adopted: Lanie and her husband could have no children the old-fashioned way.) When I explained that I wanted to talk about my father, she grew more cautious still. In the end, she agreed to see me for lunch, I suspect because she is as curious to learn what I can tell her as I am to learn what she can tell me. Her late husband, in addition to being a golf and poker buddy of many years’ standing, was one of my father’s two real confidants-the other was my mother-during the difficult days after Greg Haramoto stepped forward. Addison told me once that the two doctors Cross were extraordinarily close. I hope this turns out to be true.

(II)

I took a taxi to Lanie’s office, so we drive over to Adams-Morgan, my old neighborhood, in her blocky and practical Volvo, which she was driving at the time of my father’s confirmation hearings. She has picked out a Cuban place that she loves, and which she has not visited in a while. Lanie is, as always, well turned out, in a slimming navy pantsuit and an ankle-length vicuna coat that must have cost my monthly salary. She has to be back at the office by two, she tells me, so we will have to hurry.

During the painstaking journey across town-I forgot that Lanie drives as cautiously as her choice of car suggests-we exchange the expected pleasantries of two acquaintances who have not really talked in half a decade, and who were never particularly close. I also keep an eye out for a green sedan so ordinary it might stand out, but there are too many ordinary cars around. Lanie, oblivious to my vigilance, mentions that she saw my in-laws at a dinner party last month, and they looked fit enough to live forever, then realizes how I might take this and covers her slip with tales of her children: the oldest, her son, is rising in the Air Force, dragging his wife and three children all over the world; the second oldest, a daughter, is a freshly minted history professor right at Howard, divorced and raising a son on her own; and the youngest, another daughter, is a homemaker in New Rochelle, raising three children while her husband, who “does something with municipal bonds,” commutes to Manhattan. Lanie is proud of her children and delighted to have seven grandchildren, and I remember, uneasily, the way that some of us used to tease the Cross kids for their unquestioning devotion to their parents, the Fifth Commandment being, for most of us, just a collection of silly words hanging on the wall of the Sunday-school classroom. But I suppose if I were adopted by two parents as loving and generous as the Crosses I would put them ahead of everything too.

Around the time our appetizers run out, it is Lanie, finally, who brings us around to our purpose. “So, anyway, you said you wanted to talk about your father.”

“Well, about his relationship with your husband.”

“Relationship?” Holding her water glass in her thin hand, Lanie seems amused.

I color a bit. “What I mean is, I want to know anything you’re willing to tell me that your husband told you about my father.”

“What Leander told me about your father?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?” Her eyes twinkle. I have forgotten this about Melanie, her mischievous way of communicating with men by repeating back to them, as questions, whatever they say to her. I suppose I thought she would have outgrown it, but it is, perhaps, an instinct with her, not so much flirtatious as cautious. She likes to keep men off their guard, to enable her to stay on hers.

“Not all of it. But, thinking back to… well, when my father was nominated to the Supreme Court and had all that trouble. My dad didn’t ask many people’s advice, but I know he asked Dr. Cross’s. Anything you can tell me about what your husband told you… well, that’s what I’d like to know.”

Lanie brushes her short bangs away from her face, eats a couple of bites of her bistec empanizado, pondering. I lean back and sip my Diet Pepsi, waiting for her to make up her mind. I don’t know why everyone I talk to seems considerably less than forthcoming. Perhaps I am touching a common wound.

“There isn’t that much to tell,” she finally says. She smiles nervously, displaying perfectly capped teeth. “Leander confided in me about your dad less than everybody seems to think. A lot less.”

I file away the odd word everybody as I nod my encouragement. “Anything you can remember.”

“Those were not the easiest times,” she warns.

“I understand that, but… well, there are things I have to know.”

“Things you have to know?”

“When his nomination… when the whole thing fell apart, he didn’t talk to a lot of people. I know he talked to Dr. Cross. To your husband. I just want to know what they talked about. And what… I guess you’d say, what my father’s mood was.”

Lanie is still fencing. Perhaps her husband instructed her not to tell. “Why is this so important to you, Talcott? Does this have something to do with Kimmer’s judgeship?”

Ouch! I remember Mallory Corcoran: Aren’t there any secrets in this town? Well, no, not really, as my father learned. I choose my words warily. “No, it’s because of some other things that have been happening.”

“That private detective, you mean? The one who drowned.”

Ouch again! “Uh, yes. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“He tried to interview me, you know. He talked to a few people from the old days. I don’t think any of them told him very much.” About what? I want to ask, but Lanie does not pause in her narrative, and I do not want to interrupt. “Not that any of them had very much to tell him. He was looking for some papers or something. I don’t know the details, because I refused to talk to him. The nerve!” She frowns, shakes her head. “From what I hear, he was worse than a policeman. Badgering elderly people in their homes, intimidating them. Grace Funderburke had to sic her dog on him, I heard. Carl Little told him he was going to get his shotgun, not that Carl has probably fired the thing in a quartercentury. And they say he gave poor Gigi Walker such a hard time she was in tears when he left.”

“What was he giving them a hard time about?” I ask, fascinated.

Lanie seems irritated. “I told you, Talcott, I’m not sure. The FBI went around and interviewed all of them about it. I guess he must have broken some law. But, from what I understand, it was what I told you, papers. Some papers your father was supposed to have left behind when he passed. I don’t know.” Another shrug, elaborate now, closing the subject. “I didn’t talk to him,” she reminds me.

I take a moment, forking rice and beans into my mouth as a cover. If Lanie did not grant an interview to Colin Scott, then who is the everybody who thought her husband would have confided in her? Does she just mean her friends along Sixteenth Street? Or is there a level to which I have not penetrated?

I am sure of one thing: I am visiting the right person.

“Lanie, let’s talk about my father, not about the detective.”

“If you want.”

“I need to know what your husband told you. Please. Anything you can remember.”

“You haven’t told me why, Talcott.”

And, indeed, I have not. I realize that what I say has to be good. If Melanie Cross has not spoken of these matters in fifteen years or more, there is no reason for me to think she is ready to unburden herself now just because I ask her to.

“Because I think my father wanted you to tell me,” I say.

This gets her attention. Her wise eyes flash at me, her thin brows rising in question, and in doubt.

“He left me a note,” I explain.

(III)

Lanie cross does not ask me what the note said. She merely nods her slim head, perhaps in resignation. “Tal, you know, this might not be easy for you to hear.”

“I know that, but I think I need to hear it.”

“You mean you want to.”

“I don’t think this is about wants any more.”

She is unhappy. “Tal, you understand, my Leander was a surgeon, not a psychiatrist. But… well… okay. You want to talk about what happened after the hearings? Fine. I’ll tell you.” And she does, straight out, no frills. “Leander told me he thought your father had a breakdown.”

“A breakdown? What does that mean, a breakdown?”

“You know what it means. A nervous breakdown. He… When all the stories about Jack Ziegler started to come out, Oliver would call up Leander in the middle of the night-probably, oh, two or three times during that first week. The phone would ring at two in the morning and Leander would grab it, and I would lie there watching him, and he would whisper a few words, and then his skin would go pale, and I could see he was trying to say the right thing, trying to soothe, but after a while, he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. And later Leander would tell me that it was Oliver, and he was crying on the telephone. I’m sorry, but that’s what he said. That he was crying and kept saying things like, ‘How could he do this to me?’ Meaning that law clerk, Leander said, the one who testified against him. Or he would say, ‘I did everything I was supposed to do, I did my job right, how could he put me in this position? Whatever happened to loyalty?’ Things like that. Leander got a little frightened for him. Because of the way he was raving about his law clerk, and also because… well, Leander thought he sounded drunk again.”

“Drunk! But… but he stopped drinking back when… years before.”

Lanie shakes her head, the gray eyes solemn and sympathetic, the way they must be when she tells a patient she has ovarian cancer. “I guess he started again. At least that’s what my Leander thought. And. ..”

“Wait. Wait a minute. If he was drinking, I would have known about it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, for one thing, I came down from Elm Harbor when all this was going on. Now, my father didn’t talk to me about any of it. I’m not even sure he wanted me around.” A sudden, hot catch in my throat. I never wanted to remember this, never expected to. “He… he didn’t talk to me about any of it,” I repeat, trying to find my place. “Neither did… neither did my mother. I guess they weren’t… they weren’t the kind of people who talked much about, uh, feelings. Problems. So, when all this happened, when his nomination fell apart, we… the children… couldn’t get them to open up. But, still, drinking… if he was drinking…” I trail off, my eyes misty and stinging. I remember Wallace Wainwright’s unsubtle hints during our meeting yesterday: He wasn’t himself. He didn’t know what he was saying. Maybe I was the only one who didn’t realize that my father, in his pain and humiliation, had crawled back into the bottle.

Melanie Cross is physician enough to know that there are times when you do not reach out to comfort your patients, and she says nothing. She waits. For a terrible moment, I relive the sudden plummet from joy to horror, from a household topsy-turvy with phone calls and friends and telegrams because the Judge was about to become the Justice, to the lonely, brave, hopeless death-watch as friends disappeared and the phone grew silent-except for the soulless media-once it became clear that not only the nomination but my father’s career itself was doomed. At the time I was enduring my third and final year of law school, and I skipped classes for the first glorious days of the hearings, then returned, a little over two weeks later, to sit in the back of the room as Greg Haramoto’s testimony and a tidal wave of corroborating evidence washed away my father’s protestations of innocence. After that first, wonderful morning, I stayed on at the Shepard Street house, as well-wishers and social climbers swirled in and out of the door, and my parents, at their royal and charming best, accepted the adulation as their due. But, after the dam broke, when I wanted to help, it became clear that neither of my parents quite knew what to do with me.

“I didn’t spend much time at the house,” I say finally. “I was still in law school.”

“I remember,” says Lanie, smiling with warm reminiscence and gossipy mischief. “You and Kimmer had just started dating, right?”

I hesitate, for Lanie has, perhaps unintentionally, set me a little verbal trap. In 1986, at the time of my father’s nomination, Kimmer and I were classmates, nothing more, each of us-technically, anyway-dating someone else. In truth, the two of us were in the oh-no-we-better-stop-wait-what-about-Kathy stage of rekindling what had once been a rather passionate relationship; like most young adults of that era-or, for that matter, this one-we were besotted with the notion, dangerously antithetical to civilized life, that obeying our instincts was not merely our right but our responsibility. Somehow that tendency has always been the leitmotif of our attraction: three times, maybe more, depending on how you count, we have wound up in each other’s arms at a moment when at least one of us belonged to someone else.

Not ready to confess to Lanie what everybody already knows, I decide, as so often, that the best answer is a distraction. “I guess you could be right. About my father’s drinking, I mean. I wasn’t living in the house. If my father was drinking, say, at night… well, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

“I’m sorry, Tal.”

“No, it’s okay. It’s… believable.”

“You know, Tal, my husband tried… the first time, after Abby

… he tried to get your dad some help for his drinking. But Oliver kept saying no. And, of course, he stopped on his own.” Drumming her nails on the table. “Leander said your father always seemed a little insulted when he brought up the idea of treatment.”

“He would have been.” I sigh, heart heavy with memory. “He considered counseling and therapy the final resort of the weak of will.”

“Alcoholism is a disease…” the doctor in her begins, automatically.

Laughing, I put up my hands in surrender. “Hey, you don’t have to convince me. I know it’s a disease, and I know there’s a genetic tendency to it, which are two reasons that I never touch the stuff.” Then I grow sad again. “And if it’s a disease and my father never had any treatment… well, yes, I can believe that he would have started again.” I play with my food, my appetite fading. None of this is what I came for. All I have done is reopened the never-quite-healed wounds of those debilitating days. But I press on. “Is that all your husband told you? The drinking? The… the crazy phone calls?”

“Well, no. No, there was more.” Lanie clucks her tongue thoughtfully. She is about to drop another veil and, obviously, wondering whether she should. “Like… the chess,” she says at last.

“The chess? What chess?”

Lanie’s strong brow furrows in thought. She brushes her hair back again, forks some salad into her mouth. I wait while she sips her water. “Leander used to drop by to see your father in the evenings, both while this was going on and… and afterward. He didn’t always call first…”

“Because he wanted to see if my dad was drinking,” I suggest.

“I suppose that was part of it. But also remember, Tal, they were from a different generation. Dropping by unannounced was what friends did. It wasn’t like today, where nobody’s house is ever neat or ready for company, so you call first so your friends can clean everything up. People’s houses, people’s lives were more… oh, more open in a way. Not that nobody had any secrets, but, you know, there was a kind of a sense that… that… that your friends could see you as you really are. Were. You know what I’m saying.”

“Yes.” I smile slightly, hoping Lanie will hurry, because it is quarter past one and I know she has a patient at two. Or perhaps my secret memories of the neighborhood itself are generating this unexpected urge to rush. A few blocks up Columbia Road is the apartment where I lived in the late 1980s, and where Kimmer, although married to Andre, sometimes slept. Probably we ate a furtive meal or two in this very restaurant.

“Anyway. So Leander would drop by and he would usually find your father down in his little study-you know the room I mean-and Oliver would have his chessboard out, the one he was so proud of, always showing off the pieces, and he would be playing chess with himself.” She makes a face. “No, that’s not right. Let me think. I don’t know much about chess, so it’s hard to remember. No. He wasn’t playing. He was trying… he was making chess puzzles…”

“Problems.”

“Hmmm?”

“Chess problems. My father liked to… They call it composing. He liked to compose chess problems. I guess you’d call it his hobby.”

“Right!” Her face brightens. “Because, I remember, Leander told me he thought it was great therapy, should be very relaxing for your father, except… except that…”

“Except what?” I am running out of patience as well as time and wish she would just say it right out.

She looks me straight in the eye. She has caught my mood and is ready to give me the unadorned truth. “Leander thought Oliver had grown obsessional about it. About the chess problems he was composing. He didn’t even want to play golf any more, because he always was at his chessboard. He hardly went to the poker games. I’m talking about the months after the… after the problem with his nomination. So Leander would go to Shepard Street to visit him. And your mother would let him in, and he would find his way back to the study, and he would walk in the room, Oliver’s best friend, and Oliver wouldn’t even get up from the chessboard. Sometimes he wouldn’t even look up. He kept talking about how even chess was fixed, white moved first, white usually won, black could only react to what white did, and even if black played a perfect game he still had to wait for white to make a mistake before he would have any hope of winning-that kind of thing.” Lanie frowns, remembering another point. “But… but I think I remember that Leander said that was why Oliver liked to-what was that word?-to compose. He liked composing problems because there was some special kind of problem, where black moved first…”

“Helpmate problems, they’re called,” I say, even though this was never the side of chess that intrigued me. But something is crawling upward in my memory. “Black moves first in a helpmate, and black and white cooperate to checkmate the black king.”

Lanie raises a thin eyebrow to show what she thinks of this. “Okay, maybe so. But, Talcott, the thing is, your father, well, he kept saying that this would be his redemption, that he couldn’t win in one field but he could win in another. And… now, I don’t remember this so well… but Leander said your father had some kind of chess problem he was working on, something that had never been done before, and he somehow thought if he could solve it… or compose it, I guess… that it would make up for what happened to his nomination to the Supreme Court. Something about a knight? Double… something. I don’t remember what it was called. Chess isn’t my game. But Leander said your father seemed so… so desperate to do it, so obsessed about it, that, for a while anyway, he didn’t seem to give much time to anything else. Even his work started to slip, so Leander told me. All so he could… could compose his chess problem. Which is why my husband thought Oliver had a… a kind of breakdown. That’s what Leander said, anyway.” She looks at her watch, and I know our time is up.

Back out on Columbia Road, good old Lanie is Dr. Melanie Cross once more, and she is also in a sudden hurry to be free of me. I want to ask her whether she ever heard anything about my father wanting a gun, or whether she knows what might have spooked him a year before he died, but I see no way to phrase the questions that does not sound absurd. I walk her to her Volvo. I am not riding back to Howard with her, because my hotel is right down the hill, a ten-minute stroll. I am holding the door for her, and she is chattering about how it would be nice to get Bentley together with her grandchildren, it’s such a shame we don’t see more of each other, and I am nodding at all the right places, when the thought that has been trying to jostle its way into my consciousness suddenly bursts free.

“Lanie?”

“Hmmm?” Half in the Volvo and half out, she looks up in surprise and just a smidgen of annoyance. In her mind she is already back in her office, free of conversation almost as painful for her as for me.

“Lanie, just one other thing. The chess problem your husband told you my father was working on… the one he thought would turn everything around if he could only solve it?”

“What about it?”

“Can you try again to remember what it was called. You said… Double something?”

“I don’t know much about chess, Tal.” Smiling to hide her impatience. “I told you.”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. But can you remember anything your husband might have said about it? Please. I know you’re in a hurry, but this is important.”

She does that brow-furrowing thing again, her eyes distant. Then she shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Tal, it’s been too long. I don’t know. I know Leander mentioned a name, he said your father kept calling it by name-the chess problem, I mean. But, I’m sorry, I honestly don’t remember. I should remember the name, Leander talked about it so much, because your father talked about it so much. Let me see. Maybe ‘Double Excellence’? Or ‘The Triple Exception’? Something like that.” She looks at me again, very much the doctor, very much in a hurry. “Thanks for lunch, Tal, but I really have to run.”

“I know,” I murmur, suddenly dispirited. I remember it all now. The problem the Judge hoped to compose. The one about which he talked to me from time to time when I was much younger, even though his explanations bored me stiff. I wish now that I remembered more about it. “Thanks for trying. And thanks for your time.”

“My pleasure.” Lanie Cross brightens as she slides into the car in a flurry of thin arms and legs. I close the door solidly behind her. She rolls down the window. “Oh, I do remember one other thing. Leander told me that your father kept saying he was tired of the way white won all the time. He was going to fix it so that black would win instead.”

“You mean the chess problem? Black would win?”

“I think so. I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything else.” She gives me a harried smile. “So, Tal, let’s definitely get the families together, maybe this next summer, on the Vineyard.”

“That would be nice,” I say softly, but my mind is elsewhere.

As I watch the Volvo disappear into the swarming traffic, I am thinking of my father, out of his mind with fear and fury after the collapse of his nomination, sitting alone night after night in his little study, ignoring the overtures of his oldest and dearest friend, getting drunk, letting the rest of his world collapse around him, as he tried to fix it all by composing a special kind of chess problem called the Double Excelsior.

CHAPTER 25

A MODEST REQUEST

(I)

“I’d like to ask you a favor,” murmurs the Reverend Doctor Morris Young.

“Of course,” I say softly, because Dr. Young exudes a peace that calms those around him, as well as a power that seems to make everybody say yes.

“I hope I will not embarrass you.”

“That depends on what the favor is.”

Morris Young smiles. When happy, his pocked, orange-brown face seems gently rounded, casting warm beams of sunlight on anybody nearby. When angry, the same face is all hard planes and square corners and final judgments. His hair is sparse and gray; his reddish eyes are no longer sharp, even aided by his thick glasses; his lips are insolently protrusive, although he is as humble as they come. Though large of girth, he wears nothing in public but vested suits of dark wool, white shirts, and dark ties, a throwback to an earlier generation of preachers. He is in his early seventies, but possessed of all the evangelizing energy of the era of “muscular” Christianity. He is the pastor of Temple Baptist Church, probably the most powerful institution of the darker nation’s battered outpost in the divided city of Elm Harbor, which makes him, by many accounts, the most influential black man in town.

He is also, with the possible exception of my colleague Rob Saltpeter, the finest man it is my privilege to know. Which is why, last summer, mired in depression over the state of my marriage, I chose him for my counselor. And why I have decided I need to see him again.

Last weekend, I returned from Washington to face a buzz saw: It’s not enough for you to lust after my sister, you have to spend the night with your fat slut of a cousin! Evidently, somebody saw me going upstairs with Sally and told somebody else who told somebody else, the word reaching Elm Harbor in less than half a day. And, like every married man in America who has found himself in this situation, I raised my palms for peace and insisted, Nothing happened, darling, I promise -which in my case happens to be true. Kimmer was quite unappeased: So what? Everybody thinks something did, Misha, and that’s almost as bad! I was stung by the realization that Kimmer is less concerned about what I might have done than by what people believe I might have done; that my wife, who long ago liberated me from the stultifying prison of my parents’ expectations, has locked me away in the tight dungeon of her own.

I spared Kimmer the details of the dreary denouement of my night with Sally. So I omitted, cravenly, any mention of how I sat awake half the night in the uncomfortable wooden chair, fighting the impulse to stretch out on the other bed, lest Sally wake and misinterpret the situation. I did not tell my wife that I woke abruptly in the morning, still in the same position, feeling as though I had spent the night with my body twisted in some medieval torture device, my mouth clogged and muzzy, my head pounding, the vague lust of the night before a distant, barely plausible memory. My cousin was still asleep, breathing regularly now, and in the hard glare of daylight she was just dull, overweight Sally Stillman again. I had no trouble shaking her shoulder to wake her. She was no longer witty or cute or bold: her eyes red and puffy, she was panicky and disheveled and worried about being late for work, as well as being caught by Bud, who apparently remains more present in her life than she admitted. She could not get out of the room fast enough. Her coat, unfortunately, was in the cloakroom downstairs. To cover her wrinkled gown, I loaned her my tattered Burberry, which she promised to send back by Federal Express. She spent a few minutes in the bathroom, fixing her face, as she put it, and then was gone. It remains to be seen whether she took my reputation with her.

Yet my life continues. Onward and upward, one might say, given my father’s emphasis on the word excelsior. At Oldie earlier this morning I sat through a brief and respectful session with two quiet investigators from the FBI, this time in connection with my wife’s background check. Kimmer, interviewed twice, is excited. She thinks the portents may yet be favorable if, as she puts it, we stay on the same page. Over breakfast, she rehearsed me carefully in what to say and what to omit. She wants nothing more about the arrangements on the official record. I was too worn out to argue, and, besides, I really do want her to get what she wants. So I followed the script.

“We’ve known each other a long time, Talcott,” says Dr. Young now, leaning forward to fold his hands on his immaculate desk. His office in the basement of the church is cramped and airless, the heating vent noisy. I am sweating. Dr. Young is not. His tie is perfectly knotted, his shirt crisp and fresh, although it is late afternoon. “How many years is it?”

“Since the time the boys made a fool of me.”

He chuckles. “They didn’t make a fool of you, Talcott. A man can only make a fool of himself. All they did was treat you like they treat every other outsider. And”-he holds up a pudgy hand to forestall my interruption-“and, you can be sure, I gave them a difficult time for it. You know what we teach in the program. Understanding that every human being we meet, white or black or brown or yellow, rich or poor or in between, police officer or pusher, whether he helps us or hurts us, every person we meet is made in the image of God, and it is our task, therefore, to seek that image in each encounter.”

“I think I’ve heard this one before, Dr. Young.” My turn to smile.

“I know, I’m a bit of a broken record. But you see how it is with the boys.”

“I do,” I tell him, and, at this moment, I would rather talk about the boys in his Faith Life Skills program than almost anything else, although, at some point, we need to talk about… well, about my marriage. I am trying to be patient and calm, as Kimmer, desperate worry in her eyes, keeps urging me. And Dr. Young, in his jovial, evangelical way, is helping. His reminder about the boys in his Faith Life Skills program helps, too.

“We’ve made some progress,” the pastor murmurs, and I am not sure, at first, if he is talking about me or the boys. He leans toward me once more, his brown eyes blazing. “But, you understand, Talcott, all that these young men have learned from the world is mistrust. You know how many of them ever see their fathers? About one out of ten. You know how many of them have brothers or best friends who deal drugs? About nine out of ten. Half have been arrested. Some have been to prison. Not one has held a real job for more than a few months. They have no idea what a job is. They think the boss is dissing them when he tells them what to do. They think customers are a pain in the rear. They have no education to speak of. The schools have failed them. Welfare has trapped their mothers, but what else are their mothers to do? So the boys fight back. They hate white people, and they’re scared of them too. Successful black people”-he points a pudgy finger at my chest-“they also hate, but they do not fear. They hate the whole world, Talcott, for leaving them behind and leaving their mothers behind and leaving their mothers’ mothers behind. How are they to see God in others? They do not even see God in themselves.”

“I believe you’ve mentioned this before.”

Morris Young nods, satisfied. His face relaxes once more into its usual expression of quiet serenity. I have known him for about six years, since he invited me to talk to some of the young black men in his program for at-risk kids. I prepared a half-hour lecture about some of the heroes of the civil rights movement. It was a disaster. The younger boys dozed off; the pre-adolescents whispered behind their hands; the older teens, burdened with gold and attitude, were ostentatiously bored. Not a single one of them seemed remotely interested in anything beyond his own immediate experience. When the time mercifully ran out, Dr. Young shook his head and said, Welcome to the real world. A few months later, I persuaded my colleague Lemaster Carlyle, the former prosecutor, to speak to the same boys about the criminal justice system. I stood in the back and watched him engage them on everything from the way the jury looks at them (They’ll vote you guilty in two minutes if you walk into the courtroom the same way you walked in here) to how to avoid getting shot by police (Just saying “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and keeping your hands where he can see them will do a lot more to keep you alive than “Get out of my face,” even if he’s in your face). I would not say Lem’s performance was spellbinding, but the young men warmed to him as they never did to me. Since that time, I have spoken to the boys at least twice each year; Lem Carlyle, star of the nightly network news, only once more. But he is the one they remember.

Yes, okay, I am envious.

Now, sitting in the church basement, I exchange more pleasantries with Dr. Young and wait for him to get around to the point. He has been appropriately consoling about the loss of my father and about the death of Freeman Bishop, whom he knew for my family pastor, as he seems to know every fact about every African American in the city. He has asked after my wife and my son, and I have asked after his wife and three daughters, the eldest of whom is a first-year law student at the state university. I have always admired Dr. Young for not asking my help to get his daughter into our law school, and for the way he politely but firmly rebuffed the offer I made without his asking. The Lord has given Patricia certain talents, and she will go as far as her talent and achievements take her, praise the Lord, was all he said.

We turned her down.

“So,” murmurs the good reverend, “I suppose we should get back to your fight with your wife.”

“Please.”

“You would agree, would you not, Talcott, that what you did was unwise?”

“Yes.”

“A woman in your hotel room,” he murmurs.

“I realize it was a mistake. I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”

He nods. “You know, Talcott, I know a man, a good Christian man, a pastor, a lifelong friend, who is never alone with a woman other than his wife. Not for a moment. If he is on a trip, he insists that a man pick him up from the airport. If he has to counsel a female parishioner, he always has his wife or a female deacon present. Always. That way, there is never even the hint of scandal.”

I try not to smile. “I don’t think that would work in my part of the world. People would call it sex discrimination.”

“A strange part of the world.” He seems about to say more, then decides not to pursue the point. “But, as I say, it is easy to understand your wife’s anger, isn’t it? You have hurt her, Talcott, you have hurt her reputation…”

Suddenly I cannot contain myself. “Her reputation! She’s the one who has affairs, not me! She has no right to get angry just because. .. just because people think I had one!”

“Talcott, Talcott. Anger is not a right. It is an emotion. It flows from our fear or our pain, of which we broken creatures possess a surfeit. Your wife’s sins, her weaknesses, give you no right to impose further pain upon her. You are her husband, Talcott.” He folds his hands and hunches over his desk, and I reciprocate, drawing closer. “You know, Talcott, I have asked you for quite a few favors on behalf of th