The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  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 & 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 Ad
dison, 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.