The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  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 vicuña 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 f
or 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 reminisc
ence 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.