“Speaking of Lem,” I hear myself asking, “has he seemed… a little strange lately?”
“He’s always strange.”
“No, I mean… I don’t know, I’ve been finding him… distant.”
“He’s always distant.”
“What I’m saying is, he is less friendly. Like he’s trying to avoid me.”
“Gee, I can’t think why. He only wants to be dean.”
I surrender, quite frustrated. In her teasingly direct way, Dana is reminding me that I am nobody’s favorite around the law school just now, except maybe hers. It hurts to hear it, but she might be right about Lem. Then another thought strikes me. Dana the gossip knows everything, surely. “By the way, and I know it isn’t any of my business, but have you heard any rumors about, um, some kind of relationship between Lionel Eldridge and Heather Hadley?”
Dear Dana seems startled. Then a slow, almost feline smile softens her face. “No, I seem to have missed that one. But that would be so delicious! I really must ask around.”
There’s more than one way to start a rumor, I tell myself sourly.
(II)
Leaving Dana’s office, I run into Theophilus Mountain, who is unlocking his door with the same laborious attention he gives to driving, walking, and teaching, none of which he any longer does particularly well. Under his arm are an ancient binder and a red-and-black casebook, so he has just returned from class. I greet him as he finally manages to work the latch.
The aging Theo swivels stiffly, like a mannikin on a stand, smiling benignly.
“Well, hello, Talcott.”
“Hi, Theo. Do you have a minute?”
He frowns as though this is a difficult question. “I suppose I might,” he concedes, his hand still on the doorknob. At eighty-two, Theo is not what he was in my father’s student days, or even in mine. A few days ago, he finally got around to offering his condolences on the Judge’s passing, oddly late, but he has never quite been subject to the expectations of others. He is the only survivor among the famous Mountain brothers, the other two being Pericles, who taught at UCLA, and Herodotus, who taught at Columbia. They were, once upon a time, considered the three great constitutional scholars of the age. Perry died a couple of decades go, Hero just last year. All three were among the century’s celebrated liberals, and Theo tends the flame. In his constitutional law class, Theo covers few cases decided after 1981, “when that son of a bitch Reagan took over and everything went to hell.” He teaches his bewildered students not what the law is, or even what it should be, but what he wishes it still were. A few years ago, he wrote to a Supreme Court Justice who was once his student, accusing him of “idiotic reasoning in service of your immoral reactionary campaign.” He then released the letter to the press, an act which earned him an invective-filled appearance on Larry King Live. Theo has always been willing to say anything to anybody. And so he does to me now: “You look terrible. Did the police do that to you?”
“Of course not.”
“I heard you were almost arrested.”
I wonder whether I will be stuck with the story for the remainder of my career. “No, Theo, I was not almost arrested. It was just a misunderstanding.”
“Oh.” Spoken dubiously.
“Theo, I wanted to ask you about my father.”
“What about your father?”
I hesitate as a couple of students pass us, deep in argument over what Hegel would have said about some rule of the Securities and Exchange Commission. When they are out of earshot, I continue. “You knew him when he was a student. And after.”
Theo nods, still standing in the doorway. “We were pretty good friends, till he went off the deep end. Excuse me.”
“By the deep end, you mean…”
“After his hearings.” He waves a vague hand. “Lots of people in this building signed petitions against his confirmation, Talcott. Well, you know that. You weren’t here at the time, but you remember.”
“I was a student, Theo, so I remember.”
“Well, also remember that I didn’t sign.” Splaying his hand on his chest. His shirt, as usual, seems incompletely laundered. “I didn’t agree with him about very much, but we were friends. Like I said, until he went off the deep end.”
“Well, what I’m wondering is… after the two of you weren’t close any more… if, uh, if there’s anybody here on the faculty my father would have been close to. Somebody he would have trusted.” I pause. It is so typical of my family that I must ask an outsider who my father’s friends were on the very faculty where I teach. “Somebody he might have trusted with confidences.”
Theo’s disordered beard splits in a grin. “Well, Stuart Land is certainly a Reaganite prick.”
Is this the non sequitur it seems? Maybe not. “So he trusted Stuart, you’re saying.”
“I don’t know if your father even knew Stuart, but it wouldn’t surprise me. All those neo-cons stick together. Excuse me.” He tips his head back momentarily and frowns, gazing at the ceiling. “Who else? I guess he must have known Lynda Wyatt, from all his alumni work. And I think he knew Amy Hefferman pretty well. Amy was his classmate.”
I shake my head. Poor Amy, the much-beloved Princess of Procedure. I have almost forgotten that she and my father were in law school together. Over the years, my father seemed never to tire of cruel jokes at her expense, all of them about her intellect. The second-best third-rate mind in the building, he would say of her student days, shaking his head in wonder that she was invited back to teach. His evaluation of her work on the faculty was little different, bordering at times on misogyny. Dizzy, he would call her writing, or not serious. As so often, the Judge was frightfully unfair; but whatever devils drove him to dismiss Amy Hefferman would also prevent him from trusting her with whatever elaborate secrets he wanted me to uncover. “Not Amy,” I say sadly.
Theo squints. He is not as quick as he was, but he is no fool. “Not Amy what? Are you up to something, Talcott?” He does not sound disapproving. If I am up to something, he probably wants in on it. He leans close, his breath hideous, and whispers, “Is it about Stuart? Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Uh, not that I know of.”
“Too bad.” Theo finally opens his door and steps into his office, which, although long and high-ceilinged, is so thick with huge piles of books and papers that a trip inside can be like a spelunking expedition. He does not invite me to follow. “I haven’t really been keeping close track of your father, Talcott. Not since…”
“He went off the deep end,” I finish for him.
“Oh, so you noticed too?” Theo’s tone is somber. “He was a good man, your father. Not my kind of politics, but a good man. Until your sister died. Then it all went downhill.”
“Wait a minute, Theo. Wait. After my sister died?”
“Right.”
“But before you said he went off the deep end after the hearings.”
Theo blinks. Has he forgotten what he said? Is he confused or clever? “Well, I don’t know exactly when it happened, but he did go off the deep end.” Then his eyes brighten once more. “But if it’s not Stuart you’re looking for, then I guess you must be looking for Lynda.”
“Do you seriously think my father would have trusted Lynda Wyatt?” Even as I say the words, it occurs to me that Lynda knew I was going to be at Shirley’s party. Could she have noticed, from her office window, that I was headed for the soup kitchen all those weeks ago? Could she have known I was planning to go to the chess club last Thursday? I cannot see how, but I cannot see a lot of things that are true, like why Kimmer married me.
“More than he would have trusted me, I’ll tell you that.” A grin makes its way to the surface of his thick white beard, and he is laughing aloud by the time he closes the door in my face.
(III)
Back in my office, I field a telephone call from a woman named Valerie Bing, who was two years behind Kimmer and myself in law school and now practices with a firm in Washington. She and Kimm
er grew up a few blocks apart and have remained friends as well as professional colleagues, handling a number of matters together. Valerie says that the FBI has been in to talk to her as part of the background check. No doubt the investigators swore her to silence, but Valerie, for whom gossip is nutrition, gives me a line-by-line account of the interview. No questions about the arrangements, but they did ask Valerie if she ever heard my wife mention Jack Ziegler, a fact I immediately decide not to pass on to Kimmer.
As soon as I hang up, the phone rings again, and I find myself fending off a representative of the agency that used to book the Judge’s speaking tours. If I will keep some of his dates with the Rightpacs, it seems, the agency will guarantee me half my father’s fee. I glare at the telephone for a moment, then tell him I am not interested. He interrupts to point out that my father received forty thousand dollars per engagement, sometimes more. I am stunned. Like so many boomers, Kimmer and I live beyond our means, chronically in debt, our credit cards maxed out, our payments late. Twenty thousand dollars may be an afternoon’s income for Howard Denton, Mariah’s investment banker-husband, but it is all the money in the world to me. The man keeps talking. He says there could be television appearances, a book contract, the works.
All I would have to do is say the things my father would have said.
I’m afraid I’m not available just now for a meretricious relationship, I want to tell him, but I settle instead for a simple “No, thank you.”
He says he might be able to get me three-fourths of my father’s fee.
I repeat my refusal.
But he will not give up. He says I wouldn’t really need to speak for my father. I could talk about whatever I wanted, express any views I wanted. A couple of his clients, he adds, are very excited at the thought of having me come. All they ask is a lecture to a small group, a dinner with people who are great fans of my father, some reminiscences about the Judge, insights into his thinking. Just two or three dates, he murmurs.
At twenty to thirty thousand dollars apiece.
A debilitating worm of temptation is inching through me, thrilling and warm, as I think again of our debts. Then I remember what Morris Young said the other night about Satan, and I call a halt, rather rudely, to the conversation. “My no means no, ” I tell him.
He says he will try me again in a month or two.
An hour later, Just Alma finally calls me back. She is still in the islands, whatever that means. I have forgotten why I called her in the first place, so I ask her how she is enjoying herself instead. She complains that the men can’t keep up with her. I imagine this is true.
Then I remember and say: “Alma? Do you remember when we were down at Shepard Street? Right after the funeral?”
Over the scratchy line, she acknowledges that she does.
“You told me people would… come after me. Remember?”
“Your daddy told me. He said folks always came after the head of the Garland family.”
“Did he say… which folks?”
“Sure. The white folks,” she says at once, and my theory goes to pieces. I thought perhaps the Judge had shared with Just Alma a piece of his secret. Instead, more ramblings of his tortured mind in which everything that happened to him was somebody else’s fault.
“I see.”
Alma is not finished. “The way the white folks went after Derek.”
“Derek as in his brother? The Communist?”
“You know some other Derek? Lemme tell you something, Talcott. Your daddy, he never liked his brother, not till after he was dead. Even when they were kids, he never liked him. Never.”
“I know, Alma.” I am trying to bring the conversation to an end, but Alma rides right over me.
“Main thing was, Talcott, your daddy thought Derek complained too much about the white folks. Well, turned out the white folks got your daddy too. So he started to think maybe Derek had a point. Used to say he wished old Derek was still around, so he could tell him how sorry he was.”
“My father said he was sorry?” I try, and fail, to recall a single instance of the Judge’s ever apologizing. “What was he sorry about?”
“He was sorry they split up. Said everything went bad after that.”
“Everything like what?”
“Goodness, Talcott, I don’t know. He just said he was sorry. Because of what the white folks did. I guess maybe he just missed his brother.”
A question occurs to me. “Alma? When my father talked about splitting up with his brother-was there something particular he meant?”
“I guess when your daddy decided to be a judge and all that. He kind of had to leave all the baggage behind.”
“Derek was baggage?”
“Your daddy just missed him, Talcott, that’s all.”
This is getting me nowhere. I have to go. Fortunately, so does Alma. We talk about seeing each other over the summer, but we won’t.
(IV)
Night on Hobby road. Once more I keep my lonely vigil from the front window. I do not know what I am looking for. Around eleven, I imagine that I see a man across the street in the darkness, watching the house, a very tall man who could be black, although the shadows make it hard to tell: Foreman? Perhaps a hallucination, because, when I look again, he is gone. Half an hour later, a pickup truck jolts down the street, and I fantasize a detailed story of surveillance, alternating vehicles, legions of watchers.
Silly, of course, but I really did get beaten up a few nights ago, and somebody really did call and tell me not to worry, that everything was taken care of.
So stop worrying!
I have tried to talk to Kimmer about what has been happening, but she still refuses to listen beyond wanting to make sure I really believe we are all safe. I cannot seem to breach the wall that has arisen between us. It is as though, by being assaulted, I have become hard evidence of what my wife, still hoping for judicial office, prefers to pretend is not true: that something is going on, and that dropping it, letting it die, is no longer an option.
I shake my head. I log on to the Internet Chess Club and play four quick games with somebody from Denmark, losing three. And still I have the sense, with me now for weeks, that my efforts to reason my way through are like chewing on cotton: I chomp and chomp and chomp, but I make no progress.
Sleep is suddenly very attractive.
I hurry upstairs and look in on Bentley, whose bedroom is decorated principally with various Disneyesque images of Hercules, who was, it seems, a smiling blond Aryan with the world’s largest teeth. Herkes is our son’s word for his favorite hero. I adjust his Herkes blankets by the light of the streetlamp, check his Herkes nightlight, kiss his warm forehead, and then head down the hall to join my slumbering wife in the master bedroom at the back of the house. I undress in the bathroom, remembering with some pain the days when Kimmer and I used to leave each other little notes, and sometimes a flower, atop the vanity; WAKE ME, we would write in amorous invitation. I do not remember when we stopped, but I do know that Kimmer ignored my notes for several weeks before I realized that she wasn’t leaving them any more. I wonder whether my father, in his last years, had anybody to leave him a flower or a note at bedtime, and it occurs to me that I know nothing of his romantic life, if he even had one after my mother died. Alma implied that the Judge was lonely, and, looking back, I can see that he probably was. Now and then he would show up at an important dinner or theater opening, some famous conservative woman on his arm, invariably a citizen of the paler nation, but he always managed to convey the impression that these were mutually useful escortings, nothing romantic or sexual. I am aware of no girlfriend: if he had one, he kept her well hidden.
I decide that I do not want to know.
The notes: nowadays, Kimmer leaves on my pillow only articles torn from popular magazines, offering assistance in dealing with the death of a loved one, for she believes I have grieved insufficiently, or perhaps incorrectly. There is no serious scientific evidence that grieving in fact possesses th
e famous five stages, but an entire industry of counselors makes a fortune insisting that it is so.
“Go to bed,” I remind myself, lest I forget why I came upstairs.
I glance out the bathroom window into the yard. All seems to be at peace. At last I return to the bedroom and crawl between the sheets. I am so, so sorry, I whisper to my sleeping wife, but only in my mind. I didn’t mean it to go this way. I lie still, I say my prayers, and then I gaze at the ceiling in the darkness, sensing more than feeling my wife a few feet away, not daring to reach out to her for the comfort I crave to give, and to get. My mind refuses to settle into sleep, still besieging itself with all the guilt I can heap on my own head, which is quite a bit. I turn toward Kimmer again. Where did you go for three hours this afternoon? I ask her in my mind: for she was not at her office and did not answer her cell phone. It has happened before. It will happen again. How did we get here, darling?
I try another position, but sleep refuses to come, and the answers I crave remain as elusive as ever. I am doing little work. My reputation is crumbling around me. I am becoming known as the mad law professor who skips classes, makes nutty accusations, and gets beaten up in the middle of the Quad.
And no human being, certainly no wife, to comfort me in my depression and distress.
Ah, Kimmer, Kimmer! Why do you do… what you do? Again I remember, uneasily, our relationship in its youth, when opening my eyes each morning to Kimmer’s smiling face was all I asked of the world. I hear the rumbling of a train passing, but it is only the blood pounding in my head. I open my eyes, but my wife’s face is hidden. The bed is suddenly too vast, the distance from Kimmer too great. I turn onto one side, then the other, then back again, as my wife rolls over and mumbles something unintelligible. I wish I could believe she was telling me, in her half-sleep, that she loves me. I wish I dared reach out to her for comfort. I wish I knew why I have the sense that I have been played for a fool by forces larger than myself.
You and your family are perfectly safe.
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