Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  (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 tha
t 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 quartercentury 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.